Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard spoke frankly about the accession of grunge music in the early-'90s and how it affected hard rock and heavy metal.
Essentially, Gossard believes it was an organic changing of musical tides, telling, Vwmusicrocks.com, “I think there’s always renewal in the world, and with that renewal, comes new perspectives. And I think that hard rock was really stagnating at that point in a way that gave an opportunity to what I’ll call 'less musically talented' musicians to say, 'Hey, there’s another way to play rock songs. There’s another way to have songs that are heavy. And there’s another way to create chaos and energy from those songs that would be outside the normal color palette of a heavy metal song.'”
He went on to talk about his key influences upon learning to play: “Coming up, I listened to a lot of heavy metal. I listened to a lot of Motörhead. I listened to a lot of Iron Maiden. I listened to a lot of Merciful Fate. I listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin. I listened to all those new wave of British heavy metal bands, and I was into it. This said, as a kid, I didn’t really know how to play like that, so I was just doing what sounded right to me. And I think that in the late-'80s, there was a very free attitude about art and music that was brewing in the wake of hard rock, and a lot of people were experimenting with sounds, and the bands formed from there.”