AHC: Have "Alternative Rock" get big earlier

How would you make it so that the alternative rock scene would be the dominant rock scene as early as 1987-88? While im not the biggest fan of alternative rock (aside from a handful of songs/bands, i prefer the metal/hard rock that it was "rebelling" against) it would be an interesting TL.
 
Back in the 70s Lou Reed and Iggy Pop ruled the cool side of rock and they are kind of godfathers of the alternative scene, so...
 
Lou Reed had a great following until he released Metal Machine Music, a double album consisting entirely of guitar feedback. Without that album, he could definitely hold onto his fan base and be less of a joke.

Another great idea is to get rid of the rise of punk. Punk was the response to rock getting taken over by progressive and psychedelic rock and bands like The Ramones wanted to return to the basics. Someone else could do the same exact thing with an earlier alternative rock. I don't know how the hell to keep punk underground though. It, like gangsta rap, is really hard to stop from coming into the mainstream at the time it did. Then you get alternate rock in the late 70s.
 
Well, it was certainly nota hit. But Street Hassle was good. The title song had one of those infectious chords that gets under your skin. And back in the 80s Lou Reed was kind of the "el topo" of music, as in, what you thought of him was what you were.

How about a "velvets stay toguether POD"?
 
Maybe John Bonham doesn't quite drink himself to death in 1980, thus Led Zeppelin stays together and goes in new and unexpected directions in the 80s?

I know: you're thinking that Zeppelin is the heavy metal that alternative music was alternative to. And that's.. sort of true, on a macro level. But, as Robert Plant himself noted, a third of Zeppelin's stuff was acoustic. And Robert Plant is a weird dude with some very diverse interests -- most musical geniuses are. After Zeppelin dissolved, Plant formed The Honeydrippers (with Jimmy Page!) and cranked out "Sea of Love," which you might otherwise have expected on, say, Tom Jones's Greatest Hits. His Now and Zen album is really unlike anything else released in the '80s (or ever, really). And after all that, Plant assembled a folk rock cover band (Priory of Brion), and if the phrase "Robert Plant-led folk rock cover band" isn't seven of the strangest words ever juxtaposed together, I don't know what is.

So I don't know exactly what Zeppelin would have done in the 1980s had Bonham lived -- but I think it's plausible that it would have been "alternative" to pretty much every song ever written before or since! Plus, there was never any real tension between Plant/Page/Jones/Bonham, so it's also plausible that Zeppelin would have stayed together cranking out music for another three decades.
 
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