The Pearl Jam song Mike McCready admits he “ripped off”
Every artist is guilty of stealing more than a few licks from their favourite acts. It’s impossible not to draw from your influences, but there are more than a few times when what might be a fantastic composition has a few too many things in common with a rock and roll classic. Although most of Pearl Jam’s material remains a love letter to the songs that they heard when they were kids, Mike McCready may have been playing too close to the fire when creating this landmark guitar solo.
Of all the bands coming out of the grunge scene, though, Pearl Jam was always looked at with scepticism by various local acts. While the band never claimed to want to be the biggest band in the world, Kurt Cobain was notorious for dragging the band through the mud, thinking that they were the corporate version of what the Seattle sound was supposed to be.
Although Eddie Vedder’s signature baritone would be copied by legions of imitators later on, McCready was the one who brought the rock flair into the band. Having played in various hair metal bands before the group came together, McCready still had a fair bit of chops when putting together the songs on the band’s debut album Ten, turning songs like ‘Jeremy’ into emotional guitar exorcisms.
Outside of the traditional hair metal shredding, McCready always gravitated towards the sounds of the blues. By the time he had moved back to Seattle, the guitarist had fallen in love with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, as evidenced by the song ‘Yellow Ledbetter’, which bears a striking resemblance to the guitar icon’s classic track ‘Little Wing’.
While McCready has remained tight-lipped about any Hendrix plagiarism, he admitted that the solo to ‘Even Flow’ is one of the most blatant steals he ever made. Despite boasting a funky groove and one of the greatest riffs that Stone Gossard committed to tape, the solo section came courtesy of blues guitar virtuoso Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Modelled in the same vein as Hendrix, Vaughan’s Texas twang would become a staple of the hard rock scene throughout the 1980s, lending his skills to David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ and creating classics like ‘Pride and Joy’. When it came time for McCready to solo, one of Vaughan’s solos fell out of him.
When discussing tracking the song, McCready admitted that the solo break in ‘Even Flow’ is one of his greatest steals, telling Guitar World, “That’s me pretending to be Stevie Ray Vaughan, and a feeble attempt at that. Stone wrote the riff and song; I think it’s a D tuning. I just followed him in a regular pattern. I tried to steal everything I know from Stevie Ray Vaughan and put it into that song. A blatant rip-off. A tribute rip-off, if you will!”.
Although Vaughan may have been the inspiration for the solo, McCready takes the song in a completely different direction, making his guitar sound like it’s crying out in pain from the moment that his first guitar bend starts. While McCready may admit to being a child of his influences, the true artistry comes with being able to turn your favourite songs into something completely different.
