Mike McCready     Guitarist Mike McCready, was a guitarist from way back and an old high school friend of Stone Gossards, long before he joined Pearl Jam.  Born on, April 5, 1965 in Pensacola, Florida, he moved with his family to Seattle, as an infant.  During high school he became obsessed with the hard rock sounds of Kiss and Deep Purple, which led him to buy his first guitar.  He made surprisingly quick progress, and by 14 was considered some sort of prodigy. While at high school, he joined a bunch of fellow muso’s to form Shadow, playing covers of Aerosmith, Kiss, and Def Leppard at parties on weekends.  They moved to LA in 1988 in the hope of securing a record deal.  However, the LA rock scene was not taken by Shadow, so he ended up working in a record store to support himself. He was back in Seattle by 1989, making appearances with Love Chile a psychedelic blues outfit.  Then he became reaquatinted with his old friend Stone Gossard. When they were reunited, Mike had all but dropped out of music altogether, feeling quite depressed, working in a video store reading right wing literature to ease his boredom. Stone, aware that he was wasting his talent,  persuaded him to join his post-Mother Love Bone enterprise & they sealed the deal with a drink. Mike worked with Jeff & Stone on Temple of the Dog, the tribute to Andrew Wood, before cutting instrumental demo’s with Stone, Jeff and new member Dave Krusen, to which they found their new singer - Eddie Vedder, thus Pearl Jam was created.