Pearl Jam began life named after a point guard
Before they were Pearl Jam, four Seattle musicians played their first gig as Mookie Blaylock, borrowing the name of an NBA guard. Their debut album, Ten, took its title from his jersey number and went on to sit on the Billboard 200 for nearly five years, eventually certified 13 times platinum.
The band grew out of loss. Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament had played in Green River, which split in 1987, and then in Mother Love Bone, whose singer Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose five months before its debut album came out in August 1990. Gossard began jamming with guitarist Mike McCready, and the three recorded a five-song instrumental demo. Former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Jack Irons turned down a spot but handed the tape to a friend in San Diego who pumped gas part-time: Eddie Vedder.
Vedder heard the music just before heading into the surf, where lyrics came to him. He sang over three tracks, including what became Alive, and mailed the tape north. Flown up for an audition, he was in the band within a week. The group played the Off Ramp Café on October 22, 1990, opened for Alice in Chains that December, then signed to Epic and needed a new name. Vedder's early tale of a great-grandmother Pearl and her peyote jam was invented, he admitted in 2006; the members say Ament supplied the word pearl and the jam came after watching Neil Young stretch songs into 15- to 20-minute improvisations.
Success unsettled them. Released on August 27, 1991, Ten sold slowly before exploding in 1992. Vs. then moved over 950,378 copies in its opening week in 1993, a record at the time, and Vitalogy followed with more than 877,000. Yet after the Jeremy video took four MTV awards, including Video of the Year, the band refused to shoot one for Black and largely stopped making videos, and in 1994 it sued Ticketmaster, unsuccessfully, over what it called a monopoly on concert tickets.
Worldwide album sales passed 100 million by 2012. Induction by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came in 2017, as soon as the band qualified. Matt Cameron, its longest-serving drummer, joined in 1998 and left in 2025.
Source: Pearl Jam
