Kyle Meredith with... Mike McCready (Pearl Jam)

Mike McCready on Pearl Jam, Mad Season, & Trying to Start a Band with Kurt Cobain

With Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter nearly here, we’re pulling a pair of interviews out of the vault from guitarist Mike McCready, one that hasn’t been heard since its initial broadcast on WFPK. First from 2012, McCready talks about his UFO tribute act, Flight To Mars, and what that group, along with Kiss, Van Halen, and Aerosmith, meant to his pre-PJ band Shadow, as well as how the tribute raises awareness for Chron’s Colitis. He also touches on his side project The Rockfords, Pearl Jam’s Monkeywrench Radio period, sharing Matt Cameron with Soundgarden, and working on what would become Lightning Bolt. The biggest news at that time was the announcement that he would be celebrating Mad Season, his one-off band with Alice In Chains’ Layne Staley, with a deluxe edition, proclaiming 13 unreleased cuts they were looking to finish.

Going forward a year, the 2013 interview picks up on exactly that subject of Mad Season, with Mike giving us the story on how they recorded 3 of the 13 songs with Mark Lanegan and another pair with Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman. McCready talks about the dark period of recording the record with the best intentions of helping Staley get clean of his addictions, which he would succumb to a few years later in 2002. When it was pointed out that Mike had played with nearly all of the most famous of Seattle singers, including Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell in Pearl Jam and Temple of the Dog, we’re then given the story of the brief moment he tried to start a project with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. What could have been.

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