A man and the blues: Tinsley Ellis performs in concert with his 1969 Martin D-35, which was a gift from his father.
Acoustic blues is a form of interdimensional travel. And on his new album, Naked Truth, Tinsley Ellis displays his mastery of being everywhere, all at once. I’d say that he has one foot in the red clay of the Delta and the dust of Africa, where the music arose from; another in the present, because breathing life into this style requires committed intention; and another in the future, where his own songs and selection of covers urge the genre. But that would be a weird choice of metaphor, because, like most of us, he only has two feet.
Besides, Naked Truth is more a matter of the head, brain, voice, and heart. Playing a 1937 National resonator and a 1969 Martin D-35, and stomping his foot for rhythmic emphasis, Ellis travels a well-plotted course through the music’s dimensions. The past eloquently echoes in his roughhouse performance of Delta-blues grandfather Son House’s parable, “Death Letter Blues,” one of the greatest stories of love and loss ever told, and his own “Windowpane,” which borrows the haunted, high-singing, minor-key template of Skip James. Ellis’ rowdy “Devil in the Room” gets its title from a line by his late friend, the musical eccentric Col. Bruce Hampton—who always instructed his bands to “put the Devil in the room.” And Ellis’ “Tallahassee Blues” and “Grown Ass Man” look at heartbreak from positions of sadness and strength, respectively. It’s the instrumentals, often, that lean hardest into the future, as Ellis’ fingerpicking and open tunings step away from blues tradition with a balance of pedal tones and melody that sync more easily with the American primitive movement and acoustic, textural music. That’s familiar territory for fans of Will Ackerman and trailblazer Leo Kottke, whose “The Sailor’s Grave on the Prairie” offers a gently assertive display of Ellis’ slide and fingerpicking prowess on Naked Truth.
“I didn’t want to sit down and practice. That’s just … oh God! But writing songs is another thing.”
“Playing acoustic solo blues is a totally personal statement,” Ellis observes. “Historically, we’re talking about musicians who could do the whole thing on their own. Men like R.L. Burnside had players who accompanied them, but they weren’t needed. They could make a roomful of people dance or smile by themselves.”
It’s only recently that Ellis has come to his acoustic solo reckoning, but his singing and playing have always sounded personal. For most of his 49 years onstage, he’s been a bandleader, earning a reputation as a skilled electric bluesman. The Atlanta-based guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter’s 22 previous studio recordings have reflected steady artistic growth—from his tenure in the Heartfixers, which he formed after college, and through a chain of albums bearing his name. Storm Warning, in 1994, was a hallmark, packed with originals, blues classics, and even Joe Zawinul’s punchy soul instrumental “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” That album’s “A Quitter Never Wins” was, at the time, the best summary of his electric vocabulary: a six-minute exhibition of rich, powerful singing with a touch of grit in his soulful vocal phrasing; a guitar tone that free-ranges from sweet and pure to scooped, attenuated-wah mids to hairy raw-edged soloing; and dynamics from mouse to lion. Ellis broadened his propensity for risk with 2013’s Get It!, an all-instrumental, retro-guitar freakout with eight original compositions that ricocheted from his early surf- and garage-rock influences to the mighty, Jeff Beck-like “Anthem for a Fallen Hero.” More recently, his trilogy of Winning Hand, Devil May Care, and Ice Cream in Hell helped jolt him to the Olympus of modern blues rock. Joe Bonamassa, a fellow Olympian, has described Ellis as “a national treasure.”
“I did it myself in my studio—just miked my foot and put a mic on the guitar and vocals and did take after take until I had what I wanted.”
Ellis recorded his first acoustic album in his home studio, save for a track cut at his Atlanta neighbor Eddie 9V’s recording room.
Ellis spent 10 years dedicatedly working his way to becoming a musician who could “do the whole thing on his own”—which requires not only exceptional playing but great storytelling to keep an audience engaged. Onstage, his between-song tales of blues history and encounters with its characters, the fizzled romances or epic friendships that became a source of lyrics, and his wonder at the discoveries he’s had during his musical life bring his audiences closer, creating a palpable bond.
“I think it has a slight tear in the cone, so it makes a slight rattle.”
“Naked Truth is an album I’ve wanted to make since I started posting acoustic videos on social media—my Sunday Morning Coffee Songs—in 2013,” says Ellis, referring to his regular series of Facebook performances. During the pandemic, when his steady diet of gigs ended, “I was off the road for almost two years. I didn’t want to lose my chops, so I started designating every morning.... Well, I didn’t want to sit down and practice. That’s just … oh God! But writing songs is another thing. I designated Sunday mornings for posting songs and watching my news shows. The other six days, I wrote songs and dragged them into different folders on my computer. One folder was called ‘Acoustic,’ and it became apparent that I had a cool, quirky mixture of blues and folk songs in there. I approached Bruce [Iglauer, head of Alligator Records] about the concept of an acoustic album, and he was open to it.”
Tinsley Ellis' Gear
Ellis is currently on a cross-country solo concert tour—one musician, two guitars, and a car.
Photo by Joseph A. Rosen
Acoustic Guitars
- 1937 National O Series resonator
- 1968 Martin D-35
Recording Microphones
- Shure SM57, Neumann TLM 103
Strings, Slide, & Picks
- Ernie Ball Earthwood (.012–.054, for the Martin)
- Ernie Ball Not Even Slinky (.012–.056, for the National, with an unwound G at the advice of Warren Haynes)
- Brass slide
- Medium-gauge picks (typically for standard tuning)
So, the next step was recording in earnest. “I did it myself in my studio—just miked my foot and put a mic on the guitar and vocals and did take after take until I had what I wanted. One song on the album, ‘Death Letter Blues,’ was from a demo I did at Eddie 9V’s studio here in Atlanta. I just couldn’t get a version that sounded as good as that demo.” Ellis depended on two microphones to achieve the rich, slightly dark guitar tones on Naked Truth: a Neumann TLM 103 and a Shure SM57. (The recordings were mixed and mastered by Atlanta-based producer Tony Terrebonne.) The rest was in his touch, which is determined, tough, and precise—exactly the way he saw Muddy Waters and other blues legends bear down on their guitars as he was coming up in the music. The various tunings on the album—standard, drop D, open G, open Dm, and DADGAD—also add variety to its sound. And then there’s his National, which has been appealingly raucous since he bought it years ago at Willies American Guitars in St. Paul, Minnesota, while on tour.
“I sat at the feet of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters a bunch of times.”
“I think it has a slight tear in the cone, so it makes a slight rattle,” Ellis explains. “The salesperson there said, ‘Now, you’re going to want to replace it,’ and I did, but it didn't sound right. It was too precise, too bluegrass, too Jerry Douglas. So, I put it back in there. I like it, and nobody’s ever complained about it.” Consider it the organic equivalent of a low-gain distortion pedal.
As a child of the ’60s and early ’70s, Ellis grew up on the original wave of garage rock, when bands like the Standells and Nightcrawlers were setting teenage angst to three nasty chords, and more expert pickers, like Johnny Rivers and Lonnie Mack, were clearing the path for the arrival of the first generation of classic rock-guitar heroes. Thanks to an older brother, blues also seeped into his listening. That led to a pivotal experience at the Swinger’s Lounge in the Marco Polo hotel in North Miami Beach, Florida, not far from where the Ellis family lived.
Backstage, all 87 years of its life are reflected in the finish of Ellis’ National resonator.
Photo by Jim Summaria
“B.B. King and his band were playing there for a week, and whoever played there had to do a teen matinee,” Ellis recalls. “My dad loaded up the station wagon and took me and my friends to see this guy, who was supposed to be ‘the Man.’ My brother had come into my room when I was listening to Mike Bloomfield, on the Al Kooper Super Session album, and said, ‘If you like this guy, you’ve got to hear B.B. King.’ So, there we were. I sat right in the front. It just blew my mind! I could see where the real blues was coming from—where Duane Allman, Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, and Johnny Winter were getting it. And then, after the show, he greeted us in the lobby and talked to us for what seemed like hours. It was probably really 45 minutes or something. He was the nicest man. And that was it for me. After that, I was always in the front row. I sat at the feet of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters a bunch of times.”
Ellis has performed with and observed a coterie of his blues influences since the late 1960s. Here, he poses backstage with the high-octane “Master of the Telecaster,” Albert Collins, in 1980.
Photo by Lisa Seifert/Courtesy of Tinsley Ellis
The die thus cast, Ellis played through junior high, high school, and college, and got hired by an Atlanta-based touring blues band called the Alley Cats after he graduated. Later, he put together the Heartfixers, who became one of the Big Peach’s favorite musical sons, and cut their first album with folklorist and musicologist George Mitchell as producer. Their 1982 debut was made in one night, for $105. And from there, Ellis made his way into the international blues scene. Over the decades of constant touring, Ellis landed at the Alligator label, then to Capricorn Records, then to Telarc, and back to Alligator. (“I got passed around like a joint,” he observes, laughing.) He also released music independently, on his Heartfixer label, and made his return to Alligator again in 2018, with his electric blues style now fully grown. Songs like that album’s “Kiss This World,” where Ellis echoes the furious expressionism of Buddy Guy, and the epic “Saving Grace,” which recalls both Jimi Hendrix and Robin Trower in its roaring, swirling, Uni-Vibe vibe, mark him as a player for the ages.
Which brings us back to his navigation of the omniverse of acoustic blues. “One thing I’ve noticed about these shows, as opposed to my electric shows of more than 45 years, is that people are smiling. With my electric show, there was so much snarling and stuff onstage that the audience was also making serious faces. I didn’t see a lot of smiles. So, I think really what I need to do is get to where I’m playing some music that’s going to put more smiles on people’s faces, because with what’s going on in the world, people really need to lighten up. Maybe I can be somebody that will help them do that, and maybe this album is doing that—for them and for me.”
YouTube It
Tinsley Ellis and his slightly rattling National resonator faithfully conjure the fire-and-brimstone spirit of the Delta-blues great Son House in a performance of the latter’s “Death Letter Blues,” from Ellis’ new album Naked Truth.
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The Schaffer Replica: Storm
The Schaffer Replica Storm is an all-analog combination of Optical Limiter+Harmonic Clipping Circuit+EQ Expansion+Boost+Line Buffer derived from a 70s wireless unit AC/DC and others used as an effect. Over 50 pros use this unique device to achieve percussive attack, copious harmonics and singing sustain.
“I’m a fan of the riff,” says Jerry Cantrell. “I’m always collecting ideas, and you never know when they’re going to come, or what they’re going to turn into
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.