Priča iza pesme

This song was written by Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell for his father Jerry Cantrell Sr., who went by the nickname "Rooster" while serving with the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. Jerry Cantrell has stated that his father, Cantrell, Sr., had this family nickname "Rooster" since childhood due to the way his hair stood up on end as a youth.^[3] The "Rooster" nickname is often mistakenly attributed to a reference to men carrying the M60 machine gun ("Walking tall machine gun men"), the muzzle flash from which makes an outline or pattern reminiscent of a rooster's tail. It is also often mistakenly attributed to the 101st Airborne Division - in which Cantrell's father served - who wore shoulder sleeve insignia on their arms featuring a bald eagle. As there are no bald eagles in Vietnam, the closest thing to which the Vietnamese could draw a comparison was the chicken, thus leading to the pejorative "chicken men."^[4]
In the liner notes of 1999's Music Bank box set collection, Jerry Cantrell said of the song:

It was the start of the healing process between my Dad and I from all that damage that Vietnam caused. This was all my perception of his experiences out there. The first time I ever heard him talk about it was when we made the video and he did a 45-minute interview with Mark Pellington and I was amazed he did it. He was totally cool, totally calm, accepted it all and had a good time doing it. It even brought him to the point of tears. It was beautiful. He said it was a weird experience, a sad experience and he hoped that nobody else had to go through it.^[2]

In a 1992 interview with Guitar for the Practicing Musician magazine, in response to the question "Do you feel you communicated with (your father) with this song?", Cantrell responded:

Yeah. He's heard this song. He's only seen us play once, and I played this song for him when we were in this club opening for Iggy Pop. I'll never forget it. He was standing in the back and he heard all the words and stuff. Of course, I was never in Vietnam and he won't talk about it, but when I wrote this it felt right...like these were things he might have felt or thought. And I remember when we played it he was back by the soundboard and I could see him. He was back there with his big gray Stetson and his cowboy boots — he's a total Oklahoma man — and at the end, he took his hat off and just held it in the air. And he was crying the whole time. This song means a lot to me. A lot.

When Alice In Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell found himself temporarily homeless at the start of 1991, he turned to a fellow grunge legend for help. “I was between places to live at that time,” Cantrell recalls, “so I moved in with [Soundgarden singer] Chris Cornell and his wife Susan Silver at their house in Seattle. Susan was managing Alice In Chains at the time. I stayed for a few weeks, up in this little room.”
Alone, late at night, Cantrell’s thoughts kept turning to his estranged father, whose psychological scars from his service in the Vietnam War had contributed to the breakdown of the family some years earlier. “That experience in Vietnam changed him forever,” explains Cantrell, “and it certainly had an effect on our family, so I guess it was a defining moment in my life, too.
“He didn’t walk out on us. We left him. It was an environment that wasn’t good for anyone, so we took off to live with my grandmother in Washington, and that’s where I went to school. I didn’t have a lot of my father around, but I started thinking about him a lot during that period.”
Sitting in front of a four-track recorder, the song that poured out of Cantrell might have been laced with bitterness. Instead, its harrowing lyrics were written from the standpoint of his father; describing the ‘stinging sweat’ and ‘mosquito death’ of a trek through the jungle, and an imagined skirmish with the Vietcong. The title was the nickname given to Cantrell Snr. by his great-grandfather: “Apparently he was a cocky little kid, and his hair used to stick up on top of his head like a rooster’s comb.”
“I certainly had resentments,” Cantrell notes, “as any young person does in a situation where a parent isn’t around or a family is split. But on Rooster, I was trying to think about his side of it – what he might have gone through. To be honest, I didn’t really sit down intending to do any of that; it just kinda came out. But that’s the great thing about music – sometimes it can reach deeper than you ever would in a conversation with anybody. It’s more of a forum to dig deeper.” Alice In Chains had enjoyed some success with their 1990 debut album Facelift and its single Man In The Box, but Rooster was arguably the first song to announce the depth of the band’s talent. Cantrell recalls that “it felt like a major achievement for me as a young writer,” and this sentiment was echoed when he played the demo to vocalist Layne Staley, bassist Mike Starr and drummer Sean Kinney.
When it came to recording Rooster, the band turned a prior engagement to their advantage. “Cameron Crowe had already come to us to ask for a song for his movie Singles,” recalls Cantrell. “So in the session that was meant for recording that one song [Would?], we ended up demoing about 10 songs, which included all the stuff that ended up on the [1992] Sap EP, Rooster and a couple of others from Dirt.”


Rooster was taped at Eldorado Studios on LA’s Sunset Boulevard, which the band co- produced with Dave Jerden. “It turned out to be really powerful,” notes Cantrell, “and the way Layne sang on it is amazing.”
Similarly powerful was the video, in which director Mark Pellington [fresh from Pearl Jam’s Jeremy] interspersed scenes of Apocalypse Now-style brutality with an interview with Cantrell’s father.
“My father had never talked about that time in his life, and was reluctant to do so if anyone ever asked,” recalls the guitarist. “So I was amazed that he agreed to do Mark’s request, for about an hour, on film.
“He was totally cool, totally calm, accepted it all and had a good time doing it,” Cantrell added in the notes for 1999’s Music Bank box set. “It even brought him to the point of tears. He said it was a weird experience, a sad experience and he hoped that nobody else had to go through it.”
Released as a single in 1993. Rooster drew immediate praise, both among followers of grunge and further afield.
“I’ve been all around the world,” explains Cantrell, “and I’ve talked to combat vets from Desert Storm and the recent war in Iraq – and they have a deep affinity with that song. I just recently got a letter from a guy in Iraq who told me his unit had changed their call sign to Rooster. Obviously it’s unfortunate that guys still have to fight for political ends. But it’s cool that people connect with that song; for it to be part of them getting through.”
And yet Rooster’s greatest triumph was ultimately a personal one. Against all the odds, the song repaired the fractured relationship between father and son.
“When I first played it to my father,” recalls Cantrell, “I asked him if I’d got close to where he might have been emotionally or mentally in that situation. And he told me: ‘You got too close – you hit it on the head'. It meant a lot to him that I wrote it. It brought us closer. It was good for me in the long-run and it was good for him, too.”

One song is called "Lack of Comprehension", for which we've shot a video. It was inspired by the whole JUDAS PRIEST scandal, when the band were accused of inciting a fan to commit suicide. It is ridiculous to suggest that music is responsible for parents' fuckups. The kid probably had a depressing upbringing, maybe he was abused by his parents, so why blame JUDAS PRIEST? Kids are like sponges, they grow up absorbing everything around them. To try and lay the blame for their misfortune on a song by OZZY OSBOURNE, DEATH or whoever is mad. I cannot believe that music can be seriously brought into question on this issue. Take DEATH, for instance. To me, the name is merely five letters of the alphabet, but it in no way represents my philosophy on life. I am a peaceful person, until someone pisses me off. I enjoy life, nature and so on. I'm not evil and into killing people

The Story Behind The Song: Kreator’s Pleasure To Kill

By   Dom Lawson   ( Metal Hammer )  published March 12, 2021

How Kreator wrote the Euro-thrash game-changer that proved America didn’t have the monopoly on vicious noise



(Image credit: Press)  

1986 was an extraordinary year in the evolution of heavy music. With Metallica and Slayer releasing their respective masterpieces, Master Of Puppets and Reign In Blood, the thrash metal scene consolidated its reputation as an unstoppable force. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Europe’s metal militia were beginning to pick up the same kind of furious momentum, with Germany’s Kreator firmly at the forefront of things, alongside fellow countrymen Sodom, Destruction and Tankard. After releasing a raw and chaotic debut album, Endless Pain, in 1985, this teenage trio from Essen slowly began to realise that they were leading the charge for the European thrash scene.

Pleasure To Kill is very primitive. It could only have happened in 1986, in a studio close to the Berlin Wall.
Mille Petrozza

“When we made Endless Pain, we thought that recording an album would be a one-off thing for us,” says Mille Petrozza, still Kreator’s frontman and creative driving force today. “Of course, we were hoping that people would like the album, but it was more like, ‘OK, let’s go into the studio and try stuff out!’ We didn’t know anything about production or how music could sound outside the rehearsal room. The first time I kinda realised that people actually liked what we do, it was when I went to a show – it was Venom, Exodus and Atomkraft – and we saw that this guy had a Kreator patch on his jacket. Suddenly we knew people had got the album and were enjoying it.”

Famously, Mille was so young when Kreator were offered a record deal that his mother had to sign the contract. Two years on, it was slowly dawning on the young guitarist that his band were having a remarkable impact, not just in their home country but on an international level, too. Exhilarated by what they saw as a golden opportunity to forge an authentic career as musicians, Mille and bandmates Ventor (drums) and Rob Fioretti (bass) threw themselves into the process of writing the most brutal and vicious metal album imaginable.

“It was really special to go into the studio and make another album,” Mille recalls. “We didn’t feel pressure but we knew it was a real chance. This wasn’t a one-off anymore, it could turn into something cool. So we just wrote what we thought was a better album than Endless Pain. It was faster, it was more complex, it was more of everything. We still had the same attitude, the same sturm und drang, teenage angst inside of us. It was just a continuation, but we were digging more into the stuff that we listened to back then, which was stuff like Slayer’s Hell Awaits and Possessed’s Seven Churches. We wanted to be even heavier, really.”


With sales of their debut exceeding expectations, Kreator entered the studio once more, early in 1986, eager to capitalise on their newfound popularity. With their label, Noise Records, increasing the band’s recording budget, Kreator checked in at Musiclab Studio in Berlin, with the Berlin Wall looming in the background, to work with Harris Johns. An increasingly in-demand producer with highly regarded albums by the likes of Helloween, Grave Digger and Coroner on his resume, Harris clearly saw huge potential in the young band and pushed them to new heights. 

“The main difference for Pleasure To Kill was that Harris Johns was a real producer. He was someone that wanted to help the band. No offence to the guy who recorded Endless Pain, but he just didn’t get the music, so he just recorded what we did. Harris Johns was really producing us. He made sure that everything sounded right.”
Every classic album needs a stand- out anthem or two, and when Pleasure To Kill was released in May 1986, its wild and violent title track was immediately hailed as precisely that. A twisted diatribe, spat from the bloody lips of a gore-hungry vampire, Pleasure To Kill remains one of the nastiest thrash metal songs of all time, as Mille shrieks away like an actual psycho: “The colour of your blood from your open body is all I wanted to see / Tasting the blood from your lips as you die means satisfaction to me… pleasure to KILL!” Giving even Slayer a run for their money in the fast’n’furious stakes, Pleasure To Kill neatly encapsulated the intended theme of Kreator’s second album.

“The main idea… there was one point where we thought about calling the album ‘Faces Of Death’, because at the time there was this strange mockumentary [John Alan Schwartz’s notorious 1978 ‘mondo horror’ movie of the same name] doing the rounds on video. We were like, ‘This is the most brutal thing ever!’ so it became an album about all these different ways to die. Ripping Corpse is about a corpse coming into town and killing everybody. Command Of The Blade is about this Conan-type battle. Under The Guillotine is pretty obvious, and Pleasure To Kill is this undead, vampire creature that’s coming to kill you. So the album is basically about getting killed. We thought it was an amazing idea at the time! Ha ha ha!”

Released in May 86, Pleasure To Kill was plainly too extreme to propel Kreator into the mainstream, but its impact on the thrash scene and the burgeoning metal underground was immediate and huge. Still in their teens, the band suddenly began to receive offers for live shows and festivals, leading to a deep commitment to touring that has since sustained Kreator through several decades. As Mille states today, those early shows were a real revelation for a young band that had only occasionally ventured outside of the rehearsal room.

“There was never a particular moment when I felt, ‘Oh, this is a big record now!’ but I do remember that we played a tour with Destruction and Rage across Europe, and then we were flown to Montreal in Canada to play a tour with Voivod,” he recalls. “Before that, we played two headlining shows, one in Quebec City and one in Montreal, and the show in Montreal was huge. We thought, ‘All these people came to see us!’ When we played in the US for the first time, we met all these bands that we looked up to. Danny Lilker from Nuclear Assault came to see us in Brooklyn and he showed me around. Just great memories on a human level, you know? It was a crazy time.”
An unquestionable benchmark in the history of metallic savagery, Pleasure To Kill has remained a permanent fixture in Kreator’s live sets since its namesake album’s release. Thirty-five years later, the band are still one of Europe’s biggest and most revered metal bands, with a vast catalogue of acclaimed full-lengths. Nonetheless, the one song that is absolutely guaranteed to send any Kreator crowd into a violent, limb-threatening frenzy is the nasty one about the murderous vampire, written by a bunch of fresh- faced teenagers with big dreams and deeply unpleasant video collections, more than three decades ago.
 
“I honestly don’t know why Pleasure To Kill stands out,” Mille concludes. “Maybe it’s the raw brutality, the primitive approach. Maybe it’s a blueprint for a raw, thrash metal song with nasty lyrics. I don’t know! We usually play it at the end of the set, so we try to put everything that’s left in us into that song, after a 90-minute set. That’s when we get the craziest pits too, even though it’s right at the end of the show! Ha ha ha!”

Mille notes that he regularly receives messages from fans asking Kreator make another album “like Pleasure To Kill”, but while he observes that it would certainly be technically possible to write an album in the same vein, recreating the atmosphere and intensity of those original recordings would be utterly impossible. Instead, Kreator keep Pleasure To Kill alive by playing it at every single show and watching total chaos unfold. 

“In some ways I haven’t changed, and that 17-year-old is still inside me somewhere,” Mille grins. “The core of the band is still the same, it’s me and Ventor. We talk about this a lot, and we both still have the same attitude towards the old stuff. It’s not about showing off how well we can play those songs these days, it’s more about an emotion, an energy that we try to capture. Pleasure To Kill is very primitive. It’s not rocket science. But it could only have happened in 1986, in a studio close to the Berlin Wall, with Harris Johns and us being totally crazy, partying all of the time. It was pure energy and emotion.” 

Published in Metal Hammer #345


Dom Lawson  

Dom Lawson has been writing for Hammer and Prog for 14 intermittently enjoyable years and is extremely fond of heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee and snooker. He listens to more music than you. And then writes about it.