The Pearl Jam song Mike McCready never bothered to learn: “It never made sense”
Mike McCready can’t escape his name. It’s right there, in bold print on the page: McCready.
He’s ready for everything… or, at least, he should be, but the Pearl Jam guitarist has admitted there’s a song that he has never bothered to learn, which means he’s ultimately less prepared than his namesake might otherwise suggest.
The founding member of Pearl Jam is known for melding a kind of blues-rock with a punk energy, a talent that led him, with the rest of the band, to induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, and his distinctive guitar solos helped shape the 1990s alternative rock scene, but even though he’s a deft hand and a visionary artist, he doesn’t quite know it all.
Despite founding the band, there are elements of the group that are outside of McCready’s jurisdiction, and he’s not an omnipotent, omniscient ruler: he can recognise that each player is the master of their own part, which is why, when posed with the hypothetical of switching places with his bandmates for a day and being asked to play an entire show, the guitarist was honest about how well he would fare.
“If you and Stone [Gossard] had to switch parts for an entire gig, could you do it?” YouTuber and producer Rick Beato asked the guitarist. Immediately, McCready was sceptical; “If you gave me enough time?” He mused, arms folded in serious rumination. However, the star quickly admitted that there’s a key difference between him and Gossard; “I mean, no. I wouldn’t have the same groove that he has.”
McCready switched his answer up so he spoke on Gossard’s perspective, pointing out that there’s more to their dynamic than the sonic surface level: “I don’t know if he would have the tenacity of my leads, or whatever,” and in this pseudo-reality, then, the pair might be able to stumble through similar melodies in the right key, nailing all of the structural shifts mid-song, but there would be that ‘je ne sais quoi’ missing.
Beato moved on from hypotheticals and asked, directly, whether McCready would be able to play the guitar riff from ‘Alive’, the band’s debut single released in 1991 from their landmark album Ten, and McCready ensured fans watching the discussion would know he was familiar with the melody, regurgitating the notes vocally with a “I could kind of play it,” tittering from his mouth, before ultimately admitting, both to himself and to Beato, that the answer would be a resounding “No”.
But why? “It never made sense to learn it, because I had my own part,” McCready admitted. “I think we play complementary to each other, and that’s why it works.”
Sure enough, Gossard is known as the foundational rhythm guitarist of the rock band, while McCready often rips through everything they’ve built up to drift from the usual terrain and tear a fiery guitar solo about from his fingertips. By his logic, he’s never learnt that part because he’d be stepping on Gossard’s toes. Maybe it’s his sincere delivery, but this logic works for me.
