Q&A: Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready on the Band’s Place in Rock History

Sacado de // From: http://www.esquire.com and http://portalternativo.com

Oh, no, no. En nuestros comienzos pensaba que todo terminaría al día siguiente… He querido hacer esto toda mi vida así que cuando finalmente logramos un contrato discográfico y poder salir a tocar… Fue como, “Está pasando. Todo va a llevar a algo”.

Ando ahora mismo trabajando en un documental llamado “The Glamour and the Squalor”, sobre un DJ llamado Marco Collins, de Seattle y también de San Diego. Fue parte integrante de aquellos tiempos, con las bandas alternativas, todos nosotros, en la radio, en Seattle. Hay imágenes de Kurt (Cobain), hablando de “In Utero” y me hizo pensar, “Guau, qué joven es”. Tenía veintipico años, cuando le entrevistaban, y me hizo recordar aquellos tiempos en los que había aquella supuesta tensión entre nosotros, este rollo creado por la prensa. Probablemente hubo algo pero al final, no. Creo que él y Ed (Vedder) habían hablado. Recuerdo que estábamos en los VMAs de la MTV y salté sobre algunos asientos y le dije (a Cobain), “Hey, he oído que tu y Ed vais a hacer un disco algún día”. Y me dijo, “Oh, hablaremos de ello en otro momento”. Sentí que tenía que acercarme porque había ese extraño muro entre nosotros, nosotros contra ellos y ellos contra nosotros, y no existía. Todos salíamos de la misma escena, según veo. Salimos de una ciudad muy provinciana que no apoyaba mucho la música y tuvimos que hacerlo todo nosotros, con flyers por doquier. Nunca hubo apoyo municipal para hacer música, tampoco lo hay ahora. Tuvimos que hacer eso, Nirvana tuvo que hacerlo, los chicos de Soundgarden tuvieron que hacerlo, pero todos íbamos a los conciertos de los otros. Íbamos a las mismas fiestas. Así que acabamos todos juntos. Cuando la cosa se hizo grande y todos salimos a la carretera, nos alegrábamos por todos y espero que Kurt fuese feliz también. En este documental, me entristeció, obviamente, verle tan joven y desearía que pudiera estar aquí, para ver donde estaría ahora, ¿sabes a lo que me refiero? Es conmovedor y festivo pero también hay tristeza y oscuridad. Dicho eso, “In Utero” es un disco fantástico. Me alegra que sigamos aquí. Soundgarden sacaron un disco el año pasado. Mudhoney tocaron en lo alto del Space Needle. Toda clase de cosas guays nos han pasado y yo lo celebro. Lo que significa eso hoy es que, guau, seguimos aquí. Estoy muy agradecido por ello. Hay algo de belleza en ello. Y hay algo de tristeza.

El guitarrista muestra su ilusión por ver como entre el público de sus conciertos hay nuevas generaciones de fans.

Eso es lo que me flipa. Veo adolescentes en el público. Está ocurriendo un rollo generacional con nosotros que desearía que Kurt hubiera visto. Chavales jóvenes están redescubriendo esta era musical y, eso, para mi, es atemporal e importante y divertido y es emocional y significa algo. Desearía que hubiera podido ver eso.

IN ENGLISH

There’s a band onstage in an arena somewhere, and its members are wailing through an impromptu take on Van Halen’s «Eruption,» covering the Dead Boys’ punk anthem «Sonic Reducer,» dousing the stage with whatever they’re drinking, smashing the dangling lights that hang from their elaborate stage setup with the necks of their guitars, and mounting one of said lighting fixtures like Tarzan for the sole purpose of swinging over the sweaty, screaming, feeding frenzy of a crowd. The front man, more often than not, is engaged in some kind of sinister back-and-forth with the microphone stand, which appears to be holding him up at times throughout the two-hour assaultive marathon. They calm down for a minute or two to play an acoustic set before the lights go up, and they barrel through the encore the audience is growing hoarse screaming over. They thank the crowd profusely, they grin, they hand their guitars to the stage techs, and they leave.

That band, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn last week, was Pearl Jam. The Seattle grunge gods, best known for crafting coffeehouse and college-radio standards of the ’90s like «Jeremy» and «Daughter,» are currently plowing through a list of dates that’ll take them on a national tour in celebration of Lightning Bolt, their tenth studio effort and the scorching, loud record that sounds nothing like the stuff that made them famous back when MTV Unplugged was still a thing and Kurt Cobain was sneering at them for «pioneering a corporate alternative and cock-rock fusion.» (Cobain would later apologize for these remarks.) The current fervor for Pearl Jam doesn’t quit with the tour: Lightning Bolt and other Pearl Jam picks will soundtrack the World Series this week, and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is in the middle of its own Pearl Jam week. As Pearl Jam continue to learn about themselves as musicians while touring behind Lightning Bolt, Mike McCready, Pearl Jam’s lead guitarist, walks us through their milestones, the band’s meager beginnings, the Kurt Cobain feud, and why «relevance» isn’t necessarily a word that concerns them at this point in their smoldering career.

ESQUIRE.COM: There were four years in between Backspacer and Lightning Bolt. Do you think this heightens the kind of enthusiasm that your fans greet you with?

MIKE MCCREADY: We toured a bunch within those four years. We don’t go out for a year straight like U2. We did two tours in Europe, two in South America, and a tour through part of the U.S. I think that absence maybe makes the heart grow fonder, as they say, so maybe that’s what our fans are feeling. That’s one thing I’m excited about, our fans listening to the new material. A lot of times, bands will go on tour and people only wanna hear the hits. Luckily our fans are receptive to our new stuff. That’s another crazy thing, that they want to hear what Ed’s singing about now, that they want to sing along with it, or feel it, or cry with it. That’s great, because we’re all growing together, the band and the fans. Lyrically, Ed’s dealing with stuff that maybe a lot of our fans are. That’s always something he’s been good at, kind of writing across the board and touching a lot of people because of his honesty and realness.

ESQ: «Jeremy» and «Even Flow» were noticeably absent from the set list at Barclays — or at least on the night we saw you there — and those are two of Pearl Jam’s biggest hits. Is this a consistent thing on the Lightning Bolt tour? 

MM: We have 188 songs or something like that. When Ed’s working on the set list, say, tonight in Philly, he goes, «Here’s every set list we’ve done here.» He’ll look at every set list to see how we started the show, and compare it to what we should do in his mind. He worries about this stuff all day. If we played «Even Flow» last night, which we did, we may not play it tonight. We want to get «Sirens» in there because it’s on the radio, or «Mind Your Manners» because people may be expecting to hear that. Those songs are growing as we play them. They’re turning into something different from what they were when we recorded them, and it’s exciting to see which songs make that happen. «Lightning Bolt» is a fun song to play live. I kind of knew it would be. We’ve got to fit in as much as we can in three hours and cover all the records. Sometimes «Jeremy» might not get played, but you’ll get «Alive,» or you’ll get something from that era, and we can’t do it every night. And sometimes it’s how Ed reads the crowd. He’ll go, «I don’t know if I’m feeling it tonight,» and he’ll call out an audible and we’ll do something different. That’s been happening a lot, which gets super-confusing.

ESQ: Is that what happened with «Eruption»?

MM: Exactly. There was some kind of guitar malfunction, and Ed’s guitar was out of tune or not working or something, so he goes, «Hey, will you do ‘Eruption’ on the guitar?» And I said yes. I changed guitars, because I’d rather do it on a Strat. At any rate, he was having some sound problems and wanted to nail them down very quickly and buy some time. I’ve been working on «Eruption» — it’s been sort of a personal challenge of mine to figure it out since I was 11, when I first started playing guitar. It’s been something that I was intimidated by, of course, because it’s so crazy, but I thought, «I might be able to learn this, but it’ll take some time,» so I worked on it for every night for six months. I didn’t realize I was going to play it that night. Luckily, I had it in me, Ed got to buy some time, and something like that will happen tonight, I’ll guarantee you, but you never know what it is, so you have to be ready. That’s the dance we do.

ESQ: It’s a dance you do well, though.

MM: It’s a panic dance.

ESQ: Don’t tell people that!

MM: Oh, I panic. I’ll tell them. It’s all right. [Laughs]

ESQ: Everyone’s so excited about Lightning Bolt, and its songs are popping up everywhere, from Late Night to the World Series. If there’s one cable network that goes against what Pearl Jam seems to be about politically, it’s Fox, and they’re the ones airing the World Series. Did that come up when getting involved with the World Series broadcast was a possibility for you?

MM: There are certainly elements of Fox that I hesitate to call «news,» but we were looking at it purely as baseball fans. This is a great opportunity to be a part of the mythology and greatness of what this sport has been. Us being fans of it, to get to be involved in it and have music played in it, we’re excited about that. We’re not looking at the political leanings of a network more than the excitement of what the World Series means to us as individuals and as Americans and just the height of sports. I think it’s more in that. That’s a good question, because we never really discussed that aspect of it. We discussed, «Wow, they’re going to put our songs in the World Series, that’s pretty cool!»

ESQ: But this is a big year for Seattle grunge in general. You’re celebrating your tenth studio album, with Lightning Bolt. Mudhoney just observed their 25th anniversary. In Utero just turned 20, with a big reissue behind it. It seems like members of the Seattle scene are hitting milestones left, right, and sideways. Relevancy comes up a lot in that context, too, as people are perpetually listing you as an influence. How is it to acknowledge your own achievements alongside these other bands? Are you where you thought you’d be 22 years ago?

MM: Oh no, no. I felt that in the early days that this could be all over tomorrow… I’ve been wanting to do that my whole life, so when I finally got a record contract, and got to play… It was like, «It’s all happening. It’s all gonna lead somewhere else.» I’m working on a documentary called The Glamour and the Squalor right now, about a DJ named Marco Collins from Seattle and also San Diego. He was kind of integral to that time, with the alternative bands, all of us, on the radio, in Seattle. There’s some footage of Kurt [Cobain, in the documentary], of him talking about In Utero, and it made me think, «Wow, he’s so young.» He was in his mid-20s, when they interviewed him, and it brought me back to that time when there was this supposed tension between all of us, this press-created thing. There probably was some of that, but toward the end of it, there wasn’t. I think he and Ed had talked. I remember we were at the MTV VMAs, and I just jumped over the seats, and I said [to Cobain], «Hey, I heard you and Ed might be doing a record some day. I’d love to play a lead on it.» And he goes, «Oh, we’ll talk about it some other time.» I just felt like I had to reach out, because there was this weird wall between us, us versus them or them versus us, and it wasn’t. We all came from the same scene, in my mind. We came out of a very provincial city that was not very supportive of music, and we had to do our own thing, and flyer everywhere. There was never support from the city to do music there, not as there is now. We had to do that, Nirvana had to do that, the Soundgarden guys did that, but we’d all go to each other’s shows, too. We’d go to the same parties. So we all kind of came up together. When it got huge and we all went on the road, we were happy for everyone else, and I wish Kurt was happy, too. In this documentary, it made me kind of sad, obviously, to see him as such a young man, and wish he could be around to see where they’d be now, you know what I mean? It’s poignant and it’s celebratory, but also, there’s some sadness and darkness that goes along with it. That being said, In Utero is a fantastic record. I’m glad we’re still around. Soundgarden put out a record last year. Mudhoney played on top of the Space Needle. All sorts of cool stuff has happened, and I celebrate that. What that means today is, wow, we’re still around, I’m very grateful for it. There’s some beauty to it. And there’s some sadness.

ESQ: Do you think that those supportive bones of the Seattle grunge scene make the music that came from it perpetually relevant?

MM: That’s what blows me away. I’m seeing teenagers in the crowd. There’s a generational thing that’s happening with us now that I wish Kurt could’ve seen. Younger kids are rediscovering this era of music, and that, to me, is timeless and important and fun and it’s emotional and it means something. I wish he could’ve seen that.

ESQ: Is that something that feeds into the intensity you feel for Lightning Bolt? Do you look at your most recent releases differently when you take your history as a band — and the history you play such an active part in — into consideration? Is Lightning Bolt a record 22 years in the making?

MM: It kind of is. It’s all of our past experiences. It’s how long we’ve been together. It’s how many things we’ve learned from doing side projects. It’s how many times we’ve played on stage together. It’s how we communicate and non-verbally communicate onstage. It’s how we’ve learned how to write songs. We all get a chance to write a song in this band, which is the really cool part about being in this. I feel very grateful about that. That’s a situation that doesn’t happen in all bands, and Ed can go out and write a lot of great stuff, and he chooses to want to hear other stuff from us. And it’s all kind of cool in that way. In that, we can have a lot of songwriters coming in, and that can be a blessing.