“Hopefully they won’t sue us”: The Pearl Jam song Mike McCready said they ripped off from Kiss
The so-called Seattle grunge bands are typically seen as noble descendants of punk and first-wave metal, pushing back against the glitz and posturing of mainstream 1980s hair bands and watered-down stadium rock. Kurt Cobain loved the Pixies, Dave Grohl loved Bad Brains, and Eddie Vedder loved Fugazi: These were dudes flying the flag for “alternative”.
Of course, without much prodding required, each of those guys would also tell you how much they’d all been obsessed with The Beatles. And as children of the ‘70s, most of the musicians in the Seattle scene had also gone through the usual rites of passage when it came to early air-guitar-playing influences: Sabbath, Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Queen, and the ilk. Cobain was famously trying to work out the riff to Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling’ when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ popped out, and a similar thing might have happened to Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard when he was creating the main guitar line for what would become one of his band’s most recognisable hits.
“‘Alive’ is almost ‘Love Theme from Kiss’ from the first Kiss record,” Gossard’s bandmate Mike McCready told the Seattle fanzine Backfire in 2001, noting, “If you listen to the riff, it’s almost the same, so hopefully they won’t sue us.”
By this point, Pearl Jam were ten years into their career and among the biggest bands in the world, so perhaps McCready—in the midst of a comfortable chat with the beloved Seattle zine editor Dawn Anderson—felt willing to put forth the truth about ‘Alive’ into the ether, risking the very real possibility of an attack from the litigation-loving Gene Simmons.
“The riff [from ‘Alive’] is a little slower,” McCready continued, singing it out loud for a moment, “but if you listen to it… I don’t know if Stone was even listening to that, but I know that Stone likes Kiss, so, I’ve given him shit about it for years.”
When Anderson asked if McCready gave Gossard shit for stealing the riff or for liking Kiss in the first place, McCready was at least noble enough to acknowledge his own equal, if not significantly greater, appreciation for the makeup-clad quartet.
“No, no, not about liking Kiss,” he said, “I love Kiss myself. I actually just bought some Kiss dolls today”.
In a more recent 2023 interview on Chris Shiflett’s YouTube channel, McCready further acknowledged that Kiss inspired him to start playing the guitar after he saw a very normal item in a school setting with the band plastered on it: “My friend Rick had a Kiss lunchbox in sixth grade, and I was like, ‘What is that?’ And I remember just coming home a couple of days later and saying, ‘Dad, I don’t wanna be a Cub Scout anymore. I wanna do this…I started playing guitar at 11 and I just obsessed…”
According to him, Kiss was a hugely popular outfit for ’70s kids, and he definitely gave into the hype: “I just wanted to emulate that stuff”.
McCready’s own guitar solo on the aforementioned ‘Alive’, as he told Shiflett, was partially inspired by an Ace Frehley solo—not from ‘Love Theme from Kiss’, but from the 1975 track ‘She’.
“I knew I was taking directly from Ace [Frehley],” McCready said, “He was the man. I wanted to play like those guys”. Clearly, the musician, in trying to emulate, found his sound along the way.
