Every account of how thrash reached the shops eventually arrives at a locked door, and behind that door is somebody with money. In 1982 the entire American record industry stood on the wrong side of it. Not one major label in the country believed there was a paying audience for music this fast, this loud and this badly recorded, and the men whose job it was to find new bands had all reached the same conclusion in the same week without ever having to speak to one another. The door was opened instead by a married couple who sold second hand albums off a table at a flea market in New Jersey, and who did it by borrowing against their own house.
Jon and Marsha Zazula had no capital, no distribution and no experience of manufacturing a record. What they had was a stall and a conviction, and between 1982 and 1987 the label they built on those two things put out the first albums by Metallica, Anthrax, Overkill and Testament. Four bands, four debuts, and none of them would have existed in that form without a mortgage on a house in East Brunswick.
Rock 'n Roll Heaven, East Brunswick
Jon Zazula, born in March 1952 and known to everybody in the business as Jonny Z, was a stockbroker's clerk who had gone broke and then gone into records. He and Marsha ran a stand called Rock 'n Roll Heaven at a flea market off Route 18, selling European imports to the sort of teenager who had already worn out everything the local mall stocked. That is a very particular vantage point on a music scene. A label executive sees sales reports six months after the fact; a man behind a table watches which sleeve gets picked up, put down, picked up again and finally bought with money the kid clearly did not have, and he watches it happen on a Saturday afternoon in real time.
What the Zazulas were watching in 1982 was a demand with no supply behind it. The imports moved. Neat and Music For Nations records out of Britain moved. The American labels were selling those same customers nothing at all, and the gap between what the counter wanted and what the industry was willing to press had grown wide enough to drive a company through.
The tape that crossed the country
The tape was No Life 'til Leather, seven songs recorded in California in the summer of 1982 and copied hand to hand until it reached New Jersey, and it reached Zazula in the condition every important demo reaches its buyer in, which is to say fourth or fifth generation and hissing. He listened to it and did the only thing a man with a flea market stall and no money could do: he told everybody. He brought the band east. He put up the fare.
Metallica drove across a continent in the spring of 1983 to record for a company that did not yet exist, on the word of a man who had never made a record. That is the whole of the arrangement, and it is worth pausing on how little sense it made from either direction. Megaforce was founded, by Zazula's own account, with a hundred and eighty dollars.
The second mortgage
Every label that heard the band said no. Zazula took the tape around and collected refusals from people who would spend the next decade explaining that they had always known, and when he had run out of doors he took a second mortgage on his home and used it to fund the record himself. The budget was fifteen thousand dollars. Kill 'Em All was cut in May 1983 at Music America Studios in Rochester, New York, and Megaforce released it that July, catalogue number one, the first record the company ever made.
Consider what was actually being risked there. Not a marketing budget, not a quarter's profit, not a line item somebody in an office would have to justify at a meeting: the house. If Kill 'Em All had sold the eight hundred copies a sensible man would have forecast, the Zazulas would have lost the roof over their heads to a band nobody had heard of, playing music that had no name yet. It did not sell eight hundred copies. It sold, and went on selling, and by the time anybody thought to count it had gone platinum in the United States, though by then it belonged to somebody else. Once the record was out and the band had no money to move on, Zazula sent them fifteen hundred dollars to keep the tour alive.
Kill 'Em All For One
The tour was the second half of the plan and it was as improvised as the first. Zazula also handled Raven, the Newcastle band who had relocated to the United States, and in the summer of 1983 he put the two acts on the road together under a name that told you everything about the operation's sense of humour: the Kill 'Em All For One tour, welded out of the two album titles. Metallica opened. A California band that had existed for two years played its way across America underneath a British band on a bill assembled by a man from a flea market, and the East Coast met thrash for the first time in a series of rooms holding a few hundred people each.
| Year | Band | Record | What it was |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1983 | Metallica | Kill 'Em All | The label's first release, and thrash's first album |
| 1983 | Raven | All For One | US release for the British band Metallica opened for |
| 1983 | Manowar | Into Glory Ride | US release |
| 1984 | Anthrax | Fistful Of Metal | The New York band's debut |
| 1984 | Metallica | Ride The Lightning | Released, then bought out by Elektra the same year |
| 1985 | Overkill | Feel The Fire | The New Jersey band's debut |
| 1985 | S.O.D. | Speak English Or Die | The record that fixed the spelling of mosh |
| 1987 | Testament | The Legacy | The Bay Area's second wave, financed from New Jersey |
Losing the band
Megaforce held Metallica for exactly one more record. Ride The Lightning came out in July 1984, Elektra heard what the rest of the industry had spent two years failing to hear, and by November the album and the band had moved to a major. That is the standard arc and there is no villain in it. An independent with a mortgage and a stall cannot press, ship and promote a band across a continent once that band starts selling in six figures, and the majors know it, and they wait.
Zazula has said plainly that losing them put him into a serious depression, and it is not hard to see why: he had risked the only thing he owned on a record everybody else had refused, been right about it in a way that almost nobody in that industry is ever right about anything, and watched the payoff walk out of the door eighteen months later into an office that had turned the band down flat. Being first is not a business model. It is a temperament, and it is expensive.
What he did next is the part that gets left out of the story. He signed Anthrax and put out Fistful Of Metal in January 1984. He signed Overkill. He put out S.O.D. He took Testament, three thousand miles away in Berkeley, and released The Legacy in 1987. Atlantic came in to distribute the label from 1985 to 1991, which solved the shipping problem without solving the underlying one, and Anthrax's records went out through Island during those years. The Zazulas also ran a management company, CraZed Management, out of the same operation, on the reasonable theory that if you are going to be the only person in the country who believes in these bands you may as well book them as well.
Being first is not a business model. It is a temperament, and it is expensive.
What the label actually proved
Megaforce demolished an assumption rather than a competitor. Before 1983 the industry position on thrash was not that it would sell badly, it was that it was not a market at all, that the audience did not exist in numbers a company could count. One record made by two people with a mortgage broke that argument in half, and every label that moved into the genre afterwards, Combat, Metal Blade, Roadrunner, Noise, moved into a space Megaforce had already proved was occupied.
The label outlived the scene that made it. It went on through the 1990s and beyond with Ministry, Bad Brains and others, a working company rather than a monument. Marsha Zazula died on 10 January 2021 and Jon Zazula died on 1 February 2022, aged 69, and both obituaries led with Metallica, which is fair and also slightly beside the point. The story is not that they found a band. Half a dozen people had heard that demo. The story is that they were the only ones who put their house behind it.
That is the answer to the question the second wave leaves open, and it holds for the whole of the chapter this belongs to: the music was made in California, and the risk was taken in New Jersey. Which raises the obvious question about the geography itself, and that is Why the Bay Area and Not Los Angeles.
