Strip the hearings and the panic and the moral arguments out of thrash's history and what is left is not a sequence of confrontations with authority. It is a long list of decisions that nobody sensible would have made, taken by people with no money who did not expect any of it to matter, and a surprising number of them turned out to be the reason the genre exists.
Everything below is true and checkable. None of it was planned.
The genre's name came off a fanzine shortlist
Ron Quintana was starting a metal fanzine in San Francisco and had a list of possible titles. He showed it to his friend Lars Ulrich for an opinion. Ulrich looked down the list, recommended Metal Mania, and quietly kept one of the other names for the band he was putting together.
So the most famous name in heavy metal was a magazine title somebody else had thought of first, given away in a conversation between two teenagers, one of whom was doing his friend a favour.
The first record had the name spelled wrong
That band's first commercially released recording appeared in 1982 on a compilation put together by a young man running a label out of Woodland Hills, and the first pressing misspells them. A typesetting error nobody caught, on a promotional compilation for local bands, is now the object every serious collector of this music wants.
A label was founded with a hundred and eighty dollars
Jon and Marsha Zazula sold second hand records off a table at a flea market in New Jersey. They heard a demo, could not persuade anybody to release it, and started a company with, by Jon's own account, a hundred and eighty dollars. When the record needed funding they took a second mortgage on their house and put fifteen thousand dollars into an album by a band nobody had heard of, playing music that did not have a settled name.
The tour that followed was named by welding two album titles together, because the other band on the bill was touring All For One. It went out as Kill 'Em All For One.
The album title is an insult
The record itself was supposed to be called something considerably ruder, with artwork involving a toilet and a blade. Distributors refused it. What the band said about those distributors, in exasperation, became the replacement title, and the label printed it on the cover.
Distributors refused the title. What the band said about the distributors became the title instead.
Two genres were named by accident
Death metal was named on a three song demo tape made by teenagers in the East Bay in 1984. The band was Possessed, the tape was called Death Metal, and the phrase travelled through the tape trading network attached to the cassette until it meant a form of music the band largely stopped playing.
Black metal was named on an album sleeve in 1982 by Venom, as a piece of showmanship, nine years before the music now called that existed. Neither term was coined by a critic, a magazine or a label, and both stuck permanently.
A fourteen year old made one of the era's albums
Death Angel were five Filipino American cousins from Concord who had been playing together since primary school. They paid for their debut themselves, recorded it in Santa Rosa across three days in June 1986, and their drummer, Andy Galeon, was fourteen years old at those sessions. The album contains a ten and a half minute instrumental with a classical passage in the middle of it.
The manager was a grandmother
Debbie Abono had no connection to heavy metal beyond driving her daughters to shows. One of them was going out with the guitarist in Possessed, and Abono ended up agreeing to manage the band on condition that two of its members finished school first. She was in her fifties.
She went on to work with Exodus, Vio-lence, Forbidden Evil, Obituary and Cynic across a career of some twenty five years, and died in 2010 at the age of eighty.
| The fact | The detail |
|---|---|
| A flute won the metal Grammy | 1989, over Metallica. The winner's label advertised the fact |
| Two thirds of Primus came out of thrash | Claypool and LaLonde, via Blind Illusion and Possessed |
| A hip hop producer made the most extreme record of the decade | Rick Rubin, Reign In Blood, 1986 |
| Its label released it anonymously | Geffen left their logo off the sleeve |
| A 1970s arena rock guitarist produced a thrash debut | Ronnie Montrose, Heathen, 1987 |
| A bass player finished an album after his death | Cliff Burton's material became To Live Is To Die, 1988 |
| Mosh is a mishearing | H.R. of Bad Brains shouting mash, heard as mosh |
| Milano Mosh is not about Milan | It is named after Billy Milano, the singer |
| Two future stars left the same school in the same year | Kirk Hammett and Les Claypool, Richmond, 1980 |
| A band bought a film | Metallica bought the rights to Johnny Got His Gun |
A joke band made one of the decade's most influential records
S.O.D. existed because Scott Ian was bored. Anthrax were between commitments, he had been drawing a character in a notebook, and he assembled a band out of whoever was available, including a bass player who had already left Anthrax and a singer who was working in the same building. They wrote the material in a few days and recorded it in about three.
Speak English Or Die came out on Megaforce on 30 August 1985 and did something none of the people involved intended: it put the word mosh, and that spelling, in front of an entire metal audience, and it became one of the founding documents of crossover. A record made as a joke by people killing time settled the vocabulary of a genre.
The rap collaboration nobody asked for, which worked
In 1991 Anthrax recorded a version of Bring The Noise with Public Enemy, whose original they had already been covering live. On paper it is a novelty. In practice a great deal of what happened commercially in the following decade descends from it, and the two bands toured it together, which in 1991 required a certain amount of nerve from both.
The album funded by a hospital job
Slayer's debut was paid for by the band. The money came out of Tom Araya's wages as a respiratory therapist and a loan from Kerry King's father, and Metal Blade put Show No Mercy out on 3 December 1983. The most frightening band of the decade financed itself with a medical salary and a favour from a parent.
One guitarist, three bands, one accident of timing
Robb Flynn was a founder member of Forbidden Evil and left in 1987 before the debut was recorded, though four of its songs are wholly or partly his. He joined Vio-lence, played on two of their three albums, and quit in 1992. The band he formed next released a debut in 1994 that shipped more than four hundred thousand copies and stood as its label's best selling first album until Slipknot in 1999.
And then, thirty six years later
In July 2022 a television programme used a song from 1986 in its finale, staged as a performance by a fictional teenager, and the record entered the American singles chart for the first time in its existence. The band it belonged to had not needed the money since about 1989.
That is the pattern under all of the above and it is the reason the genre is worth writing about carefully. Almost nothing here was strategy. A fanzine shortlist, a misprint, a mortgage, a mishearing, a fourteen year old, somebody's mother with a car: the whole apparatus was assembled out of accidents by people who assumed none of it would last, which is where this sits in the story. What various governments decided to do about it is Where Thrash Metal Was Censored, and Why.
