A twenty year old who worked in a record shop in Woodland Hills and wrote a fanzine in his spare time could not find a label willing to put out the bands he liked, so he borrowed money from his mother and made one himself. The compilation he released in June 1982 carried the first recording by a band whose name was misspelled on the sleeve.
That is the founding story of Metal Blade Records and of a substantial slice of American heavy music, and almost every detail of it is smaller and more improbable than the legend suggests.
The fanzine that became a label
Brian Slagel wrote The New Heavy Metal Revue, one of a large number of American fanzines covering British imports for an audience that the mainstream press was ignoring entirely. He worked at Oz Records. He knew the Los Angeles bands because he went to see them, and he knew the British ones because he wrote to them.
The idea for a compilation came from an obvious observation: there were a dozen good unsigned bands in southern California and no way for anybody outside a hundred mile radius to hear them. A compilation album spreads the cost across all of them and gives each a track on a record that shops will stock.
The money came from family, the pressing run was small, and the label existed to release exactly one record. It has now been operating for more than forty years.
What was on it
Ten tracks by ten Los Angeles area bands, including Ratt, Bitch, Malice, Steeler and Cirith Ungol. And in the middle of it, a track called "Hit the Lights" by a band from Los Angeles whose drummer had contacted Slagel because he had read the fanzine.
The name on the first pressing reads Mettallica. The recording is rough even by the standards of the compilation, having been put together in a hurry with a guitarist borrowed for the session. It is the first commercially released Metallica recording, and the misprint is now the most collectable typographical error in metal.
The volumes that followed
The series ran for years and the second and third volumes are where it becomes historically decisive rather than merely lucky.
Metal Massacre II carried Armored Saint. Metal Massacre III carried Slayer, whom Slagel had seen playing an Iron Maiden cover at a party in Huntington Park and had signed more or less on the spot.
Later volumes carried Voivod, Hellhammer, Overkill, Possessed and Fates Warning. Over a decade the series functioned as the closest thing American underground metal had to a scouting system, and the strike rate is remarkable given that the selection process was one man's taste.
| Volume | Year | Notable track |
|---|---|---|
| Metal Massacre | 1982 | Metallica, "Hit the Lights", name misspelled |
| Metal Massacre II | 1982 | Armored Saint |
| Metal Massacre III | 1983 | Slayer |
| Metal Massacre IV | 1983 | Lizzy Borden, Overkill |
| Metal Massacre V | 1984 | Voivod, Hellhammer, Possessed |
| Metal Massacre VI | 1985 | Fates Warning |
How the label actually worked
Not the way a record company works, and this is the part that explains why so much good music came out of it.
There was no budget. Slayer's debut was paid for by the band, out of Tom Araya's wages as a respiratory therapist and a loan from Kerry King's father, because Metal Blade did not have the money to advance. What the label supplied was a catalogue number, a pressing, distribution to the specialist shops, and adverts in the fanzines.
That model, an independent that does the unglamorous work while the band takes the financial risk, is how nearly every important American metal record of the early eighties got made. It is also why the majors could arrive in 1985 and 1986 and simply buy the bands: the independents had done the expensive part and had no way to hold on to anybody.
Why compilations mattered so much
It is difficult to reconstruct now, when hearing an unknown band costs nothing, how hard the problem was that these records solved.
In 1982 a listener who wanted to know what unsigned bands sounded like had three options: go to the shows, know somebody with a tape, or read a description in a fanzine and imagine it. A compilation album put ten of them on one piece of vinyl for the price of one record, in a shop, with a sleeve you could read.
Europe had the same mechanism working at the same time, and the German and British scenes used compilations in exactly the same way. Between the compilations, the fanzines and the postal tape network, an entire international scene was documented and distributed before a single major label noticed there was one.
The tape half of that machinery is dealt with separately, and the British bands the whole thing was modelled on are in NWOBHM Bands Every Thrash Fan Should Know. The full account of the period is in where this sits in the story.
The bands who did not become famous
The compilations are usually remembered for the two or three names that got out, and that is unfair to the records themselves, which were mostly not about those bands at all.
Most of the acts on the early volumes never released an album. Some split within a year. A few made one record on a tiny label and disappeared, and their tracks on these compilations are the only professionally distributed recordings they ever had. That is not a footnote, it is what the series was for: a band with no prospect of a deal got four minutes of vinyl in shops on three continents.
The ones who did continue took very different routes. Ratt went to the Sunset Strip and sold millions. Cirith Ungol stayed obscure for thirty years and were then rediscovered by a generation who found them online. Bitch made records for Metal Blade for years. One compilation, ten bands, and every possible outcome represented.
What Metal Blade became
Still operating, more than four decades later, and still owned by the man who borrowed the money from his mother. That is close to unheard of in the record industry, where independents are usually either bought, folded or reduced to a catalogue.
The catalogue over that period runs from the founding thrash records through most of American death metal, into metalcore, and back around to the modern revival. Whatever else can be said about the label's judgement, it has consistently signed the thing that was about to happen rather than the thing that had just happened, which is a rarer skill than it sounds.
Sources and notes
The first pressing of Metal Massacre is dated June 1982 and carries the misspelling. Volume contents refer to original pressings; several volumes were later reissued with altered track listings. Funding details for Show No Mercy follow the band's published accounts.
