Back in April 2024, Jerry Cantrell thought that his beloved 1984 “Blue Dress” G&L Rampage – which has been used on almost everything he has ever recorded and defined the sound of grunge – had gone missing.
“I was freaking out for three or four days,” he shares in a new interview with Guitar World. “We couldn’t track it down. It was a pre-album thing, and we were doing a video and a photo shoot and then going back for rehearsal, and shit was moving around, and I lost track of it.”
Thankfully, the “Blue Dress” G&L was just misplaced, but Cantrell had previously experienced his fair share of missing guitar trauma after one of his prized possessions went missing for nearly 20 years.
“I’ve had a guitar that meant a lot to me go missing, where I was lucky to get it back, and that was a goldtop Music Man that Ed [Van Halen] gave me. Alice In Chains were on tour with Van Halen, and I got two from him,” he relates.
“One was a goldtop and was a trans blue where you could see the wood flame through the finish. The goldtop went missing when I was making Degradation Trip [Jerry’s 2002 solo album] I didn’t see it for 18 or 19 years. It disappeared, and it broke my heart because my fucking dude gave me that guitar.
As he had previously specified in another Guitar World interview, “Somebody lifted it out of the A&M studio,” but two decades later, a couple of dedicated Alice in Chains fans managed to track it down.
“[They] tried to do a sting on this kid who had it and was trying to sell it,” he continued. “He went dark on the first guy, who was from Florida. The second guy was a separate collector from San Diego. Between the two of them, it took about two weeks for me to get that guitar back… after 19 years!”
Therefore, losing the G&L, even for a mere few days, was, understandably, devastating. “When I thought that was what happened to the G&L, I was crushed for a couple of days,” he now admits.
Fortunately, the Rampage hadn't been stolen – it had just been misplaced.
For more from Jerry Cantrell, plus new interviews with Randy Bachman and Don Henley, pick up issue 604 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.
In more recent news, the Alice in Chains guitarist recently looked back on the “walk-off home run” of Ozzy Osbourne’s final show.
