Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell + Sean Kinney Talk Festivals, ‘AIC 23′ Mockumentary + Rock Hall

Alice in Chains are back with the new album, 'The Devil Put Dinosaurs' here and co-vocalist and guitarist Jerry Cantrell and drummer Sean Kinney recently took the time to speak with Loudwire.

In the first part of our interview, we went in-depth on the new album and its current singles. In the second portion of our conversation with Cantrell and Kinney, they talk about the humorous 'AIC 23' mockumentary they shot to promote the album and their heavy presence on the festival circuit this spring and summer. In addition, Cantrell speaks specifically about being part of Heart's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction festivities and his annual fantasy football league. The interview can be read below:

The 'AIC 23' mockumentary was pretty awesome. How much fun did you have shooting that and who had the best time with their character?

Sean Kinney: [laughs] It's probably one of the greatest marketing tools of all-time. And by tools, I just mean it's us making tools of ourselves. But that was fun.

Jerry Cantrell: I think we all had a great time with our characters. It was a great job. That came out of about five or six conference calls of, 'What the f--- do we do [to promote the new record]?' and we all just started riffing, flushed s--- out , made up our characters and a loose idea of what we wanted to do. We did that same thing with the NONA tapes. That's all ad-lib s---. You get a great idea and just f---ing go.

Same thing with this. We zoned in our characters and there was a couple of changes early on, and we zoned in on what we should do. We got Peter involved and he's a very creative guy and also Earl, my buddy Earl Brown, who's a great character actor. He played a great part in wrangling us all together too. So it was a pretty fun thing to do. And the f---ing makeup guy, wow!

SK: Trying to pull that off in real time without people who cared, you couldn't afford to do these things. These aren't like amateur guys coming around.

JC: Yeah, nobody made money on that. It was just kind of a labor of love and we got some cool and talented people to help us make it. [I remember] those EPKs became a marketing tool back in the '90s and we were early in on that and I remember the record company saying, 'It's an electronic press kit. Go talk about yourself.' And we're like, 'I'm not gonna do that.' So we got the money and told them we were gonna do that, and then told them, 'Oh it's heavy, it's a departure,' all this stuff that everybody says, and we went and took that made that ridiculous thing and gave it to them. They were f---ing pissed. They were livid, telling us we wasted money and what the hell did we do and we were like, 'This is it!' And it turned into like a little cult thing and then they rallied around it and were like, 'We should sell this.' Noooo. We were totally against it.

It's just one of those things, we always get the, 'You're music's so dark and you're so depressed,' but we're just not. It's an outlet and it's a mirror of reality life stuff, but in general we're pretty light guys for the most part.

JC: You've gotta have a pretty strong sense of humor to go through life -- period. And the stronger one you have, the better the life is. We like to have fun and the last time we got made up in Kiss makeup and went and did our laundry and s---. That was kind of a cool way to talk about some s--- that was really hard to talk about and take the piss out of ourselves at the same time. You've gotta have a sense of humor, not only about the world, but about yourself, you know.