“I have a question,” Zoë Kravitz posed to her Caught Stealing co-star Austin Butler and Rolling Stone film critic David Fear while playing a Nineties trivia challenge game recently. “How old you were when you when you realized what Pearl Jam means? It’s jizz, dude.”
“I’ve also heard that it was a jam that Eddie Vedder’s grandmother made where it was an hallucinogenic jam,” replies Fear. “You’d take it and have visions.”
Their confusion about the origin of Pearl Jam’s name is understandable. In the early days of the band, they were asked about the name in nearly every interview. Vedder always gave the same response. “Great-grandpa was an Indian and totally into hallucinogenics and peyote,” he told Rolling Stone‘s Kim Neely in October 1991. “Great-grandma Pearl used to make this hallucinogenic preserve that there’s total stories about. We don’t have the recipe, though.”
They finally confessed the Grandma Pearl story was “total bullshit” in a 2006 cover story interview with Rolling Stone‘s Brian Hiatt. In reality, Pearl Jam originally had the unfortunate idea to call themselves Mookie Blaylock after the NBA star when they formed, and they actually billed themselves as this throughout their first few months. As they got more successful, and were on the verge of signing with a major label, they realized they needed a better name, one that wasn’t likely to get them sued by a member of the New Jersey Nets.
In February of 1991, they traveled to New York to sign with Epic. During downtime, they drove out to Long Island to see Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Sonic Youth, and Social Distortion at the Nassau Coliseum. At the time, Ament was already toying around with the world “Pearl,” but knew it needed something else.
“[Young] played, like, nine songs over three hours,” Ament told Hiatt. “Every song was like a fifteen-or twenty-minute jam. So that’s how ‘jam’ got added on to the name. Or at least that’s how I remember it.” (To get absurdly technical, they played 13 songs over 110 minutes that night. Many of the songs, including “Love to Burn, “Like a Hurricane,” and “Love and Only Love,” stretched past the ten-minute mark. It was an truly great tour, one of the best in Young’s history.)
By the time the true story of Pearl Jam’s name emerged, the story of Grandma Pearl’s hallucinogenic jam had already hardened into fact for most people. And yes, an alternate theory emerged that Zoë Kravitz came across. To be fair, we’re not even saying she’s definitely wrong. They lied about the name in 1991. We can’t say for certain they weren’t also lying in 2006. Would they really admit if the name did indeed refer to “jizz?”
In all probability, the “jam” part of the name did come from Neil Young’s February 22, 1991, show at the Nassau Coliseum. It feels appropriate that the Godfather of Grunge not only laid down the musical groundwork for the entire genre, but he also inspired one of the top grunge bands to give themselves a proper name.