Atlanta Music News: William DuVall, unplugged
Plus Sash the Bash prepares to record in Joshua Tree, and Victory Hands return with 'Bishop' 12-inch
Photo credit: Courtesy William DuVall
To the world at large, William DuVall is best known as the singer-guitarist who has fronted Alice In Chains since 2006 — the post-Layne Staley years — and consummated his role in the group with 2009’s Black Gives Way to Blue LP. To Atlanta, DuVall is a favorite son; he’s an artist who cut his teeth amid the city’s early ’80s hardcore scene, playing in bands such as AVOC (Awareness Void of Chaos), No Walls, Final Offering, and the almighty Neon Christ. Later, he redefined his presence with alternative rock groups Madfly and Comes With the Fall.
On October 4, DuVall celebrates the arrival of his debut, One Alone, a self-produced, self-released solo album filled with stripped-down solo acoustic numbers.
“After putting out full-throttle music for more than three decades, I felt it was time to peel everything back to the core of what I do,” DuVall says. “The acoustic guitar has long played a part in my work going back to No Walls in the late ’80s. It’s certainly added an important element to every record I’ve made with Comes With the Fall and Alice in Chains. But I really wanted to feature it exclusively this time.”
One Alone was recorded in Atlanta, mostly at Jeff Bakos’ studio, with a few songs laid down at DuVall’s friend Jeffrey Blount’s place. The first single, “'Til The Light Guides Me Home,” rolled out July 21, with a video that sets introspective themes of growth and atonement to a walking tour of Little Five Points, the BeltLine, the Earl, and other familiar settings. “If I had to pick one overarching theme, I suppose it would be the wisdom that can be gained from owning one's mistakes,” DuVall says.
Over the last few years, DuVall hit a creative stride with songs such as “The One You Know,” “So Far Under,” and the title track from Alice in Chains’ 2018 LP Rainier Fog. It was the group’s first album to fully reconnect with its Seattle roots, giving DuVall an opportunity to inhabit the Emerald City’s grunge and alternative metal ambiance on a much deeper level.
On the heels of Rainier Fog’s victories, DuVall’s aspirations to take on a more concerted singer-songwriter role and look deep within himself on “'Til The Light Guides Me Home,” is a natural and self-affirming next step. The song’s somber and sincere melodies — strummed out on steel strings to lyrics such as, “It’s a wicked sorrow that makes a man do the things I’ve done” — are more intimate but no less affecting than anything he has released over the years, classic punk and otherwise.
Pre-orders of the limited edition One Alone LP and CD are available online now.
In other news, Sash the Bash, the high-energy astro-punk outfit led by singer, guitarist, and songwriter Sasha Vallely (Midnight Larks, Spindrift, the Warlocks) plans to record a four-song EP at Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree, California, this September. Rancho de la Luna is something of a legendary studio that has hosted artists ranging from Iggy Pop and the Foo Fighters to PJ Harvey, Queens of the Stone Age, and Josh Homme’s Desert Sessions.
To cover the cost of traveling to the West Coast, studio time, pressing vinyl, and everything else that comes along with releasing an album, Vallely and Co. have launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise $10,000.
Sash the Bash’s next Atlanta show takes place August 17 at the Star Bar, as part of the Upbeat Festival, with all proceeds donated to the Tigerbeat Foundation for Musicians. The foundation was established in honor of Vallely’s former drummer Tony “2 Skulls” Dinneweth, who died in August of 2017. Other acts on the bill include the Border Dogs, the Wheel Knockers, Elzig, the Casket Creatures, the Cogburns, Rocket 350, and the Pits.
Sash the Bash is also one of the featured acts performing at the upcoming Muddy Roots Music Festival Sept. 30-Aug. 1 at June Bug Boogie Ranch in Cookeville, Tennessee.
Election season looms large on the horizon. Victory Hands, the math rock outfit featuring Atlanta’s ’90s and early aughts post-punk and indie rock vets — Kip Thomas (drums and vocals) and Shawn Christopher (vocals and guitar) of Haricot Vert along with Jimmy Ether, aka Ryan Williams (bass and vocals) — have a new 12-inch LP due to arrive September 27, titled Bishop. This is the group’s third offering following the Anderson 10-inch and the Bernstein 7-inch. Each release is named after journalists whose names were published on President Nixon’s list of enemies.
The group only plays shows during the presidential election season, and has recently upgraded to a four-piece, adding Dain Johnson on bass, as Ether slides over to a second guitar. Keep your eyes peeled for some 2020 shows to be announced over the coming months.
In other new-releases news, Gringo Star celebrates the arrival of its latest album, Controlled Burn, with a release show on August 2 at 529. Shantih Shantih and Lesibu Grand open.
Country and Americana singer-songwriter Mark Miller celebrates the release party for his self-titled EP with back-to-back performances at 7 and 9:15 p.m. at Eddie’s Attic on Saturday, August 24.
Send music news tips to chad.radford@creativeloafing.com.
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string(6079) "Hearing Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys album. In the summer of 1976, when I was eight years old, my cousin, Donald, who was 18, moved in with my mother and me, bringing his small but potent record collection with him — Santana, Weather Report, and Roy Ayers, among others. Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys was the one that spoke directly to me. I was captivated by the sheer spiritual power blasting out of my little Show ‘n Tell record player. I kept asking my cousin, “So ALL of those noises are being made on a guitar?” Donald tried to explain feedback, Marshall stacks, and wah-wah pedals as we listened to the album on endless repeat, often running the needle back to analyze key parts in greater depth. Our copy of the album was missing the cover. The paper sleeve with Donald’s psychedelic drawings in green magic marker was the only protection for the warped, scratched vinyl. So for the first few weeks I didn’t know what Hendrix looked like. Finally, Donald went to the public library and photocopied some pictures of Hendrix from old issues of Rolling Stone magazine and brought them home. “He looks like us!” I said. That was it. My life was made right then and there.
Seeing Weather Report in concert. Another pivotal moment was when that same cousin took me to see Weather Report at the Warner Theater in Washington, D.C., in 1977. They were touring in support of their Heavy Weather album and the band was completely on fire. Jaco Pastorius, the Hendrix of the electric bass, was at his absolute peak. Jaco was visibly basking in his power as arguably the dominant instrumentalist of the era, doing his trademark side-to-side slide dance, snake-like fingers slithering all over the neck of his beat-up fretless Fender Jazz bass. Band founder Josef Zawinul was also relishing his role as the maestro behind his bank of keyboards, several times kicking his bench out from under himself during his most ecstatic moments. Co-founder Wayne Shorter remained stock-still at center stage, the eye of the hurricane, blowing the meaning of life through his saxophone. I remember the haze of marijuana smoke hanging over the crowd and the whoops of exhilaration from the audience as the band repeatedly drove the intensity to a fever pitch. It was a profound formative experience to see people so moved by brilliant improvisational music.
Seeing Prince in January 1982 on the Controversy tour. I had already been a Prince fan for a few years, and even saw him on the Dirty Mind tour. But this show at Washington, D.C.’s Capital Centre, supporting his fourth album, stands out. The show was general admission, or what we called “festival style” back in the day. The moment the venue doors opened, my sister Alison and I scrambled ahead of everyone and managed to get front row, center right against the barricade. The Time and Zapp opened and both were great. The Time were Prince’s hometown protégés and rivals. It was their first national tour and they came out hungry with something to prove. After they played, I remember seeing the Time’s Morris Day and Jerome Benton standing in the wings laughing at Zapp’s less sophisticated, more jheri-curled presentation. Finally, Prince came on, starting his set with “Uptown” and sliding down a fire pole from the upper tier of his dual-level stage. From 1981-’82, despite his crossover ambitions, Prince was still considered a black R&B act, and Washington, D.C., known in those days as Chocolate City, was one of the few cities in America where he could even attempt to play a venue the size of the Capital Centre. So, even more than the Time, Prince appeared determined to prove himself the superstar he envisioned. The Controversy show was a giant leap forward in terms of thematic unity and detail. Even the purple smoke they used to fill the stage tasted like the cotton candy it resembled.
It was amazing to watch Prince work from such a close visual vantage point. He wasn’t as polished as he would soon become. A lot of his dance moves were raw — more punk/new wave than suave perfection. But he had the James Brown knee drops and splits in his repertoire by then. He was still connecting the dots but it was obvious he would get where he wanted to go. I was struck by how he teased the largely female audience. For the now-classic slow jam, “Do Me, Baby,” Prince emerged to an army of screaming teenage girls to work the stage in a shiny purple suit (having made the audience wait for several long minutes while the band vamped on the opening groove during his costume change). During the song’s famous breakdown section, a girl who was pressed against my sister and me was desperately trying to hand Prince a rose she had brought for him. The girl was already reduced to violent sobbing by this point, and when Prince saw this, he drew closer. He fell to his knees right in front of us, looked the girl directly in her eyes, and reached out across the barricade to her while making squealing noises. Of course, the girl became completely unglued, shrieking and contorting to raise herself above the crush of bodies to place the rose into Prince’s outstretched hand. My sister and I lifted her up trying to help span the distance between her hand and Prince’s — basically crowd-surfing this girl. But every time it seemed like she might actually reach him, Prince drew his hand back a few centimeters, continuing his squealing, falsetto trills, and eye contact, while pretending to be just as desperate to reach her. This went on for probably a full agonizing minute until Prince abruptly jumped to his feet and stormed off as if she had never existed. The girl let out a sound, the memory of which still curdles my blood to this day — I truly believe she left her body for a second. My 13-year-old mind was blown. In hindsight, I got more from that show than just a good performance from an up-and-coming superstar. Prince was doling out life lessons that night.
“The One You Know,” the first single from Alice In Chain's forthcoming album, arrived May 3."
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~~#000000:''“The One You Know,” the first single from Alice In Chain's forthcoming album, arrived May 3.''~~"
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Seeing Weather Report in concert. Another pivotal moment was when that same cousin took me to see Weather Report at the Warner Theater in Washington, D.C., in 1977. They were touring in support of their Heavy Weather album and the band was completely on fire. Jaco Pastorius, the Hendrix of the electric bass, was at his absolute peak. Jaco was visibly basking in his power as arguably the dominant instrumentalist of the era, doing his trademark side-to-side slide dance, snake-like fingers slithering all over the neck of his beat-up fretless Fender Jazz bass. Band founder Josef Zawinul was also relishing his role as the maestro behind his bank of keyboards, several times kicking his bench out from under himself during his most ecstatic moments. Co-founder Wayne Shorter remained stock-still at center stage, the eye of the hurricane, blowing the meaning of life through his saxophone. I remember the haze of marijuana smoke hanging over the crowd and the whoops of exhilaration from the audience as the band repeatedly drove the intensity to a fever pitch. It was a profound formative experience to see people so moved by brilliant improvisational music.
Seeing Prince in January 1982 on the Controversy tour. I had already been a Prince fan for a few years, and even saw him on the Dirty Mind tour. But this show at Washington, D.C.’s Capital Centre, supporting his fourth album, stands out. The show was general admission, or what we called “festival style” back in the day. The moment the venue doors opened, my sister Alison and I scrambled ahead of everyone and managed to get front row, center right against the barricade. The Time and Zapp opened and both were great. The Time were Prince’s hometown protégés and rivals. It was their first national tour and they came out hungry with something to prove. After they played, I remember seeing the Time’s Morris Day and Jerome Benton standing in the wings laughing at Zapp’s less sophisticated, more jheri-curled presentation. Finally, Prince came on, starting his set with “Uptown” and sliding down a fire pole from the upper tier of his dual-level stage. From 1981-’82, despite his crossover ambitions, Prince was still considered a black R&B act, and Washington, D.C., known in those days as Chocolate City, was one of the few cities in America where he could even attempt to play a venue the size of the Capital Centre. So, even more than the Time, Prince appeared determined to prove himself the superstar he envisioned. The Controversy show was a giant leap forward in terms of thematic unity and detail. Even the purple smoke they used to fill the stage tasted like the cotton candy it resembled.
It was amazing to watch Prince work from such a close visual vantage point. He wasn’t as polished as he would soon become. A lot of his dance moves were raw — more punk/new wave than suave perfection. But he had the James Brown knee drops and splits in his repertoire by then. He was still connecting the dots but it was obvious he would get where he wanted to go. I was struck by how he teased the largely female audience. For the now-classic slow jam, “Do Me, Baby,” Prince emerged to an army of screaming teenage girls to work the stage in a shiny purple suit (having made the audience wait for several long minutes while the band vamped on the opening groove during his costume change). During the song’s famous breakdown section, a girl who was pressed against my sister and me was desperately trying to hand Prince a rose she had brought for him. The girl was already reduced to violent sobbing by this point, and when Prince saw this, he drew closer. He fell to his knees right in front of us, looked the girl directly in her eyes, and reached out across the barricade to her while making squealing noises. Of course, the girl became completely unglued, shrieking and contorting to raise herself above the crush of bodies to place the rose into Prince’s outstretched hand. My sister and I lifted her up trying to help span the distance between her hand and Prince’s — basically crowd-surfing this girl. But every time it seemed like she might actually reach him, Prince drew his hand back a few centimeters, continuing his squealing, falsetto trills, and eye contact, while pretending to be just as desperate to reach her. This went on for probably a full agonizing minute until Prince abruptly jumped to his feet and stormed off as if she had never existed. The girl let out a sound, the memory of which still curdles my blood to this day — I truly believe she left her body for a second. My 13-year-old mind was blown. In hindsight, I got more from that show than just a good performance from an up-and-coming superstar. Prince was doling out life lessons that night.
“The One You Know,” the first single from Alice In Chain's forthcoming album, arrived May 3. Scott Dachroeden PURPLE HAZE: “Even the purple smoke they used to fill the stage tasted like the cotton candy it resembled.” — William DuVall on seeing Prince’s Controversy tour in 1982. 3 moments that changed my life: William DuVall "
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With DuVall in town, and now functioning as a five-piece, Bl'ast! spent countless chaotic, and often times bloody, nights on stages hammering out songs that would go down in history as the group's crowning achievement — culminating with the 1987 LP, It's in My Blood (SST Records).
The album arrived as a powerful step up from the terse but clumsy songwriting that Bl'ast! had delivered three years earlier with its debut, The Power of Expression. Nailing the high-speed tempos of songs such as "Only Time Will Tell," "Something Beyond," and the album's title track became an audacious testament to the band's physical and mental dexterity. "They were pissed-off Reagan-era California kids who all knew each other since junior high," DuVall says. "Then, much like what happened to Neon Christ on the opposite coast, one gets a little older and the music gets more sophisticated — it develops a different kind of swag."
Although DuVall parted ways with Bl'ast! in March of 1987, less than a year after he'd joined the group, he co-wrote and recorded the early versions of the songs that would later be re-cut without his parts for It's in My Blood. For more than 25 years, the only real document of the time he'd spent playing with Bl'ast! has been a few grainy live shots flashing across the screen in the "Surf and Destroy" video. But a recently unearthed cache of the original It's in My Blood recordings, featuring DuVall's guitar parts, reveals the significant role he played in the group's evolution.
Released in August via Southern Lord, and re-titled simply as Blood, the re-released album compiles a more hard-hitting version of the group's songwriting of the era in all of its teeth-gnashing glory. From the thundering bass and charged air of anguish that rushes in with the album's opener, "Only Time Will Tell," Blood takes aim at anything and anyone that gets in its way.
In the American music press, Bl'ast! was often saddled with Black Flag comparisons, and rightfully so. The visceral intensity and real-time emotional confrontation playing out in such songs as "Ssshhh," "Winding Down," and "Your Eyes" bear an unmistakable mark of Black Flag's influence. But Bl'ast! adhered to a tight, baroque dynamic. Stylistically, Blood embodies the late '80s era when punk and metal found common ground with a dark balance of catharsis and experimentation. The bombast of each of the album's 11 songs builds both attitude and tension in the subtle interplay between Neider and DuVall's guitar attacks, particularly throughout the songs "Sequel" and "Poison." The music for the former was written by DuVall, as were most of the lyrics for the latter number.
Ultimately, this is the lineup that wrote and arranged these songs. As such, there's a breadth and intensity here that the original release just doesn't capture. Of course, mixing the album on the Sound City board at Dave Grohl's Studio 606 gives the songs a thickness that the originals never projected. The members of the band worked alongside Grohl, Southern Lord's Greg Anderson, and John "Lou" Lousteau — the latter of whom did some engineering work with Duvall for Alice in Chains' 2009 album, Black Gives Way to Blue — to flesh out the sound. The lo-fi grit of the original release is lost, but it's a small price to pay when setting such a powerful record straight. "The important thing for me is that with Blood, the world finally gets to hear a more accurate version of what we were doing," DuVall says.
Credibility aside, Blood is a richly detailed redux that's far more solid than anything else from Bl'ast!'s catalogue, making it an excellent artifact from a chapter in DuVall's career that until now has remained lost in time."
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With DuVall in town, and now functioning as a five-piece, Bl'ast! spent countless chaotic, and often times bloody, nights on stages hammering out songs that would go down in history as the group's crowning achievement — culminating with the 1987 LP, ''It's in My Blood'' (SST Records).
The album arrived as a powerful step up from the terse but clumsy songwriting that Bl'ast! had delivered three years earlier with its debut, ''The Power of Expression''. Nailing the high-speed tempos of songs such as "Only Time Will Tell," "Something Beyond," and the album's title track became an audacious testament to the band's physical and mental dexterity. "They were pissed-off Reagan-era California kids who all knew each other since junior high," DuVall says. "Then, much like what happened to Neon Christ on the opposite coast, one gets a little older and the music gets more sophisticated — it develops a different kind of swag."
Although DuVall parted ways with Bl'ast! in March of 1987, less than a year after he'd joined the group, he co-wrote and recorded the early versions of the songs that would later be re-cut without his parts for ''It's in My Blood''. For more than 25 years, the only real document of the time he'd spent playing with Bl'ast! has been a few grainy live shots flashing across the screen in the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEl1ITa6F6Y|"Surf and Destroy" video]. But a recently unearthed cache of the original ''It's in My Blood'' recordings, featuring DuVall's guitar parts, reveals the significant role he played in the group's evolution.
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In the American music press, Bl'ast! was often saddled with Black Flag comparisons, and rightfully so. The visceral intensity and real-time emotional confrontation playing out in such songs as "Ssshhh," "Winding Down," and "Your Eyes" bear an unmistakable mark of Black Flag's influence. But Bl'ast! adhered to a tight, baroque dynamic. Stylistically, ''Blood'' embodies the late '80s era when punk and metal found common ground with a dark balance of catharsis and experimentation. The bombast of each of the album's 11 songs builds both attitude and tension in the subtle interplay between Neider and DuVall's guitar attacks, particularly throughout the songs "Sequel" and "Poison." The music for the former was written by DuVall, as were most of the lyrics for the latter number.
Ultimately, this is the lineup that wrote and arranged these songs. As such, there's a breadth and intensity here that the original release just doesn't capture. Of course, mixing the album on the Sound City board at Dave Grohl's Studio 606 gives the songs a thickness that the originals never projected. The members of the band worked alongside Grohl, Southern Lord's Greg Anderson, and John "Lou" Lousteau — the latter of whom did some engineering work with Duvall for Alice in Chains' 2009 album, ''Black Gives Way to Blue'' — to flesh out the sound. The lo-fi grit of the original release is lost, but it's a small price to pay when setting such a powerful record straight. "The important thing for me is that with ''Blood'', the world finally gets to hear a more accurate version of what we were doing," DuVall says.
Credibility aside, ''Blood'' is a richly detailed redux that's far more solid than anything else from Bl'ast!'s catalogue, making it an excellent artifact from a chapter in DuVall's career that until now has remained lost in time."
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string(4729) " BL'AST Blood 2019-07-25T17:30:20+00:00 BL'AST Blood.jpg Blood sheds new light on William DuVall's secret history 21257 2013-09-04T08:00:00+00:00 Bl'ast! from the past Chad Radford Chad Radford 2013-09-04T08:00:00+00:00 In September of 1986, just six months after guitarist, singer, and songwriter William DuVall had moved away from his home in Atlanta, effectively disbanding the city's seminal hardcore group Neon Christ, he turned up in sunny Santa Cruz, Calif. It was there amid the late '80s flashpoint, when thriving surfing, skateboarding, and punk scenes had all converged, that DuVall joined the ranks of local hardcore outfit Bl'ast! Alongside his new bandmates, Mike Neider (guitar), Clifford Dinsmore (vocals), Dave Cooper (bass), and Bill Torgerson (drums), DuVall's second guitar brought strength and focus to the group's already snarling melodies.
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Although DuVall parted ways with Bl'ast! in March of 1987, less than a year after he'd joined the group, he co-wrote and recorded the early versions of the songs that would later be re-cut without his parts for It's in My Blood. For more than 25 years, the only real document of the time he'd spent playing with Bl'ast! has been a few grainy live shots flashing across the screen in the "Surf and Destroy" video. But a recently unearthed cache of the original It's in My Blood recordings, featuring DuVall's guitar parts, reveals the significant role he played in the group's evolution.
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In the American music press, Bl'ast! was often saddled with Black Flag comparisons, and rightfully so. The visceral intensity and real-time emotional confrontation playing out in such songs as "Ssshhh," "Winding Down," and "Your Eyes" bear an unmistakable mark of Black Flag's influence. But Bl'ast! adhered to a tight, baroque dynamic. Stylistically, Blood embodies the late '80s era when punk and metal found common ground with a dark balance of catharsis and experimentation. The bombast of each of the album's 11 songs builds both attitude and tension in the subtle interplay between Neider and DuVall's guitar attacks, particularly throughout the songs "Sequel" and "Poison." The music for the former was written by DuVall, as were most of the lyrics for the latter number.
Ultimately, this is the lineup that wrote and arranged these songs. As such, there's a breadth and intensity here that the original release just doesn't capture. Of course, mixing the album on the Sound City board at Dave Grohl's Studio 606 gives the songs a thickness that the originals never projected. The members of the band worked alongside Grohl, Southern Lord's Greg Anderson, and John "Lou" Lousteau — the latter of whom did some engineering work with Duvall for Alice in Chains' 2009 album, Black Gives Way to Blue — to flesh out the sound. The lo-fi grit of the original release is lost, but it's a small price to pay when setting such a powerful record straight. "The important thing for me is that with Blood, the world finally gets to hear a more accurate version of what we were doing," DuVall says.
Credibility aside, Blood is a richly detailed redux that's far more solid than anything else from Bl'ast!'s catalogue, making it an excellent artifact from a chapter in DuVall's career that until now has remained lost in time. Courtesy Southern Lord Recordings BL'AST: 'Blood' 13075129 9178050 Bl'ast! from the past "
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string(13481) "More than 25 years have passed since William DuVall's tirades as the guitarist and songwriter for Neon Christ kicked open the door for Atlanta's hardcore scene in the early '80s. Back then people called him Kip, and the same scene that he played a vital role in creating during the Reagan era still resonates on local stages. But like Atlanta's urban landscape, DuVall has changed dramatically since those days. Mention his name to the tight-jeans-wearing kids of the local punk scene now and Neon Christ hangs on their lips like the evocation of an ancient demigod. Mention his later, proto-grunge/art rock trio No Walls, or his more recent and decidedly commercial rock act Comes With the Fall to the same youthful zealots and they only offer blank stares. Truth be told, hardcore was only the beginning of a long legacy in which DuVall has labored to strike a balance between artistic integrity and commercial success.
When news spread in 2006 that DuVall had joined Alice in Chains to replace vocalist Layne Staley, who died of a heroin overdose in 2002, fans of Neon Christ scoffed at the new gig. In the early '90s, Alice in Chains was the watered-down cousin to the post-punk fuzz of Nirvana, Soundgarden and the rest of Seattle's Sub Pop grunge scene. Alice in Chains was a metal band first and foremost, and though the group's songs dwelt on the dark side, they were polished by comparison – and tailored to suit a much larger audience.
Reaching an audience of that size has been DuVall's M.O. almost from the beginning, and every phase of his career has inched him closer to that goal. Joining Alice in Chains – a band that has sold nearly 15 million records in the U.S., including two No. 1 albums and 21 Top 40 singles – is an epic leap that finds DuVall far removed from the hard-line aesthetics of his musical beginnings. And yet, even though he left hardcore's dogmatic ways to embrace commercial music a long time ago, he has never let go of his convictions.
Soon after Neon Christ broke up in 1986, DuVall left town. "Things got pretty heavy for Neon Christ and I bolted," he recalls. Although he didn't witness it firsthand, he was told that a group of racist skinheads had set up a gun range in a warehouse near DuVall's old punk haunt the Metroplex. For target practice they were using pictures of his face. The time was right for a change of scenery, so he moved to Santa Cruz, Calif., to join the SST Records band Bl'ast!
But his time there was short-lived. "I found it a bit limiting," he says. "They were just surfer guys trying to play rock music. I tried to turn them on to things like John Coltrane or MC5, but they didn't want to know about it. Playing with them was fun, but I was done."
Around that same time, bassist and vocalist Mike Dean of Raleigh's hardcore band Corrosion of Conformity was leaving his group. DuVall caught wind and gave him a call. "I said, 'Mike, oh man. I want to form the ultimate band for this kind of twisted punk-metal and it's gonna be called the Final Offering, because it's going to be the end for this kind of music.'"
Dean left COC and he and DuVall returned to Atlanta to convene with Greg Psomas – the drummer for Neon Christ contemporary DDT — whom DuVall canonizes as the Keith Moon of Atlanta. They were briefly joined by vocalist Randy Gue, but the Final Offering was short-lived. A few years after they broke up, Psomas died of a heroin overdose in '93.
In 1988, DuVall formed No Walls with jazz bassist Hank Schroy and drummer Matthew Cowley. The new project saw DuVall moving beyond punk's limited scope with a sound that encapsulated jazz, psychedelic rock and prog bursts of melodic, acoustic strumming. After giving a tape of No Walls' songs to Vernon Reid of Living Colour backstage after a show, Reid championed No Walls in the press, as did David Fricke of Rolling Stone, who described one CBGB show as "a brilliant collision of sinewy punk attack, angular-jazz maneuvers and catchy art-pop songwriting."
The demo, recorded at Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios in New York, generated a strong Atlanta buzz but was never properly released. Instead, the group's '92 self-titled CD, issued by Third Eye Records, met with disappointment. When the CD arrived, the punk edge had given way to a softer, overproduced pop sound, which was intentional.
Adulthood was approaching quickly for the 24-year-old DuVall and he still wasn't making a living playing music. A&R reps were courting No Walls, but label interest hadn't materialized. "I thought No Walls was the ticket," he says. "It was all the music I ever loved thrown into one band, but all I had was people telling me I don't have 'a song.'"
A few years after the group broke up, DuVall saw Jeff Buckley play at the Point (now Clothing Warehouse in Little Five Points), and the similarities he noticed between Buckley's band and No Walls were uncanny to the point of frustration. "He had a drummer playing the same kind of jazzed-out drums in a rock club while he was crooning this otherworldly Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan shit over some Zeppelin-influenced rock, and he's getting pushed by Columbia," DuVall says. "He was fantastic, and he did it his own way, but we had a lot of mutual friends in New York and he moved there when we were getting started on our thing here."
It seemed to DuVall that No Walls had missed a great opportunity by remaining in Atlanta.
Meanwhile, the same A&R reps busy working on such pop filler as the next M.C. Hammer and Warrant albums were telling him that he lacked palatable songs. "I never saw what was so difficult about my music," he says. "I thought, 'I'm going to show these people!'"
DuVall immersed himself in the craft of songwriting, studying everything from Motown and the Beatles to Edie Brickell in an attempt to make his songwriting more viable while staying true to his personality. Before long it paid off. In '95 former Arrested Development singer Dionne Farris scored a No. 1 radio hit with "I Know," co-written by DuVall.
In '96 he formed the group Madfly, an over-the-top glam-pop group that took a complete 180 from his prior efforts. He dropped the guitar and became a full-fledged spectacle of a frontman, complete with flashy costumes and body paint. While DuVall describes it as a "tongue-in-cheek, pissed-off reaction" that stemmed from his frustration with No Walls' lack of commercial appeal, fans of Neon Christ and No Walls failed to see the irony inherent in the group's presentation and found themselves alienated by what seemed like a complete about-face at the time.
"We dressed in stupid clothes and I said, 'If I'm going to be a clown for you assholes, I'm going to have fun and write some cool music," he says. "I was just trying to move forward and explore. If my music wasn't commercial enough, what could I do to make it more commercial?"
Madfly later dropped the shtick and became Comes With the Fall. It was a return to the more stylized and sincere songwriting DuVall had fostered with No Walls. He was back on guitar, cranking out heavy but radio-friendly riffs and melodies. The lineup settled on Bevan Davies (drums), Adam Stanger (bass) and Nico Constantine (second guitar). But it wasn't long before DuVall found himself in the same situation he'd been in with No Walls — getting no attention.
Leaving Atlanta seemed inevitable, but DuVall was reluctant. He wanted to spark something new at home, the same as he'd done before with Neon Christ, but things were no longer as simple as they had been when he was 14. "There was no punk rock in Atlanta so we made it happen; I thought we could make something else happen here, but when the industry and art consciously interface with commerce, it gets weird," he says. "My family was coming down on me saying, 'What are you going to do with your life?' It was like that old Twisted Sister video — 'I want to rock!'"
In 2000, Comes With the Fall moved to Los Angeles. Within a week, DuVall met Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell. A mutual acquaintance had given Cantrell Comes With the Fall's second album, The Year Is One (released on DuVall's DVL Recordings), and it caught his ear. "When I met Cantrell the first thing he said to me was, 'Cool hair!' The next thing he said was, 'I'm a fan.'"
That kind of validation was exactly what the group needed after leaving Atlanta. The disappointment over their stalled status had reached a breaking point, and they hit Hollywood "like a bomb," DuVall says. "Cantrell was one of the people who got hit." The two became friends, and soon Cantrell was learning CWTF songs and occasionally joining them onstage. The following year, Cantrell enlisted CWTF as his backing tour band to promote his solo album, Degradation Trip (Roadrunner).
In the meantime, Alice in Chains was slowing to a crawl. When Layne Staley died in '02, the group came to a halt until the surviving members reconvened in 2006 to play a tsunami benefit with various singers. Later that year, they played a second time at a tribute concert for Heart. Again, several singers, including Phil Anselmo (Pantera) and Duff McKagan (Guns N' Roses, Velvet Revolver) sang with the group during the benefit. DuVall was invited to sing "Rooster" with Heart's Ann Wilson.
"There was never a moment when I was sitting at a table with the band and they asked, 'Would you like to be the new singer for Alice in Chains?'" DuVall says. "It was more like, 'We're playing this tribute' or 'We have some European dates booked, would you like to sing?'"
Before he knew it, DuVall had played 23 countries as Alice in Chains' frontman. At first, the pairing was a tribute to the music that the group had recorded with Staley, but it was apparent that the new lineup had its own synergy. New riffs and new ideas were forming. They became a new band on the road and documented as many of their impromptu song ideas as possible. Between tours, scraps of audio and video turned into songs.
In September '09, Alice in Chains released Black Gives Way to Blue (Virgin), a new album that finds DuVall and Cantrell in twin roles singing and playing guitar. Fourteen years had passed since the group's self-titled album was released in '95, but when placed side-by-side, the albums sound as though they could have been recorded at the same time. DuVall's voice blends smoothly with Cantrell's low guitar and vocal harmonies. The warped-record riff of "Check My Brain" laid over the acoustic remorse of "Your Decision" bares the mark of classic Alice in Chains. And the slow, bottom-heavy punk dirge on the DuVall-penned "Last of My Kind" hits hard — yet still falls seamlessly within an emotional range that culminates with the album's title track, featuring Sir Elton John's wilting voice and piano.
The group's lineup is filled out by original drummer Sean Kinney and bassist Mike Inez. Cantrell writes much of the material, but DuVall plays a significant and growing role in the songwriting as well. "Alice in Chains is nothing without all four people; that's how it was with Layne and that's the case now," DuVall says. "The difference now is that I'm a guitar player first. I'm able to approach the songwriting process from different angles. Cantrell can play me some weird, idiosyncratic piece of Cantrell-ness, and I can play it right back and say, 'What about this?'"
Replacing a frontman with such a distinct style as Staley's is daunting, but DuVall has eased into the new role. "If there had been that one formal discussion saying, 'Would you like to help us resurrect Alice in Chains?' I would have thought twice," he admits. "But we were just playing for the fans who care about it and hadn't seen it in a long time. For all we knew it was going to be one more victory lap and goodbye."
The reaction to DuVall has been equally divided between supporters and naysayers, ranging from Staley disciples to old-school punk purists who question DuVall's motives. "It was surprising when he joined Alice in Chains but it wasn't shocking because he'd already had some commercial success with the Dionne Farris song," says Atlantan G.G. King, who used to sing lead for Carbonas and played drums for Neon Christ reunion shows in the past. "Even though he left hardcore behind him a long time ago, he's still a great musician and I respect the hell out of him."
An anonymous Alice in Chains fan attempted to diss DuVall's vocals, commenting on the blog Musing for Amusement that "William Duvall's singing compared to Layne's is like comparing Bob Dylan to Pavorotti sic. Dylan CAN'T sing, he knows that. William doesn't yet."
But one thing is certain: The charts have responded kindly. Last week, "Your Decision" sat in the No. 2 spot on Billboard's rock songs chart. In Atlanta, the group had to book a second Tabernacle show to meet the ticketing demand. "As you're out there and growing up in public and going through all of these things, there's bound to be a lot of discussion from both sides," DuVall says. "We're aware of that, but at the same time there's a gig to play every night. There's no time to dwell on the things that would make you second-guess yourself."
DuVall's evolution from Atlanta's underground to Alice in Chains' frontman finds him performing for the biggest audiences he's ever seen, which is exactly where he wants to be. Second-guessing his music, however, is a burden he left behind a long time ago."
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string(13513) "More than 25 years have passed since William DuVall's tirades as the guitarist and songwriter for Neon Christ kicked open the door for Atlanta's hardcore scene in the early '80s. Back then people called him Kip, and the same scene that he played a vital role in creating during the Reagan era still resonates on local stages. But like Atlanta's urban landscape, DuVall has changed dramatically since those days. Mention his name to the tight-jeans-wearing kids of the local punk scene now and Neon Christ hangs on their lips like the evocation of an ancient demigod. Mention his later, proto-grunge/art rock trio No Walls, or his more recent and decidedly commercial rock act Comes With the Fall to the same youthful zealots and they only offer blank stares. Truth be told, hardcore was only the beginning of a long legacy in which DuVall has labored to strike a balance between artistic integrity and commercial success.
When news spread in 2006 that DuVall had joined Alice in Chains to replace vocalist Layne Staley, who died of a heroin overdose in 2002, fans of Neon Christ scoffed at the new gig. In the early '90s, Alice in Chains was the watered-down cousin to the post-punk fuzz of Nirvana, Soundgarden and the rest of Seattle's Sub Pop grunge scene. Alice in Chains was a metal band first and foremost, and though the group's songs dwelt on the dark side, they were polished by comparison – and tailored to suit a much larger audience.
Reaching an audience of that size has been DuVall's M.O. almost from the beginning, and every phase of his career has inched him closer to that goal. Joining Alice in Chains – a band that has sold nearly 15 million records in the U.S., including two No. 1 albums and 21 Top 40 singles – is an epic leap that finds DuVall far removed from the hard-line aesthetics of his musical beginnings. And yet, even though he left hardcore's dogmatic ways to embrace commercial music a long time ago, he has never let go of his convictions.
__Soon after Neon Christ__ broke up in 1986, DuVall left town. "Things got pretty heavy for Neon Christ and I bolted," he recalls. Although he didn't witness it firsthand, he was told that a group of racist skinheads had set up a gun range in a warehouse near DuVall's old punk haunt the Metroplex. For target practice they were using pictures of his face. The time was right for a change of scenery, so he moved to Santa Cruz, Calif., to join the SST Records band Bl'ast!
But his time there was short-lived. "I found it a bit limiting," he says. "They were just surfer guys trying to play rock music. I tried to turn them on to things like John Coltrane or MC5, but they didn't want to know about it. Playing with them was fun, but I was done."
Around that same time, bassist and vocalist Mike Dean of Raleigh's hardcore band Corrosion of Conformity was leaving his group. DuVall caught wind and gave him a call. "I said, 'Mike, oh man. I want to form the ultimate band for this kind of twisted punk-metal and it's gonna be called the Final Offering, because it's going to be the end for this kind of music.'"
Dean left COC and he and DuVall returned to Atlanta to convene with Greg Psomas – the drummer for Neon Christ contemporary DDT — whom DuVall canonizes as the Keith Moon of Atlanta. They were briefly joined by vocalist Randy Gue, but the Final Offering was short-lived. A few years after they broke up, Psomas died of a heroin overdose in '93.
In 1988, DuVall formed No Walls with jazz bassist Hank Schroy and drummer Matthew Cowley. The new project saw DuVall moving beyond punk's limited scope with a sound that encapsulated jazz, psychedelic rock and prog bursts of melodic, acoustic strumming. After giving a tape of No Walls' songs to Vernon Reid of Living Colour backstage after a show, Reid championed No Walls in the press, as did David Fricke of ''Rolling Stone'', who described one CBGB show as "a brilliant collision of sinewy punk attack, angular-jazz maneuvers and catchy art-pop songwriting."
The demo, recorded at Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios in New York, generated a strong Atlanta buzz but was never properly released. Instead, the group's '92 self-titled CD, issued by Third Eye Records, met with disappointment. When the CD arrived, the punk edge had given way to a softer, overproduced pop sound, which was intentional.
Adulthood was approaching quickly for the 24-year-old DuVall and he still wasn't making a living playing music. A&R reps were courting No Walls, but label interest hadn't materialized. "I thought No Walls was the ticket," he says. "It was all the music I ever loved thrown into one band, but all I had was people telling me I don't have 'a song.'"
__A few years after__ the group broke up, DuVall saw Jeff Buckley play at the Point (now Clothing Warehouse in Little Five Points), and the similarities he noticed between Buckley's band and No Walls were uncanny to the point of frustration. "He had a drummer playing the same kind of jazzed-out drums in a rock club while he was crooning this otherworldly Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan shit over some Zeppelin-influenced rock, and he's getting pushed by Columbia," DuVall says. "He was fantastic, and he did it his own way, but we had a lot of mutual friends in New York and he moved there when we were getting started on our thing here."
It seemed to DuVall that No Walls had missed a great opportunity by remaining in Atlanta.
Meanwhile, the same A&R reps busy working on such pop filler as the next M.C. Hammer and Warrant albums were telling him that he lacked palatable songs. "I never saw what was so difficult about my music," he says. "I thought, 'I'm going to show these people!'"
DuVall immersed himself in the craft of songwriting, studying everything from Motown and the Beatles to Edie Brickell in an attempt to make his songwriting more viable while staying true to his personality. Before long it paid off. In '95 former Arrested Development singer Dionne Farris scored a No. 1 radio hit with "I Know," co-written by DuVall.
In '96 he formed the group Madfly, an over-the-top glam-pop group that took a complete 180 from his prior efforts. He dropped the guitar and became a full-fledged spectacle of a frontman, complete with flashy costumes and body paint. While DuVall describes it as a "tongue-in-cheek, pissed-off reaction" that stemmed from his frustration with No Walls' lack of commercial appeal, fans of Neon Christ and No Walls failed to see the irony inherent in the group's presentation and found themselves alienated by what seemed like a complete about-face at the time.
"We dressed in stupid clothes and I said, 'If I'm going to be a clown for you assholes, I'm going to have fun and write some cool music," he says. "I was just trying to move forward and explore. If my music wasn't commercial enough, what could I do to make it more commercial?"
Madfly later dropped the shtick and became Comes With the Fall. It was a return to the more stylized and sincere songwriting DuVall had fostered with No Walls. He was back on guitar, cranking out heavy but radio-friendly riffs and melodies. The lineup settled on Bevan Davies (drums), Adam Stanger (bass) and Nico Constantine (second guitar). But it wasn't long before DuVall found himself in the same situation he'd been in with No Walls — getting no attention.
__Leaving Atlanta__ seemed inevitable, but DuVall was reluctant. He wanted to spark something new at home, the same as he'd done before with Neon Christ, but things were no longer as simple as they had been when he was 14. "There was no punk rock in Atlanta so we made it happen; I thought we could make something else happen here, but when the industry and art consciously interface with commerce, it gets weird," he says. "My family was coming down on me saying, 'What are you going to do with your life?' It was like that old Twisted Sister video — 'I want to rock!'"
In 2000, Comes With the Fall moved to Los Angeles. Within a week, DuVall met Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell. A mutual acquaintance had given Cantrell Comes With the Fall's second album, ''The Year Is One'' (released on DuVall's DVL Recordings), and it caught his ear. "When I met Cantrell the first thing he said to me was, 'Cool hair!' The next thing he said was, 'I'm a fan.'"
That kind of validation was exactly what the group needed after leaving Atlanta. The disappointment over their stalled status had reached a breaking point, and they hit Hollywood "like a bomb," DuVall says. "Cantrell was one of the people who got hit." The two became friends, and soon Cantrell was learning CWTF songs and occasionally joining them onstage. The following year, Cantrell enlisted CWTF as his backing tour band to promote his solo album, ''Degradation Trip'' (Roadrunner).
In the meantime, Alice in Chains was slowing to a crawl. When Layne Staley died in '02, the group came to a halt until the surviving members reconvened in 2006 to play a tsunami benefit with various singers. Later that year, they played a second time at a tribute concert for Heart. Again, several singers, including Phil Anselmo (Pantera) and Duff McKagan (Guns N' Roses, Velvet Revolver) sang with the group during the benefit. DuVall was invited to sing "Rooster" with Heart's Ann Wilson.
"There was never a moment when I was sitting at a table with the band and they asked, 'Would you like to be the new singer for Alice in Chains?'" DuVall says. "It was more like, 'We're playing this tribute' or 'We have some European dates booked, would you like to sing?'"
Before he knew it, DuVall had played 23 countries as Alice in Chains' frontman. At first, the pairing was a tribute to the music that the group had recorded with Staley, but it was apparent that the new lineup had its own synergy. New riffs and new ideas were forming. They became a new band on the road and documented as many of their impromptu song ideas as possible. Between tours, scraps of audio and video turned into songs.
__In September '09__, Alice in Chains released ''Black Gives Way to Blue'' (Virgin), a new album that finds DuVall and Cantrell in twin roles singing and playing guitar. Fourteen years had passed since the group's self-titled album was released in '95, but when placed side-by-side, the albums sound as though they could have been recorded at the same time. DuVall's voice blends smoothly with Cantrell's low guitar and vocal harmonies. The warped-record riff of "Check My Brain" laid over the acoustic remorse of "Your Decision" bares the mark of classic Alice in Chains. And the slow, bottom-heavy punk dirge on the DuVall-penned "Last of My Kind" hits hard — yet still falls seamlessly within an emotional range that culminates with the album's title track, featuring Sir Elton John's wilting voice and piano.
The group's lineup is filled out by original drummer Sean Kinney and bassist Mike Inez. Cantrell writes much of the material, but DuVall plays a significant and growing role in the songwriting as well. "Alice in Chains is nothing without all four people; that's how it was with Layne and that's the case now," DuVall says. "The difference now is that I'm a guitar player first. I'm able to approach the songwriting process from different angles. Cantrell can play me some weird, idiosyncratic piece of Cantrell-ness, and I can play it right back and say, 'What about this?'"
Replacing a frontman with such a distinct style as Staley's is daunting, but DuVall has eased into the new role. "If there had been that one formal discussion saying, 'Would you like to help us resurrect Alice in Chains?' I would have thought twice," he admits. "But we were just playing for the fans who care about it and hadn't seen it in a long time. For all we knew it was going to be one more victory lap and goodbye."
The reaction to DuVall has been equally divided between supporters and naysayers, ranging from Staley disciples to old-school punk purists who question DuVall's motives. "It was surprising [when he joined Alice in Chains] but it wasn't shocking because he'd already had some commercial success with the Dionne Farris song," says Atlantan G.G. King, who used to sing lead for Carbonas and played drums for Neon Christ reunion shows in the past. "Even though he left hardcore behind him a long time ago, he's still a great musician and I respect the hell out of him."
An anonymous Alice in Chains fan attempted to diss DuVall's vocals, commenting on the blog Musing for Amusement that "William Duvall's singing compared to Layne's is like comparing Bob Dylan to Pavorotti [sic]. Dylan CAN'T sing, he knows that. William doesn't yet."
But one thing is certain: The charts have responded kindly. Last week, "Your Decision" sat in the No. 2 spot on ''Billboard'''s rock songs chart. In Atlanta, the group had to book a second Tabernacle show to meet the ticketing demand. "As you're out there and growing up in public and going through all of these things, there's bound to be a lot of discussion from both sides," DuVall says. "We're aware of that, but at the same time there's a gig to play every night. There's no time to dwell on the things that would make you second-guess yourself."
DuVall's evolution from Atlanta's underground to Alice in Chains' frontman finds him performing for the biggest audiences he's ever seen, which is exactly where he wants to be. Second-guessing his music, however, is a burden he left behind a long time ago."
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string(14605) " Music Feature1 1 07 2019-07-25T04:26:24+00:00 music_feature1-1_07.jpg The former Neon Christ frontman makes an epic leap toward commercial success 21245 2010-02-23T09:00:00+00:00 With Alice In Chains, Atlanta punk and hardcore icon William DuVall finds his audience Chad Radford Chad Radford 2010-02-23T09:00:00+00:00 More than 25 years have passed since William DuVall's tirades as the guitarist and songwriter for Neon Christ kicked open the door for Atlanta's hardcore scene in the early '80s. Back then people called him Kip, and the same scene that he played a vital role in creating during the Reagan era still resonates on local stages. But like Atlanta's urban landscape, DuVall has changed dramatically since those days. Mention his name to the tight-jeans-wearing kids of the local punk scene now and Neon Christ hangs on their lips like the evocation of an ancient demigod. Mention his later, proto-grunge/art rock trio No Walls, or his more recent and decidedly commercial rock act Comes With the Fall to the same youthful zealots and they only offer blank stares. Truth be told, hardcore was only the beginning of a long legacy in which DuVall has labored to strike a balance between artistic integrity and commercial success.
When news spread in 2006 that DuVall had joined Alice in Chains to replace vocalist Layne Staley, who died of a heroin overdose in 2002, fans of Neon Christ scoffed at the new gig. In the early '90s, Alice in Chains was the watered-down cousin to the post-punk fuzz of Nirvana, Soundgarden and the rest of Seattle's Sub Pop grunge scene. Alice in Chains was a metal band first and foremost, and though the group's songs dwelt on the dark side, they were polished by comparison – and tailored to suit a much larger audience.
Reaching an audience of that size has been DuVall's M.O. almost from the beginning, and every phase of his career has inched him closer to that goal. Joining Alice in Chains – a band that has sold nearly 15 million records in the U.S., including two No. 1 albums and 21 Top 40 singles – is an epic leap that finds DuVall far removed from the hard-line aesthetics of his musical beginnings. And yet, even though he left hardcore's dogmatic ways to embrace commercial music a long time ago, he has never let go of his convictions.
Soon after Neon Christ broke up in 1986, DuVall left town. "Things got pretty heavy for Neon Christ and I bolted," he recalls. Although he didn't witness it firsthand, he was told that a group of racist skinheads had set up a gun range in a warehouse near DuVall's old punk haunt the Metroplex. For target practice they were using pictures of his face. The time was right for a change of scenery, so he moved to Santa Cruz, Calif., to join the SST Records band Bl'ast!
But his time there was short-lived. "I found it a bit limiting," he says. "They were just surfer guys trying to play rock music. I tried to turn them on to things like John Coltrane or MC5, but they didn't want to know about it. Playing with them was fun, but I was done."
Around that same time, bassist and vocalist Mike Dean of Raleigh's hardcore band Corrosion of Conformity was leaving his group. DuVall caught wind and gave him a call. "I said, 'Mike, oh man. I want to form the ultimate band for this kind of twisted punk-metal and it's gonna be called the Final Offering, because it's going to be the end for this kind of music.'"
Dean left COC and he and DuVall returned to Atlanta to convene with Greg Psomas – the drummer for Neon Christ contemporary DDT — whom DuVall canonizes as the Keith Moon of Atlanta. They were briefly joined by vocalist Randy Gue, but the Final Offering was short-lived. A few years after they broke up, Psomas died of a heroin overdose in '93.
In 1988, DuVall formed No Walls with jazz bassist Hank Schroy and drummer Matthew Cowley. The new project saw DuVall moving beyond punk's limited scope with a sound that encapsulated jazz, psychedelic rock and prog bursts of melodic, acoustic strumming. After giving a tape of No Walls' songs to Vernon Reid of Living Colour backstage after a show, Reid championed No Walls in the press, as did David Fricke of Rolling Stone, who described one CBGB show as "a brilliant collision of sinewy punk attack, angular-jazz maneuvers and catchy art-pop songwriting."
The demo, recorded at Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios in New York, generated a strong Atlanta buzz but was never properly released. Instead, the group's '92 self-titled CD, issued by Third Eye Records, met with disappointment. When the CD arrived, the punk edge had given way to a softer, overproduced pop sound, which was intentional.
Adulthood was approaching quickly for the 24-year-old DuVall and he still wasn't making a living playing music. A&R reps were courting No Walls, but label interest hadn't materialized. "I thought No Walls was the ticket," he says. "It was all the music I ever loved thrown into one band, but all I had was people telling me I don't have 'a song.'"
A few years after the group broke up, DuVall saw Jeff Buckley play at the Point (now Clothing Warehouse in Little Five Points), and the similarities he noticed between Buckley's band and No Walls were uncanny to the point of frustration. "He had a drummer playing the same kind of jazzed-out drums in a rock club while he was crooning this otherworldly Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan shit over some Zeppelin-influenced rock, and he's getting pushed by Columbia," DuVall says. "He was fantastic, and he did it his own way, but we had a lot of mutual friends in New York and he moved there when we were getting started on our thing here."
It seemed to DuVall that No Walls had missed a great opportunity by remaining in Atlanta.
Meanwhile, the same A&R reps busy working on such pop filler as the next M.C. Hammer and Warrant albums were telling him that he lacked palatable songs. "I never saw what was so difficult about my music," he says. "I thought, 'I'm going to show these people!'"
DuVall immersed himself in the craft of songwriting, studying everything from Motown and the Beatles to Edie Brickell in an attempt to make his songwriting more viable while staying true to his personality. Before long it paid off. In '95 former Arrested Development singer Dionne Farris scored a No. 1 radio hit with "I Know," co-written by DuVall.
In '96 he formed the group Madfly, an over-the-top glam-pop group that took a complete 180 from his prior efforts. He dropped the guitar and became a full-fledged spectacle of a frontman, complete with flashy costumes and body paint. While DuVall describes it as a "tongue-in-cheek, pissed-off reaction" that stemmed from his frustration with No Walls' lack of commercial appeal, fans of Neon Christ and No Walls failed to see the irony inherent in the group's presentation and found themselves alienated by what seemed like a complete about-face at the time.
"We dressed in stupid clothes and I said, 'If I'm going to be a clown for you assholes, I'm going to have fun and write some cool music," he says. "I was just trying to move forward and explore. If my music wasn't commercial enough, what could I do to make it more commercial?"
Madfly later dropped the shtick and became Comes With the Fall. It was a return to the more stylized and sincere songwriting DuVall had fostered with No Walls. He was back on guitar, cranking out heavy but radio-friendly riffs and melodies. The lineup settled on Bevan Davies (drums), Adam Stanger (bass) and Nico Constantine (second guitar). But it wasn't long before DuVall found himself in the same situation he'd been in with No Walls — getting no attention.
Leaving Atlanta seemed inevitable, but DuVall was reluctant. He wanted to spark something new at home, the same as he'd done before with Neon Christ, but things were no longer as simple as they had been when he was 14. "There was no punk rock in Atlanta so we made it happen; I thought we could make something else happen here, but when the industry and art consciously interface with commerce, it gets weird," he says. "My family was coming down on me saying, 'What are you going to do with your life?' It was like that old Twisted Sister video — 'I want to rock!'"
In 2000, Comes With the Fall moved to Los Angeles. Within a week, DuVall met Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell. A mutual acquaintance had given Cantrell Comes With the Fall's second album, The Year Is One (released on DuVall's DVL Recordings), and it caught his ear. "When I met Cantrell the first thing he said to me was, 'Cool hair!' The next thing he said was, 'I'm a fan.'"
That kind of validation was exactly what the group needed after leaving Atlanta. The disappointment over their stalled status had reached a breaking point, and they hit Hollywood "like a bomb," DuVall says. "Cantrell was one of the people who got hit." The two became friends, and soon Cantrell was learning CWTF songs and occasionally joining them onstage. The following year, Cantrell enlisted CWTF as his backing tour band to promote his solo album, Degradation Trip (Roadrunner).
In the meantime, Alice in Chains was slowing to a crawl. When Layne Staley died in '02, the group came to a halt until the surviving members reconvened in 2006 to play a tsunami benefit with various singers. Later that year, they played a second time at a tribute concert for Heart. Again, several singers, including Phil Anselmo (Pantera) and Duff McKagan (Guns N' Roses, Velvet Revolver) sang with the group during the benefit. DuVall was invited to sing "Rooster" with Heart's Ann Wilson.
"There was never a moment when I was sitting at a table with the band and they asked, 'Would you like to be the new singer for Alice in Chains?'" DuVall says. "It was more like, 'We're playing this tribute' or 'We have some European dates booked, would you like to sing?'"
Before he knew it, DuVall had played 23 countries as Alice in Chains' frontman. At first, the pairing was a tribute to the music that the group had recorded with Staley, but it was apparent that the new lineup had its own synergy. New riffs and new ideas were forming. They became a new band on the road and documented as many of their impromptu song ideas as possible. Between tours, scraps of audio and video turned into songs.
In September '09, Alice in Chains released Black Gives Way to Blue (Virgin), a new album that finds DuVall and Cantrell in twin roles singing and playing guitar. Fourteen years had passed since the group's self-titled album was released in '95, but when placed side-by-side, the albums sound as though they could have been recorded at the same time. DuVall's voice blends smoothly with Cantrell's low guitar and vocal harmonies. The warped-record riff of "Check My Brain" laid over the acoustic remorse of "Your Decision" bares the mark of classic Alice in Chains. And the slow, bottom-heavy punk dirge on the DuVall-penned "Last of My Kind" hits hard — yet still falls seamlessly within an emotional range that culminates with the album's title track, featuring Sir Elton John's wilting voice and piano.
The group's lineup is filled out by original drummer Sean Kinney and bassist Mike Inez. Cantrell writes much of the material, but DuVall plays a significant and growing role in the songwriting as well. "Alice in Chains is nothing without all four people; that's how it was with Layne and that's the case now," DuVall says. "The difference now is that I'm a guitar player first. I'm able to approach the songwriting process from different angles. Cantrell can play me some weird, idiosyncratic piece of Cantrell-ness, and I can play it right back and say, 'What about this?'"
Replacing a frontman with such a distinct style as Staley's is daunting, but DuVall has eased into the new role. "If there had been that one formal discussion saying, 'Would you like to help us resurrect Alice in Chains?' I would have thought twice," he admits. "But we were just playing for the fans who care about it and hadn't seen it in a long time. For all we knew it was going to be one more victory lap and goodbye."
The reaction to DuVall has been equally divided between supporters and naysayers, ranging from Staley disciples to old-school punk purists who question DuVall's motives. "It was surprising when he joined Alice in Chains but it wasn't shocking because he'd already had some commercial success with the Dionne Farris song," says Atlantan G.G. King, who used to sing lead for Carbonas and played drums for Neon Christ reunion shows in the past. "Even though he left hardcore behind him a long time ago, he's still a great musician and I respect the hell out of him."
An anonymous Alice in Chains fan attempted to diss DuVall's vocals, commenting on the blog Musing for Amusement that "William Duvall's singing compared to Layne's is like comparing Bob Dylan to Pavorotti sic. Dylan CAN'T sing, he knows that. William doesn't yet."
But one thing is certain: The charts have responded kindly. Last week, "Your Decision" sat in the No. 2 spot on Billboard's rock songs chart. In Atlanta, the group had to book a second Tabernacle show to meet the ticketing demand. "As you're out there and growing up in public and going through all of these things, there's bound to be a lot of discussion from both sides," DuVall says. "We're aware of that, but at the same time there's a gig to play every night. There's no time to dwell on the things that would make you second-guess yourself."
DuVall's evolution from Atlanta's underground to Alice in Chains' frontman finds him performing for the biggest audiences he's ever seen, which is exactly where he wants to be. Second-guessing his music, however, is a burden he left behind a long time ago. James Minchen MEN IN A BOX: Alice In Chains 13037862 1430144 /mediaserver/atlanta/2015-17/music_aliceinchainstease.jpg /mediaserver/atlanta/2015-17/music_feature1-1_43-5.jpg JAMES MINCHIN BACK IN BLACK: Former Atlantan William DuVall (right) returns home as the new frontman of Alice in Chains. /mediaserver/atlanta/2015-17/music_feature1-2_43-2.jpg COURTESY WILLIAM DUVALL SOCIAL UPHEAVAL: Neon Christ's 1984 Parental Suppression EP reeks of Orwellian punk angst. /mediaserver/atlanta/2015-17/music_feature1-3_43.jpg COURTESY WILLIAM DUVALL REVOLVER: A Neon Christ album cover (left) and a No Walls publicity shot taken in the early 90s highlight DuValls artistic evolution. With Alice In Chains, Atlanta punk and hardcore icon William DuVall finds his audience "
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