Without Contraries is no progression.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Bay Area story closes with a bus on a Swedish road in September 1986, and that is where the previous chapter leaves it. This one begins three years earlier and four hundred miles south, in a city that had already decided what heavy music was supposed to look like and had no obvious room for any of this. Los Angeles in 1983 was Sunset Strip: Mötley Crüe in the clubs, W.A.S.P. doing theatre with raw meat, hairspray as a business expense. Two suburbs away, in Huntington Park and South Gate, four young men were rehearsing an Iron Maiden cover set in stage make-up and would shortly stop bothering with the make-up or the covers.
What follows is the middle section of the history of thrash metal: the five years in which the music stopped being a regional accident and became an American industry, with four bands at the front of it who had almost nothing in common except a tempo and a decade. This chapter is about those four, the two cities that produced three of them, and the label phrase that was hung around their necks long after the fact.
Los Angeles was not the Bay Area
The northern scene had a room, a house band and a mythology. Los Angeles had a distributor. Brian Slagel was a record shop clerk in the San Fernando Valley who wrote a fanzine called The New Heavy Metal Revue, and in June 1982 he borrowed money from family and friends to press a compilation called Metal Massacre. It carried an early Metallica recording of "Hit the Lights" with the band's name misspelled on the sleeve, and it turned into Metal Blade Records, which for the next four years functioned as the clearing house for everything heavy in southern California. Slagel did not run a scene. He ran a catalogue, and bands came to the catalogue.
Slayer got there in 1983. Slagel saw them at a club in Anaheim playing "Phantom of the Opera" in eyeliner and studs, offered them a track on Metal Massacre III, and got "Aggressive Perfector" in return. The band was Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman on guitars, Tom Araya, who was working as a respiratory therapist and paying for things, and Dave Lombardo, who delivered pizzas and played faster than anyone in the country. Metal Blade had no recording budget to speak of, so Show No Mercy was funded out of Araya's wages and a loan from King's father, cut at Track Record in Los Angeles in November 1983 and released on 3 December that year.
It is a rougher record than its reputation suggests, closer to a very fast Judas Priest than to what the band became, and Araya sings on it in a high register he would drop within two years. What it has already is the thing that separates Slayer from everyone else in this chapter: no blues. Hanneman and King wrote in tritones and chromatic runs, treated the guitar solo as a burst of noise rather than a melody, and never once in their career wrote a chorus you could hum on the way out. The satanic imagery was largely theatre, and the band said so, but it was theatre performed with a straight face, which is why it worked and why parents' groups eventually noticed.
The band found the real thing on the Haunting the Chapel EP in 1984. Three songs, and "Chemical Warfare" among them, recorded far heavier and slower in the low end than the debut, with Lombardo double kicking under riffs that had stopped resembling anything British. Hell Awaits followed on 8 April 1985, cut at Eldorado in Los Angeles with Brian Slagel co-producing, a murky, complicated album with a backwards chant on the front of it, and it is the one Slayer record that sounds like a band trying too hard. It also sold well enough to get somebody in New York interested.
Slayer never once wrote a chorus you could hum on the way out, and that is the whole difference.
Around them, southern California produced a scene that has been badly served by history because none of it got a major label deal. Dark Angel from Downey were faster than Slayer and, with Gene Hoglan behind the kit from 1984, better drummed; Darkness Descends in 1986 is the most violent American thrash album of its year. Hirax, Abattoir, Bitch, Agent Steel and Armored Saint all circled the same Metal Blade orbit. That story sits beside this one rather than inside it.
The bus from New York
Dave Mustaine came back to Los Angeles in April 1983 with a guitar, four songs on a Metallica record he had helped write, and a grievance he has never fully put down. The details of the firing belong to the previous chapter. What belongs here is what he did with the four days on the bus, which was decide that he was going to build a band that played faster and more precisely than the one that had just removed him, and then more or less do it.
He found his bass player by shouting at him. David Ellefson, newly arrived from a farming town in Minnesota, was rehearsing too loudly in the apartment below Mustaine's on North Sycamore in Hollywood; the complaint turned into an audition. Megadeth took its name from a line about the arsenal of megadeath, a megadeath being a unit of one million fatalities, in a nuclear disarmament pamphlet put out by the California senator Alan Cranston. The guitarist Greg Handevidt wrote the word out as one word and dropped the second a; Mustaine took a couple of days to decide he liked it.
The first line up is the interesting one. Chris Poland on lead guitar and Gar Samuelson on drums had both come out of jazz fusion, and they played thrash the way fusion players play anything, with a loose wrist and a habit of landing slightly behind the beat. That is why Killing Is My Business, released on Combat in June 1985, swings when nothing else in the genre did. It also contains "Mechanix" played at the speed Mustaine had always wanted it, which was the point of the exercise, and a rewritten cover of "These Boots" that would cause a legal problem years later when its author objected to what had been done to his lyric.
Capitol Records bought the contract out and released Peace Sells... but Who's Buying? in September 1986. It is the album where Megadeth's argument becomes coherent: fast, angular, sarcastic, sung by a man with a nasal sneer who could not carry a tune and did not need to, about money, television and the American security state rather than about hell. The bass figure that opens the title track was taken by MTV News in 1990 as the opening of The Week in Rock and stayed in use for the rest of the decade, which is the strangest afterlife any thrash riff has had.
New York, Megaforce and the Queens end of the story
Anthrax had been going since 1981, formed in Queens by the guitarist Scott Ian and the bassist Dan Lilker, who picked the name out of a biology textbook on the grounds that it sounded unpleasant and meant nothing. Their route into the business ran through New Jersey, where Jon and Marsha Zazula sold records out of a stall and had already mortgaged themselves to put out Kill 'Em All. Megaforce released the Anthrax debut, Fistful of Metal, in January 1984, with a singer named Neil Turbin, a sleeve nobody has ever defended, and a song called "Metal Thrashing Mad" that gave a British magazine the phrase it needed.
The band that people mean when they say Anthrax arrived the following year. Turbin was gone; Lilker was gone, replaced by Frank Bello, who was the nephew of the band's road manager; and the new singer, Joey Belladonna, was a clean, high, entirely melodic tenor who had come out of covers bands and had no interest in barking. Putting that voice on top of Ian's rhythm guitar was the single most contrarian decision any of the four bands made, and it gave the East Coast its own sound. Spreading the Disease came out on Megaforce with Island distribution in late 1985 and does not sound like the Bay Area at all.
Among the Living arrived in March 1987, produced by Eddie Kramer, who had engineered Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and had no obvious business being anywhere near a thrash record. It is dedicated to Cliff Burton. It is also the album on which Anthrax stopped pretending to be evil and wrote about what they actually cared about: Stephen King novels, comics, the Judge Dredd strip, and, on "Indians", the treatment of Native Americans, which was an unusual subject for anybody in 1987. "Caught in a Mosh" put the pit into a chorus. The band toured it in bermuda shorts and high tops, which the purists loathed and which turned out to be the more durable idea. It had been cut between October and December 1986, partly at Quadradial in Miami and partly at Compass Point in Nassau, and Kramer's first mix came back so wet with reverb and effects that the band sent him away to do it again dry.
New York had a full scene behind them. Lilker left Anthrax and formed Nuclear Assault, whose Game Over in 1986 is faster and angrier than anything on Island. Overkill from New Jersey put out Feel the Fire on Megaforce in 1985 and have never stopped since. Whiplash and Carnivore worked the same clubs. And in 1985 Ian, Lilker, Charlie Benante and the singer Billy Milano recorded S.O.D.'s Speak English or Die in a matter of days as a joke, and accidentally wrote the blueprint for crossover, which is a debt hardcore and metal have been arguing about ever since.
Who counted the four
Here is the awkward part. Nobody can point to the article that coined "the Big Four", and no first printed use of it has ever been traced. The genre name itself has a paper trail: Malcolm Dome put "thrash metal" into Kerrang! in February 1984, writing about "Metal Thrashing Mad". The four band grouping has nothing of the kind behind it. It drifts into the metal press, gets used loosely and inconsistently on both sides of the Atlantic, and only hardens into a fixed term on 16 June 2010, when the four of them stood on the same Sonisphere stage in Warsaw and turned the phrase into a ticket.
What the phrase actually records is not scene standing but American major label sales between 1986 and 1991. Measured on any other axis it falls apart. Exodus were there before three of the four and defined the guitar style. Testament had a better lead guitarist than any of them. Overkill outlasted all of them at club level. Dark Angel and Kreator were heavier. And Sepultura, working in Brazil with no money and no distribution, would within four years make records that mattered more to the next generation than State of Euphoria ever did.
| Band | Formed | Base | First album | First major label album | Producer on the breakthrough |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Metallica | 1981 | Los Angeles, then the East Bay | Kill 'Em All (1983) | Ride the Lightning reissue, Elektra (1984) | Flemming Rasmussen |
| Slayer | 1981 | Huntington Park, California | Show No Mercy (1983) | Reign in Blood, Def Jam (1986) | Rick Rubin |
| Megadeth | 1983 | Los Angeles | Killing Is My Business... (1985) | Peace Sells..., Capitol (1986) | Randy Burns |
| Anthrax | 1981 | New York | Fistful of Metal (1984) | Among the Living, Island (1987) | Eddie Kramer |
The label stuck anyway, because four is a number people can hold and because the four of them genuinely did carry the music out of the fanzines and into shops that also sold Phil Collins. Whether it was ever a fair description of the genre is a different question, and one worth arguing about at length.
The record that settled it
Rick Rubin was a New York University student running a label out of his dormitory with Russell Simmons. Def Jam in 1986 meant LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys and the Run-DMC production style that had just put a rap record on rock radio. Rubin had grown up on punk and metal, thought Hell Awaits sounded like it had been recorded through a blanket, and offered Slayer a deal on the basis that he could make them audible.
He did. Reign in Blood is ten songs in under twenty nine minutes, engineered and mixed by Andy Wallace, with the reverb stripped off, the guitars dry and forward, and Lombardo's kick drums placed where you cannot avoid them. Nothing in metal had ever been recorded that plainly. It opens with "Angel of Death", a song about Josef Mengele written by Hanneman after reading about the camps, which describes rather than endorses and which the band spent the next thirty years explaining. It ends with "Raining Blood", four and a half minutes of storm effects and one of the three or four most recognised riffs the genre owns.
Its real effect was on everybody else. After Reign in Blood a thrash album could be short, dry and brutally recorded and still be taken seriously; the fashion for nine minute epics with acoustic introductions, which Metallica had made compulsory, was suddenly optional again. Death metal took the production as a starting point. So did grindcore. Half the bands in the chapter on the German scene rebuilt their sound around it within two years.
Long is the way
John Milton, Paradise Lost
And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.
Out of the independents
Between 1984 and 1987 all four bands left the independents. Metallica went to Elektra, Slayer to Def Jam with Geffen behind it, Megadeth to Capitol, Anthrax to Island. Megaforce, Metal Blade and Combat, the three companies that had actually taken the risk, kept the back catalogues and, in Megaforce's case, a percentage that would matter for years.
What the majors bought was not radio, because there was none. American rock radio would not play any of this for another five years, and MTV gave it late night slots at best. What the majors bought was distribution: racks in shopping centre chains, promotional budgets for tours, and the ability to press a hundred thousand copies of something instead of ten. Master of Puppets, discussed at length in the previous chapter, moved three hundred thousand copies in its first three weeks with no single and no video, and reached 29 on the Billboard 200. That is the number that changed the industry's mind about the whole genre. The rest followed it up the same chart: Peace Sells... but Who's Buying? to 76, Reign in Blood to 94, Among the Living to 62. Not one of those was a hit by the standards of 1987. All of them were unthinkable in 1983.
The costs came later and were mostly internal. Mustaine sacked Poland and Samuelson in 1987 and spent the next three years replacing musicians while the drugs got worse. Slayer lost Lombardo for a period after Reign in Blood in a dispute about money on tour. Anthrax's relationship with Belladonna started to fray as soon as the band's sense of humour and its singer's sense of scale stopped matching. Everyone in this chapter got what they wanted in 1986 and 1987, and everyone paid for it by 1992.
Four bands that sounded nothing alike
The most useful thing about the Big Four label is how badly it describes the music. Metallica by 1986 wrote long, arranged pieces with acoustic sections and harmonised leads, and were already halfway to being a rock band. Slayer wrote atonal riffs at maximum speed and refused every melodic option available to them. Megadeth played with fusion phrasing and technical detail that neither of the other two could have executed. Anthrax wrote major key hooks, sang them cleanly, made jokes and borrowed from hardcore. Put a track from each in a row and the only shared property is a downpicked right hand.
Put a track from each of them in a row and the only thing they share is a downpicked right hand.
1988 is a reasonable place to stop. Megadeth put out So Far, So Good... So What! in January, a bad tempered record made by a band in the middle of collapsing. Slayer released South of Heaven in July and deliberately slowed down, which half their audience took as treason and which turns out to be their best sequencing decision. Anthrax released State of Euphoria in September, the point at which the shorts and the jokes started to wear. And Metallica released ...And Justice for All in August, nine songs, sixty five minutes, with the bass mixed almost out of existence, and got a Grammy category invented for them the following year, which they then lost to Jethro Tull.
Five years earlier the same four bands were pressing a thousand copies each and selling them at the merchandise table. I still have the mail order form from a Combat advertisement somewhere in a box of fanzines, which is a habit rather than a boast. By the end of 1988 thrash metal was an American industry with a European rival that was in several respects harder, faster and less interested in being liked. That is where this history goes next.
