Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt started playing local shows around the Bay Area as Sweet Children in 1986 when they were just 14 years old. The faithful knew this was Green Day's original moniker, and they were using it again for one night only as a celebration of their earliest days.

When Green Day took the stage at Cleveland's House of Blues days before their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year, everyone but the most hardcore fans in attendance were confused by the name on their drum riser: Sweet Children. 'So that's how 'jam' got added on to the name.

'Every song was like a 15-or 20-minute jam,' said Ament. Bassist Jeff Ament randomly thought of the name Pearl, and the rest came to them after they saw Neil Young and Crazy Horse play a killer set at the Nassau Coliseum on the Smell the Horse tour. 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. 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.

The lamb band called the cult