![]() ![]() The story of how they came up with Pearl Jam has been much-mythologized over the years, largely due to the fact that Vedder claimed it was after his grandmother Pearl who created hallucinogenic jam, but the real story is far more mundane. Among many other problems it posed, they couldn't exactly trademark it and sell merchandise. "But that first week we were too busy working on songs to think about a name." This was fine for a completely unknown local band, but when they started to attract national attention and record an album they couldn't continue to have the same name as a popular NBA point guard. "It was kind of goofy," admitted Eddie Vedder. In October of 1990 a new band from Seattle played their first concert at the Off Ramp under the name Mookie Blaylock, a New Jersey Nets player whose basketball card wound up in the tape case of one of their early demos. Black Thought explains why on the song "Anti-circle": "Yo, I'm tha anti-circle. Never comin' twice in one form. so hip that I'm square." True to the lyrics, the band didn't come twice in that form once they discovered that there was already a Philadelphia folk group by the name, instead shortening their moniker to the less mathematical the Roots. They called themselves Radio Activity for a school talent show in 1989, which became Black to the Future, then the nerdiest of the handles yet, the Square Roots. The Roots originated when Questlove (Ahmir Khalib Thompson) and Black Thought (Tariq Trotter) were high school classmates in Philly. It was important that he should be true." "I always felt it was a big shock to people when Bob Dylan turned out to be Bobby Zimmerman. They called themselves Tom and Jerry (apparently fearing no lawsuit from Hanna-Barbera) and actually scored a minor hit with "Hey Schoolgirl," which they played on American Bandstand directly after Jerry Lee Lewis did "Great Balls of Fire." (Sadly, no video survives.) They failed to land a follow-up hit and soon focused on college, and by the time the duo reconvened in 1964 as a folk act they decided to use their real names, even though they risked alienating segments of the country that weren't amenable to openly Jewish entertainers. Realizing they didn't have the most marketable names in the world, Paul became John Landis (after a girl he had a crush on, Sue Landis) and Arthur became Tom Graph, because he loved to graph the progress of hit records on graph paper ( really). Paul Simon and Arthur Garfunkel were just 15 years old when they started shopping their songs around the Brill Building in 1956. Image Credit: James Kriegsmann/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ![]()
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