MIKE MCCREADY admits he RIPPED OFF KISS’s guitar riff for PEARL JAM hit song “Alive.”
While speaking to Foo Fighters’ guitarist Chris Shiflett on his podcast “Shred with Shifty,” Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready opened up about some of his biggest musical influences.
“KISS was the reason I started playing guitar,” he explained. “I was a Cub Scout, and I was looking for my merit badges and my friend Rick Friel 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 that’s all I ever did.”
Shiflett then revealed that his own guitar inspiration growing up was KISS’ Ace Frehley, who McCready also said influenced him.
“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 said before admitting that he “ripped off” a KISS guitar riff for a classic Pearl Jam song.
“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 said. “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 descending pattern. So I kind of went with it. And then I improvised from there.”
