It was the 22nd of October 1990 when a new band from Seattle played their first concert at the Off Ramp Cafe. Their name: Mookie Blaylock. It was the name of a New Jersey Nets player whose basketball card somehow found itself in the band’s tape case of early demos. “It was kind of goofy,” Eddie Vedder admitted. But apparently, they were too busy working on songs to worry about a band name.
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That’s fine, really, for an unknown local band. But once they started attracting national attention and recording an album, they couldn’t just keep the name of a popular NBA point guard. The story of how they came up with Pearl Jam is somewhat of a myth, with some saying Vedder named the band after his grandmother Pearl who would make hallucinogenic jam.
This is the origin story of Pearl Jam and their most controversial song, Jeremy…