by Ian Christe
Regrouped emotionally and refitted for action, the members of Metallica found that in absentia their popularity had grown exponentially. Not quite yet a household name, the band was on the brink of the kind of success enjoyed by former foils like Quiet Riot and Ratt— Los Angeles glam bands now several albums into their careers, still selling multiplatinum but clearly running out of time. Rising above the now vast and rich heavy metal underground, Metallica was on the verge of destroying a host of heavy metal clichés with a distinguished, grand-scale rebuttal, crowning the heavy metal 1980s with a master’s thesis on heaviness.
With the greatest expectations, Metallica imported Danish engineer Flemming Rasmussen to a Los Angeles studio in January 1988 to record its first studio album in almost two years. Working from rough tapes of guitar riffs, the team spent the winter months twiddling knobs, intent on the meticulous work of outdoing its fantastic three-album rise. Revealing commercial desires, the band first tried recording with Guns N’ Roses producer Mike Clink—but reverted to Rasmussen after bristling under the suggestions of a “golden-eared” studio professional with no experience in the trenches of real metal. Guided well by its management team at Q Prime, Metallica seemed to be succeeding beyond conventional advice. If the band’s next effort went platinum with no radio, no MTV, and no gimmicks, Metallica would not be just a gritty alternative to glam metal—they would be its replacement.
The fourth Metallica album was finished by early summer, but its release was delayed until after a blockbuster twenty-six-date summer American stadium tour with Van Halen, Scorpions, Dokken, and Kingdom Come, dubbed “Monsters of Rock.” If Metallica’s fifty-five-minute sets had put Ozzy Osbourne through his paces every night of the six-month Ultimate Sin journey in 1986, it was par for the course—the crowd only loved Ozzy more for offering the extra value of a great opener. The story was different in 1988, as Metallica absolutely stole the show. What was supposed to be a powerhouse bill combining the best of heavy metal transformed into a passing of the baton from heavyweights and lightweights alike to Metallica, the band in a class of its own.
The massive events grossed more than $1 million in ticket sales nightly, yet Van Halen was routinely facing vacant seats at the end of the night after satisfied fans left early. “It’s just a simple fact of life on this tour,” notes Lars Ulrich. In fact, more fans went home from Monsters of Rock with Metallica T-shirts than those of any other band, and rumors estimated Metallica sales above those of all four other acts combined. After the Ozzy tour Master of Puppets became Metallica’s first gold record—during the Monsters tour it was bumped up to platinum. Said Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar to Hit Parader: “They’ll be the new kings of rock, just you wait and see.”
Finally, at the end of August 1988, the weighty double album … And Justice for All shipped to colossal response. Elongating the thrasher-era Metallica sound to its limit, the record bore more riffing force and less catchy songwriting than anything from the band since the never-ending side two of Kill ‘Em All. If The $5.98 E.P. hinted at the band’s expanded range of musical influences, Justice unveiled a strict continuation of Metallica’s most basic tenets over an hour of long, brainy multipart epics. The songs shunned the guitar solos and catchy choruses of good-time heavy metal, yet instead of simple punk-influenced songwriting, the album steadfastly labored to maintain the band’s precious integrity with drawn-out and strenuous song structures.
The new album suffered from the loss of a major musical dimension, Cliff Burton, who would likely have explored the thrash metal of Master of Puppets more deeply rather than simply extending its playing time. Furthermore, Justice appeared to have been produced under duress—the impaired mix obscured the bass entirely and inordinately favored the overproduced clack of Lars Ulrich’s drums. The trademark rhythm guitars were buried, and headbangers had to reach for their tone controls at home in order to retrieve the gentle balance between subtlety and power. Yet in intensifying and laying bare its rhythmic riffing, Metallica conquered critics with musical gravity. “The band’s breakneck tempos and staggering chops would impress even the most elitist jazz-fusion aficionado,” gushed Rolling Stone. Not that the rock magazine of record had developed a curious new appreciation for thrash metal—two weeks earlier it dismissed Slayer’s masterfully mixed pace of South of Heaven as “genuinely offensive Satanic drivel.”
As hoped, the subject matter of Justice was exceedingly serious, displaying an enlightened social outlook gleaned from hardcore punk. “Blackened” cursed the blighting of the natural environment, while “… And Justice for All” decried the failure of the judicial system. The somewhat tender and religious “To Live Is to Die” used riffs and lyrics written by Cliff Burton. “Dyer’s Eve” revealed the lapsed Christian Scientist in James Hetfield, the song tingling with pain from a family in which discipline always trumped emotion. “Probably about half our fans actually think about it; the rest just like the heaviness of the music,” Jason Newsted told AP of Metallica’s lauded lyrics. “When the chorus comes around, they know the words, that’s about it. The other half really looks into it, and gets their heavy, heavy interpretations. They tend to overanalyze. I like it better when they get involved with what the song is actually about, but as long as they are happy listening to the music, that’s my main concern.”
Nearly every major U.S. newspaper rushed to recognize this intelligent “new” alloy of heavy metal called thrash metal. Headlines found the metal front lines as the New York Times noted Metallica’s HEAVY METAL, WEIGHTY WORDS. The Washington Post gauged METALLICA’S PLATINUM OVERDRIVE; THE BAND AND ITS HIGH-DECIBEL DEPARTURE FROM THE HEAVY METAL MIND-SET. Most dramatically, former hometown paper the Los Angeles Times cooed over METALLICA AND POETRY OF THE POWER CHORD; THE NEW METAL IS SOUL MUSIC FOR SUBURBAN WHITE BOYS.
Sonic shortcomings and adamant heft notwithstanding, the unrelenting Justice immediately became the first Metallica record to enter the Billboard Top 10. Nearly eight years after its birth, Metallica had suddenly arrived at mainstream cool, becoming a behemoth among birds of a lighter feather. “It says that we can still do what we want, and people like it,” a bewildered Newsted told AP. “I can’t really fathom it. It’s a weird thing to look at Billboard and see it amongst Whitney Houston and INXS.” Propelled quickly past long-looming milestones, Justice was simultaneously certified gold and platinum on Halloween 1988, only nine weeks after its release. The ambitious double album went on to sell 7 million copies and counting, one of the most ardent and unsympathetic musical successes ever recorded.
As Metallica thrashed toward respectability with teeth bared, the band’s compatriots were finding their own visions of maturity. Holy Terror and Testament had begun injecting sophisticated melodic twists into Bay Area—style thrash metal after Master of Puppets. Now Slayer, whose Reign in Blood staked the heart of the high-speed extreme the previous year, returned in 1987 with South of Heaven, daring to play slowly. Rather than pursue the sweltering Napalm Death grindcore brigade into sheer rapid-fire oblivion, South of Heaven paced the band’s terrific twin-guitar riffing down to the more perceptible speeds of its Judas Priest roots. With that shift Slayer produced a durable and multifaceted masterpiece on par with Priest’s Sad Wings of Destiny and earned a like share of respectability.
The masters of thrash metal absorbed the lessons of hardcore punk and moved onward and upward, while the underground shot off toward sonic oblivion and destinations unknown. At the peak of heavy metal’s most successful hour, there was room in the commercial arena for creative music expressed in elegant and well-considered ways. The metal scene had already proved it could produce bands that were exponentially more punishing, but the most brilliant of contemporary metal was coming now from the synthesis of tradition with radical new influences. As Tony Iommi once said of Black Sabbath, “We thought it would kill the band if we weren’t allowed to grow up within it.”
In the late 1980s, heady metal efforts by Celtic Frost and Voivod brought eclecticism, experimenta
tion, and astounding elements of maturity. Always ravenous for progress, Celtic Frost had taken vast strides in three brief years since forming from the rubble of Hellhammer. For 1987’s Into the Pandemonium the band spent four wintry months in a Berlin studio recording with classical musicians and opera singers. Joining graveyard thrash with choirs, Latin percussion, and synthesizers, the Swiss trio intrigued fans and terrified their business partners. “Our label, Noise Records, was an upstart company that wanted to have the heaviest band in the world,” says Tom Warrior.
“When we told them we were going to do a really avant-garde album, they didn’t know what the hell that meant. It was the time of Exodus, Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax, and the company expected that.”
Instead Into the Pandemonium introduced drum machines and samplers on “One (In Their Pride),” a protoindustrial track that nodded to Belgium’s Front 242. “The dance track threw me for a little while, and I’m probably not the only one,” says Nuclear Assault bassist Dan Lilker. “But I think by then some of the stuff that Frost had been doing on To Mega Therion with female vocals and orchestration got people ready for some of the avant-garde stuff.” Indeed— as Metallica proved with platinum sales of an album loaded with eight-minute epics—the metal market was affording bands unprecedented leeway.
Subverting the craze for thrash metal overhauls instigated by Metallica’s $5.98 E.P., Celtic Frost offered an unlikely rendition of the new wave hit “Mexican Radio” by Wall of Voodoo. When Noise Records representatives finally made it to the studio to listen to the work-in-progress, all they heard was the sound of their own financial ruin. “Instead of taking the risk, they tried to force us to change,” says Warrior, “but the album had already cost too much, and it was impossible to change anything. At the time nobody knew if that would sell, but nowadays, of course, Pandemonium is the key album of the band.”
Equals to Celtic Frost in staunch individuality, their Noise Records labelmates Voivod made the transition sublimely from subterranean noise-mongers to post-thrash metal sophisticates. First appearing alongside Hellhammer on Metal Massacre V, the band went from noisy Motörhead worship on their 1984 debut, War and Pain, to a clean yet heavy, polyrhythmic science-fiction slam four years later. From its icy stronghold in Montreal, the French-speaking band brilliantly indicted humanity’s technology-driven alienation and fear of the unfamiliar. The fourth album, 1988’s Dimension Hatross, represented the progressive pinnacle of their evolution, as booming drums battered mind-expanding layers of extended guitar chords within a heavy mechanical system. Their meticulous music emulated the cacophony of a landscape of competing factories, yet its human spirit was overwhelming.
Epitomizing metal’s search for enhanced sensory experience, Voivod dwelled deep within the alternate universe summoned by its music. Drummer Michael Langevin, aka Away, was a talented visual artist influenced by the French illustrators of Métal Hurlant magazine. Away himself created every Voivod album cover and experimented with early computer animation in videos for Dimension Hatross. “We were always talking about different things,” says Voivod vocalist Denis Belanger, aka Snake, “reading books that give us ideas and reading science-fiction magazines like Omni. We tried to mix fiction with reality in the Voivod concept, and then those three things move in and out of each other. Music is for feeling different than normal life, and that’s what I expect.”
The generation that grew up with heavy metal was now entering college, and was ready for innovative sounds and ideas. As major label MCA Records tapped Voivod in 1989, the band’s fifth LP, Nothing-face, featured a more conventional sound and a minor hit with a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine.” Turned on its side, the familiar song attracted new listeners to Voivod’s strange inventions. As Pink Floyd brought new possibility to rock and roll music twenty years earlier, so Voivod injected giant brains into metal—while still charged with ample energy to raise the hairs of the average thrasher. As with prior Voivod albums, Nothingface touched on the big themes of civilization’s being anointed and ultimately tainted by technology. The songs “Pre-Ignition” and “Missing Sequences” described a mythical kind of metal poisoning in robots while alluding to the real-life epidemic of aluminum-related Alzheimer’s disease along the St. Lawrence Seaway coursing through Montreal.
Even the glam scene was showing signs of sophistication, sprouting bands like Tesla and Extreme to counterbalance its chain saw-wielding novelty acts like Jackyl. In 1985, a less welcoming time for complex metal, arguments over commercial direction had split apart Mercyful Fate, one of the creative treasures of the early 1980s. Only a few years later guitarist Hank Shermann’s mainstream direction had already proved self-defeating—while vocalist King Diamond charted in Billboard by continuing the gothic horror of Mercyful Fate. Drawing from classic heavy metal ghost stories, King Diamond also nodded to thrash metal by dealing with social issues, which he dubbed “life philosophy"—the mysteries of human relations. His 1987 album, Abigail, was an eighteenth-century horror tale fraught with contemporary relevance. “It deals with what you’d call bastard children, children born out of marriage,” he says. “Children who are looked down upon because they don’t have both mom and dad. Like when Vice President Quayle had this brilliant comment that all children should have a mom and a dad.”
King Diamond sang of witches with the understanding that in many parts of Europe in the 1800s “witches” were merely unmarried women. “That story of Abigail was inspired by what happened to my own mama,” he explains. “My real grandmother—the bitch, she really was—she was a servant in a professor’s house in Denmark, and the professor’s son got her pregnant. It was like scandal, scandal—she must have the child somewhere else. My mother was raised by a nice family, but later on she got in contact with my grandmother and went to a different part of Denmark to take care of her when she got ill. One day the neighbor came over, and my mom overheard a conversation: ‘Who is that nice lady who is staying with you these days?’ My grandmother said, ‘Oh, it’s just an old friend.’ She didn’t even admit or recognize that she had a daughter. There’s a lot of deep stuff behind every song we do, and to raise these questions affects everyone.”
Soon, not only the Big Four bands—Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax—but also second-rung ringers like Exodus, King Diamond, Metal Church, and Testament were populating the Billboard charts and increasingly in need of professional support. As the entire thrash metal scene graduated to the big leagues, MTV finally set aside a half-hour segment of Headbangers Ball for those bands, and corporate magazines like Creem Thrash Metal were launched to publicize the bands to a national audience. Suddenly, independent labels like Metal Blade and Megaforce coped with album sales surging into the hundreds of thousands.
For many years specialty metal companies had been family operations. Now these entrepreneurs went legit, forming alliances with major labels as they retained contractual ties to graduating bands. “Johnny Z was like a metal trader on the stock market, and Marsha Zazula worked for Mattel,” says former Megaforce Records publicist Maria Ferrero. “They knew nothing about the music business. We learned everything from the bottom up, and that’s the best way. Using your wits and your taste instead of just throwing the big money around.”
The success of Metallica indicated that the future was not in Hollywood glam metal—major labels would now be forced to court underground tastemakers instead of tinkering with formulas. Consequently the independent operators who were big fish in the underground pond found themselves fending off sharks from the mainstream music industry. They were holding hot tickets, and their assets looked attractive to scavengers. “In the late eighties and early nineties, when metal was really huge,” Brian Slagel of Metal Blade recalls, “the majors were spending so much money it was hard to compete with them. We had fifteen or twenty different employees move on to majors. It was almost the same as with a band, where you find them, develop them, and they become some big thing.”
From college radio,
fanzine editors, and bedroom labels, an entire cottage industry developed. The CMJ Music Marathon, a struggling yearly conference allowing college radio programmers a glimpse into the music industry and its expense accounts, added a metal marathon tailored to the two hundred American radio stations with metal specialty shows. The promotions firm Concrete Marketing, founded to hype metal records to stores and radio, soon launched the Foundations Forum—an annual metal trade show in Los Angeles. The business of selling metal had its own tricks. Unlike pop music, whose audience did not mind being told what to think, heavy metal fans were incredibly keyed to musical affairs and thus much harder to influence. Savvy labels such as Roadrunner and Combat experimented with cracking the codes of the underground through street-marketing techniques—like circulating advance tracks from upcoming releases on cassettes designed to look like demo tapes.
In the performance realm thrash metal soon gained its own annual concert festival in America, when Milwaukee Metalfest emerged in answer to yearly European outings like Holland’s earthquaking Aardschok fest and England’s mammoth Monsters of Rock at Castle Donnington. Organized by the same concert promoter who brought Raven and Metallica to the Midwest in 1983, the first Milwaukee Metalfest in 1987 featured King Diamond along with Nuclear Assault, Hallow’s Eve, At War, Sacrifice, Trouble, Death Angel, Death, Zoetrope, and Kublai Khan, a band featuring ex—Megadeth guitarist Greg Handevidt. It was a dream lineup—though many other unconfirmed bands publicized before the show were only a pipe dream. “Because of the size of the hall, it was any thrash band’s nightmare,” adds Dan Lilker of Nuclear Assault. “If you played any faster than a power metal band, it was a total washout. There was a bunch of gear up there all day that everyone had been hammering away on. But we saw people and friends from all around the world. We’d always heard about festivals in Europe, like at Dynamo, but we didn’t have them here. Obviously it was a different thing culturally—in Europe people aren’t as spoiled. They’ll sleep in a dirty pit in the mud for three days.”