ALICE IN CHAINS Bassist MIKE INEZ: 'We're Very Blessed And Lucky To Have Such A Long Career'

Whopperjaw recently conducted an interview with ALICE IN CHAINS bassist Mike Inez. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Whopperjaw: Talk about the band's legacy. Why is the group still so popular after all these years?

Inez: I don't know. We're very blessed and lucky to have such a long career. Not just with our band. We're like family and brothers. The bands that have any sort of longevity get along well internally. We try to keep things very simple for ourselves, whether that's a small rehearsal space or dealing with playing stadiums with METALLICA in Europe, which we'll do after this tour. We really rely on each other. We're just four dudes in a room making a racket. Not matter what size of venue it is. That's our default position. We can handle anything. That's the biggest thing that I'm proud of. At the end of the day, we're all family. That is the key to having a long legacy. And I think that if we like the music, other people tend to like it too.

Whopperjaw: When it initially came out, "Black Gives Way To Blue" was the band's first studio effort in 14 years. Was it a difficult album to make?

Inez: Oh, yeah. It was really hard for us. We financed it ourselves. We didn't have a label. We believed, but you just don't know how it's going to go. We went to the studio and it was like, "Where's Layne [Staley, late ALICE IN CHAINS singer]?" We felt like we couldn't make a record without him. We did some shows and it started out with a benefit show and we were trying to get some money for the victims of the tsunami. Ann Wilson [HEART] and Maynard from TOOL helped out. It felt good at that point. It turned into "let's play some clubs." We did six club dates. We were opening for TOOL in front of 40,000 people at a festival in Portugal. It went quickly. We did shows in Europe and then wanted to attempt a record. We found a great producer and we holed up at Dave Grohl's studio. Elton John played on the record with us. It was great. Everybody was pulling for us. We thought, "If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't." It was our goodbye to Layne thing too. We needed to go through this stuff. The only way it could work was if we faced our pain and our past and accepted an unknowing future.

Whopperjaw: What did you set out to do differently with the new album ["The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here"]?

Inez: This one was easier in the respect that we had played 300 to 400 shows with William DuVall, new ALICE IN CHAINS singer]. We had multiple world tours. I always feel like you're not a real band until you wake up in a strange place. I woke up in Istanbul and heard chanting and there were weird smells. I woke up and realized I was so fucking far away from home. Bands have to do that. It's 300 or 400 of those. Those shared experiences really went into making the second record. It was much easier.

Read the entire interview at Whopperjaw.