Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready revealed KISS influenced him to play guitar and become who he is today.
In a chat with Foo Fighters’ Chris Shiflett, the guitarist discussed how he got into KISS. “KISS was the reason I started playing guitar,” he admitted. “I was a cub scout, and I was looking for my merit badges and my friend Rick Freel had a KISS lunch box in sixth grade and I was like, ‘What is that?'”
“I remember just coming home and a couple days later talking to my dad and saying, ‘Dad, I don’t wanna do the Cub Scouts anymore, I wanna do this. I wanna play guitar.’ And my parents were cool enough to buy me a hundred-dollar Mateo Les Paul in 1979. I started playing guitar at 11 and I just obsessed and went that’s all I ever did,” he continued.
When Shiflett said his inspiration was Ace Frehley, McCready also shared Frehley’s influence on him. “I’m doing this it’s I want to be Space Boy or I want to be the Starchild. I want whatever. KISS was such a huge thing to kids of the 70s. So I obsessed on it. It was exciting and then that turned me on to all sorts of other music out of that you know of the 70s. I just wanted to emulate that stuff.”
McCready was so influenced by the KISS guitarist that he even ‘ripped off’ some of a classic KISS riff. “I really gravitated towards his vibrato. My lead for ‘Alive’ is based on ‘She’, and that’s based on ‘Five to One’ by The Doors,” he admitted during a chat. “I remember we were in Surrey, England. I thought about it like, ‘I’m going to approach this like Ace did on ‘She’. And I remember the chord pattern that Stone [Gossard] wrote lent it to that kind of a descending pattern. So I kind for went with it. And then I improvised from there.”
Not only that, but McCready even joined Frehley on stage during a show at Neptune Theatre in Seattle. He jammed the KISS classic ‘Cold Gin’ with Ace’s band.
