Mike McCready and Stone Gossard: the secret weapons of Pearl Jam
At this point, Pearl Jam are a touring act as much, if not more, than an album act. To be completely clear, I do not mean this as a criticism. This may sound like I’m dressing up an accusation of Eddie Vedder, Mike McCready and Co being a nostalgia act in ten-dollar words.
However, I think being a nostalgia act and being a live act are two very different things. The former is a group of past-it chancers charging the highest price possible to put in the least possible effort to make an audience who peaked decades ago pretend they’re 20 again. That is the very last thing that Pearl Jam does.
Sure, very few people are going to a Pearl Jam gig specifically to hear songs from their (very, very good) 2024 record Dark Matter over tracks from their iconic debut album Ten. Songs from both will decorate their marathon setlists, though, and will be played with just as much conviction and grace as each other. That right there is what makes the band a live act over a nostalgia act. The fact that when you go to see Pearl Jam in concert, you see a band of artists who prize their stage performances over just about every aspect of being a rock band.
For them, the stage is their natural habitat, and they’re as uncompromising and exciting as Radiohead, Kendrick Lamar and Björk are on record. Their setlists are pretty much always handwritten by Eddie Vedder the day of the show, taken from the bank of over a hundred songs they’ll have rehearsed for the tour. Those setlists are as likely to contain B-sides, rarities, and spur-of-the-moment covers as they are the deathless likes of ‘Jeremy’, ‘Better Man’ and ‘Alive’.
The truth is, Pearl Jam are such seasoned pros that they could basically play whatever they wanted and make sure an entire arena gets their money’s worth. Each of them plays with fluidity, heart and the kind of telepathy you can only get by playing together for 35 years. And, there are two members of the band who embody this possibly more than the others.
What makes the guitarists of Pearl Jam so special?
Mike McCready and Stone Gossard are the twin guitarists of the outfit. They have arguably been the core of the band’s sound since they formed in 1990, just as much as Eddie Vedder and his famously consonant-averse vocal stylings.
By this point, the six-string duo have evolved past the need for markers like “lead” and “rhythm” guitarist. They each take on a Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood style “ancient art of weaving” attitude towards who’s playing the riffs and who’s playing the melodies.
Gossard may be nominally the rhythm player, but there are more than a few examples of him stepping up to the plate and shredding with everything he’s got. The likes of ‘Do the Evolution’, ‘Not For You’ and ‘Brain of J’ show that he’s the kind of lead player that many bands would give up their tour managers for.
His skillset goes far beyond soloing, though. He laid down the iconic bassline for ‘Rats’ and the riff for one of the most famous riffs in modern rock, ‘Alive’. Just like he wrote boatloads of the other classics of the band. Basically, any Pearl Jam moment that gets particularly heavy like ‘Animal’ and ‘Black’ stems from riffs that Stone Gossard wrote.
However, McCready is the one historically in charge of solos and, fair play to him, there are few lead guitarists in rock that can match the guy for sheer six-string wizardry. There’s a reason why the band will very occasionally drop a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Little Wing’ into their setlist, and it’s because in McCready, they’ve got someone who can replicate the great guitar hero’s sound beat for beat. What’s more, he still gets a kick out of playing live. In a rock world seemingly colonised by the jaded, that’s a rare feat.
We can see this in McCready’s interview with Loudwire, where he talked through his favourite songs to play live. In it, he said, “I love playing ‘Black’, I love playing ‘Even Flow’ because I get to show off. My part in the set is to do the solos in that, and I get to experiment every night on those. Playing the song ‘Dark Matter’ now is really fun; that’s a great rocker live. ‘Waiting for Stevie’ is a fun one to play. There’s a myriad of them, but those are the top ones off my head… First and last record!”
Clearly, these are two men who find as much joy playing songs old enough to have a family as they do songs that have just been created. Despite the band having such a furrowed-brow reputation, that joy is what makes Pearl Jam still such a vital part of the modern rock scene. The fact that watching them tear it up onstage can make you feel so (if you’ll forgive the pun) ‘Alive’.
