Mike McCready Plugged In, Faced the Flag, and Gave Seattle Its Hendrix Moment

There is a particular kind of nerve required to walk into a stadium in Seattle, alone, with an electric guitar, and play “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the city that produced Jimi Hendrix. Mike McCready did it anyway on Wednesday, September 9, before the Seattle Seahawks opened the 2026 NFL season against the New England Patriots at Lumen Field — a Super Bowl LX rematch with the league's reigning champions at home.

It was not polite. It was not the tidy, one-chorus, get-in-and-get-out anthem that most stadium performances settle for. McCready bent notes until they cracked, let feedback hang where a singer would have taken a breath, and treated the melody the way Hendrix treated it at Woodstock in 1969: as a starting point rather than a script.

What actually happened at Lumen Field

The performance came after a moment of silence marking 25 years since the September 11 attacks. Then the Pearl Jam guitarist plugged in and turned the pregame ceremony into a piece of Seattle guitar history.

McCready was not finished. At halftime, Soundgarden's three surviving members — guitarist Kim Thayil, drummer Matt Cameron and bassist Ben Shepherd — played a medley of “Outshined” and “Spoonman” with The Pretty Reckless frontwoman Taylor Momsen on vocals in place of the late Chris Cornell, and McCready joined them on guitar. Two Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions' worth of Seattle rock inside one football broadcast.

Momsen has stood in for Cornell before, including Soundgarden's Rock Hall induction in November 2025 and the “I Am the Highway” tribute in 2019.

Watch the performance

NBC Sports posted the anthem from the NFL Kickoff broadcast. Turn it up — the feedback is the point.

He was nervous, and he said so

Speaking to the Seahawks' official site before the game, McCready did not pretend this was routine.

“It's way scary in a way, because I want to do it right and I don't want to mess it up, so that's going through my head every time,” he said. “I've done it a bunch of times, I just want to do it how I do it, and hopefully it means something and I do it right, so there's pressure there.”

He has form here. McCready has played a Hendrix-inspired anthem at Seahawks, Mariners and Sounders games for years. He was also at team headquarters wearing a Washington Innocence Project shirt, recording a promo for the nonprofit — his wife, Ashley O'Connor McCready, is its board president — as one of the Seahawks' Spirit of 12 community partners.

That context matters to how the performance reads. This was not a celebrity cameo flown in for the broadcast. It was a local guitarist doing a local thing in front of a home crowd.

Why a Hendrix anthem still works

Hendrix's Woodstock version is one of the most analyzed ninety seconds in electric guitar. What makes it hard to imitate is not the notes — the melody is the melody. It is everything around the notes.

The melody is stated plainly enough that the crowd never loses the thread, and the chaos happens in the gaps between phrases. Dive bombs, feedback, controlled noise, then back to the tune. If you fill every bar, it stops being an anthem and becomes a solo. McCready understands that balance, which is why his version reads as a tribute rather than a copy.

It is also a physically loud approach. A stadium anthem played through a cranked amp with a whammy bar is an exercise in managing feedback on purpose — standing in a spot where the guitar sings instead of screams, and knowing when to mute.

The tone behind it

McCready's sound is not exotic. It is a single-coil guitar into an amp that is working hard, with a wah and a fuzz or overdrive doing the rest.

““It's way scary in a way, because I want to do it right and I don't want to mess it up.” — Mike McCready”

The Hendrix connection is technical as well as sentimental. Roll the tone control on the neck pickup back slightly, push the amp past the point where the notes bloom, and stand close enough for the string to feed back on its own. For the deep background on that riffing language, read our breakdown of “Purple Haze”.

Build the tone yourself

If you want to chase this sound with the gear you already own, ToneMD is the fastest route. Tell it the target — a Hendrix-inspired anthem tone with fuzz, wah and controlled feedback — and it builds a prescription around your guitar, your amp or modeler and your pedals, including pickup position, gain staging, EQ direction and the playing approach that makes the difference.

The tone tool will not make your hands do the vibrato. It will stop you from blaming the amp when the problem is the gain structure.

Where to look for the gear

Disclosure: The Guitar Plugged may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through affiliate links. This does not affect the price you pay.

A Strat-style guitar is the natural starting point for this sound. Compare current listings on Amazon or look through used and vintage options on Reverb.

Fresh strings before you chase feedback

Feedback tone is unforgiving of dead strings. Old strings choke sustain, go sharp on big bends and make a fuzz pedal sound woolly instead of vocal.

String Club delivers X Concepts Strings on a recurring schedule, with options that include The Guitar Plugged Premium experience. Choose 9–42 Lights for easier bends and whammy work, or 10–46 Mediums if you want more resistance under a heavy pick attack.

The point of it

Anthem performances are usually forgotten by the first snap. This one was trending before kickoff because it was the right player in the right city playing the right way — a Seattle guitarist honoring another Seattle guitarist in front of seventy thousand people, without sanding down any of the edges.

Hendrix would have recognized it. That is the whole review.