The received answer is one word long and it is wrong. Grunge did not kill Bay Area thrash. Grunge arrived at the funeral, took the photographs and got the blame, and the actual causes had been working away underneath the scene for three or four years before anybody in Seattle sold a record. By the time Nevermind reached the shops in September 1991, half the county's bands were already broken, exhausted or unrecognisable, and the machinery that had built them had been dismantled some time earlier.
What follows is the honest version: what happened, in what order, and which of it was anybody's fault.
The endings, in sequence
Possessed went first and went early, finished by 1987, and their singer Jeff Becerra was shot in 1989 in an attack that left him paralysed. Death Angel were stopped by a tour bus crash in Arizona in 1990 while they were touring Act III; Andy Galeon was critically injured, needed more than a year to recover, the band lost the Clash of the Titans support slot and had come apart before he was well.
Testament survived and paid for it in pieces: Alex Skolnick left in 1992 to play jazz, which cost the band the exact thing that had made it distinctive, and the records of the mid 1990s pushed towards a heavier and darker sound that had nothing to do with 1987. Vio-lence lost Robb Flynn in 1992 and stopped the following year. Exodus put out Force Of Habit in 1992 and split in 1993. Forbidden kept going the longest, through Distortion in 1994 and Green in 1997, and then stopped as well.
Read that as a list of dates and the pattern is obvious. The collapse is spread across 1987 to 1993 and its causes are individual: an assault, a crash, a guitarist who wanted to play something else, a singer poached by a better offer. No single event did this. A dozen unrelated small disasters happened to a scene that had no slack left in it.
What grunge actually did
The Seattle story is real, it is just narrower than the legend. What changed in 1991 and 1992 was not the audience's taste but the record industry's shopping list. Labels that had signed thrash bands on the theory that heavy music sold now had a different kind of heavy music that sold considerably better, needed no double kick drum and came with a press narrative attached. Contracts were not renewed. Tour support dried up. Bands in the middle of a record found their A and R man had been moved.
The audience did not evaporate; that part of the myth does not survive contact with the touring receipts from Europe, where the same bands kept playing to the same crowds throughout. What evaporated was American commercial infrastructure, and a band whose income depends on that infrastructure dies whether or not anybody has stopped liking it.
Metallica compound the confusion, because the biggest band the county ever produced left the genre commercially in August 1991 with a record that sold in numbers thrash had never approached. Every label in America drew the obvious conclusion, which was that the money was in the direction Metallica had gone, and the bands who could not or would not follow were left holding a style the industry had just decided was a phase.
The audience did not evaporate. American commercial infrastructure did, and a band whose income depends on it dies whether or not anybody has stopped liking it.
The room and the rent
The deepest cause is the least discussed, because it is about property rather than music. The whole scene had been built on two things being free or nearly free: stages that would take an unknown band, and space to be loud in. Both were gone by the middle of the 1990s.
Ruthie's Inn ran as a metal room only until 1988. The club circuit thinned through the same years, squeezed by licensing, insurance and the simple arithmetic of the arena tour, which had turned the three hundred capacity room from a band's living into a courtesy date. And then the Bay Area's rent, which had been the quiet subsidy under everything, began the climb it has never stopped. The garage in El Cerrito, the shared house, the cheap rehearsal room in a warehouse: those had made a teenage band possible on part time wages, and by the end of the 1990s they had been priced out of existence.
That is why nothing quite like the 1983 scene has happened in the Bay Area since. The bands could be replaced. The conditions could not.
| Band | When it stopped | What stopped it |
|---|---|---|
| Possessed | 1987 | Internal collapse; Becerra shot and paralysed in 1989 |
| Death Angel | 1991 | The 1990 tour bus crash and its aftermath |
| Vio-lence | 1993 | Robb Flynn left in 1992 for Machine Head |
| Exodus | 1993 | Label and line-up attrition after Force Of Habit |
| Testament | Did not stop | Skolnick left in 1992; the band changed shape instead |
| Forbidden | 1997 | Outlasted the market by four years, then ran out |
11 August 2001
The scene came back on one night, for the worst possible reason. Chuck Billy of Testament had been diagnosed with a germ cell seminoma, and Chuck Schuldiner of Death was also being treated for cancer, and a benefit concert for the two of them was put on at the Maritime Hall in San Francisco on 11 August 2001 under the name Thrash of the Titans. All 2,300 tickets sold.
What the bill turned into was an inventory of everything the county had lost. Heathen reformed for it. So did Death Angel, ten years after the crash. So did Vio-lence, without Flynn, who declined. So did Forbidden Evil, and Sadus, and Legacy, which is to say Testament under the name it had used in 1983, and Exodus played as well. Billy Milano of S.O.D. compered.
Nobody had planned a revival. What happened is that several hundred musicians and 2,300 people found themselves in a room together and remembered what the thing had been, and a number of those bands simply did not stop again afterwards. Death Angel in particular date their second career from that night. Chuck Billy recovered and Testament are still working. Schuldiner died on 13 December 2001, four months after the show.
What survived, and what it is now
Exodus reformed and have kept a catalogue going since Tempo Of The Damned in 2004, with Gary Holt somehow also filling in for Jeff Hanneman in Slayer for the better part of a decade. Testament never truly went away and Skolnick came back to them. Death Angel have been continuously active since 2001. Forbidden returned for a spell. Vio-lence came back at the end of the 2010s. Heathen are on their third life. Machine Head, which is Vio-lence's guitarist and a completely different set of ideas, became the biggest thing any of these people did after 1990.
What did not come back is the arrangement itself: a dozen bands inside twenty minutes of each other, garages that cost nothing, four rooms that would book anybody, and no expectation whatsoever of being signed. Those conditions produced the entire style in about thirty months and have not been reproduced anywhere since, which is the argument running through where this sits in the story. The full roll call of who was there, from the famous names down to the bands who made one record, is Bay Area Thrash Bands.
