The Rockfords
AFTER BEING OUT OF PRINT FOR AGES, THE LONE STUDIO ALBUM BY PEARL JAM SIXSTRINGER MIKE McCREADY’S Y2K POWERPOP SIDE PROJECT IS GETTING ITS FIRST DIGITAL RELEASE
IN ADDITION TO his rather wellknown work with Pearl Jam, throughout the 1990s Mike McCready kept fairly busy, be it playing with the supergroup Temple of the Dog, co-founding the Layne Staley-fronted Mad Season or backing Neil Young, along with his PJ band mates, on the 1995 album Mirror Ball.
But perhaps only the most devoted of McCready fans will also recall that, as the Nineties gave way to the new millennium, the guitarist helped to create what stands as one of the era’s most pristine, and unheralded, power-pop documents — the self-titled record from his short-lived project, the Rockfords. Long out-of-print, the record is once again seeing the light of day with a first-time-ever digital release. “It’s a record I had kind of put away in my mind,” McCready tells Guitar World, “and then hearing it again, it brought back really fun memories of recording it and playing with the band.”
The band, in this case, was built around McCready, co-guitarist Danny Newcomb and brothers Rick (bass) and Chris (drums) Friel, all of whom had been friends and band mates since childhood. “Our first show we ever played together, the four of us, was 1979 at a birthday party,” McCready says. For the Rockfords, they enlisted singer Carrie Akre of respected Seattle bands like Goodness and Hammerbox, and put together a set of songs that conjured “all of our earliest childhood influences: Cheap Trick. Kiss. Aerosmith. AC/DC,” McCready says. Add in Akre’s “really powerful pop voice,” and you get a record that sparkles with bright, ringing riffs, earworm solos and big, unabashed chorus hooks. “It’s a combination of all those things, as well as just our youthful enthusiasm for playing together,” says McCready, who employed a Les Paul Goldtop and his trusty 1960 Stratocaster in the service of the recording.
At the time The Rockfords was first released, McCready recalls, “it kind of got buried and put away and nobody really heard it.” Now that the album is widely available, has there been any talk of getting the band back together? “There’s been a lot of texts between me and Danny, and
“It kind of got buried and put away and nobody really heard it”
— MIKE McCREADY
we’d like to do something,” McCready says. “We’re just trying to figure out the scope of what this year is going to be.”
Until then, McCready has several projects on the horizon, including documentary work and, quite possibly, new Pearl Jam. “We’ve got a bunch of songs ready to go, and we also need to do a tour for the Gigaton record, which we never got a chance to do because of Covid,” he says. “But hopefully we can do something with the Rockfords, because I’m very proud of the record, and I’m glad the music’s getting out there again. I hope people will want to hear it, in whatever context that may be.”