While speaking on SiriusXM‘s “The Howard Stern Show,” Matt Cameron, the drummer for both PEARL JAM and SOUNDGARDEN, recalled about an incident nearly five decades ago when he faced the threat of legal action from KISS.
“I was in a neighborhood KISS cover band when I was 13, 14 or something like that,” Cameron said. “We played played our local high school’s keggers, whatnot. And my dad was friends with the head of the stagehand union in San Diego. So, when KISS was playing there — it was during the Alive! tour, so that was ’75 — we got to go see KISS do a soundcheck at the San Diego Sports Arena. So I brought the two guys that I was in the KISS band with, Tim and Dave Mahoney, to the soundcheck, and we brought our photo album from our stupid KISS cover band.
“My mom made my costume, Tim‘s mom made his costume. We built these rickety plywood platforms in Tim‘s garage. We made flash pots out of coffee cans and a light socket with a little flash powder inside of it. It was janky, low rent, horrible. So anyways, we took this photo album to meet [KISS frontman] Paul Stanley. We got a photo with him. And so, we were sort of, like, ‘Hey man, we’re in a KISS cover band. Here’s our stupid little photo album.’ Cut to, like, I don’t know, four to six months later, we get a cease-and-desist letter from [KISS‘s then-management company] Aucoin Management. And we were big KISS fans. So, KISS used to put the logo from Aucoin Management on their albums, so we were all excited [when we got the letter]. ‘Whoa, we’re getting a letter from Aucoin Management. We’ve made it.’ And it was a cease-and-desist from KISS.”
Regarding the objections raised by KISS‘s management, Cameron said it was “because I think we just called [our KISS cover] band ‘KISS‘. We didn’t really think ahead there. So after that, we had [changed our name to] ‘KISS‘ [and] in parentheses [the word] ‘imitation.”
PEARL JAM will release their twelfth studio album, Dark Matter, on April 19, 2024 via Monkeywrench Records/Republic Records.
