Thrash metal was built by people competing with each other at close range, and that is not a colourful detail about the scene. It is the mechanism. A dozen bands living inside twenty minutes of each other, watching each other play every week, all trying to be faster, tighter and more frightening than the group who had been on the stage the previous Tuesday, is how a style gets made in thirty months instead of ten years.
Some of that competition was musical and produced records. Some of it was personal and produced interviews. The two are worth separating, because only one of them made anything.
The productive kind
The Bay Area's founding period runs on a rivalry nobody involved would have called one. Exodus were the band Metallica had to beat locally, and Metallica were the band Exodus had to beat once they left; the two shared a guitarist, shared stages and shared an audience that would tell either of them, immediately and to their faces, if a new song was worse than the last one.
The same pressure operated between Slayer and everybody. Reign In Blood in 1986 is a direct answer to a room full of bands who had spent three years getting faster, and it ended the argument so completely that the only available response was to go somewhere else, which is what Dark Angel tried with riff density and what death metal did with the vocal.
Germany ran the purest version. Kreator, Sodom and Destruction emerged within a hundred miles and two years of each other, on the same small labels, with the same audience, and none of them could afford to release a weak record because the other two would put one out that season. The German run from 1985 to 1990 is a three way argument conducted in albums.
A dozen bands inside twenty minutes of each other is how a style gets made in thirty months instead of ten years.
The line-up traffic that fed it
What makes the Bay Area's competition unusual is that the personnel kept moving between the competitors. Kirk Hammett left Exodus for Metallica in 1983 and Exodus carried on. Steve Souza left Legacy for Exodus in 1986 and told Legacy who to hire, which is how Chuck Billy joined the band that became Testament. Robb Flynn founded Forbidden Evil, left before their debut, joined Vio-lence, and then formed Machine Head.
That is a scene where your rival is also your former guitarist and your replacement's recommendation, and it makes the competition intense without making it poisonous. Nobody in that traffic seems to have carried a grudge worth reporting, which is exactly why it stayed productive.
| The rivalry | Kind | What it produced |
|---|---|---|
| Metallica and Exodus, Berkeley | Musical, friendly | The Bay Area style, and a shared guitarist |
| Kreator, Sodom and Destruction | Musical, relentless | Five years of German albums with no weak links |
| Slayer against the tempo | Musical, one sided | Reign In Blood, and the end of the speed race |
| Bay Area and Los Angeles | Regional | Two dialects that refused to converge |
| Anthrax and the seriousness of everybody else | Temperamental | Shorts, jokes, and the genre's best lyrics |
| Metallica and Megadeth | Personal | Forty years of interviews, and two great catalogues |
| The Big Four and everyone below them | Commercial | Resentment, mostly justified |
The famous one
Dave Mustaine was dismissed from Metallica on 11 April 1983, in New York, immediately before the sessions for the first album, and put on a bus back to Los Angeles the same day. He formed Megadeth and spent the next four decades being asked about it in every interview he has ever given.
It is the genre's defining personal rivalry and it has its own long account elsewhere on this site, so the only thing worth adding here is the artistic verdict. It worked. Megadeth exist because a man was angry and had something to prove, Peace Sells and Rust In Peace are the records of somebody proving it, and a great deal of what makes that catalogue technically remarkable comes directly from the refusal to let the thing go.
The rivalry with the neighbours
The competition thrash felt most sharply was not with other thrash bands at all. It was with the music playing four hundred miles south of Berkeley on the Sunset Strip, which had the videos, the record deals, the magazine covers and the audience, and which thrash defined itself against so completely that the definition still holds.
Everything about the genre's presentation is a refusal of that: jeans instead of spandex, no narrative videos, no ballads, no songs about women, a refusal to be photographed doing anything except playing. A great deal of what reads now as authenticity started life as an argument with a specific rival who was winning at the time.
By 1991 both sides had lost to the same third thing, which is the joke at the end of that particular rivalry and which neither camp found funny.
The unproductive kind
Not all of it was useful and it is worth being honest about which parts were not. The Big Four framing, once it hardened, did real damage to bands who were making equivalent or better records: Overkill, Testament, Exodus, Kreator and Sodom all spent the 1990s being described as the tier below four groups whose worst albums are worse than their best ones.
The resentment that produced is understandable and it also curdled. There are interviews from the middle 1990s in which good musicians spend their allotted column inches complaining about somebody else's record sales, and none of that produced a single song.
The other unproductive strand is the purity argument that started when Metallica's Black Album sold in numbers thrash had never approached. Being angry with a band for changing is a legitimate position for a fan; it is a career ending one for a musician, and several bands spent the 1990s defining themselves against Metallica rather than in favour of anything.
What happened when the rivals reformed
The best evidence that the competitive era was over is what the reunions look like. When the Bay Area bands came back, from the 2001 benefit onwards, they came back together, on shared bills, with members guesting on each other's records and Gary Holt eventually playing in Slayer.
Nobody is competing any more, and the records made since are more comfortable for it. That is not a complaint; a group of men in their fifties and sixties who spent forty years in the same business have earned the right to be friendly. But it does explain why the modern albums by these bands, which are frequently well made and well played, do not have the edge the ones from 1986 have. There is nobody in the room who might do it better next Tuesday.
What competition actually did
It set a floor. In the Bay Area between 1983 and 1986, a band could not release a mediocre record without a dozen groups it drank with noticing, and neither could a band in the Ruhr. That is a quality control mechanism no label and no critic has ever matched, and it evaporated the moment the scenes dispersed into national touring schedules.
Which is a large part of why the records of 1993 onwards are weaker than the records of 1986, and it is not because the musicians got worse. They stopped being watched every week by the only people whose opinion frightened them.
That mechanism runs under the whole of where this sits in the story. What the four bands at the top of it actually were, and what the phrase does and does not mean, is The Big Four of Thrash Explained.
