In February 1983 four young men drove a van north out of Los Angeles because their new bass player refused to come south, and moved into somebody's mother's house at 3132 Carlson Boulevard, El Cerrito. Within eighteen months that garage had produced the first thrash record and the best one, and within four years the man who had made them move was dead. Everything in this chapter of the thrash metal story runs out of that address.
The genre is usually narrated as though Metallica invented it in Los Angeles and merely carried it north to sell. The truth runs the other way. Los Angeles in 1982 wanted hair, choruses and a good time, and what it was offered was a Danish drummer with an accent, a singer who could barely raise his eyes to the room, and a set built out of Diamond Head and Savage covers. In Hollywood that was a curiosity. In the East Bay, where No Life 'til Leather was already being copied and passed hand to hand among Ron Quintana's listeners, it was the most important band in town, and it had not yet played there.
So they went where they were wanted. This chapter is about what they found, and about the people who were there first and stayed after they left.
The house in El Cerrito
The move happened for a bass player. Cliff Burton was from Castro Valley, played in a Bay Area band called Trauma, and had been seen by Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield at the Whisky in Hollywood, running a bass through a wah pedal with his hair over his face as though the building were empty. They asked him to join. He agreed on one condition, that the band come to him, and the band came.
The house at 3132 Carlson Boulevard belonged to Mark Whitaker, who managed Exodus and would go on to engineer Metallica's sound. The garage became the rehearsal room. The house acquired the name the East Bay reserves for its own legends, delivered flat and without affection: the Metalli-mansion.
Two months later they cut out their lead guitarist. Dave Mustaine, whose drinking had outrun the band's patience and whose playing was the best thing they had, was woken in a New York rehearsal space on the morning of 11 April 1983, told he was finished, and put on a Greyhound out of Port Authority with his guitar and three days in which to think about it. His replacement was already standing in the room. Kirk Hammett had been Exodus's lead guitarist since 1979, had grown up in El Sobrante a few miles up the road, and had been quietly taught the set before the man playing it knew there was anything to learn. Whitaker had arranged it. Exodus lost their best player to the band borrowing their manager's mother's garage, and, in the way of that scene, nobody appears to have held it against anybody.
They were in New York because a record shop owner from New Jersey named Jon Zazula had heard the demo, had failed to interest a single label in it, and had founded one himself rather than let it go. Megaforce Records existed to release Kill 'Em All, cut in Rochester in May 1983 for around fifteen thousand dollars and out that July. Four of its ten songs carry Mustaine's name in the credits; The Four Horsemen is his song Mechanix, slowed through the middle and fitted with a new lyric, and he would take the original back to Los Angeles and record it faster out of spite. That is Los Angeles and New York's problem, not this chapter's.
What matters here is that nothing had sounded like it. The previous chapter listed the components: Motorhead's speed, the NWOBHM riff, Venom's nerve, the hardcore beat. Kill 'Em All is the first record on which all four are audible at once, forged together at full pour by four people who could actually play. Hit The Lights opens it on tape hiss and a drum fill that lands like furniture going over. Whiplash is a D-beat with a Diamond Head riff bolted to it. Seek And Destroy is the first thrash song a stadium would ever sing back. And halfway through side one, (Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth is four minutes of Burton alone with a distorted bass, a wah pedal and a working knowledge of Bach, serving notice that this music was going to be permitted to have ideas. They toured it that summer opening for Raven, the Newcastle band from the previous chapter, on a run billed as Kill 'Em All For One. The Geordies had crossed the Atlantic and found the children grown.
Ruthie's Inn
Every scene needs a room, and the Bay Area's was a low-ceilinged bar on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley run by a promoter named Wes Robinson, who booked heavy bands on the nights nobody else would and appeared indifferent to what became of his furniture. Between 1984 and 1986 it was the centre of the world. Metallica played it. Slayer came up from Los Angeles and played it. Possessed, Death Angel, Legacy, Heathen, Blind Illusion and Hirax played it, on cheap bills that started late. The Stone on Broadway, the Keystone in Berkeley, the Kabuki and the Mabuhay Gardens took the bigger nights. Ruthie's took the ones that mattered.
What went on in that room became the liturgy of the genre and is worth describing precisely. The audience did not watch. It moved: a circular, violent, oddly courteous crush in front of the stage that would later acquire the name pit, and a habit of climbing onto the stage in order to throw oneself off it that would later acquire the name stage diving. Both were borrowed wholesale from the hardcore shows across the bay, and both were the physical translation of what the music was doing. The band stopped being a performance and became the loudest part of a crowd. That crowd called itself thrashers, and by the time Kerrang! reached for the words thrash metal in February 1984 to describe an Anthrax song called Metal Thrashing Mad, with the fanzines Metal Forces and Metal Mania having printed the phrase some months before, the kids on San Pablo Avenue had been thrashers for a year.
The band stopped being a performance and became the loudest part of a crowd.
The master of that room was a singer. Paul Baloff joined Exodus in 1982 and was, by every surviving account and every surviving photograph, the most committed human being in the East Bay. He could not sing in any sense a teacher would recognise. What he did was bark, in pitch and with total conviction, about killing posers, and the poser was his standing enemy: anyone at a show for the wrong reasons, anyone in a glam shirt, anyone who did not mean it. His remedy, by scene legend, was to cut the offending shirt off its owner and wear the strips onstage as colours taken in the field. Grown men who went on to sell millions of records still speak about him in the tone people reserve for a saint who was also slightly dangerous to stand next to.
Exodus: the band that was there first
Exodus are the true story of the Bay Area and the cruellest one. They were there before anybody, formed in Richmond in 1979 by the drummer Tom Hunting and by Hammett himself. They had the singer, they had the room, and once Hammett had gone and Gary Holt had stepped forward with Rick Hunolt beside him, they had the definitive guitar sound of the scene: two players locked together, one on rhythm and one on the leads, downpicking in a tight choppy lockstep that every Bay Area band after them adopted and that the Germans would spend the rest of the decade trying to reproduce.
In July 1984 they cut their debut at Prairie Sun, and it should have arrived that year, while Metallica were still in Copenhagen and the Bay belonged to them. It did not. Bonded By Blood sat on a shelf at a new and under-resourced label called Torrid Records for the best part of a year, and by the time it surfaced in April 1985 Ride The Lightning had been out for nine months and Slayer had two records in the shops. The band that had arguably built the Bay Area sound were reviewed as though they had inherited it. A year late in that market was not a delay. It was a demotion, handed down by an accounting department.
None of which makes the record anything other than what it is. Where Kill 'Em All reaches for melody and Ride The Lightning reaches for scale, Bonded By Blood reaches for the throat and does not let go for forty minutes. A Lesson In Violence, Piranha, Strike Of The Beast and the title track are Ruthie's Inn pressed onto vinyl, and Metal Command and And Then There Were None are the proof that Holt could write as well as riff. The industry never forgave them for being late and they never entirely forgave Metallica for being early. Baloff was sacked in 1986 and replaced by Steve Souza out of Legacy, which is the kind of transfer that only happens in a scene where everyone lives inside ten miles and has slept on everyone else's floor.
Copenhagen, and the arrival of harmony
Metallica's second album was made at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen because Ulrich knew the city and a producer named Flemming Rasmussen worked there and was cheap. They lived in the studio, slept in it, and came out with a record that permanently widened what a thrash album was allowed to contain. It went out in July 1984, still on Megaforce money, and it opens with an acoustic guitar.
The acoustic guitar is Burton's doing, and so is everything else that makes the record larger than the one before it: the harmonised leads on Fight Fire With Fire, the counterpoint running under For Whom The Bell Tolls, the nine minutes of The Call Of Ktulu, and, at one remove, the nerve required to write Fade To Black, a song about suicide that opens as a ballad and that a section of the band's own audience treated as treason for the crime of containing a clean guitar. Burton had studied music at a community college, could read a score, and heard Bach, Thin Lizzy and Lynyrd Skynyrd as one continuous argument. He brought harmony into a genre that until then had owned only speed, and he brought it without slowing anything down by a single beat. The title track and Creeping Death are as fast and as heavy as anything on the debut. They are simply also better music.
Two songs still carry Mustaine's name. The rest is the band that would outsell every heavy group in history, caught in the eighteen months before it became that band, in which one garage in El Cerrito produced the first thrash record and the first great one.
Possessed, and the door to somewhere darker
Not everyone in the East Bay wanted harmony. A few miles up the road in San Pablo, a band called Possessed formed across 1982 and 1983, took the Venom and Mercyful Fate half of the inheritance rather than the Diamond Head half, and drove it clean through the far wall of thrash into something that did not yet have a name. Jeff Becerra growled where Baloff barked. Their 1984 demo closed with a song called Death Metal. The guitarist who arrived in 1985 in time for the album, Larry LaLonde, later to reinvent himself entirely inside Primus, played leads that sound like tape being chewed.
Combat Records put out Seven Churches in November 1985, and that is the record at which thrash and death metal part company. It is played at thrash speed with thrash riffs and it is unmistakably a Bay Area album: Randy Burns produced it, Ruthie's Inn broke it. But the voice, the subject matter and the complete absence of anything a radio programmer could use make it the first record that bands from Florida to Stockholm would afterwards name as year zero. That story belongs to the death metal history. What belongs here is that it was born in the same room as everything else in this chapter, and that what the Bay Area gave heavy music does not stop at thrash.
The second wave, still at school
By 1985 the room had produced a second generation, most of it still in education and all of it faster than the first. Testament were still called Legacy, an East Bay band with a teenage guitarist named Alex Skolnick who was taking lessons from Joe Satriani and would become the most fluent lead player the genre ever produced, and a singer, Steve Souza, who left for Exodus and was replaced by a large and gentle man from Dublin, California, called Chuck Billy. Their 1985 demo travelled the way No Life 'til Leather had travelled. Their first album is 1987's business, and belongs to the chapter after this one.
| Album | Band | Released | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kill 'Em All | Metallica | 25 July 1983 | Megaforce |
| Ride The Lightning | Metallica | July 1984 | Megaforce |
| Bonded By Blood | Exodus | April 1985 | Torrid |
| Seven Churches | Possessed | November 1985 | Combat |
| Master Of Puppets | Metallica | 3 March 1986 | Elektra |
Master of Puppets, and the end of the founding period
It is not a Bay Area record in the way Bonded By Blood is a Bay Area record. It is too large and too composed for a bar with no printed capacity. But every part in it is a Bay Area part, and the man playing bass on it was the reason the band had come north at all. Orion carries a movement in its middle that Burton wrote and that the band would not play through in full onstage until 2006, twenty years later.
27 September 1986
On 27 September 1986 the band's tour bus left the carriageway near Dörarp, in southern Sweden, and rolled. Cliff Burton was killed. He was twenty four years old.
The band went home, buried him, and within weeks had auditioned and hired Jason Newsted out of Arizona, because the tour was booked and stopping was not a thing anybody in that scene had been taught how to do.
The Bay Area did not end that night. Testament, Death Angel, Vio-lence and Forbidden all had their first albums still ahead of them, and the three richest years the genre would ever have were the three that followed, which is the subject of Los Angeles, New York and the Big Four. But the founding period ended. A garage on Carlson Boulevard had produced the genre's first record, its first great one and its first masterpiece, and had then lost the musician who made all three possible. Everything after 1986 is thrash metal grown up. This was the part where it was born.
