by Ian Christe
The horror film—inspired Misfits became legendary after succumbing to massive internal entropy and disbanding in 1984. Though he dressed in blue denim like a mellow 1970s acid rocker, it was wired fiend Cliff Burton who force-fed the Misfits to his bandmates in Metallica by monopolizing the tape deck in the tour bus with a ninety-minute bootleg tape of greatest hits labeled “Misfits.” Metallica played the first of several Misfits covers, “Last Caress,” in stadiums with Ozzy Osbourne. “They couldn’t play ‘Green Hell’ because Lars couldn’t play the thrash beats!” recalls former Misfits singer Glenn Danzig. Both songs became Metallica live standards, and the renewed interest in his music soon brought Danzig to the attention of Rick Rubin, who signed the singer on the condition that he disband his current adventurous band, Samhain, and concentrate on developing as a solo act.
As Metallica and Megadeth jumped the fence and embraced the glam-killing properties of hardcore, the long-lasting divisions between metalheads and punks were erased. The growing respect was mutual, once hardcore punks understood that the heavy metal that flowed from the veins of Motörhead and Black Sabbath was not the same as the cheesy aerosol music they saw on MTV. “People don’t recognize Sabbath for the power of what they had,” C.O.C. guitarist Woody Weatherman told Metal Maniacs. “’War Pigs’ and ‘Children of the Grave’ did more to make me think than a lot of punk rock songs. They just laid it on the line, just totally told how it is.”
The power lines of punk and metal fused together completely in the catalyzing Stormtroopers of Death, a hardcore side-project formed in April 1985 by members of Anthrax. Combining a sense of humor cultivated by repeated viewing of Caddyshack with a crunching guitar, S.O.D. was a metalhead’s dream of how hardcore should sound. The lineup brought bassist Dan Lilker—ousted a few years earlier from Anthrax by former singer Neil Turbin—back together with Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian and drummer Charlie Benante. “Scott still wanted to play with me in some manner,” Lilker says. “He wasn’t happy about me leaving the band.”
Unlike the inspired amateurism of midwestern teenage hardcore, the Stormtroopers of Death were top-notch professional musicians ripping into short bursts of hardcore punk— akin to installing a turbo racing engine in a go-cart. Their short spurts of ripping thrash were ordered into action by the loud vocals of Billy Milano, formerly bassist of the Psychos. With a knack for pushing people’s buttons, Milano was equal parts comedian and New Jersey thug who considered himself an artist. “I do write poetry,” says Milano. “A couple years ago I had a whole bunch of poems circulating. It’s not real poetry, it’s more like art, with words instead of pictures.”
Billy Milano of S.O.D.
Speak English or Die sprinkled personal jokes among extreme responses. “Chromatic Death” advocated human annihilation
HARDCORE PUNK
After punk’s heyday in the late 1970s, a younger generation was inspired to continue shocking attacks against the status quo through underground gigs and records. Any kid with a white T-shirt and a Magic Marker could join the club, banging out adolescent uncertainty in a room filled with peers equally addicted to brazen power and nonconformity. British hardcore bands like GBH and especially Discharge were more preoccupied with global politics. American hardcore was a succession of scene revolts, chastising uncool behavior with a litany of antisocial anthems. Alone in the crowd, the Misfits wore ghoulish makeup and retained a heavy metal fascination with skulls and crossbones. Many of these bands were essentially heavy metal bands minus the commercial expectations.
Skinheads, Brains, and Guts
Agnostic Front, Victim in Pain (1984)
Bad Brains, / Against I (1986)
Black Flag, Damaged (1981)
Black Flag, My War (1982)
Circle Jerks, Group Sex (1981)
D.I., Team Goon (1981)
Die Kreuzen, Die Kreuzen (1984)
Discharge, See Nothing, Hear Nothing, Say Nothing (1984)
GBH, City Baby Attacked by Rats (1982)
Minor Threat, Out of Step (1983)
Misfits, Walk Among Us (1982)
Negative Approach, Tied Down (1983)
Suicidal Tendencies, Suicidal Tendencies (1983)
as a measure of environmental cleanup, and “Speak English or Die” and “Fuck the Middle East” stirred up controversy in the conscientious punk scene. Forced to defend themselves against charges of Nazism and nationalism, the members noted that Lilker and Ian were both Jewish, and Milano and Benante descendants of recent Italian immigrants. Besides the self-explanatory “Kill Yourself,” an example of their unforgiving humor was “The Ballad of Jimi Hendrix,” set to the opening strains of the late guitarist’s “Purple Haze.” After eight seconds the song ended abruptly with the disrespectful punch line “You’re dead!”
At the same time, S.O.D.’s “United Forces” urged collaboration between the punk and metal troops: “It doesn’t matter how you wear your hair / It’s what’s inside your head.” Indeed, fans accustomed to Iron Maiden and even Metallica’s ten-minute strolls through the park found S.O.D.’s eight-second songs hilarious. There was a refreshing carelessness to the operation that contrasted with how life in heavy metal was growing so altogether serious. The Dead Kennedys stickers on Slayer’s guitars and Metallica’s GBH and Discharge T-shirts had advertised this alliance for a few years already—now the cat was out of the bag.
Released by Megaforce Records, Speak English or Die rose in popularity until S.O.D. rivaled its members’ regular jobs in the more established Anthrax. After its unauthorized tribute to horror hero “Freddy Kreuger” found its way into the offices of New Line Cinema, S.O.D. was approached by the studio to write music for a sequel to the popular Nightmare on Elm Street. In anticipation the band posed for publicity photos with actor Robert Englund in full Kreuger costume. “That’s kind of why S.O.D. was cut short back then,” recalls Lilker. “Other people in Anthrax were getting angry about it. You gotta remember, it was supposed to be this project like, ‘Oh, they’re just going to get it out of their system,’ and then, boom, it got fucking huge.” By 1999 Speak English or Die had sold more than a million copies worldwide.
The crossover had begun. By late 1985 the Los Angeles hardcore bands Suicidal Tendencies and Circle Jerks were tempering their speed assault with slower, heavier riffs in order to lure the huge metal audience. The critical British band Discharge did the same, and soon concert promoters like Goldenvoice in Los Angeles and Rock Hotel in New York were cultivating a unified scene with giant spectaculars that put Motörhead and the hardcore punk Cro-Mags together on the same bill. By way of contrast there were almost no examples still to be found of thrash metal bands ever playing shows with MTV glam metal groups.
Crossover in effect: Anthrax and Possessed meet D.R.I. and C.O.C.
As metal infected the hardcore scene, the spiky-haired English Dogs threw down their protest anthems in favor of medieval-themed hymns on the aptly titled Metalmorphosis. Likewise, one of the most brilliantly spastic hardcore groups, the Bad Brains—a group of self-styled Rastafarians from suburban Maryland—fought the problems of human wickedness with the intensity of hardcore, the religious soul of reggae, and the sharp instrumental skills of metal on their powerful I Against I. Hosts of bands, including the Hare Krishna hardcore group Cro-Mags and the dreadlocked C.O.C., took inspiration from the same forward-reaching spirit—discovering discordant music and creating a heterogeneous new social scene.
Remaining at the forefront of metal-hardcore fusion in New York, S.O.D.’s Dan Lilker joined with John Connelly to form the quirky Nuclear Assault. Wholly dedicated to cross-genre impurities, the quartet gigged at Sunday afternoon matinees at punk club CBGB with Agnostic Front, then played heavy metal strongholds like L’Amour with thrash troopers Overkill. “Believe me, there were more shiny satin jackets and metal jewelry in L’Amour than you could shake a stick at,” says Lilker. “You could practically be blinded in there. We straddled that divide. One day we’d be playing hardcore shows w
ith crazed skinheads jumping right over you, and a couple days later we’d play at L’Amour and there would be some girls in the front poking their elbows at each other trying to get your attention.”
Leading the crossover band Carnivore in the mid-1980s, towering singer Peter Steele, aka Petrus T. Steele, found that merging the tribes was not always easy. “There was a clear distinction between black metal, and speed metal, and punk, and hardcore, and rap,” Steele says. “There was almost no crossover. Nuclear Assault and S.O.D. were just starting to cross over, and we wanted to be one of those bands. I liked the heaviness of metal, but I liked the violence and the excitement at hardcore shows, and I wanted to incorporate both. We had a lot of trouble, because metal kids saw Carnivore as outdated and image-heavy, and the hardcore kids didn’t accept us because we had long hair.”
Indeed, for punks still living a Sid Vicious fantasy, accusing a band of having “gone metal” was a wounding insult. When Kirk Hammett of Metallica joined the Crumbsuckers onstage at CBGB, the audience spit at him and bruised his ego with shouts of “rock star,” leading to Hammett’s clobbering a heckler with his guitar. Ultimately the punk scene remained as much a testing ground for attitudes as for music—and metal fans saw the obnoxiousness as part of the appeal.
Resentment of heavy metal interlopers increased in the late 1980s after do-it-yourself punk labels were suddenly forced to compete with new hardcore-oriented spinoffs of business-savvy metal indies. Combat spawned CombatCore, Roadrunner formed Hawker, and Metal Blade dallied with Death Records. The very fact that these companies were organized and making money made them morally suspect in the eyes of some punks. “People give you flak automatically because you’re on Combat Records,” says Blaine Cook of the Accused, sole punks on the label among bullet-belted thrashers Megadeth, Agent Steel, and Possessed. “Combat’s just another independent label, but I guess there’s an attitude that goes along with heavy metal, and [punks] feel it carries over to the business aspect.”
Like it or not, metal rejuvenated the urgency of the hardcore punk scene at a crucial hour. While the originators of hardcore punk—Necros, Redd Kross, Negative Approach, Minor Threat, and Black Flag—disbanded and grew their hair, young hardcore acts like Attitude Adjustment and Underdog suddenly sprang from a fountain of Exodus riffs. Also, many headbangers took hardcore’s revolutionary promise at face value—during a time when most punks were dangerously close to losing their faith in nihilism. “In some of the younger scenes they just got done watching Sid and Nancy and The Decline of Western Civilization,” says Blaine Cook of the Accused, describing two punk exploitation movies. “They still think that’s what it is to be a punk rocker, but it’s eight to ten years later now. It’s becoming a costume, like the new resurgence of hippies who still think it’s 1967, wearing tie-dyed shirts and listening to the Grateful Dead. There’s supposed to be more to the hardcore scene than just the fashion and the music aspect, y’know? There’s supposed to be a set of ideals and attitudes that go beyond the trashing of the clubs and the violence and the swastikas and the Mohawks and the shock value. In my opinion that grew old a long time ago. If you’re going to shock somebody, do it with your intelligence, not your three-foot-high green Mohawk.”
In the late 1980s the territories were merging to become one and the same. Younger fans embraced thrash metal and hardcore punk to the benefit of both breeds of rejected music. The value differences between hardcore and metal were often based on stereotypes that did not necessarily hold true: bald heads versus long hair, “straight-edge” tee-totaling versus alcoholic abandon, and self-produced basement shows versus concert halls. At the end of the day pentagrams looked well enough like anarchy symbols.
As metal encountered punk music, fashion, politics, and ethics, a broader sense of identity developed. Metalheads realized there was more to life than hating posers and pushing for world domination, and started thinking of their scene in terms of a culture separate from the mind-controlling mass-media empire that never understood them anyway. The resulting underground pride influenced the development of metal in the next decade. As Euronymous of the black metal band Mayhem described the heavy music subculture in Norway to Morbid Mag in 1987, “More and more people seem to become active in the scene, which I think is good. One thing which also is good is that punks and thrashers now start uniting. But I think that more girls should get into the scene!”
As advertised by the Anthrax videos “Madhouse” and “Indians,” the Megadeth clip “Wake Up Dead,” and various MTV specials, the influence of hardcore punk also brought slam dancing and stage diving into the densely packed and more professional metal environment.
METALCORE
In the mid-1980s thrash metal bands like Metallica and Slayer began openly admiring the fast, hardcore punk of DRI, GBH, and SNFU—to name a few initials. With two subcultures running neck and neck in speed and energy, something had to give. Hardcore already drew significantly, if secretly, from heavy metal dating back to Motörhead. In the late 1980s, the underground became a hodgepodge of metallic guitar, socially conscious lyrics, and crunching speed rhythms. Unlike their brethren in the black metal underground, these bands dismissed leather and spikes in favor of typical American teen wear: goofy T-shirts, shorts, and sweat socks. They didn’t take themselves too seriously, but their contributions were crucial. Too dirty and noisy to be heavy metal, too technically adept to be punk, these bands hung on the periphery, reveling in freedom.
Crossover Dreams
The Accüsed, Return of Martha Splatterhead (1985)
Corrosion of Conformity, Animosity (1985)
Cro-Mags, The Age of Quarrel (1986)
Cryptic Slaughter, Convicted (1986)
Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, Dealing with It (1985)
Dr. Know, Plug In Jesus (1984)
Excel, Split Image (1987)
Hirax, Hate, Fear and Power (1987)
Prong, Force Fed (1987)
Samhain, November Coming Fire (1986)
S.O.D., Speak English or Die (1985)
Wehrmacht, Shark Attack (1987
Aggressive music demanded violent physical responses that sent bodies colliding into one another—even the most frantic headbanging was no longer enough. As guitarist Gary Holt recalls an especially chaotic Exodus event, “One guy left in an ambulance because he hit headfirst after stage diving, and a couple guys got broken noses. It was pretty out of hand, and we weren’t even playing! We were just lip-synching for the video shoot!”
Concert-hall violence had been a rock and roll hazard since fans rioted after performances by Deep Purple and Black Sabbath in the early 1970s. Now, with the increasing popularity of hardcore, slam dancing—or “moshing,” as it was dubbed by the S.O.D. song “Milano Mosh"—spread from underground club shows to large-scale arena venues. Security guards struggled to interpret the difference between dancing and fighting. “I go into a concert situation and see people going absolutely insane moshing and slamming,” says Dave Mustaine of Megadeth. “We were one of the bands that started that in America. It started off with pogo-ing and doing the worm in the punk scene, and then when the metal scene came along, the people wanted to dance like that, but they didn’t know what pogo-ing and doing the worm was, so they invented slam dancing.”
Crowd surfing at an Anthrax show
(Dean Sternberg)
In the song “Caught in a Mosh,” Anthrax glorified the slam pit as a metaphor for life struggles. Yet as onstage interlopers stomped on guitar cables and jostled musicians during intricate guitar solos, the experience was not universally appreciated. “We were sick and tired of the ultrahardcore fans in Europe,” says Tom Warrior of these excursions. “They would be so violent in the front row that the other fans couldn’t enjoy the show anymore. It had nothing to do with music anymore. It was just antisocial. We became so frustrated that we intentionally altered our music to be more intellectual and more melodic in order to scare those fans away, because they were making it impossible for the large ma
jority of fans to enjoy our shows.”
One of the most aggressiv eand punk-inspired metal bands, Slayer had problems playing in its home city of Los Angeles due to the destruction of property that inevitably followed its packed performances. “We were playing with Slayer at the Olympic, and a guy hit me in the throat with his shoe,” says David Wayne of Metal Church. “The blow just about paralyzed my vocal cords. It made me so mad that I put my mike down, and as soon as I saw the other shoe, I dove over a six-foot photo pit and went down with my hands around this guy’s throat. His little buddies proceeded to kick the tar out of me. I’m laying down there with all these feet on top of my head, with guys putting boots in my ribs, thinking, ‘You dumb asshole, your anger got the best of you, now you’re gonna die on the ground in front of your own show.’”
Metal club flyer banning stage diving
When even Judas Priest and AC/DC began depicting stage divers and body surfing in their MTV videos, it was clear that the mosh had been brought mainstream. The age-old practice of headbanging seemed innocent in comparison to flailing limbs, bodies smashing into each other, and a crush of thousands of fans pressing against the stage. Bands in the metal arena learned that rough crowds came with the territory—it was understood that metalheads would risk life and limb in order to experience something real. “There comes a point where you have to feel like someone gives a shit that you’re actually playing,” notes Rob Zombie of White Zombie. “It’s so much cooler to play where kids are going nuts, and every show looks like it ends in a riot. Security guards get nailed, kids get hurt, things are broke, and there’s total damage. It becomes this insane, fun event. Watching Slayer is like going to a riot. Your blood’s pumping.”