Every scene is described afterwards by its top five bands, and every scene is actually made by the thirty underneath them. The Bay Area's third tier is a longer list than most people would guess, it contains at least two records that stand comparison with anything the famous bands made, and it functioned as something more useful than a queue for a record deal: it was the county's reservoir. Half the players who kept American metal running for the next thirty years came out of bands whose names never got past the second page of a fanzine.
This is not a consolation list. Some of these records are better than some of the ones everybody owns, and the reason nobody bought them has almost nothing to do with the music.
Heathen: the best band in the second row
Heathen formed in San Francisco in 1984 around the guitarist Lee Altus and the drummer Carl Sacco, and the demo that got them signed was called Pray For Death. Combat released Breaking The Silence on 1 May 1987 and it is one of the two or three finest records the county produced in that decade. Everything the Bay Area was supposed to be good at is on it and executed at a level the more celebrated bands rarely reached: harmonised twin leads from Altus and Doug Piercy that actually resolve, David White singing rather than barking, arrangements that go somewhere instead of merely going fast.
The producer is the detail that gives the game away. Ronnie Montrose, a man whose own band had been headlining American arenas while these players were at primary school, sat behind the desk for a thrash debut on an independent label, and the record sounds like somebody who knew exactly what he was being handed. It sold in the region of a hundred thousand copies worldwide, which no third tier band is supposed to manage, and a cover of Sweet's Set Me Free, played straight and played well, got onto rock radio and into MTV rotation. That took a certain nerve in 1987.
Then four years, a move from Combat to Roadrunner, and Victims Of Deception in 1991: more technical, better played, and delivered into a market that had stopped buying thrash entirely. They toured Europe behind it, including dates with Sepultura, and broke up in 1993 after the death of their bass player Randy Laire. That is the whole misfortune of the third tier in two records, and it is not a quality problem. Heathen reformed for the 2001 benefit and never quite stopped again; Lee Altus has played in Exodus since 2005, which is the county's usual way of settling its debts.
Blind Illusion, and the two men who left
Blind Illusion were led by Marc Biedermann and had been around, on and off, since the end of the 1970s. Their single album, The Sane Asylum, came out on Combat in 1988, and it is a genuinely peculiar record: thrash with progressive rock's structural ambitions bolted onto it, riffs that turn corners nobody signposted, a sense of humour, and a low end doing things no thrash bass had any business doing.
The low end was Les Claypool. The guitarist beside him was Larry LaLonde, who had already served in Possessed. Both left, and both turned up in Primus, and a band that sold almost nothing in 1988 turns out to be the missing link between Bay Area thrash and one of the strangest commercially successful groups in American music. Claypool had also auditioned for Metallica after Cliff Burton's death, which is the kind of near miss the East Bay generates as a matter of routine.
Laaz Rockit: five years too early and then five years too late
Laaz Rockit formed in 1982, which makes them contemporaries of Exodus rather than followers, and they got four albums out between 1984 and 1989: City's Gonna Burn, No Stranger To Danger, Know Your Enemy and Annihilation Principle. The first two are traditional metal with the speed turned up, made before the local style had hardened; the second two are proper thrash, made after everybody else had already claimed it. Being early and then late in the same career is the specific misfortune of the third tier, and it is not a talent problem. Michael Coons could sing, and the Jellum and Kettner guitar partnership was as tight as anything in the county.
Being early and then late in the same career is the specific misfortune of the third tier, and it is not a talent problem.
Sadus, Defiance, Mordred and the rest
Sadus came out of Antioch in 1984 and were faster and nastier than almost anyone, close enough to death metal that the boundary stops meaning much, and their bassist Steve DiGiorgio played fretless at a speed that should not have been physically available. He went on to Death and to Testament, and he is the strongest single argument that this tier was a reservoir rather than a waiting room.
Defiance formed in Oakland in 1985 and made Product Of Society in 1989, straight down the line and well played, arriving at the precise moment the market shut. Mordred, from San Francisco, did the least likely thing anybody in the scene attempted: they put funk and a turntable into thrash on Fool's Game in 1989, years before that combination became an industry, and were rewarded with bafflement. Vicious Rumors, up in Santa Rosa, went the other way into a cleaner and more traditional metal, and had a considerably better time of it in Europe than at home.
The woman who managed half of them
The most important person in this part of the story never played a note. Debbie Abono came into the scene by the least likely route available: she was driving her daughters to shows, one of them was going out with Larry LaLonde, and she ended up agreeing to manage Possessed on the condition that Jeff Becerra and LaLonde finished school first. She was in her fifties. She had no prior connection to heavy metal of any kind.
What followed was a management career that ran for a quarter of a century and took in Exodus, Vio-lence and Forbidden Evil at home, and Obituary, Cynic and Broken Hope elsewhere. In a scene with no infrastructure, no local industry and no adults in it, a woman old enough to be everybody's mother did the job that a company would have done in Los Angeles: she took the calls, argued about the money, and got teenagers onto stages in countries they could not have found on a map. She died on 16 May 2010, aged 80, and there is not a band in this article that did not owe her something.
Who actually released these records
Almost none of it came out on a major and almost all of it came out on the same four or five independents. Combat, out of New York, took Heathen, Blind Illusion and Forbidden and was the single most important company to this tier. Metal Blade covered the compilations and the Los Angeles end. Roadracer, later Roadrunner, picked up Defiance and the second Heathen album. Wild Rags and the smaller operations handled everything beneath that.
The Bay Area also had a label of its own, and it was not a thrash label. Mike Varney founded Shrapnel Records in Novato in 1980, at twenty two, as the first American company dedicated purely to heavy metal, and it became famous for technical guitar players rather than for thrash bands. That is worth noticing, because it means the county exported its thrash and kept its virtuosos, which is precisely the wrong way round for the bands in this article.
| Band | Formed | The record | Where the talent ended up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Heathen | 1984 | Breaking The Silence (1987) | Lee Altus to Exodus, from 2005 |
| Blind Illusion | 1970s, on and off | The Sane Asylum (1988) | Les Claypool and Larry LaLonde to Primus |
| Laaz Rockit | 1982 | Know Your Enemy (1987) | Stayed, reformed, kept going |
| Sadus | 1984 | Illusions (1988) | Steve DiGiorgio to Death and Testament |
| Defiance | 1985 | Product Of Society (1989) | Arrived as the market closed |
| Mordred | 1984 | Fool's Game (1989) | Funk and turntables, years too early |
| Vicious Rumors | 1979 | Digital Dictator (1988) | A long European career |
What actually kept them down
Three things, and none of them is quality. The first is arithmetic: a label could sell two or three Bay Area thrash bands to a national audience, not fifteen, and the slots were taken by 1986. The second is the calendar. Nearly every one of these bands got its best record into the shops between 1987 and 1989, which is the exact window in which the majors stopped signing thrash and started looking somewhere else entirely. The third is the one nobody likes saying out loud: a scene this crowded produces bands that sound like the scene, and a band that sounds like the scene has nothing to sell to anyone who already owns two records by it.
What the third tier did instead was keep the standard impossibly high. A band in Berkeley in 1987 was not competing against the national average, it was competing against Heathen on a Tuesday, and that is why the county's players ended up staffing everybody else's bands for the next three decades. The famous names got the covers. This lot supplied the personnel, and the argument about who deserved what sits under the whole of the wider story. Where inside the county each of them actually lived and played turns out to matter more than it should, and that is Why the East Bay and Not San Francisco.
