The stripped-down production of the blues-rocker’s latest captures his evolving mastery as an improviser on road-tested originals and Delta blues and jazz classics.
“We’re always in a state of becoming,” says blues-rock guitarist JD Simo. And his new album, Songs From the House of Grease, contains five tracks that spotlight his unrestrained, rock-informed improvisation, gritty vocals, and gristly slide guitar, along with a sense of emergence. “There’s probably hints of Ry Cooder and Bill Frisell, just because they’re such big influences,” he shares. “But it’s more natural than anything that I’ve done thus far, because every year that goes by I’m that much more comfortable with myself and whatever I can do to trick myself into not overthinking—which, in this case, was incredibly fortuitous.”
The evolution of Simo, who’s worked with Jack White, Beyoncé, Phil Lesh, and Luther Dickinson, and who contributed to the Grammy-nominated soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, stands in unironic juxtaposition with the fact that three of the tracks on the album are covers. Most notably, he applies a slightly dirtier, accentuated approach to John Coltrane’s iconic “Afro Blue”—a task he didn’t take lightly (more on that later). Then there’s the propulsive, blistering Mississippi Fred McDowell tune “Mortgage on My Soul” and Blind Alfred Reed’s raw, stirring “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live.” Fitting comfortably within that collection are Simo’s originals, “Missy Strut” and the album-closing “Higher Plane Pt 1 & Pt 2.”
When Simo and his band, whose current lineup includes bassist Todd Bolden and drummer Adam Abrashoff, had a break in tour dates in June 2022, he had the idea to put some recordings together inspired by what the group had been playing on the road, but not yet released. “I said to Todd and Adam, ‘Hey come over, we’ll record a couple of these things, and we’ll figure out what to do with it after the fact.’” The entirety of the record was recorded in a day-and-a-half at his House of Grease home studio in Nashville, and Simo says the band didn’t really play any of the tunes more than once. “It was very fast; not much thought.”
Missy's Strut
At the time, he imagined the recordings would be made into an EP, or maybe put out as a vinyl-only release. But when he presented the end product to his record label, they told him, “This is your next record.”
“The last couple of records I’ve made, there was a plan, and this was not that at all,” Simo elaborates. “It was just a live document of awesome tunes that I enjoy playing. It was very organic. I’m very pleased with the performances, because it’s just a live record with a lot of focus on the playing. There’s really no production at all.”
Songs From the House of Grease is Simo’s fourth album as a solo artist. (He’s also recorded three with his psych-rock group, SIMO.) He says of this one, “I feel like there’s much more focus on my actual guitar, and my prowess as an improviser. On the other records, my guitar playing certainly has played a part, but on this one, it’s the main focal point.”
Simo plays his 1962 ES-335 in the depths of his House of Grease studio in Nashville. As the title of the band’s new album alludes, it was recorded there.
Simo engineered the record himself. He used a splitter to record his guitar through both a ’65 Fender Deluxe Reverb and a 1949 Alamo Model 3, using old Electro-Voice 666 mics. “The mic of the devil!” he jokes. “They’re kind of dark, and it’s easy for me to get a good sound with those on guitars.” The bass was recorded direct through an old Motown DI with ’60s transformers. But his minimalist approach shone most while recording drums.
“Guitarists will be probably chagrined to hear me say that I actually am not as focused on my own sound when I’m engineering,” he shares. “I’m much more focused on drums and enjoy drum sounds way more than guitar sounds. More than part of the sound of this record is my use of room mics. With me, drums are usually two or three channels at the most … very much in the Daptones or jazz world school of engineering.”
That “jazz world” style was serendipitous for the recording of “Afro Blue,” a hallowed selection from the Coltrane catalog, originally composed by Mongo Santamaria and recorded by Coltrane in 1963. “If I’d thought about it a little harder, I probably would have been more insecure about it,” says Simo. “I was hesitant to do it, but I’m really glad that we did.” On “Afro Blue,” the guitarist carefully and masterfully places some brazen yet lyrical, blues-tinged fluidity in the context of an otherwise bristling, tonally rugged record, creating a fresh example of how classic jazz and blues can thrive in concord.
Simo and his band recorded his new album in a day-and-a-half, only playing each of its five tunes once. “It was very fast; not much thought,” he relates.
When it comes to fueling the evolution of his improvisatory abilities, Simo explains, “There’s a diligence of always feeding your harmonic and technical ability, but not in a musical setting. You spend as much time possible, on your own, trying to continue to add words to your vocabulary, and how to use those words, so to speak, so that when you get into a musical setting you can just have your conversation and not be encumbered. And you start off small, just like when you’re talking to somebody, with small punctuation … and then you just let it naturally build until it climaxes. That’s the best I can describe it.
“The true art of it is to let go and have it just be that moment in time,” he elaborates. “’Cause when you’re truly engaged in it, you can’t have other thoughts. There’s this suspended time feeling when it’s really great, and that’s really addictive. If I don’t have it for a few days, I crave it.”
On Songs From the House of Grease, the main and only vehicle for satisfying that addiction was his Danocaster, a T-style fashioned by Nashville-based luthier Dan Strain of Danocaster Guitars. The guitar is outfitted with a ’62 Gibson ES-335 humbucker neck pickup and a ’56 Telecaster bridge pickup. Simo found it while visiting Strain at his home. It was also Strain’s personal guitar. “I really fell in love with it. It’s a pure guitar; it’s kind of a magic instrument,” says Simo. He purchased it before the House of Grease sessions. Among the many other guitars he owns are a few more favorites: a 1952 Gibson ES-5, a 1960 Gibson J-50 with a pickup made by California-based Galletta Guitars, and a ’60s refin Fender Jazzmaster with a Wade Cofer Valco pickup in the bridge and gold-foil in the neck.
Simo on playing: “When you’re truly engaged in it, you can’t have other thoughts. There’s this suspended time feeling when it’s really great, and that’s really addictive. If I don’t have it for a few days, I crave it.”
Photo by Adam Abrashoff
Simo recalls when he fell in love with guitar with perfect clarity: “It was seeing Elvis on television when I was 4, and seeing Scotty Moore play guitar.” Since he was born in 1985, and Elvis died eight years earlier, it was obviously a rebroadcast or historic footage, but it set him afire, nonetheless.
That experience made his work on the film Elvis all that more exciting. “So much of the music that is encapsulated in the movie is a big part of my musical makeup from when I was very young,” he shares. “It was just wonderful. It comingled a lot, because it was just, like, wow, this is a trippy thing to be playing something that I learned as a child.”
But it was really a variety of influences that laid the foundation for his musical upbringing. After seeing Elvis and Scotty, “I became obsessed with ’50s rock ’n’ roll, whether it was Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Bill Haley, or Buddy Holly.” Then, growing up in Chicago in the late ’80s and early ’90s, he heard Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Dinosaur Jr. on Windy City radio station WXRT.
JD Simo's Gear
JD Simo specializes in timeless, classic guitar tones and compositions that resonate with his wide knowledge of electric 6-string history.
Photo by Brad Elligood
Guitars
- Danocaster
- 1952 Gibson ES-5
- 1960 Gibson J-50
- 1962 Gibson ES-335
- '60s refin Fender Jazzmaster
- '60s Kay electric mandolin
Amps
- 1965 Fender Deluxe Reverb
- 1949 Alamo Model 3
- Headstrong Lil King Reverb
Effects
- Dominion Fuzz
- Electro-Harmonix Freeze Sound Retainer
- Strymon El Capistan dTape Echo
- ’70s Crybaby wah
- Mythos Argo Octave Fuzz
- J. Rockett Archer Ikon
Strings and Picks
- Stringjoy Pure Nickel Broadways (.010–.042, for standard tuning)
- Blue Chip TD55s
- Divine Noise Cables
The third element? “I saw The Blues Brothers and I was just really taken, in particular, with Steve Cropper and [Donald] ‘Duck’ Dunn. And, of course, John Lee Hooker was in that movie. All of those things fanned out into a relatively big family tree of music really quickly.”
Simo began playing with local, professional musicians—most of them decades older than him—when he was around 9. “No one I grew up with played music. I was the only kid at my school that was into music,” he says. It wasn’t until he moved to Nashville, at 21, that he started playing with people his own age. “It was wonderful. I was like, ‘Where have you all been? Jesus.’”
In the 17 years since, he’s seen himself transform as both a person and a musician. “In essence, just as a human being, I’ve become a lot chiller, more relaxed, and much more comfortable in my own skin. My playing has sort of mirrored my personal path in that regard. It’s been to get to a point where, now, I really enjoy every minute that I’m making music. Or try to, at least. ’Cause for years and years, I thought I was enjoying myself, but I was really chasing manic stimulation. Now, I’ve sort of centered into a place where there’s real joy, and it’s just so fun.
“In all honesty, I’ve never had a regular job,” he continues. “I certainly don’t come from money, and I’ve had some really difficult times in my life. But at this point, with a wife and a young child, I just want to keep doing what I’m doing. If I can be lucky enough to do that for another 30 or 40 years,” he laughs, “man, I’ll have beat the system.”
JD Simo - Higher Plane - 8/26/22 Orpheum Theatre - Flagstaff, AZ
Performing live with his trio, JD Simo exhibits his intuitive playing and bristling tone on one of the tracks from Songs From the House of Grease, “Higher Plane.”
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The final day is here! Enter Stompboxtober Day 31 for your last chance to win today’s pedal from Keeley and finish the month strong!
Keeley Octa Psi Transfigurating Fuzz Pedal with Polyphonic Pitch Shifting
Meet the OCTA PSI Transfigurating Fuzz – The Ultimate Combination of Pitch-Shifter, Octave Generator, and Tri-Voiced Analog Fuzz! Key features include: Instant Effect Order Switching, Flexible Output Configuration, Momentary or Latching Octave/Pitch, and more! Each pitch shift mode includes an up, down, and dual setting, resulting in 24 different modes.
Developed specifically for Tyler Bryant, the Black Magick Reverb TB is the high-power version of Supro's flagship 1x12 combo amplifier.
At the heart of this all-tube amp is a matched pair of military-grade Sovtek 5881 power tubes configured to deliver 35-Watts of pure Class A power. In addition to the upgraded power section, the Black Magick Reverb TB also features a “bright cap” modification on Channel 1, providing extra sparkle and added versatility when blended with the original Black Magick preamp on Channel 2.
The two complementary channels are summed in parallel and fed into a 2-band EQ followed by tube-driven spring reverb and tremolo effects plus a master volume to tame the output as needed. This unique, signature variant of the Black Magick Reverb is dressed in elegant Black Scandia tolex and comes loaded with a custom-built Supro BD12 speaker made by Celestion.
Price: $1,699.
The 6-string wielding songwriter has often gotten flack for reverberating his classic band’s sound in his solo work. But as time, and his latest, tells, that’s not only a strength, but what both he and loyal listeners want.
The guitarist, singer, and songwriter Jerry Cantrell, who is best known for helming Alice in Chains, one of the most influential bands in hard-rock history, is an affable, courteous conversationalist. He’ll apologize, for instance, when he’s been on a PR mission all afternoon and needs to eat something. “I’m sorry. I’m starving. I’m going to make a BLT while we finish this interview,” he says on a recent Zoom call.
“That’s bacon frying, by the way,” he adds, in case his interviewer was wondering about the sizzling sound in the background.
Over the better part of an hour, only a couple of points of discussion seem to stoke his ire. One would be ’90s-era culture writers who felt compelled to brand a wide range of interesting bands from the same city (Seattle) with the same hollow tag (grunge). “It’s just a fucking label,” he says. “But I get it. You gotta have a fucking descriptor.” (When he gets miffed, or especially enthusiastic, Cantrell’s F-bombs can progress from steady punctuation to military fusillade.)
Another pet peeve: Those who seem bewildered by the fact that his solo work often evokes Alice in Chains. “It always trips me out,” he says, “when I hear comments or get questions all the time, like, ‘Well, this sounds like Alice.’ Well, what do you think it was going to sound like? I’m the guitar player and the songwriter of Alice. That’s what I do. Do you want me to not be myself? It’s just a bizarre, bizarre thing.” A big laugh follows.
“I’m always collecting ideas, and you never know when they’re going to come, or what they’re going to turn into. I look at it like depositing money in a bank.”
Cantrell, 58, has a right to feel irked by such exchanges. After all, he and the classic Alice lineup of vocalist Layne Staley, bassist Mike Starr, and drummer Sean Kinney invented a mesmeric, instantly identifiable sound that continues to stand alone in heavy music. On paper, the Alice formula doesn’t indicate multi-platinum success outright: off-kilter vocal harmonies shared between Staley and Cantrell, which can call to mind arcane American folk music or the classical avant-garde; parts written in odd time; lyrics about the most wrenching depths of drug addiction, a black cloud that followed the band throughout its ascent and tragically claimed Staley’s life in 2002 and Starr’s in 2011.
But Cantrell and Alice were also dedicated students of hard-rock history, who, along with their Seattle peers Soundgarden, helped to reinvent chart-topping metal for the alternative-rock era. To be sure, the guitarist ranks among the great riff maestros, and his solos, whether all-out wailing or comprised of a few bluesy bends, always had weight and meaning within the context of the song. And with all due respect to Extreme, no other hard-rock act explored acoustic music with more brilliant results.
Boasting nine tracks and coproduced by Cantrell and Joe Barresi, I Want Blood keeps the guitarist’s expert riffs and lyrical solos front and center.
On their masterpiece, the 1992 album Dirt, Alice in Chains managed to take Black Sabbath’s template for molten riffs into stranger, more artful, and more desperate territory, yet they also crafted tracks chock-full of hooks. A seamless meld of pop moves and bone-crushing heaviness is something of a holy grail for hard-rock songwriters and producers, and Dirt nabs it. Think of tracks like “Them Bones,” with its 7/8 intro riff and aslant vocal-harmony verses that resolve into a punchy, satisfying chorus—among the pithiest assessments of mortality in rock ’n’ roll. Or “Rooster,” an homage to Cantrell’s Vietnam-veteran father, with its left-field R&B harmonies and molasses-drip tempo. Somehow, these are songs that can rattle around in your brain throughout entire road trips or workdays; as of this writing, Dirt has sold five-million copies in the U.S.
“Let the players find their songs, and the songs find their players.”
Cantrell’s new album, I Want Blood, is his fourth solo release, and it’s a strong argument that he should continue to sound like himself and his legacy. Coproduced by Cantrell and hard-rock studio wizard Joe Barresi, its nine tracks tap into the Alice in Chains aesthetic in a way that will hit a sweet spot for longtime fans. As on the albums that Alice has released since Staley’s passing, with vocalist William DuVall, that indefinable sense of unease, that smoky ambiance of dread, isn’t so enveloping. But Cantrell’s most crucial gifts—the riff science, the knack for hooks, the belief that solos should be lyrical, musical, singable—are front and center, and razor-sharp.
What’s more, he’s recruited fellow hard-rock royalty to fulfill this vision. In addition to Barresi, whose credits comprise Kyuss, Melvins, Tool, QotSA and many, many others, the album’s personnel includes bassists Robert Trujillo and Duff McKagan, and drummers Mike Bordin (Faith No More) and Gil Sharone (Marilyn Manson, the Dillinger Escape Plan).
Through Alice in Chains’ rise in the early ’90s to recent years, Cantrell’s hard-rock presence has remained unshakeable. Here, he strikes a timeless rock 'n' roll pose.
Photo by Jordi Vidal/PhotoFuss
I Want Blood is a ripper. “Vilified” couples a chunky metal riff with wah and talk-box accents and a wandering, Eastern-tinged melody; “Off the Rails” matches a line à la John Carpenter’s Halloween score with a groove-metal thrust, before a radio-ready chorus kicks in. Ditto the chorus of “Let It Lie,” whose verse riff is pure Sabbath bliss. The earworm title track is the stuff music-sync-licensing dreams are made of. When he dials the tempo back toward ballad territory, as on “Echoes of Laughter,” “Afterglow,” or “It Comes,” Cantrell’s instinct for songcraft seems to get even stronger. As with Alice’s best LPs, I Want Blood stays with you and grows on you until it’s in steady rotation.
So what of that songcraft? It’s been over three decades since Cantrell debuted on record, and he’s still mining heavy gold. What’s the strategy, and what’s the secret? Does Cantrell’s work get harder or easier as he edges toward 60? “There’s a duality to it,” he says. “So in one way, I can answer that it’s pretty easy for me to make music. And then also, it’s fucking incredibly difficult to make something good. It can be both.”
He details the three-part work cycle that has defined his adult life: “There’s the demo process of writing. There’s the preproduction and actual recording of a record. And then there’s the period where you go out and tour it, along with all your other material, in a set. During that last third of the process, I’m really not writing, but through all the phases I’m always collecting riffs.” He’s also continually listening to great music, and allowing it to seep in. In the previous week, Cantrell says, he’d “rocked a bunch of Bad Company, UFO, AC/DC, some Maiden, some Hank Williams, some Ernest Tubb, some ‘Jungle Boogie.’”
Jerry Cantrell's Gear
This photo, taken from underneath the stage, shows Cantrell in his element, performing with Alice in Chains at Lollapalooza in the early ’90s.
Photo by Ken Settle
Guitars
- G&L “Blue Dress” Rampage
- G&L “No War” Rampage
- Gibson “D Trip” Les Paul Custom
- Gibson Les Paul Junior
- Gibson Flying V
- G&L ASAT
Amps
- Bogner Fish preamp
- Friedman JJ-100 signature head
- Snorkeler (Bogner-modded Marshall JCM800)
Effects
- Dunlop Jerry Cantrell Firefly Cry Baby Wah
- MXR Jerry Cantrell Firefly Talk Box
- MXR EQ
- MXR EVH Flanger
- MXR Smart Gate
- MXR Timmy
- MXR Poly Blue Octave
- MXR Reverb
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- Boss CE-5
- Boss DD-500
- Strymon Ola dBucket Chorus & Vibrato
Strings & Picks
- Dunlop strings
- Dunlop picks
“I’m a fan of the riff,” he adds. “I’m always collecting ideas, and you never know when they’re going to come, or what they’re going to turn into. I look at it like depositing money in a bank. Like if I’m in a dressing room somewhere and I’m just warming up, and I see [one of my bandmates] react to something that I’m playing—put it in the bank. If I have a superpower, it is being able to hear something that might be a cool thing to work up and develop into a full-on song.
“When I’m slugging out riffs and just jamming out, if it feels good to rock out and your head starts moving and your foot starts tapping and you got something good—you know. It’s got to hit on a primal level first, and satisfy in that way.”
Writing, then, is often the more cerebral duty of assembling the best of what Cantrell has accrued and documented. “Like Lego pieces,” he says. “That used to be one of my favorite toys when I was a kid—Legos. Building stuff, block by block.” But, Cantrell points out, the process can also be more straightforward; he’ll start with a single riff and attempt to build the song’s infrastructure out from there, “throwing options at it, and ideas,” he says.
Cantrell, pictured here at 27, has carried on his hard-rock legacy with confidence, defying those who question his support and continuation of Alice in Chains’ influential sound.
Photo by Ebet Roberts
“I don’t necessarily know where I’m going a lot of the time. I just know that I have an intention to get there, and I’ve been able to take that journey to completion and make some pretty decent albums and songs over the years. And so I have the confidence to know that I probably can do this again—if I just put my mind to it and go through the process and work my ass off in concert with a group of people who have the same thought process.”
“There should always be the threat that the train is going to come off the rails.”
Cantrell is most certainly a “band” guy. For I Want Blood, he decided to play through a bunch of the material with his famous friends in preproduction, rather than simply assigning them one or two songs to guest on: “Let the players find their songs, and the songs find their players,” as he puts it. “It might’ve been with a little bit of frustration, because they got day jobs in some pretty impressive bands.” Time wasn’t exactly plentiful, but he did get in some living-room jams and other sessions with Trujillo, Bordin, and McKagan that ensured each track had its best possible lineup. Fortunately, Cantrell’s coproducer, Barresi, is similarly averse to cutting corners. Cantrell describes him as “a long-haul trucker” who “doesn’t suffer fools.”
“I’m an architect who is also a builder. You know what I mean?” says the guitarist, alluding to the relentless, often tedious work of record-making.“There should always be the threat that the train is going to come off the rails,” he says. For both men, Cantrell explains, “When you’re done with the record is when you think you couldn’t have done it any better.” Or, as Barresi likes to say, “How do you know you’ve gone too far unless you’ve already been there?”
Barresi also has a kind of encyclopedic recall of rock sonics. “He’s a guy who knows where all the bodies are buried,” Cantrell says, “and any combo of stuff you want to achieve: ‘Like, you know that song in The Departed, the Stones tune where it sounds like the guitar is going through a Leslie?’ [“Let It Loose,” off Exile on Main Street.] ‘Yeah, I know that pedal, man. Let’s grab it.’ You give him a reference and he knows how to replicate it.”
“I love working with a lot of different colors,” Cantrell says. “So I’ll use any guitar or any amp or any pedal to get a certain sound, and that all comes with experimentation. But it always starts with the basics.”
“When you’re done with the record is when you think you couldn’t have done it any better.”
If you’re a faithful reader of Premier Guitar, you may already know what that means: two mid-’80s G&L Rampages and the Les Paul Custom that Cantrell relied on to write his 2002 solo album Degradation Trip (the instrument with the custom blowtorch finish job). In amps, his go-to was the Bogner Fish preamp that he immortalized in Alice in Chains, in addition to his Friedman JJ-100 signature head. Cantrell also mentions the Bogner-modded Marshall sound he’s known for—aka the fabled Snorkeler—alongside tones from Orange and Laney. Among the guitars that made the cut: a butterscotch Les Paul Junior that was a gift from Billie Joe Armstrong a couple years back. When asked about effects, picks, and strings, Cantrell responds that he’s “a Dunlop guy”—which includes his MXR Jerry Cantrell Firefly Talk Box and Dunlop signature Cry Baby wah pedals.
YouTube It
Live at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2021, Jerry Cantrell testifies to his status as one of the most iconic guitarists in hard-rock history.
Cantrell is a fount of anecdotes, and talking guitar is a great way to hear some of them. He first saw the Rampage onstage in a club, after moving from Washington to Dallas, Texas, in the mid-’80s. Later, he began jamming with some guys who played Rampages, and picked up a job at a music shop that their father managed. The shop was a G&L dealer, so Cantrell paid for his instruments in part by working there. The Rampage, he adds, “just felt right.”
“The guy who built the necks and bodies that Eddie used to build his guitars was right in my backyard.”
“You gotta give a lot of credit to Eddie Van Halen,” he adds. “[The Rampage] was basically Leo Fender’s answer to Frankenstein, to the Charvel/Jackson model. One tremolo, one knob, one humbucker; that’s it. No-nonsense, just a meat-and-potatoes rock ’n’ roll guitar.”
A few years before the Rampage—Cantrell pinpoints 1979, because Van Halen II was out—he obtained a neck that was originally intended for EVH, and used it on a Strat he built himself in woodshop. The neck was payment from Boogie Bodies, the legendary guitar-parts manufacturer where Lynn Ellsworth and Jim Warmoth laid the foundation for the Superstrat era. “That shop was in Puyallup, Washington,” Cantrell says, “and I lived in Spanaway, which was right next door.The guy who built the necks and bodies that Eddie used to build his guitars was right in my backyard.”
Cantrell was barely in his teens when he got a gig helping out around the shop, and earned a “beautiful bird’s-eye maple neck” that didn’t make it to Eddie because it had a small divot in the 3rd fret. Cantrell recalls today that his duties included sweeping up sawdust. Then, as now, it was all about the work.
Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine is one of the loudest guitarists around. And he puts his volume to work creating mythical tones that have captured so many of our imaginations, including our special shoegaze correspondent, guitarist and pedal-maestro Andy Pitcher, who is our guest today.
My Bloody Valentine has a short discography made up of just a few albums and EPs that span decades. Meticulous as he seems to be, Shields creates texture out of his layers of tracks and loops and fuzz throughout, creating a music that needs to be felt as much as it needs to be heard.
We go to the ultimate source as Billy Corgan leaves us a message about how it felt to hear those sounds in the pre-internet days, when rather than pull up a YouTube clip, your imagination would have to guide you toward a tone.
But not everyone is an MBV fan, so this conversation is part superfan hype and part debate. We can all agree Kevin Shields is a guitarists you should know, but we can’t all agree what to do with that information.