Between April 1987 and the last weeks of 1988, four bands out of the same forty square miles of California put out a debut album, and every one of those four records was played better, cut cleaner and arranged more carefully than the ones that had made the scene famous three years earlier. All four had distribution. All four had a producer with a discography behind him. Not one of them broke through. That is not a mystery, it is not entirely their fault, and the shape of it is the most useful lesson the second wave has to give anybody who ever intends to be second at anything.
They were Testament, Death Angel, Vio-lence and Forbidden. By 1987 the East Bay had contracted the disease that always follows a success: the clubs were still open, the crowds still came out of the pit with blood on their teeth, the record companies had finally found Berkeley on a map, and the one commodity nobody could manufacture any more was surprise. Metallica were shifting Master Of Puppets by the hundred thousand, Exodus and Slayer had already legislated how fast and how vicious this music was permitted to be, and every scout stepping off a plane at Oakland carried a finished picture of a thrash band in his head before he had heard a note. Into that walked four bands with better hands and worse timing.
The oxygen problem
A scene has a carrying capacity, and by 1987 the county had hit the ceiling of its own. The audience that had learned the pit at Ruthie's Inn three years earlier now carried a benchmark around in its pocket, and the benchmark was Bonded By Blood. A new band no longer got twelve months of goodwill for the crime of being loud. It got one song, one riff really, in which to prove it was not the fifth photocopy of a record every kid in the room already owned, and the room handed down that sentence in about ninety seconds, standing up, with its arms folded.
The floorboards were going as well. Ruthie's ran as a metal room only until 1988, and the three labels that mattered to thrash, Megaforce, Combat and Enigma, had spent their advance money on the first wave and signed the second on terms that told them precisely what they were worth.
So the newcomers came in carrying the only currency they had left, which was craft. Better players, real producers, real studios, in tune and in time, every part rehearsed until it could be executed at gunpoint. They arrived with all of that at the exact moment the generation above them was still arguing about whether being in tune counted for anything at all. It ought to have been the advantage of the decade. It read as politeness, and politeness in the East Bay in 1987 was a fatal condition.
| Band | Debut | Year | Label | Producer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Testament | The Legacy | 1987 | Megaforce / Atlantic | Alex Perialas |
| Death Angel | The Ultra-Violence | 1987 | Enigma / Restless | Death Angel and Davy Vain |
| Vio-lence | Eternal Nightmare | 1988 | Mechanic / MCA | John Cuniberti |
| Forbidden | Forbidden Evil | 1988 | Combat | John Cuniberti and Doug Caldwell |
Two names hold up half of that table. John Cuniberti produced Eternal Nightmare and then, alongside Doug Caldwell, Forbidden Evil, which is most of the reason the two 1988 records share the same dry, close, unforgiving snare, the sound of a drum being hit in a room with nowhere to hide. Mechanic was MCA's metal sublabel, so Vio-lence were on a major in everything except the logo printed on the sleeve. Davy Vain, of the local band Vain, sat in on both of Death Angel's first two albums.
Testament, three years under another name
Testament took the longest run-up of the four and it is the whole reason any of them are still standing. They formed in Berkeley in 1983 as Legacy, built around the guitarist Eric Peterson, and spent three entire years under that name before anybody outside the East Bay heard a bar of them. Alex Skolnick came in on lead guitar in 1984, a schoolboy taking lessons from Joe Satriani, and he brought the county a weapon nobody else in it owned: a player who thought in phrases instead of scales, who could resolve a solo rather than merely run out of one, and who could do it at a tempo designed to make thinking impossible.
The line-up settled late, and by accident. In 1986 the singer Steve Souza left to replace Paul Baloff in Exodus and, on his way out of the door, named his own successor. Chuck Billy's voice was lower, wider and heavier than anything the band had been built to carry, and it re-tuned the whole machine underneath him, giving the riffs a floor to stand on instead of a race to lose. The name went at the same time. Legacy became Testament in 1986 because other acts already held the word and the band could not clear it; Billy Milano of S.O.D. is credited with the replacement.
The Legacy landed in April 1987, cut with Alex Perialas at Pyramid Sound in Ithaca, New York, the same producer and the same four walls Anthrax and Overkill were using. Skolnick was eighteen years old. Over The Wall opens the record with a riff that had been ground down by three years of club stages and sounds exactly like it, Burnt Offerings is the finest thing on the album, and First Strike Is Deadly is the one the pit took home and kept. Nothing on it is loose anywhere. The New Order followed the next year with better songs, a cover of Aerosmith's Nobody's Fault that nobody had asked for, and enough sales to push the band up against the door of American radio: released on 10 May 1988, it reached 136 on the Billboard 200, held on there thirteen weeks, and had sold more than 250,000 copies in the United States by 1990.
Death Angel: five cousins and a fourteen year old
Death Angel were the strangest object in the county and, for one season, the most talked about. Five Filipino American cousins: Rob Cavestany on guitar, Mark Osegueda singing, the Pepa brothers Dennis and Gus, and Andy Galeon behind the kit. They had been playing in the same room since primary school, and you can hear that in the way the four instruments take a corner together, as one body rather than four, with nobody visibly steering. The 1985 demo Kill As One was produced by Kirk Hammett, whom they had met two years earlier queueing at a record shop signing.
They paid for The Ultra-Violence out of their own pockets and cut it at Banquet Sound in Santa Rosa between 15 and 17 June 1986, with Davy Vain producing beside the band. Galeon was fourteen at those sessions, and that is the fact everybody repeats because it deserves repeating: he does not play like a novelty, he plays like a session man twice his age who has never been told what is supposed to be difficult. Enigma picked the record up and put it out on 23 April 1987. The title track is a nine minute instrumental with a classical passage running through its middle, an ambition nobody else in the East Bay would have dared say out loud, and the album standing around it is thin, hurried and audibly cheap. Frolic Through The Park arrived on 5 July 1988 out of Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, Vain producing again with Cavestany and Galeon beside him, cleaner and a great deal stranger.
Vio-lence and Forbidden, one guitarist and two bands
Vio-lence formed in San Francisco in 1985 and were the most physical of the four by a distance. Phil Demmel and Robb Flynn wrote the guitar parts, Deen Dell played bass, Perry Strickland drummed, and Sean Killian sang, if that is the word anybody wants to use for it. Killian's voice is the entire argument about Vio-lence: a high, hoarse, half-strangled yelp that arrives like a man shouting a warning from underwater, and a listener either takes it as the most honest noise anybody made in the genre or cannot get past the first thirty seconds. Both verdicts are defensible. Eternal Nightmare, recorded between February and April 1988 with Cuniberti at the desk and released by Mechanic on 27 June, is a genuinely brutal record underneath that voice, and the Demmel and Flynn writing on Serial Killer and on the title track cuts deeper than the band was ever given credit for.
Forbidden carried the name Forbidden Evil through the first record and shortened it afterwards. Russ Anderson sang and Craig Locicero wrote the riffs, with Glen Alvelais taking the leads once Flynn had gone and Matt Camacho on bass. Their drummer from 1987 to 1992 was Paul Bostaph, already the most technically frightening player in the county and later a member of Slayer. Forbidden Evil came out on Combat on 30 September 1988, cut across three studios in San Francisco and Cotati with Cuniberti and Caldwell producing, and it did the one thing every other band of the second wave attempted and failed: it held a melody in both hands for a whole song without once easing off the throttle to keep hold of it.
Anderson could actually sing, which in the East Bay in 1988 was closer to a handicap than an asset.
Which of the four made the best record
The best record of the second wave is Forbidden Evil, and almost nobody bought it. It is the one where riffs, drumming and voice are all working at the same altitude, where the solos are written instead of sprayed across the bar, and where songs stop at the exact point they have finished saying something. Testament built the better career and the more durable band, and The Legacy is the more famous album by a wide margin, but it is a debut that plays safe in precisely the places where Forbidden Evil puts its hand into the fire and leaves it there.
The overrated one is The Ultra-Violence, and the reason is the story rather than the songs: a fourteen year old drummer, five cousins, three days paid for out of their own wages. Take the story away and what is left is a rough demo with one extraordinary instrumental lying inside it, and Death Angel would not make a fully good album until Act III in 1990. Vio-lence stand outside the comparison altogether, because that voice settles the question before the songs are allowed to open their mouths.
Why none of them broke
Timing, and arithmetic. The major labels of 1988 to 1991 were hunting the next Metallica, not the fifth Bay Area band that sounded a little like Metallica, and when the bidding war they had been saving their money for finally arrived, it arrived in Seattle and took the rest of the decade with it.
Then the individual endings, which are ordinary rather than operatic. Death Angel were stopped by a tour bus crash in Arizona in 1990, on the road to a show in Las Vegas while they were out behind Act III. Galeon was critically injured and needed more than a year to recover; the band lost the Clash of the Titans support slot to Alice in Chains, and had come apart before he was well again. Vio-lence lost Flynn to Machine Head. Forbidden stayed alive by touring Europe, where the audience had never got round to losing interest. Testament simply outlasted every one of them, which turns out to be the only strategy that has ever worked in this music.
Go back to the chapter above and the same pattern repeats at every level of the story, on bands and on labels alike: whoever comes through the door second plays better and is paid less, and the difference between the two of them is almost never the music. It is who got there first, and who was holding the cheque book when they did, which is the subject of Megaforce Records.
