by Ian Christe
Fists Held High
Accept, Restless and Wild (1983)
Anthrax, Fistful of Metal (1984)
Anvil, Metal on Metal (1982)
Exciter, Violence and Force (1984)
Jag Panzer, Ample Destruction (1984)
Manowar, Hail to England (1984)
Mercyful Fate, Don’t Break the Oath (1984)
Metallica, Kill ‘Em All (1983)
Raven, All for One (1983)
Savatage, Sirens (1983)
Th rust, Fist Held High (1984)
Warlock, Burning the Witches (1984)
Warlord, Deliver Us (1983)
The promise of Megaforce ‘s progenies remained a drastic contrast to their impoverished realities. Offered four days of recording time by a tiny Dutch label prior to signing with Roadrunner, Mercyful Fate took its show on the road. “The studio was in Holland in an attic of a school—it looked like a military field hospital,” says King Diamond. “That’s where we worked. Then we played three or four shows in Holland. Our car was full of equipment on the roof, and inside we were sitting with amps on our laps. We had to drive eighteen or nineteen hours down there. When we arrived, I couldn’t stand up—our legs were dead, our arms were dead, and it was really crazy. The wheels on the van were pointing outwards. Our friends thought we weren’t even going to make the border.”
By the time Mercyful Fate reached America in 1984, the band’s stature as a live act was creeping up on its ceremonial ambitions. King Diamond was singing into a cross-shaped microphone stand fashioned from human bones, and the members of Metallica were waiting in San Francisco among the throng. “Slayer kind of sounded like Venom, and for a while Metallica kinda sounded like a revved-up Motörhead,” recalls Ron Quintana. “Neither one was like Mercyful Fate, who were shockingly good and sounded much more advanced when we finally heard them.”
Kill ‘Em All for One 1983 tour shirt
Even then circumstances remained dire. “Our first American tour with Motörhead, we shared one bus, and it was just no money,” says King Diamond. “It was constantly a problem to get money for gas to get to the next city. We got three dollars per day, and you had to decide whether to get a pack of cigarettes or a burger. We had to borrow money from suspicious people to make the next city and pay it back later. We didn’t look at it as a problem, because we didn’t know any better. Then later on, when you hit the world on different terms, you really appreciate success. If we were still touring like that, I would be dead by now.”
Despite these hardships there was immense desire among the new independent bands to reenact the legendary touring regimes of Iron Maiden and live the conquest that Judas Priest and Black Sabbath had before them. Even as Metallica struggled with unreliable equipment, the band was embarking on a heavy metal dream—performing unprecedented music to growing audiences of die-hard fans. While Iron Maiden and Dio piloted their fleets of semi trucks filled with lighting trusses and laser technicians across America’s highways, Metallica was willing to ride along the side roads.
In 1983 Johnny Z organized the first American tour for his prize act, Raven, whose sizzling All for One LP he had licensed from Neat Records. In search of a support act, he presented his wild card. “Johnny Z wanted to bring us over to tour America,” says Raven’s John Gallagher. “He says, ‘We’ve got this young band, they’re the biggest thing in California.’ I thought, ‘What? Bigger than Y&T?’ He put this tape on of a band going RRRRRRRI’ I thought, ‘What the hell is this?’ Of course it was Metallica.”
While power metal bands found it easy to rate equal billing with heavy metal stars in fanzines, it remained difficult to tour comfortably without major-label backing. The so-called Kill ‘Em All for One tour was booked by phone by Zazula himself, and it led Raven, Metallica, and the tour crew across the country with few amenities. Seventeen people lived for weeks in a simple Winnebago camper designed for a vacationing family of four. “By the third date we had the tour manager up against the wall,” says John Gallagher, “saying, ‘Get some beds we can sleep on or we’ll kill you.’ We were living on ten dollars per diem. It was completely guerrilla warfare.”
In larger cities the bill fared well. In Chicago, James Hetfield nicked a bit of showmanship from Saxon, trying to engage the crowds in a rough shout-along of “Metal up your ass!” As a stage chant, Metallica’s rejected album title worked well—fans lined up across the front of the stage shaking their fists and waving their dirty hair in appreciation of this coarse young band. A few copies of Kill ‘Em All tossed into the crowd by Hetfield were ripped to shreds like raw meat in the fangs of starving wolves. Other dates were less encouraging. “We woke up in Arkansas in an outdoor amphitheater,” recalls John Gallagher, “in a natural bowl with a little stage surrounded by totem poles. There were trucks outside selling catfish. People from there couldn’t understand any of us foreigners. We arrived with our little gear to play to 1,000 people in a club, and they put us in a 10,000-seat arena. There were two forklifts holding up a little light truss, and maybe 300 people there. Talk about embarrassing.”
Above all, the two bands shared wide-eyed charm. “James made the music, and Lars gave it the push,” says John Gallagher. “We were a couple years older and had played a lot more. They were just real happy to be out on the road. You could tell Lars was the wheeler-dealer. Lars didn’t know one end of a drum set from the other. He needed to change the bottom head on the snare drum, and he didn’t know how to take the snares off, so he just cut them off with pliers. It didn’t matter.”
While far from measuring its success in platinum albums, power metal was pushed forward quickly by the support of fans. Looking back to do-it-yourself demo tapes like “No Life ‘Til Leather,” the Metallica cassette that by now had been duplicated thousands of times, young metal fans spawned their own wild new bands and promoted and distributed them through letters and fanzines. Where Brian Slagel had had barely enough bands to fill the first Metal Massacre sampler, now dozens of groups were deluging him with their music every week.
The credit due to the rabid audience base could not be underestimated. Tape trading was a unique distribution and promotion system that scaled to fit the success of the artist, encouraging creativity while fueling minitrends. Crazed bands like Overkill, Hirax, and Voivod sold thousands of demo tapes through an accumulation of fanzine praise, tape-trader ads, and thanks-list appearances on other bands’ records and tapes. Afterward they moved on to recording deals with guaranteed, if limited, sales results.
Like the NWOBHM, the power metal bands were self-sufficient inventors addicted to innovation. Instead of centering on one city like London, they were geographically dispersed. As a wide network developed around fanzines and small-time record labels, public awareness of power metal lifted the underground scene to a new level of possibility. Larger numbers of fans were beginning to look beyond MTV. “We had no idea it was going to be some monster,” says Dan Lilker of Anthrax. “It was very exciting, and we hoped it was going to do well. It was a crucial time for that shit in America.”
Mayhemic penbanger:
Nasty Ronnie of Nasty Savage writes
Across the country the antics and the music were getting wilder and weirder. Florida’s Nasty Savage revived the Plasmatics’ show-stopping stunt of smashing a television set, with the improvement of dropping it onto singer Nasty Ronnie’s armored chest. The band Medieval resembled a twisted Metallica from suburban Michigan. Their “All Knobs to the Right” demo showcased sludgy thrash by members who had all adopted the cryptic stage name “Ambuist.” Then came Agent Steel from Los Angeles, fronted by self-proclaimed outer-space alien John Cyriis. A wide-eyed screamer with a small Afro and a bullet belt, he convinced his stalwart sidemen to toss out their leathers in favor of matching orange jumpsuits. The underground metal scene nurtured these visions, then connected the dots around the perimeter to define a movement.
Though the imagery could be overwhelmingly macho, it was important to notice that metal’s
power was as appealing to young women as it was men. Well before Xena: The Warrior Princess proved this, there were many women who wanted to play with swords instead of Barbie dolls. “Being a girl? It didn’t mean anything to me,” says “Metal” Maria Ferrero, who bought her Motörhead records from Johnny Z’s garage before becoming the first Megaforce Records employee. “I never felt like being a girl kept me from doing anything, or I was never looked at in a different way. I felt almost empowered because I was involved in all of this, and a lot of girls weren’t.”
And in an era of falsetto screams, the higher natural range of women made them stunning vocalists for power metal bands in search of high-end piercing wails. The voices of Betsy Weiss of early Metal Blade act Bitch, Nicole Lee of Znowhite, Dorothy Pesch of Germany’s Warlock, “Kate” of the Belgian group Acid, Dawn Crosby of Detente, Ann Boleyn of Hellion, Debbie Gunn of Sacramento’s Sentinel Beast, the French thrash band Witches, the Swedish band Ice Age, Lynda “Tam” Simpson of Sacrilege UK, and Lori Bravo of Nuclear Death all ran the gamut from glissando to guttural. Following pioneers Girlschool, these musicians faced discrimination in the record business, but fought through frequent chauvinism with the help of metal’s self-sufficient message. In this formative time period, the metal scene was a progressive force, and far less sexist than rock music as whole.
Nonetheless, the music business was still overwhelmed by heavy metal. As late as September 1984, when anyone with a pulse could feel the tremors of Metallica, Musician stumbled through a special heavy metal issue highlighting leather-jacketed teenyboppers Billy Idol and Joan Jett, praising second-tier bands Fastway and Krokus, and unctuously declaring sacred Iron Maiden the worst heavy metal band going. It seemed the editors were trying to measure metric tons with a yardstick, and were completely incapable of facing the changes erupting around them.
Yet if Johnny Z had succeeded in finding a deal for Metallica instead of releasing their albums independently, the trajectory of heavy metal would have been altered drastically. The music industry at the time of Kill ‘Em All did scramble to sign heavy metal acts. In its estimation this often meant “metallized” versions of 1970s hard rock bands like Y&T, Rainbow, and even Michael Bolton. Even with brash bands like Tygers of Pan Tang and the Swiss group Krokus, no sooner would a label ink a deal than it would try guiding the music into radio-friendly territory, thus stripping away the heavy grit that appealed to fans in the first place. Fortunately, Metallica’s music was barely recognized by A&R executives as anything but amateurish noise, unfit for public consumption.
Thankfully, it was not until Megaforce’s subsequent success that major record companies began to pay full attention to the metal underground. When that time came, the harder bands were already trading on a large national and international loyalty built via fanzines and skin-of-their-teeth tours, as increasing numbers of fans learned to bypass the big names and head straight for the strong stuff. Making it on their own meant clout when dealing with the music industry—and gave ambitious bands like Metallica time to hone their sonic attack and thrive on their own impetuous terms.
VI
Slayer: Kings of Black Metal Devils
January 1982: Venom releases Black Metal
December 1983: Slayer releases Show No Mercy, quickly removes makeup
May 31, 1984: Hellhammer disbands— Celtic Frost forms from ashes
October 1985: Possessed releases Seven Churches
Spring 1985: Slayer’s Hell Awaits sells 100,000 copies
Still operating under the very nose of the entertainment business in Los Angeles, Brian Slagel’s homegrown Metal Blade Records by 1984 was selling tens of thousands of albums by bands whose quirks seemed to preclude any future jump to a major label. For an expanding number of hard-core metallers, the underground was reason enough to exist. This darker music was the dense honey in the center of heavy metal’s buzzing hive, and its rewards were still thought more personal than commercial. “The day the first Metal Massacre record came out,” says Slagel, “somebody told me ‘You’re going to look back on this day when this metal thing gets really big.’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, right.’”
Like its precursors, Metal Massacre III launched a number of bullet-belted careers, none more impressive than that of Los Angeles crew Slayer. Destined to become one of the most respected and awe-inspiring elements in metal’s formidable front, Slayer was still raw when Brian Slagel caught them opening for Bitch at the Woodstock in Anaheim. “I went because Bitch were friends of mine, and Slayer was amazing,” says Slagel. “They played eight or nine songs, and most of them were covers, including an amazing version of ‘Phantom of the Opera’ by Iron Maiden. I went backstage and talked to the kid who was managing them and asked them to be on the next Metal Massacre record.”
Formed in Huntington Park in 1982, Slayer existed not just outside the ranks of local glam bands headed for MTV but even on the fringe of the power metal clique revolving around Metallica. For one thing, Slayer was nonplussed by the NWOBHM. “We’d see other bands wearing T-shirts and check it out,” recalls guitarist Kerry King. “I remember going to a record store to see what was up. We’d listen to it, but we didn’t dig it. I remember Metallica played Diamond Head’s ‘Am I Evil?’ live way before they recorded it. I figured out who it was, but when I heard the original, it was crap, boring.”
After losing Metallica to Johnny Z due to lack of resources, Brian Slagel was barely in a better position to retain Slayer, yet he persisted, “We kept in touch, and they kept getting better and better,” he says. “They were awesome, so we wanted to do a full-length album. At that point we still had no money. We could only do the album if they paid for the recording, which they eventually ended up doing.”
The result was Show No Mercy, released in December 1983, a devastating collection of primitive brilliance that changed things drastically for Metal Blade. Ultrasatanic anthems like “The Antichrist,” “Die by the Sword,” and “Black Magic” sounded like malicious, hurried versions of Iron Maiden’s Killers—except at Slayer’s hectic tempo, the intricate instrumental breaks were reduced to a few seconds in their hasty entirety. In place of operatic vocals, singer/bassist Tom Araya let loose hellish screams. Lead guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman adjusted the unison melodic riffs of Iron Maiden to a minor key or plainly played them out of key. King in particular favored lead breaks that were flashy, fractured, and made full use of the whammy bar and extra frets on his B. C. Rich Mocking-bird guitar. “Kerry’s solos were pretty out there,” assesses Hanneman.
This was metal holocaust with no hope of prettiness or polish. Slayer played the wild chugging of Metallica with a careless, wild-eyed edge instead of a relentless groove, and they lavished Show No Mercy with Satanism and hymns to evil circumstances. The aim was not exactly world domination, but rather total destruction. “I think what we did was take what metal was, injected some punk into it, and just went from there,” says Kerry King. Heavy metal fans had long been obsessed with discovering the flashiest players and the heaviest bands— Show No Mercy, like its more polished rival Kill ‘Em All, broke the scales of both measures. Suddenly, young bands were tossing away twin guitar harmonies in favor of a new standard: Who played fastest? Dan Lilker had recently left Anthrax and formed Nuclear Assault, and he recalls first hearing Show No Mercy: “Of course, one of our instincts was ‘Oh, God, now there’s another really fast band out there, we have to speed up!’ There was a sense of competition.”
Between Metallica and Slayer especially, that competitive spirit sometimes led to acrimony. In an early interview with Kick Ass Monthly, Lars Ulrich was unusually caustic about his fellow travelers. “It pisses me off, especially with Slayer,” he said. “[In October 1982] we were headlining and they were our opening act. They played all covers: Judas Priest, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, and Def Leppard. Slayer was all covers. When they played with us, that was the night that they said, ‘Holy fuck! We’ve gotta be fast metal, too!’ So it’s obvious where their influences come
from.”
If Diamond Head was not exactly Slayer’s speed, one relic from the British era clearly had an effect: NWOBHM rejects Venom. Long after giving up its Iron Maiden and Judas Priest covers, Slayer kept Venom’s “Witching Hour” in its live repertoire—a measure of Venom’s explosive influence on all things dark and dirty. Likewise, Metallica was thrilled to embark across Europe with Venom on the brief Seven Dates of Hell tour, beginning in Switzerland in February 1984. Venom’s influence on the young metal fanatics was blatant. “You know James Hetfield of Metallica?” drummer Abaddon told two Swedish journalists. “I would swear that he suddenly started to walk like Cronos [Venom’s singer, a bodybuilder who swaggered with arms swinging like a caveman.]”
Unquestionably the most extreme band of its time, Venom peaked in 1984 with At War with Satan, an album featuring a 17-minute track by the same name. Indulging every excess of its considerably crazy career, Venom raunched through the complete saga of hell’s minions assaulting heaven. In the irony-laden story line, demons invade heaven and toss out the angels, who then regroup in hell and return tainted with wrath to disrupt and destroy the demonic victory party. Taking up an entire album side with this deranged concept was commercial blasphemy from a band with little hope of radio airplay.
Rather than slog their way across America like Mercyful Fate or Raven, Venom was satisfied to rarely stray from Britain, cashing in its chips in a sensational over-the-top semiannual stage extravaganza of lights, flames, and smoke. Pushing the extremes of album design as well, At War with Satan came packaged in a deluxe, gold-embossed, leathery gatefold sleeve, including glossy poster and inserts promoting scarves, badges, and other Venom-wear. If the band could not make an impact on the airwaves, it was surely going to make itself known sitting against the record player.