Pearl Jam and Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron once received a cease-and-desist letter from KISS when he was a teenager.
In an appearance on ‘The Howard Stern Show,’ Cameron recalled being in a KISS cover band in his neighborhood.
He said, “ … 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.”
Cameron continued, “ … We took this photo album to meet 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.”
Cameron noted that they likely got the letter “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.”