10 Greatest Guitar Duos In Rock Music History
6. Stone Gossard and Mike McCready - Pearl Jam
Looking back on the music that they made, can we really call Pearl Jam a grunge band? As much as they repped for Seattle and became one of the biggest bands around right as grunge was starting to reach its peak, their sound was nothing like the more...well...grunge-y stuff you were hearing out of people like the Melvins and Mudhoney. If you asked Stone Gossard, these guys are basically just a band from the '70s who just happened to form a few decades late.
Listening to some of the band's first few demos, Stone Gossard had a unique touch on how to write riffs the size of stadiums, with songs like Alive and Even Flow working incredibly well against Eddie Vedder's voice. The riffs are only going to take you so far, and we practically had a musical Swiss Army Knife on our hands with Mike McCready.
Despite some blow back from some alternative fans for leaning to heavy on classic rock cliches, McCready is the kind of bluesy guitar player that separated PJ from their competition, being as much a fan of people like Johnny Thunders as he was of people like Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Though there are many different kinds of guitar sounds in grunge to begin with, there aren't many teams that have a pedigree that would make Neil Young proud.