For about eighteen months at the turn of the decade, thrash metal played arenas. Bands who had been sleeping on floors in 1985 were on a package tour with a production budget, in front of fifteen thousand people a night, in cities where nobody had booked a metal bill in years.
It was the genre's commercial peak and it lasted almost exactly as long as it took the audience to find something else.
Monsters of Rock, 1988
The precursor, and a strange one. Metallica spent the summer of 1988 opening for Van Halen on an American stadium tour, in the middle of the afternoon, in front of audiences who had come for something else entirely.
It was not a comfortable fit and it did the job. A band whose previous audience had been assembled through fanzines and tape trading was suddenly playing to a hundred thousand people a week who had never heard of them, and a substantial number of those people went and bought the record.
Clash of the Titans, 1990 and 1991
The European leg in 1990 put Slayer, Megadeth, Testament and Suicidal Tendencies on the same bill. The American leg the following summer replaced Testament with Anthrax and added a young opening band from Seattle called Alice in Chains, which is the detail everybody notices in retrospect.
The bill was the genre's whole commercial argument in one line up: the extreme wing, the technical wing, the crossover wing and, on the American dates, the East Coast. Nobody had put those audiences in one building before and it turned out there were enough of them to fill it.
What the tours actually did
Three things, and only one of them is obvious.
They sold records, which is the obvious one. Every band on the bill saw its sales rise, and Seasons in the Abyss and Rust in Peace both reached chart positions that would have been unimaginable for the same bands in 1986.
They built an audience in the interior. A package tour reaches secondary cities that individual bands cannot afford to play, and a substantial part of the crowd that turned up for the reunions twenty years later saw its first thrash show on one of these bills.
And they raised the overheads permanently. A band that has toured at that scale has crew, production and expectations attached, and when the audience moved on in 1992 those costs did not move with it.
| Tour | Year | Bill | Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monsters of Rock, US | 1988 | Van Halen, Scorpions, Dokken, Metallica, Kingdom Come | Thrash in stadiums, in daylight |
| Clash of the Titans, Europe | 1990 | Slayer, Megadeth, Testament, Suicidal Tendencies | The genre's whole argument on one bill |
| Clash of the Titans, US | 1991 | Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax, Alice in Chains | The peak, with the future opening |
| Wacken and the festivals | 1990 onwards | Various | The European circuit that survived |
The joke that is not a joke
Alice in Chains opened the American leg in the summer of 1991. Nevermind came out that September. Within a year the audience that had filled those arenas was buying a different kind of record, radio had changed format, and the bands on the top of that bill were being asked by their labels to consider their direction.
It is tempting to present that as irony and it is really just the ordinary mechanism of popular music. A package tour is a sign that a genre has reached the mainstream, and the mainstream is a place where things arrive and then leave.
What survived
The European festival circuit, which is the reason these bands still have careers. Wacken, Dynamo, Graspop and their equivalents kept booking thrash bills throughout the 1990s to audiences that never went away, while the American club circuit disappeared entirely.
That geographic difference explains a great deal about the following twenty years. A band who could fill a tent in Germany in 1996 had an income; a band who could not fill a club in Ohio did not. It is why several of these groups spent the decade sounding, to American ears, as though they had vanished, when in fact they were working continuously three thousand miles away.
One of the bands on those bills had arrived as teenagers a few years earlier, which is its own story: Death Angel's "The Ultra-Violence". The full account of the run is in The Golden Years.
What a package tour actually is
A financial instrument as much as a bill. Four bands on one production means one crew, one set of trucks and one lighting rig shared four ways, which brings the cost per band down to something an arena can support.
It also solves the promoter's problem. No single thrash band in 1990 could reliably fill fifteen thousand seats in an American secondary city; four of them together could, because each brought an audience that only partly overlapped with the others. That is the entire commercial logic, and it is why the bill was assembled from different wings of the genre rather than from four similar bands.
The cost is that everybody plays a shortened set, nobody headlines properly, and the running order becomes a negotiation with real consequences for how a band is perceived.
What it was like to be there
Long. A four band bill starting in the late afternoon runs for five hours, and the audience that arrived for the opening act was a different audience from the one that stayed for the headliner.
The reports from the American leg are consistent about one thing: the crowd for Alice in Chains in the summer of 1991 was small, restless and largely uninterested, and the band went on in daylight to a half empty arena. Eighteen months later they were selling more records than anybody who had been above them on that poster.
There is no moral in that, beyond the ordinary one about how quickly these things turn, and it is worth remembering the next time a bill looks like a settled hierarchy.
Sources and notes
Tour line ups refer to the principal advertised bills; support acts varied by territory and by date.
