10 Greatest Rock Guitar Solos Of The 90s

In the city of Seattle, most of the biggest bands didn't really care about how well you could play. If you were to ask someone like Mudhoney or Nirvana around the same time, it was about making an artistic statement rather than making the Eddie Van Halen style solos. Pearl Jam was always about paying tribute to their idols though, and on the song Alive, Mike McCready managed to put himself up there with fellow guitar gods.

Compared to the freestyle solos of someone like Kurt Cobain or the artsy approach of Kim Thayil, this is kind of soloing that every seasoned rock fan would recognize in an instant. Being more of a fan of the bluesier guitarists like Stevie Ray Vaughan, McCready goes for broke on the solo on here, having just the right attention to technical flash and melody to compliment the stadium sized power of Stone Gossard's riffs.

When you really break it down, this entire solo has all the power of a song within just a few minutes, starting off pretty slow before ramping things up to something a lot flashy and then bringing it home and laying everything to rest in just the right way. While we're a long ways off from the guitar gods of old, this is the exact kind of soloing that would have made Jimi Hendrix proud.