Dee Snider has claimed in a new Ultimate-Guitar interview that Pearl Jam and Soundgarden would get ‘physically violent’ when called Grunge bands to their face, though it’s unclear if Snider may be joking to make a point that the word upset them.
“I loved them. When they first came out, it wasn’t even called grunge. And this is the thing about titles – even heavy metal, punk, hair metal, those are not titles chosen by the artists; they’re titles chosen by the writers. And usually, as a negative connotation. Usually, as a turn of a putdown. And the artists that they called grunge, called punk, called heavy metal – they hated it
This is a fact, dude; I’m old, I know this, a fact: if you mentioned grunge to Soundgarden or Pearl Jam, they got physically violent with you. They were just a rock band! And if anything, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, they were metal bands. They were touring with Ozzy!
It just became defined by some writers, they pigeonholed it and called it a new sound. When it first came out, I was, again, doing metal radio, and I was playing Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Nirvana on my show, and I was like, ‘This is great! Heavy, new stuff!’
So then it became defined as grunge, and then it was the hair-metal killer, and that was awful. But I don’t blame it on the music; hair metal did it to itself. It became too commercialized, and then it got unplugged and become nothing but power ballads and acoustic songs, and it wasn’t metal anymore, it had to go, it had to change.”
Pearl Jam were set to tour for their new album Gigaton in 2020, but they were forced to cancel North American and European tours due to the worldwide pandemic.
