What is the real meaning of Pearl Jam’s name?
In October 1990, a brand new alternative rock band launched them into Seattle’s already-burgeoning grunge music scene, calling themselves Mookie Blaylock. Less than a year later, they hit the big time with a new name: Pearl Jam.
Their debut LP Ten climbed its way to number two in the US album charts, courtesy of the enormous growth of grunge as a musical movement, the cult following they’d already developed in the Pacific Northwest, and their debut single ‘Alive’. This was also the track that got Eddie Vedder the gig as the band’s vocalist as he wrote and recorded vocals for the song’s instrumental demo, which had already been recorded by the other members before he joined.
Vedder’s lyrics and vocal work on three of the band’s instrumentals convinced them to invite him up to Seattle from his home in San Diego. He met Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, and Mike McCready, following which they asked him to join their band. All the four of them needed now was a drummer and a name.
The right drummer soon presented himself in the form of Dave Krusen, but the right name took a while to come. Suddenly, with their record company demanding a change from “Mookie Blaylock”, late-joiner Vedder had an epiphany.
“Peyote and preserves”?
“My great-grandma and her name is Pearl,” he told an interviewer at a press junket in 1991. “And she was at one time married to a [Native American] Indian chief. In a wonderful crossing of cultures,” as Vedder put it, his ancestor created “this hallucinogenic jam. It was great-grandma Pearl’s jam”.
And so, he dug deep into the well of his family history and pulled out a jewel of a name for his new band. Except, as brilliant as that story is, it turned out to be entirely false, as Vedder himself confirmed in 2006. His great-grandmother Pearl existed, but her preserve definitely didn’t.
Instead, there has been a sordid rumour swirling for over 20 years that Pearl Jam’s name is actually a puerile joke about ejaculatory fluid. That’s to say, it refers to the jam produced by men’s most prized possessions.
The group allegedly thought it’d be hilarious to see the jocks who turned up to grunge gigs wearing T-shirts bearing a phrase with this meaning, without the slightest idea what it meant. In the vein of the Nirvana song ‘In Bloom’ about these very same audience members.
In fact, Vedder later clarified that the name had several admirable sources of inspiration, not one of which was any kind of fluid. He cited “pearl” as a term surfers use for going head first into a wave, the name of Janis Joplin’s greatest record, and the nickname for one of the band’s favourite basketball players, Earl Monroe.
“I feel that the best justification for the name is in reference to the pearl itself,” he went on to say. “The natural process from which a pearl comes from. Basically, taking excrement or waste and turning it into something beautiful.” Pure poetry. “This is how our band began. Taking emotions that we wrestled with personally and letting them evolve into songs.”
Bassist Ament takes the credit for that part of the name. As for the “Jam” part, he told Rolling Stone in 2006 that this was the collective inspiration of him, Gossard and Vedder after they’d watched Neil Young jam his way through a three-hour live set of nine songs. As artists to emulate go, few have more pearls of wisdom to impart than the Godfather of Grunge.
