10 Greatest Rock Bands With Two Guitar Players

Half of the reason why grunge made as big an impact as it did in the early '90s was for just how weird it sounded. MTV was used to bands that sounded more like Poison most of the time, and hearing a song like Smells Like Teen Spirit take over the world like it did completely changed the game around what was popular on the charts anymore. Kurt Cobain may have had his strange moments, but Stone Gossard may be the most 'Seattle' sounding guitar player to come out of the city.

Although you can definitely spot Stone's love of old school players like Jimmy Page and Keith Richards in a handful of Pearl Jam's song, there's a much more organic quality to a lot of the riffs that got the band started, like the simple flow of a song like Dissident or the weirdo open tunings that he found when putting together songs like Daughter or Deep. You need someone to keep that in check though, and Mike McCready has all of the flash to compliment Stone, graduating from the Jimi Hendrix school of playing and melting your face off whenever he took a solo on a track.

For all of the strange avenues that we were going to get on albums like Vitalogy and No Code, the guitar team behind Pearl Jam was always what helped us get back down to Earth. This was far from a band like Van Halen, but the tastiness behind every guitar line turned Pearl Jam from eclectic art rock band into a band that could fill up stadiums.