AboutCaleb Expertise I'm happy to help you with suggesting bands to listen to, or resolving questions about the history of punk. I end up telling most people to listen to the Velvet Underground - definitely check them out of you haven't yet.
Question How did punk music influence grunge and alternative music.
Answer Pretty early on, the punk/new wave movement morphed into post-punk. Punk was always about challenging the status quo, so experimental bands like Gang of Four, Husker Du (post-hardcore), The Cure and Sonic Youth (called "No Wave" as a play on new wave rather than punk) were in the spirit of punk. Probably more so than derivative punk bands who sound more like original punk, simply because they're just trying to emulate what their hero bands sounded like.
Post-punk in turn morphed into alternative rock, also known as indie rock, in the 80s. Well perhaps it's more that the term "alternative rock" became a popular way to refer to bands that had previously been known as post-punk, college rock, indie rock, gothic rock, industrial rock, post-hardcore etc. I suppose you could say that the difference between post-punk and alternative/indie (apart from the era in which such terms were popular) is that alternative includes bands such as R.E.M. who don't really have any of the aggression that the suffix "-punk" would suggest, but the alternative genre as a whole owes a huge debt to the punk/new wave movement.
The term indie is more common nowadays, largely because it was said that in 1991 Nirvana "brought alternative into the mainstream"; thus "alternative" came to refer to more mainstream and popular alt-rock bands such as the Smashing Pumpkins while the alternative bands that still remained under the mainstream radar, such as Pavement, were classed as "indie". (I suppose the same thing has happened nowadays with highly popular major-label "indie" bands such as Coldplay; a better word for independent music now is "underground").
Anyway, I digress.
Meanwhile (and a little later), grunge was developing in Seattle. It was part of the wider alternative scene (which as we have discussed owes a huge debt to punk), and the bands were also influenced by punk, particularly hardcore punk, particularly Black Flag's 1984 record My War, where they slowed their usual hardcore punk sound down, combining it with heavy metal influences; this was very popular in Seattle where the grunge sound developed.
However punk is not the only influence on grunge; it was also influenced by metal bands such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, "godfather of grunge" Neil Young (particularly his album Rust Never Sleeps), and alternative rock bands such as Sonic Youth.
Nirvana is a bit of a special case. They are the most famous grunge band, but they weren't really that grunge. I mean, they were from Seattle and had all the same grunge influences, but they were faster, poppier and - most importantly for the current discussion - punkier than the other grunge bands like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. They called themseves punk rock rather than grunge, and if grunge sits roughly halfway between the "cock rock" of metal/arena rock and the "balls rock" of punk/indie, Nirvana definitely falls on the "balls" side of the spectrum.
Subsequently, Nirvana have much more direct punk influences than the general grunge scene; his favourite album was Raw Power by the Stooges, and he also liked some of the more punky alternative bands such as Pixies. He also loved the Beatles and called himself a pop songwriter (punk always was pretty poppy - look at the Ramones, they're basically a bubblegum pop band, just louder).
I hope this helps.
Basically, the Velvet Underground invented all punk and alternative, and punk and alternative (along with metal and Neil Young) invented grunge.
