by Ian Christe
The return of Dave Mustaine
Thrashers who had previewed Exodus only via Metallica’s recycled “Dying by His Hand” riff rejoiced to discover more of the same. From somewhere between the chugging E-string rhythms of Kill ‘Em All and the more sculpted terrain of Ride the Lightning, Exodus unleashed a huge terrain of syncopated headbanger thrills, designed for maximum physical reaction from denim- and leather-clad bodies. As Bonded by Blood put a premium on its lock-step rhythmic groove, the hefty guitars of Gary Holt and Rick Hunolt were supported and embellished by the enduring voice of Baloff, who sounded like a gleeful victim of unspeakable pain. Like their comrades in the equally violent Slayer, Exodus jettisoned the intricacies of Iron Maiden and went for the jugular.
Unlike the punk rockers they admired, who were content merely to sing of anarchy and destruction, Exodus lived in a zone of complete mayhem, surrounded by broken glass. Instantly a major influence on headbangers everywhere, the band followed Metallica to the forefront of the San Francisco Bay Area thrash metal scene, which also spawned Death Angel, Legacy (later called Testament), Possessed, Forbidden Evil, Defiance, Heathen, Violence, Hexx, Mordred, and dozens more during the remainder of the decade. As perfected in the Bay Area, the entire thrash metal paradigm took the larger-than-life sound and energy of heavy metal to a new intensity, while remaining exceedingly down-to-earth in attitude.
A lesson in violence: Bay Area gig flyer
If Metallica initially appeared underdressed for the heavy metal party, it was now joined by acres of blue-jean-clad comrades whose only nod to haberdashery was an army-surplus bullet belt around the waist. Since 1982 Armored Saint had been attired head to toe in studded leather armor—a guise that began to feel clean unwieldy formality. “We thought it was cool, but that was never the main reason for the band,” says singer John Bush. “We always were way more serious about our music. It helped us look a little different than everybody else. It was funny when Metallica came along and became huge, and they were just wearing jeans and T-shirts. We thought, ‘Whoa, this ain’t gonna work anymore.’”
As the influence of Slayer pressured other bands to play deathly fast, Ride the Lightning urged confrontational subject matter that went well beyond escapism. As countless new bands formed, they no longer emulated the soaring, operatic vocal styles of Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. They stuck to a gruff, Lemmy-derived bark like James Hetfield, or a menacing, polysyllabic litany like Tom Araya—who soon excised the screams from his vocabulary. The hallmarks of power metal were revealed as merely a transitional phase between heavy metal and something entirely new: thrash metal. Thrash metal released the pounding gait of power metal into a full gallop, a hectic, breakneck, roller coaster of heavy, rapid sixteenth notes, odd timing shifts, and all-out fury. Instead of “wimping out” over time, the groups were just getting heavier.
Power metal bands like Anvil, still dressing in red leather bondage outfits and playing guitar solos with phallus-shaped vibrators, felt the chance for mass popularity slipping through their fingers. They had paid their dues and paved the way for Metallica, but were lost now in the wake of dozens of faster bands. There had been an instant years earlier when Lars Ulrich bragged that his band would someday be bigger than Anvil, and already that moment seemed laughable. “Remember Anvil?” asks Dan Lilker of Nuclear Assault. “When thrash got big and bands like Metallica and Anthrax started taking over and playing faster, those guys seemed pretty bitter about it. I remember reading an interview with Anvil, and they were saying, ‘All those bands do is play fast, and there’s no talent to it, there’s no song structure.’ It wasn’t true, it was just frustration.”
For one major hotbed of thrash mastery, West Germany, it took a little convincing for fans and bands to drop the dress code. Head-bangers from the struggling nation were historically ravenous, known for drinking themselves into oblivion and seen diving from the tops of bus shelters before AC/DC concerts. They bore their devotion to metal openly, decking themselves to the nines in metal garb. “Their fashion I always thought was really funny, and I’m saying that in a fond way,” says Dan Lilker. “They’ve got to have the striped pants and
THRASH METAL
By 1985 power metal was no longer fast enough to contain the tempo of the underground. A new generation of thrash metal bands seemingly overnight switched to riffing in Metallicastyle triplets. While power metal was heavy metal on steroids, thrash metal’s repeated fluttering notes lifted effortlessly into flight. This music was constantly in motion, an intricate flood of enormous sound. Stage costumes and other showbiz trappings went out the door as ‘bangers tucked their heads down and concentrated on music and more serious lyrics. Casual observers also called this speed metal; purists would point out that thrash metal relies more on long, wrenching rhythmic breaks, while speed metal, as played by Agent Steel and Destruction, is a cleaner and more musically intricate subcategory, still loyal to the dueling melodies of classic metal.
Titans of Thrash
Anthrax, Spreading the Disease (1985)
Artillery, Fear of Tomorrow (1985)
Carnivore, Carnivore (1985)
Death Angel, The Ultraviolence (1987)
Exodus, Bonded by Blood (1985)
Holy Terror, Terror and Submission (1987)
Megadeth, Killing Is My Business… And Business Is Good (1985)
Metal Church, Metal Church (1984)
Metallica, Master of Puppets (1986)
Metallica, Ride the Lightning (1984)
Nuclear Assault, Game Over (1986)
Slayer, Reign in Blood (1986)
Testament, The New Order (1988)
Voivod, Killing Technology (1988)
Whiplash, Power & Pain (1985)
the whole uniform—it’s great. You’ve never seen so many bracelets flying around, and the bands were all great shit.”
Scorpions put Germany on the hard rock map in the 1970s, but after 1981’s supercharged Blackout, the band expended its energy on a series of hugely successful, ballad-laden, made-for-MTV albums like Love at First Sting. German metal in the early 1980s was anchored by Accept, who cracked NWOBHM codes with the finely crafted records Breaker, Restless & Wild, and Balls to the Wall. By the mid-1980s a phalanx of German troops, including Running Wild, Warlock, Deathrow, Living Death, and Grave Digger took their marching orders from Judas Priest and Iron Maiden’s twin-guitar harmonies. Still, the country’s metal quotient undoubtedly reached full, glorious saturation with speed metal and the unchained creations of Destruction, Sodom, and Kreator.
Ascending early from Venom-influenced black metal, the Syke, Germany, trio called Destruction debuted on the 1984 Sentence of Death EP, festooned with no less an arsenal than seven and a half bullet belts, three upside-down crosses, twelve spiked wristbands, three leather gloves, a half tube of black lipstick, and at least two studded collars. Though their over-the-top approach raised suspicions, the band thrashed violently and skillfully enough to disarm skeptics who accused them of exploiting the black metal fad. With a weightless feel and an occasional punk sneer, Destruction further proved its might with two masterful long-players, 1985’s Infernal Overkill and 1986’s Eternal Devastation.
As its music grew faster and more careful, Destruction had a great hand in creating speed metal—the intricate Maiden-meets-Metallica subset of thrash metal that emphasized rhythmic tricks without losing the dual-guitar craft of Judas Priest. There was little intrinsic difference between speed metal and thrash metal. With the sudden boom of fast, raging bands, however, it sometimes helped to distinguish between the throbbing, rhythm-heavy thrash metal and something a bit cleaner and more melodic—dubbed speed metal.
Much heavier on their feet than Destruction, the bluntly named Sodom had a rougher time climbing out of the Venom cesspool. Their ultracrude In the Sign of Evil EP offered elementary tracks like “Blasphemer,” featuring a nursery-rhyme melody and nonfluent lyrics: “I read Satanic Bible with fucking grown / masturbate to kill myself.” Sodom bette
red themselves significantly with the wild, ugly garage metal of Obsessed by Cruelty. By Persecution Mania in 1987, they had evolved into a Teutonic invasion force, well suited to the saturation-strike sound systems of the rapidly growing outdoor European metal festivals. To that end, Persecution Maniacs “Bombenhagel” was especially noteworthy, where the band cast aside its heavily accented English in favor of guttural German—an emotional moment for many a fist-waving Rheinland metal patriot.
Sodom: Die Metallköpfe (SPV)
The most accomplished and long-lived of the German thrash metal bands was the Essen group Kreator, who, though exceedingly young, had formed under the name Tormentor in 1982. Kreator exchanged members with Sodom frequently, as both bands struggled to tour across Europe without rest. Led by gurgling vocalist/guitarist Mille Petrozza, the band threshed melodic guitar arpeggios with a speedy undertow of syncopated riffs on Endless Pain, Pleasure to Kill, and the impressive Terrible Certainty. Coloring the speed and evil intentions of Slayer with Metallica’s sense of tunefulness and social conscience, songs like “Toxic Trace” and “Storming with Menace” were a skilled and determined metallic assault on existing notions of music.
Once the province of the steel lords of England, by 1985 heavy metal had become a giant terrifying red ball, bouncing across the Atlantic and back, transplanting ideas between distant nations and leaving huge crushed craters in its wake. The thrash metal underground was literally a worldwide web, united by postal communications, international touring, and even computers—in 1986 the MetalliBashers dial-up BBS bulletin board began offering metal news, Overkill interviews, Megadeth lyrics, and chemical-weapon recipes for download, over 300-baud modems.
As Metallica’s influence made itself known in Western Europe, so did the fever spread to the hallowed birthplace of heavy metal, Great Britain. Yet after giving the world so many of the original soldiers, the musicians of merry old England never really grasped the fundamental thrash ethic—that a riff could be an end unto itself. British bands were still chasing Iron Maiden and Saxon down the path of pomp and glory, while thrash metal’s instinct needed be go-for-the-throat. Searching in desperation for “Britain’s answer to Metallica,” Kerrang! and Metal Forces offered such worn redcoat cloth as Wolfpack, Onslaught, Acid Reign, and Xentrix. All made the fatal mistake of equating thrash with playing standard metal at higher speeds, inconclusively fumbling at attempts to combine majesty with street appeal. The goofy Xentrix remake of the Ghostbusters theme song certainly marked the low point of a craze for thrash metal cover songs.
Anxious to prove itself a worthy successor rather than a mere band of snotty foreign upstarts, Metallica joined the Monsters of Rock festival on August 17, 1985, at Castle Donington. Though Europe now offered countless metal events throughout the summer, England’s Donington bash remained the original. Festival organizers scheduled Metallica on the bill beneath Bon Jovi and ZZ Top but above Ratt. Metallica was far short of the glam band’s platinum popularity in America, but pop metal was a lesser factor in England, where music videos were broadcast only weekly. Live onstage, Metallica certainly had the advantage, winning over English fans with typical insouciance. “If you came here to see spandex, eye makeup, and the words ‘oh, baby’ in every fuckin’ song, this ain’t the fuckin’ band,” James Hetfield told a crowd of 70,000.
Donington was a prestigious annual gathering spot, even as its once-green fields were trampled to a muddy brown by the throng of drunken maniacs. Though fans persisted in pelting Metallica with
GERMAN SPEED METAL
The German bands had the true grit of thrash metal but retained a precise melodic edge that showed devotion to the unique traits of heavy metal songwriting. Add on a gonzo sense of dress and an undying pool of prometal energy, and these bands cemented the country’s status as a haven for headbangers.
Kein Schlaf Bis Deutschland
Assassin, Interstellar Experience (1988)
Celtic Frost [Swiss-German], To Mega Therion (1986)
Coroner [Swiss-German], No More Color (1989)
Death row, Raging Steel (1987)
Destruction, Infernal Overkill (1985)
Helloween, Keeper of the Seven Keys, Part I (1987)
Kreator, Terrible Certainty (1988)
Living Death, Vengeance of Hell (1984)
Running Wild, Gates to Purgatory (1985)
Sodom, Persecution Mania (1987)
fruit and other projectiles, by the end of their set the band understood they had passed a hazing ritual—a trial by friendly fire. Cliff Burton calmly chewed a pear thrown from the crowd that became embedded in his bass amp. “British audiences are strange,” mused Lars Ulrich to Metal Forces. “Once you’ve convinced yourself that just because you’re being bombarded by two-liter bottles full of piss, mud, and ham sandwiches doesn’t mean that they don’t like you, and you’ve learnt to play your instrument while ducking and running away from things, then yeah, it was great fun.”
The tastemakers of England enthusiastically claimed Metallica as rightful heirs to Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Motörhead, and Black Sabbath. Further acknowledging the popularity of the underground, Kerrang! spawned Mega Metal Kerrang! in 1985, specifically to focus on the postMaiden tones of Metallica, Slayer, and Kreator—bringing the full-color treatment to the thrash metal scene that most fanzines had lacked. In a country without MTV, such print media still held powerful sway, and the bands they endorsed would someday inherit the kingdom.
Snake of Voivod, live in Montreal
(Jean-françois “Big” Lavallée/Metal K.O. Productions)
Thrash metal was experiencing many defining moments, developing an identity separate from heavy metal. In November 1985 nearly 7,000 raging metalheads converged on freezing Montreal, Canada, for the World War III weekend festival with Celtic Frost, Possessed, Destruction, Nasty Savage, and hometown heroes Voivod. It was a dream bill of the most intense and intriguing bands from far-flung locales like Switzerland, San Francisco, Germany, and Florida. “It was an extremely exciting time,” recalls Tom Warrior of Celtic Frost. “The whole injection of fresh power into this music was really exciting. It was really a sense of a brotherhood among a lot of bands. I look back now and think everybody was really naïve. I just liked the revolutionary character of the whole thing. That a bunch of idiots went out into the world and made this a household music, and it worked.”
IX
Full Speed Ahead:
Thrash metal Attacks!
Summer 1985: MTV institutes “Crüe Rule” to block viewer-request dominance by metal bands
March 1986: Metallica begins tour with Ozzy Osbourne
September 27, 1986: Metallica bassist Cliff Burton killed in bus accident in Sweden
October 1986: Slayer releases Reign in Blood
November 4, 1986: Metallicas Master of Puppets goes gold in the United States
Honed by touring and high on the Billboard-charting success of the Elektra Records reissue of Ride the Lightning, Metallica headed home on August 31, 1985, to play the Day on the Green festival in Oakland, California. They shared the stage with former Bay Area hard rock champions Y&T, the Scorpions, and two fellow alumni of the first Metal Massacre: Ratt and Yngwie Malmsteen’s Rising Force. Even as Metallica tackled the world, it was exhilarating to face a sold-out hometown crowd of 60,000. While the groups played their usual set of raging songs, not just friends and family but an entire stadium of newcomers applauded the heavy metal band that still shunned radio ballads and MTV videos.
In a city famous for its unconventional folk heroes, the story of Metallica was hot news. On New Year’s Eve 1985 they headlined a thrash metal marathon at the San Francisco Civic Center with Exodus, Metal Church, Megadeth, and several thousand thrashers in attendance. Arms and limbs flailing, acting out their every curious, destructive impulse, the thrashers were more like punk rockers than leather-clad heavy metal clubgoers. Their venue-crushing antics and the backstage mayhem of Metallica themselves were actually a constant source of
distress to legendary Bay Area concert promoter Bill Graham. The rock-era hippie icon resented playing the role of disciplinarian every time the giddy Metallica felt like destroying a dressing room or breaking a few mirrors.
New Year’s thrash summit, 1985 flyer
Metallica finally released its first new record for Elektra, Master of Puppets, on February 21, 1986. As Appalachian fiddle songs emulated crying birds, the Delta blues adopted locomotive rhythms, and Judas Priest captured the scream of Concorde jets, Metallica’s motions in 1986 represented the sound of collapsing buildings, volcanoes erupting, and huge ships run aground without stopping. It was a highly finessed maelstrom. Expanding the grand plans of Black Sabbath with blinding flashes of lightning and subaquatic detonations, Metallica was so fast it seemed to be happening in several places at once. They had atom-splitting power— fitting for a band preoccupied with nuclear war.
The first Metallica album to feature no songwriting by Dave Mustaine, Master of Puppets concentrated on improving rather than relentlessly reinventing the band’s sound. The product of five months back in Denmark with Flemming Rasmussen, the songs mimicked the dynamics of Ride the Lightning almost exactly, but in richer, more impressive form. Both albums opened with furious bashers— “Fight Fire” and “Battery"— then segued into the moody, anthemic title tracks, followed with powerful, slow ballads— “Fade to Black” and “Welcome Home (Sanitarium).” Even as Ride the Lightning closed with the extended instrumental “The Call of Ktulu,” Master of Puppets placed the epic bass suite “Orion” one step from the end.