The “Name-The-Band” Session

Jack makes it seem like Dan Mahoney suggested “Mighty Yascha and the Pearls”, and we all agreed, and that was that. What I remember was one evening in Spring of 1966, all of us gathered around a table at the Snack Bar in the Student Center – where we usually played cards (mostly Bridge or Whist) – struggling for hours to come up with a name. I think we were sober, but we seemed to be challenged by the inability to suggest anything that wasn’t gross, obscene, or ridiculously stupid.  One after the other we went around the table, each of us offering something more inane than the last.  To the casual observer, we were having a rollicking good time, but we really weren’t getting anywhere.  I’m not exactly sure when the word Pearls was proposed, but I don’t think it was direct.  One of the bad ideas may have been something like Mighty Yascha and the Pig F**kers, and from Pigs we got Swine, and from Swine we got Pearls, as in Pearls Before Swine – a band led by Tom Rapp that actually came into being in 1965 in Florida, but didn’t become well-known until 1967 when they recorded “One Nation Underground”, so we couldn’t have stolen it.  Eventually they became pretty successful. To this day I think of us whenever I hear their name mentioned.

Honestly, I don’t remember the exact order of things – whether we committed to “Mighty Yascha” first, or “and the Pearls”, but it wasn’t gross or obscene, and everyone didn’t immediately hate it or dismiss it, so it stuck – dumb as it may have been.  Anyone remember where we went after that?

It actually took us way too long to realize that Mighty Yascha and the Pearls (without Yascha) was just too unwieldy, too hard to explain, and wouldn’t fit on the front skin of the bass drum.  So we became just “The Pearls”.  Not bad, and about as close to “The Stones” as we were ever gonna get.