The one guitarist who changed Mike McCready forever: “A religious experience”
In a band that was as varied as Pearl Jam, Mike McCready was always the classic rock hero behind everything.
He was never the first one to write songs or anything, but when listening to any of his solos, you could hear the history of the kind of guitar heroes that made the 1970s so interesting, which either infuriated or infatuated every listener when one of their songs came on. But beyond his worship of everyone from Jimmy Page to Jimi Hendrix, there are artists that McCready felt deep within his soul whenever they played.
Before he had even come back to Seattle, though, chances were high that McCready could have had a completely different career as a hair-metal wannabe. He had already gone down to Los Angeles trying to make it in his own band Shadow, but when it became clear that the Sunset Strip was on its last legs, he was the perfect glue to hold Temple of the Dog together when they first started making their one record.
Pearl Jam wasn’t an idea yet, but the roaring leads that he played on ‘Reach Down’ was enough to keep in everyone’s good graces when it came time to form a new band with Eddie Vedder. And while Vedder wrote the words that most people felt they experienced firsthand, McCready had the delicate touch on guitar that could melt faces and make people cry within the span of one song.
But even when he flew off the handle, it was never about him trying to play a solo for the hell of it. You could feel the emotion behind everything he played, and whether it was the bluesy fills in the middle of ‘Yellow Ledbetter’ or the primal freakout that kicks off ‘Go’, McCready knew that everything he did needed to be felt in his gut first before he thought about translating it to his fingers.
And that was the kind of mentality that Stevie Ray Vaughan was born with when he started playing. There was no shot of a band like Double Trouble having a prayer in the middle of the glamorous 1980s, but when listening to ‘Pride and Joy’, people weren’t just hearing someone playing a bunch of blues licks. This was someone who had internalised every bit of the blues and was delivering the most concentrated version to the mainstream.
Although Texas Flood wasn’t exactly the highest-selling record of 1983, McCready knew it was nothing short of miraculous seeing Vaughan play for the first time, saying, “As soon as he started ‘Couldn’t Stand the Weather’, these huge clouds rolled in overhead, and rain began pouring down. When the song ended, the rain stopped. It was like a religious experience, and it changed me. It lifted me out of the negative mindset I was in, and it got me playing again. I thank him forever for that.”
But beyond being a great guitarist, a lot of the lessons McCready learned from Vaughan is when to play and when not to play. As much as the track ‘Texas Flood’ is one of the greatest guitar exercises that Vaughan ever put to tape, it’s always about the spaces in between the notes that matter so much more, especially when he opens his mouth to sing and has that beautiful texture in his voice.
Then again, what McCready did with his guitar wasn’t all that different from what the millions of other guitarists had done before Vaughan came around. It’s one thing to use the guitar to shred, but if you really want to be respected on the instrument, you’re going to want to make every line feel like a second voice in the band.
