Long before he contributed to Ozzy Osbourne’s Patient Number 9, Pearl Jam and former Mad Season guitarist Mike McCready shared a guitar riff with the Prince of Darkness that was summarily rejected.McCready discussed the experience in a recent episode of State of Love & Trust: A Pearl Jam Podcast, which you can watch below.Mad Season — the short-lived supergroup featuring McCready, Alice in Chains vocalist Layne Staley, Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin and future Walkabouts bassist John Baker Saunders — released their lone album, Above, in 1995. When asked if any material off Mad Season’s abandoned second album got repurposed later, McCready detailed his pitch to Osbourne.READ MORE: Ozzy Osbourne Reveals the Best Guitarist He’s Played WithMike McCready Reveals the Riff Ozzy Osbourne Rejected”One of the riffs, I tried to bring in to Ozzy,” he said. “This was a long time ago. This is in probably like 2002 or 2001 [for Osbourne’s 2001 album Down to Earth]. Prior to that — Ozzy would not remember this — but it was me, Ozzy, Kaz [Kobayashi], this Epic rep and a guitar.”McCready then fetched a guitar and played a swaggering, down-tuned riff with bluesy undertones, the name of which he could not remember.You can watch the exchange, which begins at the 27-minute mark, below. McCready begins playing the riff around 29:20.”I forget what that was called, but that was for the second Mad Season record,” McCready explained. “I brought that riff to Ozzy and I was playing it through a little amp and I think he listened to it and he just wasn’t into it. I should’ve probably done a really good job of recording it.””I’ve never told that story, but that was that song, and I forget the name of it. It was on the second record. But anyways, that was the riff that I brought to Ozzy — that he did not use,” McCready added with a laugh.READ MORE: Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready Names His Favorite Songs to Play LiveMike McCready’s Post-Mad Season ProjectsBesides the rejected Osbourne riff, McCready didn’t recall reusing any other discarded Mad Season ideas. Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan briefly joined Mad Season in 1997, and three of his songs later appeared on the deluxe edition of Above. Pearl Jam, meanwhile, released their fifth album, Yield, in 1998.McCready finally got an on-record collaboration with Osbourne when he played guitar on “Immortal,” the second track off Osbourne’s 2022 album Patient Number 9.What Ever Happened to Rock + Metal’s Class of 1995?Alt-rock was thriving, grunge was hitting a tipping point, but there were still plenty of acts just starting to make their mark on rock and metal music.Gallery Credit: Chad Childers, Loudwire
