Four bands, two cities, five years, and a phrase that has outlived almost everything it was invented to describe. The big four is now the shorthand by which most of the world knows this music, printed on shirts sold in shops that stock nothing else heavier, and like most shorthand it is about sixty per cent useful and forty per cent lie.
What is true is that between 1983 and 1988 four American bands took a music that had been distributed by the post office and put it on major label racks in shopping centres. What is not true is that they were a movement, or a scene, or in any sense a unit. Two of them were founded by men who had been thrown out of the third. One of them was in New York and thought the other three were humourless. And by the time the phrase existed, the four of them sounded less like each other than at any point in their lives.
Los Angeles was not the Bay Area
Three hundred and fifty miles is not a great distance, but the two Californian thrash scenes might as well have been on separate continents, and the difference is audible in the first bar of any record from either.
The Bay Area had a room, a radio show and an audience that turned up for unsigned bands. Los Angeles had the Sunset Strip, which by 1983 was a functioning industry of hairspray, spandex and A and R men, and a heavy underground that existed in explicit hostility to it. A Los Angeles thrash band in 1983 was not competing with other thrash bands. It was competing with the idea that heavy music should be attractive, and it responded by making itself as unattractive as possible.
Slayer started as a covers band in Huntington Park playing Iron Maiden and Judas Priest at parties. Brian Slagel saw them do "Phantom of the Opera" and put them on Metal Massacre III. The debut, Show No Mercy, was recorded in late 1983 on money Tom Araya had earned working as a respiratory therapist and on a loan from Kerry King's father, and Metal Blade pressed it because it had no budget to do anything else.
It sold something in the region of forty thousand copies with no promotion whatsoever, which for an independent metal record in 1984 was extraordinary, and it announced the Los Angeles dialect fully formed: no harmony leads that resolve, no half time section to let the room breathe, whammy bar solos that dive and scrape rather than sing, and Dave Lombardo underneath it playing a double kick pattern that does not stop for the length of a side.
Around them the city produced Dark Angel, whose Darkness Descends in 1986 is arguably faster than anything Slayer made, and Abattoir and Bitch and a dozen others who fed Metal Blade its catalogue. The southern Californian temperament was consistent: extremity as an argument, not as an effect.
The bus from New York
On 11 April 1983, in Jamaica, Queens, Dave Mustaine was woken up and told he was out of Metallica, that his replacement had already flown in, and that there was a bus leaving for Los Angeles. There was no discussion and no severance. The journey took four days.
Whatever anybody thinks of what came afterwards, the fact remains that a man was put on a bus across a continent with no band, no money and no plan, and got off it having decided to build something faster and more technical than the group that had just removed him. He wrote most of the first Megadeth album on that ride, in a notebook, and he found David Ellefson by shouting at him through a floor for playing his stereo too loud.
Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good! arrived in 1985 on Combat, made for a budget so small that Mustaine has said half of it went on other things and the band mixed the record themselves after the producer walked. It sounds like it. It is also, note for note, more advanced than any other American thrash album of its year: the riffs are chromatic and jazz inflected, the two guitars play different parts rather than the same one, and the tempo changes land on beats that nobody else was writing to.
The following year Capitol paid to have it done properly, and Peace Sells... but Who's Buying? is where the argument becomes coherent. The bass line that opens the title track was used by MTV News for years, which is a strange fate for a song about a man being told he is a menace to society for not owning a suit.
Queens, a flea market and a record label
The New York story starts, as so much of this does, with people who had no business being in the record industry. Jon and Marsha Zazula sold second hand albums from a table at the Route 18 flea market in East Brunswick, New Jersey, under a sign that said Rock and Roll Heaven. They heard a fourth generation cassette of a Los Angeles band's demo, could not get anybody to sign them, and mortgaged the house to press the album themselves. The label was called Megaforce. The album was Kill 'Em All.
Their second signing was Anthrax, five men from Queens and Bayside who had been rehearsing above a bakery. And Anthrax are the reason the big four is so hard to talk about coherently, because they did not sound like the other three and did not want to.
New York had something California did not: a hardcore scene and a metal scene attended by the same people, in the same rooms, on the same nights. So the East Coast dialect bounces. The riffs land on the offbeat, there is a groove where Slayer put a wall, and the band hired Joey Belladonna, who was not a shouter but an actual melodic singer with a high clean voice, which in 1985 was close to heresy.
They also thought the whole thing was allowed to be funny. Shorts on stage, a song about a comic book character, a side project that turned into the first successful rap and metal record in America. Anthrax got the least critical respect of the four for exactly the qualities that have aged best, and Among the Living in 1987, produced by Eddie Kramer and dedicated to Cliff Burton, remains the most purely enjoyable album any of them made.
Who actually counted to four
Nobody sat down and appointed them. The phrase came out of the British and American metal press somewhere around 1985 and 1986, as a convenient way of saying the four American thrash bands you can buy in a normal record shop, and it hardened because the alternatives were worse. It described commercial position, not sound and not quality.
You can see the arbitrariness by asking what it excluded. Exodus were older than Metallica in the East Bay and had taught half of it how to play. Testament outsold Anthrax at certain points. Overkill have released more albums than any of them and never had a bad one. Kreator and Sodom were operating at the same level in West Germany, which is why Teutonic Thrash is a chapter of its own rather than a footnote to this one. And Sepultura would eventually outsell two of the four.
What the four actually had in common was a distribution deal and a press office. That is not a criticism of the music, which is mostly excellent. It is a warning about mistaking a marketing bracket for a musical fact, which is the single most common error made about this genre.
The record that ended the argument
In 1986 Rick Rubin, who was making hip hop records in a New York University dormitory and had just produced Run DMC, took Slayer into the studio and did something nobody had done to a metal band. He took everything out.
No reverb. No delay. No double tracking used as a blanket. The guitars sit dry and close, panned hard, and the drums are recorded as an instrument being hit rather than as an atmosphere. The result is a record on which you can hear every note of a riff played at two hundred and twenty beats per minute, and the effect of that clarity is not clinical, it is violent, because there is nothing between the listener and the event.
Ten songs, twenty nine minutes, and the argument about how fast and how extreme a metal record could be was settled for a decade. Columbia, who distributed Def Jam, refused to handle it, and the album went out through Geffen instead. It has been in print continuously ever since and every band that has tried to go further has been measured against it.
What is often missed is what the record did to everybody else. Once Reign in Blood existed there was no percentage in trying to be faster, because faster had been done and had taken half an hour. So the rest of the genre went looking for other questions, and the answers turned into groove, into technicality, into death metal, and eventually into the thing that killed thrash's commercial moment.
Out of the independents
The commercial mechanics are worth stating plainly, because the thrash metal story is usually told as if the majors arrived, ruined everything and left. What actually happened is more interesting.
Every one of the four was built by an independent. Megaforce put out Metallica and Anthrax. Metal Blade put out Slayer. Combat put out Megadeth. In each case the independent did the work that costs money and returns nothing for two years: pressing, distribution to the specialist shops, the first tours, the adverts in the fanzines. Then, between 1984 and 1987, a major arrived with a cheque and took the band.
Elektra took Metallica. Island took Anthrax. Capitol took Megadeth. Def Jam and then Geffen took Slayer. In no case did the major interfere with the music in any obvious way at first, which is the part people forget; Master of Puppets, Among the Living, Peace Sells and Reign in Blood are all major label or major distributed records and none of them are compromised. The interference came later, and it came in the form of expectations rather than instructions.
| Band | Formed | Base | First album | First major label album | Producer on the breakthrough |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Metallica | 1981 | Los Angeles, then the East Bay | Kill 'Em All (1983) | Ride the Lightning reissue, Elektra (1984) | Flemming Rasmussen |
| Slayer | 1981 | Huntington Park, California | Show No Mercy (1983) | Reign in Blood, Def Jam (1986) | Rick Rubin |
| Megadeth | 1983 | Los Angeles | Killing Is My Business... (1985) | Peace Sells..., Capitol (1986) | Randy Burns |
| Anthrax | 1981 | New York | Fistful of Metal (1984) | Among the Living, Island (1987) | Eddie Kramer |
The tours that actually built them
Records made the reputations, but the audience was assembled on the road, in vans, by bands who could not afford a bus. In 1983 Megaforce sent Metallica and Raven out on the Kill Em All For One tour, thirty odd American dates on which two bands shared one crew and slept where they could, and it did more for the music in three months than any amount of press.
The pattern repeated for the next five years. Slayer took the Combat Tour out with Venom in 1985 and terrified a generation of American teenagers who had only read about the headliner. Anthrax opened for Metallica in Europe in 1986 and were on the continent when the bus went off the road in Sweden. Megadeth toured with everyone and fell out with most of them.
What the touring did, beyond selling records, was build the physical infrastructure the genre still runs on: a circuit of halls in secondary American cities that would take a heavy bill, a network of promoters who knew the audience existed, and a generation of local support bands who watched from the side of the stage and formed something a year later.
The phrase gets a stage of its own
For twenty five years the big four was a piece of journalism. Then, in June 2010, at Bemowo Airport in Warsaw, the four of them played the same bill on the same day for the first time, and did it again across Europe and finally at Indio in California, ending with all four bands on stage together playing a Diamond Head song.
It was a reunion of something that had never actually been a unit, staged thirty years late, and it worked because the audience had spent a quarter of a century believing in the bracket. Whatever the phrase originally described, by 2010 it described a real thing: four bands, still standing, playing to a hundred thousand people in a country that in 1986 they could not have entered.
Four bands that sound nothing alike
Put the four breakthrough records next to each other and the phrase falls apart on contact.
Metallica in 1986 are writing eight minute pieces in multiple movements with acoustic introductions and instrumental sections, produced in Copenhagen with a large room sound. Slayer in the same year are making a twenty nine minute record with no reverb on it and no song over five minutes. Megadeth are writing chromatic, two guitar, music that demands more of a player than anything else in the genre with a sneering narrator and a jazz drummer. Anthrax are bouncing, in shorts, with a tenor singing over the top.
Those are four different musical philosophies. The only thing that genuinely unites them is a right hand technique and a decade. If you want a single sentence to carry away from this chapter, it is that the big four is a fact about the record business and not a fact about music, and the sooner it is treated that way the more of this genre becomes visible.
The story now crosses the Atlantic, to three cities in the Ruhr where a different set of teenagers had heard the same records and drawn almost opposite conclusions.
One last thing the four did share, and it is not musical either. All of them were signed before they were twenty two, all of them spent the second half of the decade watching the money arrive, and all of them handled it badly in different ways: line up changes, dismissals, litigation, addiction and, in one case, a bus on a Swedish road at seven in the morning. The records are the achievement. The lives that made them were mostly a mess, and any history that leaves that out is selling a poster rather than telling you what happened.
Sources and notes
Label and release details refer to original pressings. The Mustaine dismissal is dated 11 April 1983. Sales figures for Show No Mercy are the widely reported independent era estimates rather than certified numbers, and are given as an order of magnitude only. The distribution history of Reign in Blood refers to the American release.
