The 1990s band Mike McCready would reform in a heartbeat: “I hope we record again”
In a perfect world, Mike McCready probably wouldn’t have had the chance to join Pearl Jam.
For the longest time, he was trying to make it as a hair metal guitarist in Los Angeles with his band Shadow, but after that failed to work out, his fixation with Stevie Ray Vaughan was what made Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard fall in love with his playing when putting together their own band. But somewhere in the middle of grunge’s rise was one group that McCready felt like should have gone on much longer than they did.
Then again, Gossard and Ament had already been through the wringer well before Pearl Jam had even started. Green River was the first band that introduced them to the world, and even if Mark Arm didn’t bother sticking around and formed Mudhoney, their next incarnation as Mother Love Bone felt like the one band that would take over the world. And all of that came down to the sheer presence that Andy Wood had whenever they played any of their shows.
The frontman was following in the footsteps of some of his idols, like Freddie Mercury, whenever he performed, and he had the potential to be really goddamn funny while he was doing it. The band were still virtually unknown to the rest of the world outside Seattle, but Wood would still play every one of their shows like he was headlining a coliseum, with McCready remembering, “He would yell ‘to all the people in the back’ and, you know, there’d [just] be the guy at the door.”
That kind of enthusiasm could have become really annoying, but the spirit of the band was always about pushing themselves forward. Everyone knew that Wood was poised to become a star, so when he was found dead of a drug overdose right before their first album came out, it was like the wind got knocked out of the entire Seattle community. And since Chris Cornell was Wood’s roommate for years at that point, he felt the least he could do was make an album with the surviving members of the band, with songs that he wrote about Wood.
Looking back on it now, Temple of the Dog would have had the potential to be one of the biggest supergroups in the world, but since no one knew any of the band members yet, songs like ‘Hunger Strike’ spent years flying under the radar before someone realised that there was a song with Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell duetting with each other. And while McCready was happy to go along for the ride, he felt that it would have been great to have the band back together when Cornell was still alive.
Even during the handful of anniversary shows that the band did in 2016, McCready felt like the band had some unfinished business to work out, saying, “I hope we record again. It all depends on Chris and Chris’s interest. But I would record new songs in a minute. There hasn’t been any talk of it, but if Chris is into it and so are the rest of the guys, I’m totally into that.” And while Cornell was still with us, he did say that McCready was a big part of what made Temple of the Dog work so well.
‘Reach Down’ was only supposed to be a joke when he first made the demo that was 11 minutes long, but when they heard what McCready could do with a handful of blues licks, Cornell realised that he was a monster. Everyone thought that he was this nice kid who wanted to play a couple of tunes, but when Pearl Jam formed around the same time, Cornell was the one wishing them luck, trying to control someone who had that kind of musical fire in them every time they played.
Any kind of Temple of the Dog reunion is now only speculation with Cornell gone, but listening to a lot of those early songs, it’s probably better to leave the legacy where it is. The whole band was meant to come together to honour their friend, and while they could resurrect some of those songs these days, it would only be to pay tribute to both frontmen who sent Pearl Jam on their musical journey.
