by Ian Christe
If the majority of bands circulating in the tape-trading underground in 1985 wanted to be Metallica, in 1987 most new names played a cross-pollinated S.O.D.—style hybrid called metalcore, or simply crossover. In these groups shaved heads mingled with long hair, as punk drummers and singers wrestled musically with metal guitarists. As with any deceptively simple idea, S.O.D. inspired countless imitators. Among the fastest, with the sickest senses of humor, were Intense Mutilation, Sore Throat, and R.C.—all of whom pushed the songs-per-minute barrier into double digits. The cruel Anal Cunt, or A.C., was a project band like S.O.D., founded by bassist Seth Putnam from the Boston thrash group Executioner. A.C.’s ultimate statement was an 88-song seven-inch single, later topped by their own 5,643-song seven-inch—roughly ten untitled song blurts per second.
Grindcore godfathers Blaine Cook (l) and Tommy Niemeyer (r) of the Accused
(Courtesy of Blaine Cook)
A preeminent forerunner of this synthesis was the Accused, from Seattle, Washington, a smaller city where hardcore metal fans and punks teamed together out of necessity. The Retrn of Martha Splatterhead featured guitar riffs and rough, plowing bass that were sickeningly catchy and combined the dark hardcore of Discharge and the black metal of Venom. The atrocities of their gory, comic graphics rang the same alarms as did the Misfits, but the songs were delivered faster, with greater caustic, metallic finesse. Jerking onstage like an out-of-control marionette, vocalist Blaine Cook coughed out his vocal scrapings in an expressive off-balance screech, the most extreme delivery since that of Motörhead’s Lemmy. The obvious painfulness of the style was impressive. “My throat’s fucked up,” says Cook. “I don’t have polyps or anything, but there’s scar tissue.”
Several years older than his bandmates, Cook had already released an album with the Fartz on the punk label Alternative Tentacles before meeting his precocious future bandmates Tommy, Chewy, and Dana in 1983. “They came down from Seattle to Portland,” he says, “where the Fartz were playing with Poison Idea. They were like thirteen or fourteen. Chewy didn’t even own a bass, or an amp, or a cabinet. Even when he was expelled from the band, he was playing out of borrowed equipment using a cheap copy bass that he had to tune up after every song.”
The Accused were leaders on a club circuit that ran between Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle of young bands bursting with speed and chaotic energy. In the music of Mace, Hirax, Wehrmacht, and Cryptic Slaughter, the fastest hardcore punk was swirling together with underground metal and blowing away the limits of both forms. These metalcore bands wrote reckless, socially aware anthems like Excel’s monstrous “Insecurity” and Wehrmacht’s “Balance of Opinion"—emulating hardcore yet peeling off Iron Maiden riffs as fast as humanly possible. “We just liked bands that were fast and heavy, and we liked punk,” says Katon W. DePena of Hirax, who inherited its drummer from D.R.I. “We were the only band that played with D.R.I. and C.O.C., and then Celtic Frost and Venom. We were doing shit that nobody else was doing, and we didn’t care. I never took myself that seriously.”
While the graduates of the original Metal Massacre were now collecting gold and platinum albums, the rules of the underground had changed, veering away from the elaborate constructions of its heavy metal roots toward something resembling total obliteration. Endorsing this new breed, Metal Blade Records tapped Hirax, Dark Angel, and Possessed for Metal Massacre VI and Cryptic Slaughter for Metal Massacre VII. Yet the honors were not as necessary. In this age of widespread tape trading, the bands were already renowned for their demos and live tapes by the time Brian Slagel’s albums could be manufactured and distributed to stores. In 1987 everyone with access to a cassette-tape dubbing machine was already a metal insider.
Following the preparatory steps of the metalcore bands came a new wave of bands calling their music grindcore, who raised the bar to the highest limits. As it stapled notice of discontent across the heads of the speechless metal underground, grindcore made all previous music sound quaint. If traditional heavy metal bands were feeling the heat from Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax, the likes of England’s Napalm Death were ready to completely bury the old guard deep in the bitter ground.
The latest turbulent and astonishing band from Birmingham, now a rebuilt city with one of the most racially diverse populations in Britain, Napalm Death consisted of a rotating multitude of members. Almost none of them were even born when Black Sabbath or Judas Priest first walked their city’s streets. “People presume that just because we’ve got long hair we’re into Judas Priest and Iron Maiden,” says vocalist Jeff Walker of the decimating Carcass, who shared a guitarist with Napalm Death. “That really isn’t the influence at all. [Grindcore] is the result of growing up in a time when bands like that were pop music, and we went for things that were more underground and obscure, be it hardcore punk or extreme death metal or whatever.
The bedroom label Earache Records, formed to license albums by the Accused in the UK, marketed dozens of groups under the enticing and all-encompassing grindcore banner. The sound was a dense spattering of black metal, hardcore, and thrash metal accelerated nearly to the point of atom-splitting self-destruction. Thrash metal had simplified arrangements to squeeze maximum power into the riffs. In grindcore there was almost no song structure—only a blurry, sustained outpouring of the ultimate speed and ferocity. It replayed all the heaviest music of the previous ten years on fast forward.
Even a metal scene that had endured all manner of speed, gimmicks, and noise was not too callused for the first Napalm Death al bum, Scum. Released in 1987 by Earache, Scum was the culmination of a ten-year race for harder and faster, and nothing could sensibly have been more of either. Drummer and band spokesman Mick Harris used a two-string guitar and a distortion box to write shatteringly fast political hot flashes, twenty-eight of which fit onto the LP. Though unpolished, it was the most radical debut since Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All, pulsing with thick, slamming cacophony in its full-bore postevery-thing onslaught.
After skipping the development of thrash metal, England was returning to the fore. Repeat appearances by Napalm Death and like-minded blasters Doom and Extreme Noise Terror on the influential John Peel BBC radio show earned grindcore the billing of sadistic savior of British rock. “The hardcore stuff was like a renaissance for us of punk music,” says Nick Bullen, bassist and founding member of Napalm Death. “Between 1978 and 1984 there were six years of other music: industrial, electronic, reggae, psychedelic, and anything we came across. That was our second wind to go back to something like Napalm Death.”
Plans for a mixed slate of grindcore bands to wreak havoc on Top of the Pops television show were nixed by the BBC, yet Extreme Noise Terror eventually had its chance at media terrorism when invited by the KLF to help destroy the BRIT television awards show in February 1992. Never a hit in America, the KLF were a bunch of conceptual pop tricksters who won the hearts of their home country with stunts like recording country singer Tammy Wynette in a rap context. Performing at the prestigious BRIT awards, Extreme Noise Terror blasted the KLF hit “3 a.m. Eternal” into oblivion while the KLF sprayed the audience with machine guns preloaded with blanks. When the KLF were awarded “Best British Group” honors later that night, a messenger announced that the band had left the premises and retired from music, the saviors of pop appropriately opting to implode in the roaring spray of a blasting grindcore drumbeat.
One year after Scum, Napalm Death released From Enslavement to Obliteration and shook expectations by introducing into grindcore the ultraheavy influence of the New York art band the Swans. As fast as Scum had been, the opening salvo of From Enslavement‘s “Evolved as One” opened the doors with slow, painful fury—an industrial furnace built for incinerating the fat and the false. Even after downshifting
GRINDCORE
At its inception grindcore was a superfast faction of the intense underground sound of metalcore, the crossover of punk and metal. The key to grindcore was the blast beat, a pulverizing,
mechanical strobing of the snare drum, punctuated by hasty rolls around the drum set. Bands like Napalm Death and Doom took the tortured vocals of the Accüsed and played misshapen guitar licks a million miles a minute. Though death metal already existed, grindcore set new standards for the genre, adding more intelligent lyrics along with music that was not necessarily evil, but totally decimating. After missing the boat with thrash metal, Great Britain finally reclaimed its pioneering role in metal, offering the intriguing array of brutal bands showcased on the Earache label.
Faster Than You’ll Ever Be
Bolt Thrower, BBC Peel Sessions (1988)
Brutal Truth, Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses (1992)
Carcass, Symphonies of Sickness (1989)
Doom, BBC Peel Sessions (1989)
Extreme Noise Terror, Holocaust in Your Head (1989)
Napalm Death, Scum (1987)
Napalm Death, From Enslavement to Obliteration (1988)
Sore Throat, Unhindered by Talent (1989)
to a snail’s pace, Napalm Death could still instantly return to vaporization speed. From Enslavement slipped a full twenty-two tracks onto the vinyl, each alarmingly titled like block-print newspaper headlines: “Cock-Rock Alienation,” “Uncertainty Blurs the Vision,” and “Mentally Murdered.”
Miraculously, Napalm Death survived to further a full slate of creative inventions, though the band remained a revolving door of volatile personalities. Each side of Scum featured a different band roster, the result of short attention spans and impatience. “We were a bit younger, and we didn’t know how to discuss things,” recalls bassist Shane Embury, who remained with the group after working on From Enslavement to Obliteration. “Back then we were so isolated as members we weren’t friends in the rational sense. Something would spark up an argument, not even over a musical thing, and someone would get up and leave the band rather than work it out.”
Discharged members of Napalm Death went on to form bands fitting every category and description of extreme expression. Guitarist Justin Broadrick spawned Godflesh, Head of David, and Loop, all among the first heavy acts to use drum machines and ambient song structures. Guitarist Bill Steer returned to Carcass, where grindcore reconnected with metal virtuosity. Vocalist Lee Dorrian slowed things down to a gravestone’s creep with his doom metal band Cathedral, and drummer Mick Harris helped along an early version of Extreme Noise Terror before launching the electronic-dub group Scorn. As the blast patterns emanating from this roster of surprises indicated, Napalm Death had effectively ended the race for harder and faster. The coming years would instead require heavy metal to become better and brighter.
XII
And Platinum for “One”…
Metal Matures
July 1987: First annual Milwaukee Metalfest held
April 1988: Public Enemy samples Slayer on “She Watch Channel Zero”
August 19, 1988: Anthrax I’m the Man EP earns gold record in the United States
July 19, 1989: Metallica‘s … And Justice for All goes double platinum in the United States
June 1990: Faith No Mores The Real Thing cracks Billboard Top 10, a year after release
Wdallying with hardcore, Metallica’s first priority was still to rule the metal world—now an enormous, thriving realm. Cliff Burton and James Hetfield had sometimes ventilated through Spastik Children, a goof-off stupor-group that would play “London Dungeon” by the Misfits repeatedly during a performance. The band carried on sporadically after the passing of Burton, playing an engagement at the birthday party of old friend Ron Quintana. “Those shows all became fiascoes,” says Quintana, “because the club owners would leak that Metallica was playing a special show, but they wouldn’t say it was Spastik Children. That would always create friction, because all those guys wanted to do was get up there and play really badly on the wrong instruments and annoy people. They eventually got tired of people yelling, ‘Play “Ride the Lightning"!’ At that point forget it—Metallica was just too big.”
Heavy metal was experiencing a golden age, and Metallica was poised to join the multiplatinum ranks of Ratt and Mötley Crüe when the death of Cliff Burton stopped them in their tracks. Still recovering from the loss of their bassist, Metallica returned to its unused rehearsal space in late October 1986, soon after the bus accident in Sweden. Hundreds of applicants plugged in to Cliff Burton’s abandoned bass gear and auditioned in vain for a band loath to replace a dear friend. Among the parade was Kirk Hammett’s pal from algebra class, Les Claypool, who was rejected on the grounds that he played too well. Others were shown the door based on looks alone, seconds after entering the room.
On the recommendation of Brian Slagel, Lars Ulrich eventually hired Jason Newsted—the letter writer, songwriter, and source of energy behind Phoenix, Arizona-based Flotsam & Jetsam, a graduate of Metal Massacre VII. In him Metallica found not a fully equivalent replacement for Cliff Burton but a reverent substitute. Among his primary qualifications: Metallica was his favorite band. Something of a latecomer to Diamond Head and the other NWOBHM groups, Newsted grew up listening to Kiss and Motown records, and he professed an affinity for jazz fusion. Yet the disciplined zeal he developed in Flotsam prepared him perfectly to jump aboard the Metallica juggernaut.
Underground flyer for Jason Newsted’s first Metallica show
Metallica debuted the new member at a surprise-appearance opening for Metal Church on November 8, 1986, at the Country Club in Reseda, California. Those in attendance could be excused for thinking that the band had grabbed a fan from the audience, strapped a bass on him, and ordered him to thrash—after turning his volume down so low he could do little harm. That was not far from the truth.
Hetfield, Ulrich, and Hammett had been in awe of their former bassist, but Newsted they ran ragged. The band spent the end of 1986 in Japan, where an intense and by most accounts permanent period of hazing began. Whenever one of them missed Cliff Burton, something bad happened to Newsted. They took his drinks and clothing, they told foreign hosts he was gay, and they assaulted his hotel room in the wee hours of the morning. Newsted responded with his own weird behavior: packing away sandwiches from the backstage buffet each night in case he was asked to leave unexpectedly the next morning. Complaining to AP that there were no Denny’s diners on the road in Europe, he sounded a little lost in a band that had a Danish drummer and who worshipped old-world heavy metal.
Metallica canceled a scheduled appearance on Saturday Night Live in March 1987 because James Hetfield again broke his arm skateboarding, further forestalling arrival on the main stage of American life. Instead Metallica recruited opening act Metal Church and completed the remainder of the transatlantic tour of Europe, America, and Canada that had been halted by the bus accident the previous October. The bill sold thousands of tickets each night—during the months of delay, thrash metal’s upsurge had wildly accelerated. “It was the time of my life,” recalls Metal Church singer David Wayne. “Every night we were in an arena. The worst we played was like huge theaters. It was mind-boggling. It just blows you away to see that many screaming metal fans. Heavy metal was at its peak, and it was sweet, brother.”
Soon The $5.98 E.P., Garage Days Re-Revisited presented Jason the new kid and several other changes to the masses. Released on August 21, 1987, the album was smartly titled after its retail price. This prevented record stores from selling the EP as a full-price new Metallica album, for which there was now substantial demand. All tracks on the record were cover versions of Metallica’s favorite songs, continuing the practice begun when “Am I Evil?” and “Blitzkrieg” appeared on the import Creeping Death.
The $5.98 E.P. surprised the public with music by cult acts Budgie, Killing Joke, Diamond Head, the Misfits, and Holocaust— associations that clearly set Metallica apart from hair metal superstars Mötley Crüe, who had just recorded Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock.” Diamond Head and Holocaust were classic NWOBHM bands, but obscurities in America: Budgie was an early-1970s English pub ba
nd with a heavy shot of Black Sabbath in its beer. Killing Joke helped define the evocative and macabre postpunk movement in Britain. By clear design none of these groups had anything to do with prevailing metal trends—the eclectic selections on Garage Days simply explained Metallica’s heritage to fans and peeked into the band’s current frame of mind.
As for the reject pile, Metallica had decided against material by other hardcore bands such as Discharge, as well as more songs by Diamond Head and the NWOBHM doom group Witchfinder General— though similiar selections trickled out continually on limited-release B-sides and imports. Cliff Burton had often half sarcastically mentioned a desire to play Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” a generic rock anthem that would certainly have called for a raging Metallica overhaul. The band declined, though, to perform that familiar encore for their departed bassist.
Crossing into new commercial territory with a flurry of chart activity, the low-budget release The $5.98 E.P., Garage Days Re-Revisited immediately cracked the Billboard Hot 30, just as Master of Puppets was ending its seventy-two-week run on the album charts. In December 1987 The $5.98 E.P. was certified gold, proving that an unassuming and casual approach would keep fans by Metallica’s side as the band became more dangerously popular. January 1988 brought the Elektra reissue of Kill ‘Em All. Now widely promoted, the band’s debut LP took its own place in Billboard five years after it was first released as a hastily financed independent dark horse.
In December 1987 Metallica released Cliff ‘Em All, a video collection of camcorder bootlegs and television appearances highlighted by several eye-opening free-form bass solos by Burton. In do-it-yourself fashion the footage was gathered mostly on the cheap from underground videotape traders. Nonetheless, the tape went platinum, with Burton’s share of the royalties going to his parents, Jan and Ray Burton. As a measure of its wide appeal, the band was surprised to receive a number of letters from kids upset to see Burton smoking weed on Cliff ‘Em All. The message was clear: The quartet was no longer playing only to its peers—now there was a younger generation expecting to look up to Metallica as role models.