Even when he was feeling a bit moody for ten years, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder would still find ways to amuse himself doing interviews. One such method was to weave some fictional nonsense in there, and it’s for that reason that there are so many varying tales regarding the name of the band.
The best one was that the band’s moniker combined the name of Vedder’s great-grandmother Pearl, who he claimed was married to an American Indian and had a habit of cooking up preserves spiked with an array of mind-melting hallucinogenics, so Pearl’s jam = Pearl Jam. A very decent tale, except, apart from the fact he had a great-grandmother called Pearl, it was exactly that. Just a tale.
