The Pearl Jam song Mike McCready struggles to play live
Few guitarists from the grunge scene could claim to be masters behind the fretboard. For all of the great acts that may have honed their craft by writing songs based on the gloomy sounds of the northwest, a handful always used the guitar as an emotional translator rather than an excuse to shred. In a world where most guitar acrobatics were looked down upon, Mike McCready was one of the few who could ignite any lead guitar break when Pearl Jam stepped up to the plate.
Before the Seattle scene had become a mecca of rock and roll brilliance, McCready was still making ends meet as an aspiring guitarist in the glam rock movement. Inspired by the likes of Eddie Van Halen, McCready spent his first days working in the group Shadow, playing the same nimble lead lines that would become passé just a few years later.
When he realised that his first band wasn’t working out, McCready returned to Seattle, becoming more in tune with blues guitarists like Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. By the time his friends in the group Mother Love Bone had lost singer Andy Wood to a drug overdose, he began to make inroads to join the new outfit with the supergroup Temple of the Dog.
After drafting in Eddie Vedder from San Diego, Pearl Jam finally had a lineup, making savage takes on classic rock on songs like ‘Alive’ and ‘Even Flow’. While the group were still in the trenches with the local Seattle scene, not everyone was impressed by McCready’s delicate fretwork on their songs.
For every artist that showered the band with praise, others like Kurt Cobain thought that McCready’s playing catered too much to the traditional sounds of classic rock to be alternative. As if to lash out at the rest of the music scene and the corporate side of the business that wanted to keep them down, Vs marked the band’s heaviest material to date, with McCready storming out of the gate with the song ‘Go’.
Taken from a riff that drummer Dave Abrruzzese would fool around with in between takes, the band would turn the song into the moody introduction to the record, with Vedder wailing until it sounded like his lungs would give out. Although McCready responded in kind with a face-melting solo, he admitted that he had trouble trying to work the same magic when he played the tune live.
Since the solo was created on the spur of the moment, McCready had a challenge trying to capture lightning in a bottle again, telling Guitar World, “That solo on ‘Go’ was probably the second of three or four takes. And I do have a problem recreating it live because I wasn’t thinking about it at all when we did it in the studio. So on stage, I get into this mode where I’ll start to think while I’m playing, ‘Okay, this sounds like the album, and I want to emulate that.’”
Then again, McCready always turned into a different animal whenever he got onstage. Across the rest of Pearl Jam’s career, McCready would be instrumental in bringing the heaviness out in the band’s live shows, playing the role of the band’s resident Jimmy Page as he strutted across the stage. Out of all of Pearl Jam’s ever-shifting concert setlists, though, ‘Go’ is one of the tireless warhorses from their angriest period.
