Ottawa, 1983, on an American label run by a guitar magazine columnist, by a band who had been playing this music since before Metallica existed. Heavy Metal Maniac is Canada's claim to have got there first, and the reason nobody makes it is that the histories are written in California.
The band
A trio formed in 1978 under a different name, with Dan Beehler singing from behind the drum kit, which is rare in any heavy genre and almost unheard of at these tempos. John Ricci on guitar and Allan Johnson on bass completed it.
They were playing fast, aggressive, downpicked material in Ottawa in 1981, which is contemporaneous with anything happening in the East Bay and earlier than most of it.
The record
Released on Shrapnel, Mike Varney's label, in 1983, the same year as Kill 'Em All and Show No Mercy, and owing neither of them anything because the band had not heard either.
It sits between speed metal and thrash and refuses to settle. The rhythm guitar is downpicked and palm muted in places and open and ringing in others. The drumming is a fast rock beat rather than a consistent offbeat snare. The vocal is a shriek in a high register rather than a shout. And the riffs resolve melodically in a way the Bay Area's did not.
Whether that makes it thrash is a genuine argument. What is not arguable is that it is one of the fastest and heaviest records released anywhere in 1983.
Violence and Force
The 1984 follow up on Megaforce is faster and better recorded, and it is the record most people who love this band actually recommend. By this point the material is unambiguously as extreme as anything the Americans were doing.
| Year | Canada | United States |
|---|---|---|
| 1978 | Exciter form | Nothing |
| 1981 | Exciter playing fast material live | Metallica and Slayer form |
| 1982 | Anvil, Metal on Metal | Metal Massacre, No Life til Leather |
| 1983 | Exciter, Heavy Metal Maniac | Kill 'Em All, Show No Mercy |
| 1984 | Exciter, Violence and Force; Voivod, War and Pain | Ride the Lightning |
Why the claim does not stick
Four reasons, none of them musical.
Ottawa had no scene, no venue circuit and no local press, so there was nothing behind the band except the band. The label was American and small. The style sits between two categories, which makes it easy for a historian to leave out of both. And the histories of this genre were written by British and American journalists interested in bands they could see.
The same set of reasons explains Anvil, and it explains a good deal of the rest of this chapter. Being first is worth nothing without a scene, a press and a distributor, and Canada in 1983 had none of the three.
What they got instead
Citations, which is the consolation prize of this entire genre. Exciter turn up in interviews with people who outsold them a hundred to one, and they have kept working in various line ups for four decades, playing European festivals to audiences considerably larger than anything they had at home.
The other British claim to have supplied everything and received nothing is the subject of British Thrash, and the wider account is in Brazil, Canada and the Rest of the World.
The singing drummer
Dan Beehler sang and played drums simultaneously at these tempos, which deserves more attention than it gets.
Holding a fast double kick pattern while delivering a shrieked vocal in a high register is a coordination problem that most musicians would not attempt, and it constrains what both the drums and the vocal can do. The pattern has to be simple enough to run without conscious attention; the vocal has to be phrased around the breaths the kit allows.
The result is a band with a distinctive limitation, and limitations of that kind are frequently what makes a group identifiable. Nobody else in this genre sounds like Exciter, and a substantial part of the reason is a man doing two jobs at once.
What Shrapnel was
The label is worth a paragraph because it explains how a band from Ottawa ended up on an American release in 1983.
Mike Varney ran Shrapnel out of California and had a column in a guitar magazine, and his interest was in technically formidable players rather than in any particular genre. The label became known for launching guitarists who could do things nobody else could, which meant it was signing on ability rather than on scene affiliation.
For a band with no local scene and no press, a label indifferent to where you came from was the only realistic route out, and Exciter took it. The same mechanism put a great many bands from nowhere onto American vinyl in this period, and it is one of the more under-recorded parts of how this genre spread.
The argument about the category
Whether this is thrash or speed metal has been argued for forty years and the honest answer is that it precedes the distinction.
In 1983 both words were in use and neither meant anything fixed. The press used speed metal for Metallica, Slayer and Exciter without distinguishing them, and the split only hardened in about 1986, once a genuinely different melodic music had appeared in Europe using the same tempos.
So asking which side of that line Exciter fall on is asking a 1986 question about a 1983 record. What can be said is that the technique is mixed, the riffs resolve melodically, the vocal is sung rather than shouted, and the aggression is unquestionably thrash aggression. A band standing at the fork, before there was a fork.
One further detail that makes the Canadian claim harder to dismiss. Exciter were touring the United States by 1984, sharing bills with bands who would go on to be far better known, and several American musicians of the period have said they saw them before they saw anybody from the Bay Area. Priority in this genre was never established by records alone; it was established in rooms, and Exciter were in a great many of them early.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. Formation dates follow the band's published accounts.
