Alice In Chains recently watched a Tool performance, and their photographer shared some adorable photos on Instagram. You can view them below.
William DuVall discussed learning guitar in a new Ultimate-Guitar interview.
“Yeah, the primary reason was my cousin turned me on to Jimi Hendrix. That was the thing that really sparked me. My cousin, Donald, was 10 years older than I was – I was 8 and he was 18 and he moved in with my mother and I in this little apartment in Washington DC. He brought his record collection with him. Among those records were things like Weather Report and stuff like that, then there was Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies and that was the one that really caught me. It didn’t have a cover – the cover had long since disappeared so it was just this warped vinyl LP sitting in a paper sleeve. So I didn’t know what Hendrix looked like or anything and after a few weeks of listening and me bombarding [my cousin] with questions because I just couldn’t get over the idea that all those sounds were being made by a guitar. After me asking him over and over all these things and him doing his best to explain, he finally went down to the library and photocopied some old pictures from some magazines for me to look at. So then I could see the Stratocaster, the Marshall stacks, all that stuff. Putting those pictures to the explanations was helpful because he would talk to me about things like feedback and I could finally see him holding his guitar up to the amp and then he starts almost wrestling with the amp. So I could see pictures of all that stuff.
But the thing that really got me was that he looked like us [my cousin and I] – that was the real revelation. That’s when I really started playing. So when it came time to get a real guitar I wanted a Fender. My cousin, by that time had joined the Navy, so with his first paycheck from the Navy he said we could get me a used Stratocaster or a brand new Mustang, so of course I got the Mustang because it was brand new and that was it.
It was Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies that got me going. From there it was Ernie Isley from the Isley Brothers and then Ace Frehley from KISS – when I got ahold of KISS that was a big deal because I love comic books and guitar and they were the perfect blend, like for millions of other kids at that time and Ace Frehley especially really captured my imagination with the whole spaceman thing. He was just perfect and their stuff was a bit simpler and you had more of a fighting chance of figuring out what Ace was doing and it made me feel like maybe I had a shot to play a couple of my favorite songs, which is encouraging when you’re first starting out.”
