(Credits: Far Out / Spotify)
One of the cardinal sins of being in a grunge outfit is buying into the myth of being a rock star. Even though many artists may have seen massive success after Nirvana broke down the doors for the genre with a performance on MTV, there was always a level of insecurity within the Seattle scene about letting their favourite bands get overexposed by the music industry monster. While Pearl Jam may have been respected and reviled by fans for not being authentically alternative, Mike McCready was on the verge of collapse at every moment.
Before Pearl Jam had even started, McCready was already deep into the world of hair metal. After trying to make a name for himself touring with his upstart band Shadow, McCready started to fall out of love with being a rock star and quickly returned to Seattle. Having been turned on to blues players like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix around the same time, McCready was convinced to give music a shot when Jeff Ament offered him to join Temple of the Dog.
Assembled by Chris Cornell and the surviving members of Mother Love Bone, McCready earned his spot by playing the massive jam ‘Reach Down’, showing off his dexterity and emotional bends. By the time Cornell left, Pearl Jam had been born, with Eddie Vedder taking over vocal duties when the band arrived to cut their debut album, Ten.
Though the album would be heralded as a classic upon release, Vedder had a lot of insecurity about being a rock star, leading to the band’s next albums taking a massive tonal shift. Even though McCready was happy to go with the flow whenever he played, he was also nursing a troubling drinking problem.
While most of the band was more private about their nefarious habits, McCready was playing with rock and roll excess, with one Rolling Stone from the early 1990s remarking about the news that McCready was running around their hotel in a drunken stupor after a performance. Although McCready would eventually get help for his problem, he knew it had reached a boiling point when they played Saturday Night Live.
After going through the handful of songs that needed to play, McCready remembered nothing from the show, remarking in the band’s documentary Twenty, “I called Jeff later, and he said, ‘What’d you think of ‘Daughter’? And I kept thinking, ‘We played ‘Daughter’?’. So essentially, I blacked out on national television.”
While McCready would get everything straightened out, they would continue to move in wilder directions on their next albums. Looking to disassociate themselves from the traditional rock bands around the same time, records like No Code saw the group intentionally kneecapping their commercial potential, looking to lose any of the fairweather fans and pave the way for something more experimental.
Despite the drastic style changes, McCready could still contribute massive solos to every song, even making tracks that reached the same heights as David Gilmour on pieces like ‘Nothing As It Seems’. McCready may have been close to becoming a rock and roll cliché, but his return from the brink has made him one of the most longstanding guitar legends of the Seattle scene.