"In the bay area, Death Metal was sort of a joke since it didn't fit in with the thrash bracket." That is Chris Reifert, who drummed on Scream Bloody Gore at nineteen and then went home to California and started Autopsy, speaking to Full in Bloom on 25 May 2020. It is the single most useful sentence anybody has said about this state, and it explains a contradiction that runs through forty years: California produced the record that gave the genre its name, and never once produced a scene to go with it. The state that did produce one is the chapter this belongs to. This is what happened in the place that got there first.
The Bay Area made the first one and then laughed at it
The teenagers who separated the voice from the words before anybody else worked out that it could be done recorded Seven Churches at Prairie Sun Studios in Cotati in the first week of April 1985 with Randy Burns producing, and Combat released it on 4 November that year. Two of the four were sixteen. What the record started is not in dispute anywhere. What is worth stating is what happened to it locally, which is nothing. The Bay Area in 1985 had the densest thrash economy on earth, with clubs, fanzines, distributors and four major label signings inside eighteen months, and none of that machinery had any use for a band whose singer had stopped forming words.
Reifert's other memory from those years is the one that fixes the temperature. He has described watching D.R.I. play with Possessed and the punks in the room throwing eggs at them. That is the environment the genre's founding record came out of: not hostility from outside metal, but contempt from inside it.
I remember seeing DRI play with Possessed and the punks threw eggs at Possessed.
Chris Reifert, Full in Bloom, 25 May 2020
The bands that followed took the hint and stopped asking. Sadus formed in Antioch in 1985 with Steve Di Giorgio on bass, made Illusions in 1988, later reissued as Chemical Exposure, and played faster and more technically than the material strictly required, which is how Di Giorgio ended up carrying a fretless bass into the Death album that made technique the subject three years later. Autopsy formed in Contra Costa County in August 1987 when Reifert came back from Florida, and went in the exact opposite direction, downward and filthy.
Los Angeles exported people rather than records
Southern California's contribution is stranger and, in personnel terms, larger than the Bay Area's. Terrorizer formed in Los Angeles in 1985 under the name Unknown Death and took the name everybody knows in 1986, with Oscar Garcia singing, Jesse Pintado on guitar and Pete Sandoval on drums. They made one album. World Downfall was recorded in April 1989 at Morrisound in Tampa, mixed and finished by Scott Burns inside three days for a budget of twelve hundred dollars, and Earache released it on 13 November 1989.
Then the band ceased to exist, because both of the musicians who mattered most had somewhere better to be: Pintado joined Napalm Death and Sandoval went to Morbid Angel, where he held the blast beat that defined the Tampa sound for the next fifteen years. A metropolitan area of ten million people produced one record and two of the most consequential players in the genre, and then had nothing left. That is the Los Angeles pattern in miniature, and it is the reverse of what happened in Texas, where the players stayed put and the records went nowhere.
California invented this music, laughed at it, and then subcontracted the running of it to smaller places. Every part of that sentence is a compliment to somebody.
The state's real contribution was a label
Eight hundred miles of coastline, and the most consequential thing on any of it after 1993 is an office. Deeds of Flesh formed in Los Osos in 1993 around Erik Lindmark, lost a label deal, and founded Unique Leader Records to press its own records. The imprint then became the working address for brutal death metal worldwide, with a roster drawn from three continents and a house sound that a listener can identify in four bars. Disgorge, from San Diego, put She Lay Gutted out through it on 9 November 1999, twenty five minutes long and with nothing decorative on it at all. Lindmark died on 29 November 2018 at the age of 46.
That is a real inheritance and it is an odd one. A state with no scene produced the institution that organised everybody else's, which is the same trick New York pulled with Roadrunner and the opposite of what happened in Florida, where the institution was a studio and the bands had to travel to it.
Gore, and the second wave
The nineties generation stopped worrying about the thrash bracket entirely, which turned out to be liberating. Exhumed formed in San Jose in 1990 around Matt Harvey, spent eight years reaching a first album, and Gore Metal in 1998 arrived with the production compromised by circumstance, part of it lost when the producer was evicted from an Oakland studio. Harvey has been open about using the gore imagery allegorically rather than literally, which is a more interesting position than the genre usually allows itself. Impaled worked the same seam out of Oakland from 1996. Cattle Decapitation started in San Diego in 1996 and eventually built a career out of writing about the species from the animals' side of the abattoir door.
Autopsy meanwhile had already produced the record the rest of the world took its instructions from. Mental Funeral was cut at Different Fur Studios in San Francisco in late November 1990 and Peaceville released it on 22 April 1991, barely mixed and deliberately so, and half of what is now called cavernous death metal is downstream of it. Compare that with what the same years produced in texas Death Metal and the difference is not talent. It is whether anybody was listening.
What links that generation is a refusal to treat the music as a career, and it produced a sideline the state is still known for. Reifert spent the years between Autopsy's stop in 1995 and its return in 2009 running Abscess, a band whose entire purpose was to sound worse on purpose. Impaled and Ghoul, both out of the same handful of Bay Area rehearsal rooms, made records that are funny and genuinely unpleasant at the same time, which is a harder balance than either half looks. None of it was aimed at an audience larger than the room, and most of it has outlasted material that was.
What the state does now
Oakland has the last word, which is fitting for a city that spent thirty years being told this was thrash country. Necrot formed there in 2011 out of the remains of several local bands, and Blood Offerings in June 2017 put them fourth in Decibel's albums of the year, with Mortal following through Tankcrimes on 28 August 2020 and charting in fourteen separate Billboard categories. Autopsy is still working, thirty nine years after Reifert came home. Exhumed released To the Dead in 2022.
Set the whole run against the state that got the industry, the studio and the reputation, and the comparison is instructive rather than sad. California supplied the first record, two of Tampa's key players, the label that organised the brutal wing and a cavernous strain that half the current underground copies. What it never had was a room where all of those people could stand at once. That, precisely, is what the other coast built, and it is set out in the Florida Death Metal Scene.
