McCready, the ever-enthusiastic guitar hero and Seattle scene connector, was mid-sentence in a discussion about Mad Season when he dropped a sentence that stops you cold: “I tried to start a band with Kurt Cobain once.”
Wait—what?
“I’d heard he and Eddie might be working on something, so at the VMAs I jumped over some seats and just pitched it,” McCready recalls. “I told him I’d play guitar if they ever did something. I’m sure he was irritated, but I had to try.”
It didn’t happen, of course. But between Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell (Temple of the Dog), Lane Staley (Mad Season), and Mark Lanegan (also Mad Season), McCready has already played with just about every frontman of the grunge pantheon. Cobain was the last unshuffled card.
The 2012 conversation centers around Pearl Jam in a period of low-grade turbulence, navigating side projects and Ed Vedder running himself into the ground with the short-lived Monkeywrench Radio broadcasts. “We had to sit down and ask, ‘Do we want to still be a band? Do you want to be with us, Ed?’” McCready says. The answer was yes, eventually. But it wasn’t a sure thing.
Amid that band-wide uncertainty, McCready found stability in a project that seemed, at first, to be anything but. Mad Season had already come and gone in the mid-’90s—an emotional detour with Lane Staley, Screaming Trees’ Barrett Martin, and bassist John Baker Saunders that resulted in the harrowing and soulful Above. But the 2012 interview revealed something fans had only speculated about: there were more tracks. A lot more.
“Thirteen songs,” McCready said. “Lane didn’t come back to sing on them. But the music’s there.”
A year later, when our second interview picks up, some of that music had found a second life. Mark Lanegan had recorded vocals for three songs. Jazz Coleman of Killing Joke added his voice to two more. Duff McKagan had joined the fold. And still, there were leftovers. “We’re not sure what to do with the rest,” McCready says. “But we’re trying to find singers that could do them justice.”
It’s one of those what-if projects that haunts the edges of '90s rock lore. It might’ve been a second Mad Season record. It might’ve become Disinformation. It might still be something else. But at its heart was McCready—just a year out of rehab at the time—trying to keep his friends, and himself, from falling apart.
“I was coming out of my own addictions,” he says. “And I wanted to help Lane. It was probably naïve, but the intention was there.” When Staley didn’t show for the second sessions, the music sat on a shelf for 17 years. When McCready finally revisited it, he was struck by how much it still hurt. “I couldn’t listen to it for a long time. Not just because of the loss. Because I could feel the pain in it. Lane was struggling, and you can hear it.”
But Mad Season wasn’t just a moment of grief—it was also a turning point. “That project gave me the confidence to write songs again,” McCready says. “I’d felt like I didn’t measure up next to guys like Stone and Ed. But after Mad Season, I came back and wrote ‘Given to Fly.’ That started a whole new phase for me.”
Even now, as Pearl Jam releases Lightning Bolt and McCready remains the band’s ever-optimistic engine, you can hear the emotional residue of that strange, productive, heartbreaking era in how he talks about music. He’s the guy who’ll still nerd out over an old UFO record, who’ll champion an unknown singer-songwriter to anyone who’ll listen, and who somehow keeps uncovering new pieces of the story—even when it’s his own.
Listen to the full episode above and then check out the video below.
