Mike McCready - PJ20

Mike McCready and Pearl Jam Celebrate Their 20th Anniversary

By Matthew Halverson



NOT MANY BANDS can say they outlived the genre they helped create. But two decades after ripping rock in two and catapulting Seattle into the pop culture conversation, Pearl Jam has transcended grunge. And through van tours and quick fame, Crohn’s disease and song fatigue, Mike McCready has been there, stage left, jamming away. This month, the solo-shredding guitar hero will join Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, and Matt Cameron to celebrate PJ’s 20th anniversary with a Labor Day weekend festival in East Troy, Wisconsin. The flannel has frayed and the combat boots are worn through, but rock and roll like this will never die.

• • •

The other day I was watching the AC/DC “Let There Be Rock” video, which I hadn’t seen since 1980. Watching them, back in the day at their prime, that’s rock and roll. Because it’s simple, it’s from the gut, and it’s kind of dangerous. You’re like, “I feel a little bit uncomfortable here. But I like it.”

I hear sounds in my head sometimes. They come out of nowhere. And if I don’t grab them really quick, they’re gone. Sometimes I can’t get the rhythm back, and that’s the most important part.

When we were on Lollapalooza in 1992, we were second on the bill. We had a 45-minute slot at about 2 every afternoon, but when we went on we’d have 50,000 people rush the stage. Maybe not that many every time, but it started happening. It was kind of scary, but it was also totally exciting. That’s when I knew something was up.

Some decisions early on—not doing videos, not doing interviews, not going to award shows—I didn’t necessarily agree with. I remember one record company guy saying, “If you guys don’t do a video for ‘Black,’ you’re over.” We felt like that was bullshit, but at the same time I thought, “Maybe a video for ‘Black’ would be cool.” Had we gone the route where we did all of those things, though, we would have broken up. I just remember how tense it was and how much weirdness had happened because we got so big so quickly. We would have ridden that for a little bit, and then given how volatile we all are there would have been a big blowup.

I’m more of a peacemaker in the band. Ed will certainly have strong opinions. Jeff will have things that he believes really strongly. Stone will, too. The three of them don’t always meet up. But they somehow make compromises. And I go along. I have opinions about stuff, but I just want the band to keep going.

There’s the audience and the band, and the symbiotic relationship that goes on emotionally and physically and spiritually between the two. You want to be there for it.

The Strat is the easiest guitar to smash, but I’ve smashed Les Pauls and Telecasters and all of that. But I miss a bunch of them. Honestly, looking back, I wish I could have a couple of those guitars back. It felt good at the time, though. It was very Who-ish.

It was 1986, and I was at Johnny Rockets on Melrose in LA. All of the sudden I had to go to the bathroom really bad—and it hurt. I thought it was something I ate, but then it was still going on over the next week and a half. So I finally called back to my parents, and I was like, “I see some blood. This is weird.” They told me to go to a doctor, so I did, and it was originally diagnosed as ulcerative colitis. I was 21. I was just devastated. I was like, “Am I going to die?” I only lasted about a year in LA after I was diagnosed, and then I said, “I got to get back home.” I quit playing music for a while, and then I started playing again, and then Stone called me to see if I wanted to start a band. So had I not gotten Crohn’s, I might never have been a part of all of this.

The best thing to happen when I’m soloing is to have nothing going through my mind. It’s a place that I try to get to, but I can’t unless it just happens. Sometimes I’ll think, “Maybe I’ll have a ham sandwich after the show” or “I had a fun time running today”—random stuff—and that just screws it up.

You know, no, I don’t get tired of playing “Yellow Ledbetter.” Who knows what it’s really about, but people still sing it with a passion. Actually, I just played it with Ed on his solo tour down in Long Beach. I went to the show and thought he might ask me to jump up on stage, but I didn’t find out for sure until I got there. And I have to come clean: I went out to the lobby and listened to a YouTube version of it on my phone. Hey, I still have to rehearse.


Bellissima

Edited by Innocent Bystander - 11/9/2011, 13:17

sì sì, reharsa ancora un pò, che a noi ci piace

CITAZIONE

I hear sounds in my head sometimes. They come out of nowhere. And if I don’t grab them really quick, they’re gone. Sometimes I can’t get the rhythm back, and that’s the most important part.

Guided By Sounds

le famose vocine...

ecco, ci mancava...

un'altra, sempre di Mike. enjoy!

www.montrealgazette.com/entertainme...0895/story.html

Pearl Jam: From ten to 20
By Bernard Perusse, Gazette Music Columnist August 23, 2011


Guitarist Mike McCready says Pearl Jam has been defined in part by “a vision of doing something a little different than other bands. Sometimes longevity can, at least in part, boil down to enjoying the same old in-jokes.

It’s one of the factors guitarist Mike McCready cited without hesitation when he explained what has kept four of the five original members of Pearl Jam together for two decades. The milestone is being celebrated this year with a tour, a new documentary and archival releases like the recent upgrades of Vs. and Vitalogy.

“We still share the same tired, 20-year-old jokes,” McCready said during a phone interview last week. While the shared humour speaks of the all-important friendship component, there’s stronger glue, too.

“We play together like no other five guys in the world,” McCready said. “Not that it’s better or worse. It just is that way. I will play with Jeff (Ament) and go, ‘Wow! I love how he plays bass,’ or

‘I love how Stone (Gossard) is behind the groove when he’s playing guitar,’ or ‘Wow! Ed (lead singer Eddie Vedder) is totally connecting with the audience tonight.’

“We’re still respectful of each other and still impressed with each other,” he said. “We’re all grateful to still be around. We’re just firing on all cylinders now.”

McCready said the group is touring to share that gratitude with its fans, with shows that go deep into the Pearl Jam catalogue and will be tailored for every stop, taking into account what has been done before in each city. Old set lists will be consulted to avoid repetition, McCready said. Working up the right song sequence is an obsession of Vedder’s, he added – and if that means changing it in mid-show by interpreting the audience’s reaction, so be it.

“It’s a living, breathing, exciting thing,” McCready said. “And we want people to come out and live it and breathe it with us.”

While the vitality of the Pearl Jam catalogue might seem self-evident now, it was not necessarily in the cards when the group’s debut album, Ten, was released in 1991. At least some of the music press was dismissive, and even doomed legend and fellow Seattle-based rocker Kurt Cobain blew them off as commercial sellouts. Oddly, part of Cobain’s logic was that there was too much lead guitar work in Pearl Jam’s music.

“It was kind of irritating,” McCready conceded, “because (the Seattle bands) were all trying to do this thing together. I was p---ed about it. There was some tension, but at the same time, we were like, ‘Bring it. We’re a really good band and we’ll keep going.’ ”

McCready preferred to remember Cobain as a great songwriter, and said Pearl Jam saw Nirvana early on as a measuring stick of what they should and shouldn’t do as a band. In conversation, his memories of what is now seen as the game-changing year 1991 – when guitar-based grunge bands exploded out of the Seattle scene and buried the synth-pop of the 1980s – seem nothing but fond.

“It turned into a fashion thing after the fact,” he said. “(The Seattle scene) was so close-knit. It’s rainy here, so we were always playing in garages and putting shows on together. The local government was not receptive at the time to having bands playing to all ages. You had to be creative. There was a healthy competition, but we were helping each other. And out of all that, we all became much better bands.”

If more proof is needed of popular music’s cyclical nature, we need only look at this week’s charts, where synthesizers, keyboards, Auto-Tune and machines define the sound and guitar has once again been grounded. Even so, McCready isn’t ready to write the instrument’s obituary.

“A lot of singer-songwriter guys, like Fleet Foxes, are using guitars in a different way,” he said. “I still believe guitars will be around as long as there’s rock music.”

Nor is rock ’n’ roll – declining chart positions notwithstanding – ready for the boneyard, McCready suggested. “Hip hop and rap have (become) the thing kids relate to most. Maybe that’s taken rock ’n’ roll’s mantle a little bit. But when it comes right down to it, I’m stuck in rock, so I look at things through those glasses. It still means a lot to me and it’s the soundtrack to my day every day.”

Talking about Pearl Jam’s association with classic rockers like Neil Young (with whom they recorded the 1995 album Mirror Ball) and the Who, McCready expressed hope that Pearl Jam might mean as much to its fans as the Who and the Rolling Stones did to him.

Director Cameron Crowe has made a solid case on the group’s behalf. A devotee of the band, Crowe has channelled his enthusiasm into making Pearl Jam Twenty, due in theatres next month. It’s a look at the band’s history through rare footage, live performances and current interviews. A CD and book of the same name will be released simultaneously.

“The film is pretty fantastic,” McCready said. “I know that people who are fans will enjoy it. There’s a lot of stuff you will not have seen before. And Cameron builds a pretty cool story of what was going on in Seattle at the time. Our scene was where (bands) were helping each other out. You’ll see that. And people who are not fans, maybe, will learn something about the band or about the city or about the music that came out of it.”

In the course of its history, McCready acknowledged, Pearl Jam has paid a price for sticking to its guns on some issues. Its mid-1990s boycott of mainstream Ticketmaster venues over the agency’s service charges might have alienated some of the fans who had to work hard to see the group at out-of-the-way venues, he said. Similarly, the band’s decision to make virtually no videos shut the door on one of the most valuable promotional tools available to artists.

But what has, in part, defined Pearl Jam over two decades, McCready said, is “having a vision of doing something a little different than other bands, or what labels have told bands to do over the years – of going against the grain and then actually having success from that, which is a welcome surprise.

“You don’t know until you go through the process, whether it’s the Ticketmaster thing or a myriad of things we’ve had to learn from,” McCready said. “And I think we’re still learning. There’s no time for regrets. You’ve just got to keep moving forward.”

Pearl Jam performs Sept. 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the Bell Centre, with Mudhoney. Tickets cost $83. Phone 514-790-2525 or go to www.evenko.ca.

[email protected]

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Edited by fran altereddie - 28/8/2011, 22:30