Most accounts of how the pit began start with a band. They should start with a room. Thrash has a founding riff, a founding demo tape and a founding argument about who played fastest, and every one of those was written by musicians. The pit was not. It was built by the people who paid at the door, it spread by imitation rather than by record sales, and by the time the music press noticed it existed it already had a vocabulary, a code of conduct and a casualty list.
It also had an address. The habit crossed out of hardcore and into metal in a handful of clubs where a promoter put both audiences on the same bill, which is why what happened on a low stage in Berkeley matters more to this story than any album does. What follows keeps the documented parts and the scene folklore in separate piles, because forty years of retelling has stirred them together.
Before 1983: fists, hair, and a floor nobody used
Watch footage of a metal audience in 1981 and the striking thing is how still it is. People stand where they are put. They headbang in time, punch the air on the downbeat, play air guitar through the solos and hold lighters up for the slow one. The mass moves as one field of heads, never as bodies travelling through space. At a Judas Priest or Iron Maiden show the floor is somewhere to stand on, and the only people who get onto the stage are the ones being carried back off it by security.
The word headbanger is older than the pit and comes out of a different reflex entirely. The usual account traces it to front row fans beating their heads against the stage at a Led Zeppelin show on the band's first American tour in 1969, at the Boston Tea Party, and it is the kind of story that improves each time somebody tells it. Nobody has ever produced the printed page. Film of Cream's farewell at the Royal Albert Hall in November 1968 already shows the front row doing exactly the same thing, and the dictionaries only date headbanger, meaning a heavy metal fan, to the middle of the 1980s, which leaves the word running about fifteen years behind the habit it names. Motorhead audiences at Hammersmith did it harder and faster and still did it standing on the spot. Speed changed what the music demanded of a crowd. It did not, on its own, teach the crowd what to do about it.
The pogo, the slam and the circle
Punk supplied the first answer and the answer was vertical. The pogo, straight up and straight down with the arms pinned to the sides, is credited to Sid Vicious, who said himself that he came up with it around 1976 at early Sex Pistols shows in London as a way of mocking people who had turned up without belonging. The claim is his own, no particular night has ever been pinned to it, and it has been repeated often enough to harden into a fact without ever quite becoming one. What is beyond argument is the physics. In a packed room with nowhere to go sideways, the only direction left is up.
Southern California turned it horizontal. Between roughly 1978 and 1980, in Huntington Beach, in Long Beach and in whichever Los Angeles clubs would still take the booking, the audiences for Black Flag, Circle Jerks and Fear worked out a shoulder first lateral collision the local press called slam dancing, and out of it came the circle pit: a patch of floor cleared by force, people running its edge almost always counter clockwise, and everybody else pressed into the wall that keeps it a circle. On the other coast Bad Brains were playing faster than anyone alive and drawing a crowd that behaved the same way. None of it reached the weeklies. It reached fanzines, police reports, and club owners who stopped picking up the phone.
Mash it, mash down Babylon
The word arrived by accident. Performing Banned In D.C. around 1979 or 1980, H.R. of Bad Brains shouted mash it, mash down Babylon, and a room full of American teenagers heard the Jamaican inflection as mosh. The mishearing is the best documented part of the whole story. The exact night is not. What followed was a small linguistic partition: by about 1983 metal audiences were calling the slow, heavy, half time sections of hardcore songs mosh parts, while hardcore itself went on calling those same passages skank parts. One riff, two names, depending which door you came in through.
The spelling was then settled by a joke band. S.O.D. released Speak English Or Die on Megaforce on 30 August 1985 with a track called Milano Mosh on it, and because that record went into the collections of thrash kids who had never been within a mile of a hardcore matinee, mosh became the word and that spelling became the standard. Two years later Anthrax put Caught In A Mosh on Among The Living and MTV finished the job. A term coined out of a misheard Rastafarian phrase in a Washington basement was in the mouths of American radio presenters inside eight years.
Small rooms, low stages, no barrier
The pit is a product of architecture as much as of music. A hardcore club stage in 1984 stood a foot or two off the floor, sometimes less. No crash barrier, no photo pit, no gap of any kind: the monitors were the only frontier between the band and everybody else, and the singer's microphone cable ran out into the crowd because that is where the singer spent half the set. Climbing up took one step. Getting down again meant stepping or jumping, and jumping was better.
Metal met all of this on shared bills, booked for money rather than for ideology. A promoter put a hardcore band and a metal band on the same cheap midweek night because each of them drew forty people and eighty people pays the bar. It happened at the Sunday hardcore matinees at CBGB on the Bowery, at L'Amour in Brooklyn, at Fender's Ballroom in Long Beach, at City Gardens in Trenton, at the Stone on Broadway in San Francisco, and at a low ceilinged bar on San Pablo Avenue that has since had more written about it than all of them together. Suicidal Tendencies, D.R.I. and Corrosion of Conformity ran the traffic both ways. Metal kids watched what the room did, went to a metal show the following week, and did it there.
Then there is the code, which nobody wrote down and everybody knew. You pick people up, and that rule is not sentimental, it is mechanical: a body on the floor inside a moving circle is how a night ends in an ambulance. The pit is not a fight, so you hit somebody once and never hit the same person twice. A diver owns his landing and owns whatever happens to whoever is underneath it. If you want no part of it you stand behind the line where the circle stops, and that line is real, unmarked, and visible to every person in the building. Enforcement was the room itself, and when the room failed, the largest man standing in it.
A body on the floor inside a moving circle is how a night ends in an ambulance.
It did not scale
All of that depends on a room of three hundred in which roughly the same forty people are in the pit every week. They know each other by sight. Somebody who kicks a fallen man is put out by the crowd before security has finished crossing the floor. The system has a memory, and the memory is the only thing holding the etiquette up.
| Year | What happened | Where |
|---|---|---|
| 1976 | The pogo, claimed by Sid Vicious at early Sex Pistols shows | London |
| 1978 to 1980 | Slam dancing and the circle pit take shape in hardcore | Southern California |
| 1979 to 1980 | H.R. shouts mash it, mash down Babylon, and the room hears mosh | Washington, D.C. |
| 1983 | Metal audiences on shared bills start saying mosh parts | New York and the Bay Area |
| 1985 | Milano Mosh fixes the spelling on a record metal kids bought | New Jersey |
| 1988 | Two deaths at Monsters of Rock on 20 August change front of stage practice | Castle Donington |
Now put the same behaviour in a hall of twelve thousand. Thrash reached that size fast, through arena tours from 1988 onward and then package bills that filled sheds, and a pit of four hundred strangers has no memory and nobody to answer to. Past a certain size the pit stops being the dangerous part anyway. The danger moves behind it, into the crowd that is not moshing at all, where a forward surge turns several thousand people into a fluid and the pressure at the front has nowhere left to go.
Castle Donington, 20 August 1988
The night that made the industry act was not a thrash show. At Monsters of Rock at Castle Donington on 20 August 1988, in front of 107,000 people standing on ground left soft by days of rain, the audience surged during Guns N' Roses. Alan Dick, who was 18, and Landon Siggers, who was 20, were crushed about fifteen yards from the stage and pronounced dead at hospital. Accounts of the incident describe a crowd collapse that took down around fifty people at the front of the field. The inquest returned a verdict of accidental death and found no contributory factors in the organisation of the event. The festival did not run in 1989.
What followed was an insurance argument rather than a moral one. Public liability premiums, injured fans with lawyers, and venue managers with a clause to satisfy achieved inside a few years what no amount of scolding had managed. Barriers went in. Pit crews were hired to lift divers out over the top and walk them down the side. Signs went up saying no stage diving and door staff were told to eject on the first attempt.
By the middle of the 1990s a large thrash show carried a professional apparatus standing precisely where the low stage used to be, and the thing thrash had borrowed from hardcore survived intact only in rooms small enough to police themselves. The Bay Area's second wave, Testament, Death Angel, Vio-Lence, Forbidden, played to crowds who knew every rule before the first band went on, and inherited an etiquette the venues were already dismantling around them. That is the whole arc, and it belongs inside where this sits in the story: a set of manners invented by a few hundred people on one floor, adopted by a hundred thousand, and then legislated out of existence by the people who had to insure it.
