WhenPearl Jam首张专辑十首席吉他手开始在1991年西雅图垃圾爆炸的白色热量中引起严重的浪潮迈克·麦克莱迪（Mike McCready）had one thing in mind as the cheques started to land on his doormat. “I had read史蒂夫·雷·沃恩（Stevie Ray Vaughan）使用’59Stratocaster，我已经看到他四次活了，他吹了我的脑海。”他告诉我们。“因此，这是我购买背后的最初动力：Stevie使用这吉他，这是我第一次有钱，我将购买这吉他。”
McCready found what he believed to be an original ’59 Strat in Los Angeles, and he has become synonymous with the guitar over a now 30-year career with the Seattle giants and an array of side projects. The guitar has been recreated in painstaking detail byFender Custom ShopMaster Builder Vincent Van Trigt for a limited run of 200 instruments, and in the process was discovered to actually be a 1960 model. McCready is sanguine about the revelation.
麦克莱迪笑着说：“你知道，我是如此坚信’59我的手臂上有59号的纹身。”“George [Wood], who runs the Pearl Jam warehouse, kind of wanted to keep that it was a ’60 from me because I was always talking about how much I love my ’59 – my ’59 this and my ’59 that – and he didn’t want to break my heart and say, ‘Hey, you know, you bought a ’60…’ And so I’m still kind of shocked and blown away that it turned out to be a ’60, but ultimately it doesn’t matter because I love that guitar so much and it plays so amazingly well.”
And besides, SRV’s ’59 actually turned out to be a 60s hybrid with 1959 pickups, so McCready has perhaps being paying closer homage to his hero all these years than he realised at the time of purchase.
对于McCready而言，关于吉他（他的原始签名模型和新的签名模型）真正重要的是它的播放方式和听起来，而吉他手则在这两项方面都很高兴。
“Fenderhas done an incredible job,” he confirms, “And the greatest example I can give is that they’ll both be sitting next to each other, my real one, and the new model, and I have picked up the new model three times – on separate occasions – thinking it was the original. I’m not kidding, I would just start playing and only then realise, ‘Okay, this isn’t my guitar’. So it looks exactly like my guitar, it sounds almost exactly like it, but for me the most important thing is that the neck plays like it.”
自我反省
That neck is a flat-sawn flame maple affair with a 1960 ‘oval C’ profile and a flat-lam rosewood fingerboard with 21 vintage frets and a bone nut. The back is heavily worn and wears a degree of crazing to the maple that adds to the sense of ’59-ness. It is here that McCready thinks the magic lies.
“I don’t exactly know how to say this, but I put a lot of value in the soul of a guitar,” he expands, “into how long a guitar has been played by somebody else, and how worn in it is with years of sweat and playing, and how set the neck is in its way.
“Even in terms of getting a new guitar, the neck has to play perfectly for me the first time I get it. If not, I can never adjust to how it is. I hope that makes sense, because I have a few guitars that are like that, that I’ve just never really gotten there with. They’re cool, but they never played as well as I like.
“But my original ’59… sorry, ’60, this guitar played fantastic as soon as I picked it up in 1992, and it has continued over the years. So the secret is in the years of sweating and playing双重流向on it 700 times or whatever we’ve done. I’ve just worn it into a place where I really love it, but I’ve been able to do that because I already loved it beforehand.”
Another aspect of the guitar that was important to McCready was the tremolo. On the Custom Shop model Fender has used a vintage-style synchronized model with Callaham bridge block, married with vintage-style tuning machines. Stability is key for McCready here, and he is happy with the results.
“I usually have five springs on the back of my guitar, on the tailpiece,” he explains, “so it’s a tighter tremolo, not as loose. I need that for杰里米，我将再次使用双重流向在合唱中。
“I’ll use the tremolo as a rhythmic tool, so two things: it has to stay in tune after I do all that – and that’s a hard thing to make happen on guitars – but my real one, for the most part, it stays in tune pretty great. And that’s something I really need when I’m using a tremolo because although I don’t use it all the time, when I do it’s for specific things in leads and specific parts of songs that require it.
“我想不出杰里米在我的头顶上，因为当我收到反馈时，我真的在那首歌的结尾处去做。因此，另一件事是，就其背后的琴弦而言，它必须非常强大。但是即使那样，我仍然一直打破它们！”
The Strat sound has been integral to his playing since he first hooked up with fellow guitarist石戈萨德和贝斯手杰夫·艾门（Jeff Ament）在歌手安德鲁·伍德（Andrew Wood）去世后，在1990年，他们以前的乐队Love Bone Mother Love Bone的崩溃之后。这三人的第一个记录输出将是向伍德致敬，与歌手的室友和SoundgardenfrontmanChris Cornell，再加上那个乐队的鼓手马特·卡梅隆（Matt Cameron）（现在是珍珠果酱的永久装置），在狗的庙宇中。
Strat的多功能性是McCready能够立即使用的，尽管他当时还没有参加1960年的比赛。
麦克莱迪解释说：“我喜欢在Strat上拥有五个不同的位置，而不是三个位置，而在不同的时间我都使用它们。”“我要回到这里，但我使用'过时的'第二位置 - 我认为这是错误的术语，但我使用了 - 我在开始时使用了。绝食抗议from that Temple record.
“And when I play黄色Ledbetterlive [a staple Pearl Jam set closer that is always played on the 1960 Strat], I will use that same position to play the verses of the song and the intro of the song, because it gets such a小翅膀我一直想获得的声音。史蒂夫·雷·沃恩（Stevie Ray Vaughan）这样做了，所以我也试图做到这一点。”
The Fender Limited Edition Mike McCready Stratocaster features custom Josefina hand-wound pickups, matched to the originals, that are connected to a five-way switch using vintage wiring, including a ‘treble bleed’ tone capacitor. McCready insists this is the essence of his guitar.
“When I’m doing leads, or whatever, I’m constantly going between pickups and it changes every time,” he tells us. “I can start off screaming on the high treble pickup, and then I can flip it all the way to the bass pickup, and then I’ll do a bluesy thing, and then I’ll go into the middle and then I’ll move it all over the place. Then I’ll get to those second and fourth positions. It’s like my brain needs that variety too.”
Magic Mike
From those earliest records to last year’s Pearl Jam releaseGigaton, the Strat (and, since 1992, usually his 1960 model) has continued to play a regular part in the magic McCready brings to his lead playing both within his main band and without. In fact, it is often the guitar McCready turns to when Pearl Jam’s music heads for less predictable waters.
Gigatonwas perhaps the band’s most diverse and experimental album since 2000’sBinaural，这两张专辑都以最喜欢的McCready Strat Moments为特色。前者的主打Dance Of The Clairvoyants，这是一个受话启发的人，点头了1980年代，麦克莱迪立即转向了他的Strat。
“That was one of our strangest songs that I feel we’ve ever recorded,” recalls Mike. “I remember that Matt brought in this drum loop and I thought it was cool, but I just never thought anybody was going to go for it, I didn’t think Ed would maybe sing over it, I didn’t known what was going to go on with that thing. But Stone ended up putting this rhythm track to it and then it started making sense. And I wanted to approach it kind of in a Carlos Alomar ‘David Bowie-era’ guitar playing way: that staccato funk with a tight reverb on it. That’s what I was going for and I knew I could get that sound with this guitar. I just know I can innately trust this guitar to make that happen.
“按照Nothing As It Seems[从Binaural]， 一样。Nothing As It Seemsis maybe one of my favourite sounding solos because I used this weird, huge pedal that was made by格雷施大约一年，这是最奇怪的事情。我忘记了它的名字，但是它上面有一个声音，它是在六十年代末或七十年代初（可能是Expandafuzz - Ed]制成的。我认为这几乎使Gretsch失业了。无论如何，我使用了，当时是我们的制片人的Tchad Blake得到了这种声音。除了在那张唱片上，我从来没有能得到它，但这是我的挡泥板阶层，穿过那个怪异的Gretsch踏板。这就是我们听到的那种怪异的嗡嗡声Nothing As It Seems, which I love.”
Recalling his time with Mad Season – a short-lived Seattle supergroup featuring Mike on guitar andAlice In Chains’ Layne Staley on vocals that released one album, the devastating多于in 1994 – McCready tells us again that he knew when he needed his ’60 Strat: “When I wroteRiver Of Deceit对于疯狂的赛季记录，我正在考虑我之前谈到的“阶段”声音。我将其用于介绍，实际上是整首歌曲River Of Deceit。我知道我想要即兴演奏的声音，而且我知道这吉他会给我。
“I also used it on that record onNovember Hotel– which was my dad’s call number when he was an F4 Phantom pilot in the Vietnam War – because I know I can control the kind of feedback that I get with this Strat, and the bar on it.”
Battle scars
Talk of Mad Season andNovember Hotel’s squalling feedback leads us down memory lane to a gig at Seattle’s Moore Theatre by the band in 1995. During a stunning and extended rendition of that very song McCready repeatedly drives the headstock of his original ’60 into a Marshall speaker cab. Examining all the wear and damage so lovingly recreated by Van Trigt on the Master Built Signature Model, our eyes are drawn to a large and conspicuously repaired chip in the headstock…
“You know, I think it might have happened at that show,” says McCready. “I need to be honest with you, I don’t remember exactly where that happened. I remember that it did happen, though, and I was really not that excited about it! I had been trying to do it methodically, you know, so I would just hit the speaker and it looks cool and it makes weird sounds, but I don’t break the neck, because I used to do that all the time with my other Fenders and break so many of them.
“但是有了这个，我一直在努力小心，而我的疯狂，以了解我们正在做的事情，无论是珍珠果酱表演还是疯狂的季节表演，还是我们播放的尼尔·扬（Neil Young）的表演，因为我想为很长一段时间以来，当我试图在结束时获得一些疯狂的声音时，我们做了这场尼尔·扬的表演在河边, but I just went for it and I hit the wood of the speaker cabinet and that knocked the cap off the top of that guitar. And I don’t know to this day where that chip went, but I immediately said to myself, oh, don’t ever do that again to your guitar. But I love that Vincent at Fender has re-created that ominous chip exactly like it was. And even down to how the sticker came off up there.”
The authenticity of the cosmetic damage on this signature model is something that will no doubt appeal to Pearl Jam fans and collectors, but in examining the wear and tear on the rest of the guitar McCready warns that while it is currently an exact replica of his original, it may not stay that way for long!
“A lot of the scratches on the back are not mine,” Mike insists, “they were already there. But if you look at the top of the guitar, where I’m picking above the scratchplate, those scratches are mine. And if you look at photos from 1992 up until now you’ll see how this scratched area has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger from years of just strumming on it really hard. If you look at the guitar when I first started playing it, the cuts, you can barely see them.”
大流行已经看到珍珠果酱重新安排了美国和欧洲的巨大游览以支持Gigaton(twice now in the case of Europe), but the band is itching to be back on stage – “I can’t wait,” says McCready – and given the energy with which they famously play, Mike McCready’s original 1960 Fender Stratocaster is going to get a lot more scratched up in the hopefully not-too-distant future.
Find out more about the Fender Custom Shop Master Built Mike McCready 1960 Stratocaster atfender.com。