Mookie Blaylock – Final name: Pearl Jam
In October 1990, a new band from Seattle performed their first concert with the name Mookie Blaylock, a New Jersey Nets point guard whose trading card actually wound up in the cassette case of one of the new band’s early demos. Well, the name worked for a while, but as they began to gain national attention and then record their first album, they couldn’t keep using the name of a popular NBA player.
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The story of how the band came up with the name Pearl Jam has been mythologized over the years (due to Vedder claiming that it came from his grandmother who made hallucinogenic jam), but the real story is much more mundane. Bassist Jeff Ament randomly came up with Pearl, and the rest came after seeing Neil Young and Crazy Horse play a wild set, where every song was a 20-minute “jam.”