The headstock of McCready’s ‘60 famously features a huge gouge resulting from a mis-timed stab at a speaker in the mid-1990s. Nothing’s gonna sound as good as that, but this one’s right next to it.” Stab In The Dark My 1960, the original one, is the best, I’m not gonna say that’s not the case. That’s important to me, because it’s real. I use it on six or seven or eight different songs on this tour. “George Webb, who works for us, helped me be very specific in picking out what it needed to look like, how the pickups needed to sound. “I felt confident that Fender did a lot of due diligence in getting back and forth with me,” McCready says. On tour right now, he’s playing Daughter with one of the new signature Strats in what is essentially the ultimate road-test, and he’s liking what he hears. “I wanted to get that sound of the out-of-phase pickup, the second position, for the rhythm part of it,’” McCready recalls. An almost supine rocker that plays Eddie Vedder’s vocal intensity off warm acoustics and loping chords, it remains one of Pearl Jam’s finest low-key moments. McCready recalls turning to a 335 for songs such as Animal - aka Even Flow if it hated you and wanted you to know about it - but it’s the tracklist’s next step, Daughter, that shows the developing relationship with his Strat in the best light. Pearl Jam responded to the scrutiny and pressure of a hit record by resetting a little, serving up a more abrasive sound that was only completely sure of itself here and there. began in 1993 the ‘60 was locked in, but very little else was. Image: Fenderīy the time work on their second album Vs. Mike McCready playing his signature Fender Stratocaster. It took a while to get there, playing a lot of shows, playing with a band, and playing on a lot of records, to create a style.” I think that those things got into my playing and it came out me. I talked about my early influences all the time in interviews back then. I was trying to emulate those guys in a lot of our songs, and as I was trying to emulate them I was coming up with my own style within that. “I was a giant fan of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Hendrix. “I was 25 when that record came out,” he recalls. The ‘60 entered his life at a time when he was malleable, quickly becoming a part of his creative language in a manner that moved beyond most artist-instrument relationships. But as it kept on rolling, McCready was still figuring out exactly what sort of player he wanted to be. Next to the rapid sprint to ubiquity enjoyed by Nirvana’s Nevermind the band’s 1991 debut LP, Ten, was a marathon runner that spent a couple of hundred weeks on the Billboard chart on its way to selling 13 million copies in the US alone. Inspired by Stevie Ray Vaughan, he pulled it into his rotation just after Pearl Jam made the record that would break them into the grunge stratosphere. McCready’s relationship with the original instrument began back in 1992, when he came across what he believed to be a ‘59 Strat in Los Angeles (during the making of the Custom Shop model, Fender’s master builder Vincent Van Trigt discovered it to be a ‘60). I would move between them and go, ‘I like aspects of this one, but I don’t on this one, the pickups are good on this one, not on this one.’ We put all those together into one Frankenstein guitar.” Mike McCready playing his signature Fender Stratocaster. ![]() On the last tour over in Europe, we had three different models of it. ![]() ![]() “We’ve spent a lot of time going back and forth with Fender to go, ‘This thing has to be perfect – the neck’s gotta feel this way, the treble pickup has to be not too high-end-y, it has to sound as close to the 1960 as it can,’” he says.
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