THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN THRASH

An all-access oral account featuring Slayer's Kerry King, Metallica's Kirk Hammett, Anthrax's Scott Ian, and many more

By Dan Epstein

CAST OF CHARACTERS
Chris Adler, founding drummer, Lamb of God
Chuck Billy, vocalist, Testament
Rick Ernst, producer/director of the forthcoming documentary Get Thrashed
Maria Ferrero, original Megaforce Records publicist; currently runs Adrenaline PR and manages Testament
Lonn Friend, editor of RIP magazine, 1987–1994; author of Life on Planet Rock (Morgan Road)
Kirk Hammett, founding guitarist, Exodus; Metallica lead guitarist, 1983–present
Gary Holt, founding guitarist, Exodus
Scott Ian, founding guitarist, Anthrax and S.O.D.
Kerry King, founding guitarist, Slayer
Jeff Kitts, Eighties fanzine writer and publisher; current managing editor of Guitar World magazine
Dave Mustaine, lead guitarist, Metallica, 1982–83; founding singer-guitarist, Megadeth
Brian Slagel, founder, Metal Blade Records
Jonny Z, founder, Megaforce Records

At the beginning of the 1980s, the U.K. was in the midst of a heavy-metal renaissance, thanks to bands like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Motörhead, and Venom, but the state of American hard rock was a sad one, indeed. With the exception of Van Halen, the big U.S. acts of the Seventies—like Kiss, Aerosmith, and Ted Nugent—seemed old and tired; and in the newly conservative climate of the early Reagan era, Journey, Styx, and REO Speedwagon were the closest thing to “heavy music” that you could hear on the radio.

Out of this foul wasteland came a new kind of music that was fast, heavy, and unapologetically brutal. Its lyrics encompassed everything from the demons of hell to the scumbag politicians of Washington. Its devotees banged their collective heads to the beat with an intensity that no one had ever witnessed before. Some called it “speed metal,” others called it “power metal.” Today we know it as thrash. More than just a passing fad, the movement launched the careers of some of the greatest bands to ever storm a stage—including Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer—and its take-no-prisoners sound and ethic continue to reverberate to this day.

Part I: Jump In the Fire
Like punk rock, thrash metal sprang from a secret society, a movement so underground that most people weren’t even aware of its existence until several years after its birth. San Francisco, New York City, and Los Angeles were where the music developed in the early 1980s, fed by a steady diet of then-obscure records from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and fortified by a haphazard network of tape traders, fanzine writers, college-radio DJs, record stores, and independent record labels. Nobody knew where it was going, but everyone into cutting-edge metal wanted to be part of it.

GARY HOLT How did it all start? That’s always been a really hard one to answer. I think it was due to Ron Quintana and Ian Kallen, who did this radio show, Rampage Radio, on KUSF at the University of San Francisco. They totally got us into the New Wave of British Heavy Metal thing—everything from Tygers of Pan Tang to Venom to Budgie to Diamondhead to Angel Witch.

KIRK HAMMETT Rampage Radio came on at some ungodly time—it started at 1 or 2 in the morning. By the time it came around, me and my friends were all drunk. I remember the first time I heard a Venom song—it was “Live Like an Angel, Die Like a Devil,” and it literally sounded like someone dragging a shovel across the pavement. I was like, Oh, my God, this is a sound I’ve never heard before! It’s kinda shitty—but I like it! After two bottles of vodka, it sounded beautiful to our young, unjaded ears.

BRIAN SLAGEL Lars Ulrich was just a kid who’d moved to L.A. from Denmark, and he was huge into the whole NWOBHM thing, as was I. A friend of mine met him in the parking lot of a Michael Schenker show at the Country Club in Reseda, and he was wearing a Saxon European tour shirt. The next day, the three of us went around L.A., trying to scrounge all the European imports we could find. He was a record collector. We would laugh, because we would go over to his house and he would have a drum set sitting in the corner, not even put together. He was always like, “I’m gonna put a band together!” And we were like, “Yeah, sure you are, Lars!”

SCOTT IAN Rock and Roll Heaven was a booth in this weird indoor flea market in Old Bridge, New Jersey. There’s all these people selling their crap antiques, and then there’s this little booth filled with every rad British record that we’d seen in the magazines but never knew how to get. It was only open on the weekends, so we would drive down and hang out every Saturday, which is pretty much what everyone would do. You’d hang around Jonny Z’s booth, crank metal, and then you’d go back to someone’s house and drink beer and crank some more metal.

JONNY Z My wife, Marsha, and I had our little flea-market operation, and we started promoting concerts. We were shipped an Angel Witch album by mistake, and I fell in love with it, so I started bringing in all the British stuff, like Raven and Diamondhead, because that was blowing my mind. It was very different than what was happening in the States. I wasn’t just touting things—I believed in it. I believed in the cause. It felt like you were in some kind of a revolution.

HAMMETT We [Exodus] kept on looking for music with faster beats. I remember the first time I heard Overkill, which by today’s standards is kind of medium-paced. It was almost the fastest thing I’d ever heard. It was blinding! We kept telling our drummer, Tom Hunting, “Faster beats, man! The faster, the better!” And then when we saw Metallica, we were like, “Oh, my God—this is the American version of all the bands we’ve been listening to!”

KERRY KING I remember seeing Dave Mustaine play with Metallica at the Woodstock in Anaheim, and I was just blown away. He was ripping these killer solos and riffs, and he was just glaring at the crowd—not even looking at his fingers.

SLAGEL Lars and James Hetfield had been jamming, and when they heard about the Metal Massacre compilation I was putting together of L.A. bands, the two of them recorded “Hit the Lights” on a little Fostex cassette, and they had their friend Lloyd Grant, who was a guitar teacher, come in and do the lead. There was a second version with Dave, which they recorded for the No Life ‘Til Leather demo.

RICK ERNST Tape trading was so important to the thrash scene. It was sort of the equivalent of what the Internet is today. It was the way that you found music. It was the way that you were cooler than your friends, because you found a demo tape from Sweden that nobody else had.

KING That was a real cool thing, looking back. I know Metallica’s first demo got passed around, big time. We all had that. Everyone under the sun had that!

HOLT We could have done a highly successful European tour without even having an album out, because of all the tape trading. People would send me their lists of bootlegs, and they’d have, like, 200 different live shows of ours, complete with set list and sound-quality grading. It was awesome—it’s what made bands like us and Metallica.

JONNY Z Somebody came to our flea-market stall with a cassette of Metallica called Live at the Mab—at the Mabuhay Ballroom in San Francisco. It wasn’t very well recorded, but to me it was like the most perfect sound I’d ever heard. We hustled together $1,500 for them to rent a van to come out to the East Coast and play some shows. When they got here, it was like, “We have no money to get back, no place to stay—we’re livin’ with you!”

MARIA FERRERO These bands, these guys, they were family. Venom came over from England and stayed at Jonny and Marsha’s house. Metallica, too. That house definitely needed an exorcism!

IAN Jonny Z asked us, “Hey, are there any extra rooms in that place where you rehearse?” It was the Music Building, a dilapidated old office building in South Jamaica, Queens. It was the only place in Queens where you could jam 24-7, but we didn’t know Metallica would actually be living there.

JONNY Z Living in the Music Building was really horrendous. But [Metallica] couldn’t stay in my house anymore, because they just about burned the place down! They and Venom came home one night with a big thing of venison. I’m sleeping, and all of a sudden I see this fire coming up from downstairs—the whole kitchen was on fire!

IAN Metallica only played a couple of shows in New York when Mustaine was there. I specifically remember them opening for the Rods and Vandenberg at L’Amour in Brooklyn. You gotta remember, nobody knew who Metallica were at the time, except for the small army of people who had their No Life ‘Til Leather demo. We were all down at L’Amour in the afternoon, hanging around and waiting for Metallica to get their chance to soundcheck. The Vandenberg guys were onstage doing theirs. Mustaine was already shitfaced by 3:30 in the afternoon, and he was yelling at Adrian Vandenberg and his band, “Get the fuck off the stage! You suck!” And we were all like, ‘What the fuck, dude? Shhhh!’”

SLAGEL Everybody liked to drink back then and have a good time, but Dave could go much further over the line than anyone else would, and you could see that sooner or later that was going to be a problem. When everything was good, they all got along pretty well. But to this day, Metallica have this attitude that the band is the holy grail, and we all have to do the right thing to make this what it is.

HOLT In the early Metallica days, James sang and played guitar, but Dave did all the talking in between songs, and he was pretty much the focal point. That’s why everybody was so shocked when he was ousted—the people who saw them in the Bay Area back in the very, very beginning saw it as Dave’s band. I mean, James went on to become one of the great frontmen of all time, but at the time he was pretty shy. People go, “Wow, what would have happened if they hadn’t parted ways, and you and Kirk were still together?” I think it could have ended up great for me and Kirk, because we were the best of friends, but James, Lars, and Dave were three very strong-willed people. James and Lars are metal gods, and Dave is, as well. I just think that some things are meant to be.

HAMMETT Metallica took our sound guy, this guy named Mark Whitaker, out to the East Coast with them, and when there were problems with Dave, Mark Whitaker gave Lars our tape. I got a phone call from Mark on April Fool’s Day ’83 about coming out to the East Coast to audition for Metallica. He said, “I’ll send you the tape—learn the songs as quick as you can.” On April 7th, I was on a plane to New York, and by April 12th, we were playing shows on the East Coast. We were of kindred minds, and I just fell right into place. And three weeks later, we were in the studio recording Kill ‘Em All.

Part II: Impact Is Imminent
Recorded in just two weeks on a shoestring budget, 1983’s Kill ‘Em All threw down the spiked gauntlet for thrash metal in America. Not only did the album prove that U.S. bands could play as fast and heavy as their NWOBHM heroes but its success also demonstrated that there was a greater demand for this music than anyone had imagined. From 1983 to 1986, thrash (or “speed metal,” as many called it) evolved at a dizzying pace; every time you went into a record store, it seemed as if new bands, new albums, and new subgenres had sprung up overnight. Meanwhile, major labels were raking in the cash with spandex-clad “hair metal” bands like Quiet Riot and Ratt and didn’t yet know what to make of thrash—which, of course, only amplified thrash’s credibility among young headbangers.

HAMMETT After we recorded Kill ‘Em All and we came back to the Bay Area, there seemed to be 10 or 12 newer bands who were playing faster, really aggressive beats. Bands like Possessed—they were one of the great, unsung metal bands of the Bay Area. They were uber-satanic, and they were all still in high school, which I thought was the greatest thing—the youth corrupting the even younger!

JONNY Z Launching Megaforce was a trip, because we didn’t know what we were doing. But we just learned real fast. We printed up 1,500 copies of Kill ‘Em All, and they went in five seconds. We printed another 3,500, and they went in a week. We just kept on building it and building it, and there was no stopping it. And then Elektra picked [Metallica] up on Ride the Lightning.

FERRERO The most important night in thrash history, I think, was September 3, 1984, when we signed Anthrax to Island, Raven to Atlantic, and Metallica to Elektra, all at one show at the Roseland Ballroom.

IAN We definitely felt that what we were doing was better than everything else—certainly better than the hair-metal stuff coming out of L.A. It’s like, the hero is only as good as the villain he’s gotta fight, and our enemy was that L.A. scene. It was such a catalyst for us to be more in-your-face, more aggressive, and just the polar opposite of what was selling millions of albums at the time. We took that shit serious back then, which seems ridiculous now. I mean, when Paul Baloff from Exodus would say, “Kill posers,” that wasn’t a joke! Like, for real—I’m convinced that he probably threw a couple of posers off a bridge at some point!

HOLT Paul lived and breathed for metal more than anybody I’ve ever known in my life. Nobody was ever more down for the cause. There were many times where he and I would go up to some guy wearing a Ratt shirt and demand that he let us cut it to pieces with our pocket knives—or we’d do it while he wore it. We would cut these little shreds of cloth off and tie ‘em around our wrists, kind of as a badge of honor. If you look at some of those old photos of Paul, he’s got six inches of cloth shreds tied around his left arm—those are all, like, Mötley Crüe T-shirts.

KING That Bay Area scene was crazy. They were way more into it as a whole. I remember playing shows with Exodus where they had guys walking across the crowd on other people’s heads!

HOLT That was just your typical Exodus show in the Bay Area. The first time we played at Ruthie’s Inn in Berkeley, the band that played before us had their mothers there to see ‘em. They’d been up at the front, and they left their drink glasses sitting there. Well, we come on, and all the glasses get broken. There are people just banging their arms on ‘em, and there’s blood all over the front of the stage. There was some girl in the front row who wasn’t that hip to what was going on, but she was really digging the show. Paul put his hand into this puddle of blood and just wiped it on her face. This girl screamed, turned, and ran through the crowd. It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen.

IAN Of all the debut albums—Kill ‘Em All, [Anthrax’s] Fistful of Metal, [Slayer’s] Show No Mercy, [Megadeth’s] Killing Is My Business…, and [Exodus’] Bonded by Blood—I still think Bonded by Blood is the best. Exodus were the shit, man! To me, they were the epitome of a thrash band.

HOLT While Kill ‘Em All’s a brilliant album, you listen to what bands are doing now, and I hear far more Bonded by Blood influence. Kill ‘Em All was still very Diamondhead, very Motörhead. There was zero melody on the album, no guitar harmonies whatsoever. We had full-on melody and harmony going on, as well as all the mayhem. Aside from bands like ourselves, Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax, the U.S. bands playing metal at the time just seemed tired to us. There just wasn’t any energy, compared to what all of us were putting out.

DAVE MUSTAINE When I started Megadeth, people called us a heavy-metal band. And then they started calling us a speed-metal band. “Hey, we’re not speed-metal!” “Well, then you’re thrash-metal!” “No, we’re not thrash-metal—we’re Megadeth!” If anything, the one name Megadeth should have gone under is jazz-metal. But then we would have had to stand there in one spot, doing heroin all night. Oh, wait, didn’t we do that? I think some of us did do that!

ERNST Dave Mustaine’s fingerprints are definitely all over thrash metal. He’s important beyond what words can even say. Not only was there the Dave connection with Metallica, but Kerry King of Slayer also played in Megadeth for a short time. With Megadeth, Dave took his guitar playing to heights that had just never been seen before. Killing Is My Business… And Business Is Good was so fast—his rhythm playing was like the lead playing of most other guitarists.

KING If I’m not mistaken, I played the first five Megadeth shows. To this day, I’m a Mustaine fan. I don’t really care for the guy, but I will never take anything away from his playing, and I was flattered that he would even think of me in the same fucking terms to play onstage with him. I had fun, and I think Dave would have liked me to leave Slayer, but I never really thought about it. I mean, while I was playing with Megadeth, I remember hearing [Slayer guitarist] Jeff [Hanneman] working on the riff to “At Dawn They Sleep,” and I’m thinkin’, Man, I can’t wait to be workin’ on this shit! I was so excited about what was gonna be [Slayer’s 1985 album] Hell Awaits.

CHRIS ADLER I love Metallica, but in the early days, metal was so competitive: You picked a band, and that was your band, and fuck all the other bands—and I was definitely on Team Megadeth. I just identified with the speed and technicality of the Megadeth stuff. That’s who I wanted to be.

HAMMETT After Kill ‘Em All came out, we got into this whole wave of more extreme punk bands like Charged GBH and Discharge. One day, Cliff Burton walked in and was like, “Hey, man, there’s this band called the Misfits!” Earth A.D. is a total thrashed-out album, and it came out the same year as Kill ‘Em All. They were coming from a completely different place, but somehow we both met in the middle.

IAN At this point, moshing and stage diving at the metal shows was already happening. I had already been going to New York hardcore shows, and I would invite all my friends from bands like Murphy’s Law and Agnostic Front to come down to the Anthrax shows, and slowly but surely that “crossover” thing started.

JEFF KITTS For a while there, the hardcore and metal scenes in New York started merging in a weird way. CBGB started having metal matinees, even though that was the punk capital of the world. And then you had the crossover bands like D.R.I. and C.O.C., who were really exciting to us.

ERNST I think S.O.D. is right up there with Suicidal Tendencies, D.R.I., and C.O.C. in terms of introducing hardcore to metal kids. That one album, 1985’s Speak English or Die, had enough metal in it and enough hardcore in it to please both sides of the fence. It was just incredibly heavy. None of those other crossover bands were as heavy as S.O.D. Them, Nuclear Assault, and Anthrax were the three bands that said, “Metal isn’t the only thing out there—there’s hardcore, too!”

IAN [1985’s] Spreading the Disease was taking forever to finish, and I had a lot of down time, so I started drawing this comic-book strip about a zombie who hates everybody because he’s dead. I started writing songs based on some of the comic-strip ideas, these crazy 90-second songs like “Kill Yourself.” After about nine or 10 songs, I called [original Anthrax bassist Dan] Lilker. I was like, “Hey, I’m up in Ithaca doing a record, and I’ve been writing these weird fucking hardcore songs!” Danny came up to Ithaca, we wrote 10 more songs in two or three days, and that’s how S.O.D. was born.

Part III: Set the World Afire
1986 was the golden year for American thrash. Though still very much an underground movement, the music was becoming more popular—and better—than ever. ‘86 saw the release of three of the genre’s defining albums: Metallica’s Master of Puppets, Megadeth’s Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying?, and Slayer’s Reign in Blood, all of which would help push thrash into the mainstream consciousness. But the year also brought its share of bad news to the thrash community—first with Paul Baloff’s ouster from Exodus and then with the death of Cliff Burton in Metallica’s tragic bus accident.

HAMMETT I remember when we were getting songs together [for Master of Puppets] and thinking, Wow, this is really sounding good! But we were short a couple songs. And then, the last two songs that came together were “Damage, Inc.” and “The Thing That Should Not Be.” By that point, we had been playing together for a few years, we’d toured a ton, we knew each other musically and personally. Everybody was contributing amazing ideas, and it was just a culmination of all the right spots and all the right notes at the right time. But I don’t think any of us had any idea that it would stand the test of time 20 years later, that people would be heralding this album as a breakthrough.

KITTS Metallica were on the road with Ozzy for much of that year. We went to see them at Nassau Coliseum in Long Island, and we were going there to see Metallica—at that time, we couldn’t have cared less about Ozzy anymore. Ozzy was so ’80–’81 for us.

HAMMETT Going out on that Ozzy tour really made a difference, because all of a sudden we were playing Master of Puppets to a pretty mainstream audience. Your typical Ozzy fan at the time might not have gotten Metallica, but two or three years later, they were all saying, “Yeah, I saw Metallica with Ozzy, and they were great! They blew away Ozzy! I knew they would!”

ERNST Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying? is, to my mind, the definitive Megadeth album, because they took the speed, they took the heaviness, and they combined it with some incredible songs. “Peace Sells” was just an incredible video, and in some ways it helped break them out. And MTV News used the bass line from “Peace Sells” for years! Don’t know if Dave got any royalties from it, but…

ADLER I remember when Megadeth was coming ‘round to D.C. on the Peace Sells record. The Washington Post printed the lyrics to “Black Friday” [about a sadistic mass murderer]—and my parents saw it and ripped up my tickets!

KITTS Most of us in the New York scene had had the advance tape of Reign in Blood for a good month before it even came out. There was no record in our lives that ever had that sort of impact on us. That 28-minute tape was like absolutely nothing you’d ever heard, and it actually changed the way we thought about everything, music and otherwise.

KING Reign in Blood was just our next 10 tunes. But for the time it came out, no one had ever heard anything like that. Even though we’d been playing fast and riffing our asses off [on the earlier Slayer records], nobody could hear the ferocity because it wasn’t mixed correctly. So with [producer] Rick Rubin coming in, and getting a bigger budget to get a better sound, and then taking the reverb out so that the entire thing just bludgeons you in the forehead—it just stands out for the time, I think.

HOLT By ’86, Paul was goin’ through some rough times. He was living in the Exodus rehearsal room, and his shit wasn’t very together. Paul, for all his onstage brilliance, had horrible timing as a singer. He’d have a really hard time coming in on time or remembering lyrics. There was one line on Bonded by Blood, which shall remain nameless, which was actually sung by John Volaitis, our engineer, because Paul just struggled and struggled and struggled on it. We just didn’t think we’d be able to get the next album done with him. We figured we’d still be doing vocal tracks today, you know?

CHUCK BILLY Steve Souza [a.k.a. “Zetro”], who used to sing for Legacy, which was what Testament was called at the time, left the band to join Exodus. I was playing in a band that was more like Dokken, more melodic singing and stuff. But then my brother Andy was like, “You should try out for this band.” I got the Legacy demo, and I was like, Holy smokes! These guys can write some killer songs, and that guitar player’s amazing! Alex [Skolnick] was 17 years old, and I was like, Man, that kid can play! That’s when I realized, This is the style of music I should be playing!

FERRERO One day, we got a package at Megaforce from a band called Legacy. I put it on, and it was so catchy and so tasty and so fucking cool. I drove Jonny and Marsha up a wall—he didn’t get it at all, but I loved it and kept playing it. Finally, he said, “Okay, I’ll sign this band.” They had to change their name, because there was some jazz band called Legacy. [S.O.D. frontman] Billy Milano came up with Testament.

BILLY Megaforce to me, that was it—I wanted to be with the guys who found Metallica, the guys who had Anthrax and S.O.D., all my faves. Ferrero got Jonny and Marsha to come out to California to see us. I remember the day we auditioned for them. They were all tired and bummed and worn out, because Cliff [Burton] had been killed the night before. They told us the whole story, and it just floored us—we couldn’t believe it. And then we had to play three songs for them for the audition, and it was just the saddest audition you ever heard. They said, “Okay, you got a deal,” and we were like, “Right on!” but it was such a sad day.

JONNY Z I remember it all too well. I went to see Testament at their music space on the other side of the Bay, where all the bands rehearsed. As I’m going down the hall to Testament’s room, all I heard from every room I passed was [Metallica song] “Pulling Teeth (Anesthesia)”—everyone was playing Cliff’s solo. And I remember thinking, Shit, he’s not even dead 24 hours, and look at this!

HOLT Cliff was the guy with these big bell-bottom jeans on at a time when the rest of the world had theirs pegged ankle-tight. He’s got his Morley wah, and his bass tone is all distorted, and he’s just soloing out and going crazy and banging like a madman. But he’s also the one who taught James everything James knows about harmony and melody, because Cliff was a genius at that stuff. The sad thing is, after all these years, anyone who plays bass for Metallica is still filling Cliff Burton’s shoes. Jason [Newsted] was amazing, but Cliff was one of a kind. There was nobody like him.

Part IV: And Major-Label Deals for All
Cliff Burton’s tragic death seemed to leave a gaping void not only in his own band but also in thrash metal in general. During the bassist’s tenure in Metallica, his gritty, no-bullshit attitude set the tone for the entire movement; after his untimely demise, most thrash bands began to veer toward a slicker, more technically proficient aesthetic. Even Metallica, after breaking in new bassist Jason Newsted—formerly of Arizona thrashers Flotsam and Jetsam—on 1987’s rough-and-ready $5.98 EP, Garage Days Re-Revisited, would stretch their epic arrangements to the breaking point with 1988’s double-length …And Justice for All. Anthrax, on the other hand, went against the grain with their rap-influenced, platinum-selling 1987 single, “I’m the Man.” Ditto for Slayer, who released the doomy South of Heaven the following year. Ironically, the period immediately following Burton’s passing would also see thrash metal reach its pinnacle of critical acclaim and commercial success. From 1987 to 1991, thrash was big business, attracting the attention of MTV’s Headbangers Ball and sending countless major-label reps on the futile search for “the next Metallica.”

HAMMETT Things did kind of change after Cliff’s death. Even our sound changed. On …And Justice for All, we kind of fell prey to that whole virtuosic, late-Eighties thing that was happening, that first wave of shredder guitar players, like Yngwie [Malmsteen], Tony McAlpine, Steve Vai, and Joe Satriani. All of a sudden, everyone wanted to be progressive and show off their abilities. Somehow, just playing fast and heavy took a back seat to that.

ERNST Anthrax certainly were far ahead of their time, in terms of bringing elements of rap into their music. Whether it was “I’m the Man” or “Bring tha Noise” [the band’s 1991 collaboration with Public Enemy], they were the first band to really do that.

IAN For every time we would go outside the box, I’m sure there were probably as many people who got pissed off by it as loved it. As big as “I’m the Man” was, we kind of alienated a whole portion of our audience that was into the more extreme stuff like Slayer, Celtic Frost, and Possessed. They were like, Among the Living’s really cool, but fuck them—why are they doing a rap song?

KING South of Heaven was the only one where we went in with a predetermined notion of what we wanted to do. We didn’t want to play fast—not because we were burned out on it but because we needed something to put into the live set to make it more of a rollercoaster ride than a facial bludgeoning. We also did it because we knew no one would ever expect it.

IAN From ’83 to the end of ’87, things were just moving and happening so unbelievably fast. We started the Among the Living tour in May of ’87, playing clubs. But in December ’87, we came back to the States for a three-week run with Exodus and Celtic Frost. We were playing 3,000- to 5,000-seat halls, and I remember standing onstage at the Aragon in Chicago, which was sold out—5,500 people—watching Celtic Frost open the show and going, Holy fuck! Just six months ago, we were playing to 800 kids, and three years ago, we couldn’t even get a gig! It was the first realization of, Wow, people fucking love this music! This scene really is happening, and it is important, and the bands are great, and people care!

HOLT By this time, there was a whole second wave of bands coming out of the Bay Area thrash scene, like Testament, Death Angel, Forbidden, and VIO-LENCE. They all started out as kids watching our shows, but they put their own stamp on it.

LONN FRIEND You could see that the world was ready to embrace this music on a bigger scale when …And Justice for All came out. And then, when they made the “One” video [which featured scenes from the 1971 anti-war movie Johnny Got His Gun, about a WWI soldier who has his arms, legs, and most of his face blown off by a mortar shell]… Metallica’s always been conscious of not doing things the way other people do them. So if they are going to make their debut rock video, they’ve gotta come from off the fringe. It’s not gonna be like a Poison video with girls and whipped cream!

HAMMETT I knew we were onto a good thing when I saw the “One” video come on MTV at, like, 11:30 in the evening; I watched it, and afterwards, the VJ—I think it was Adam Curry—came on and said, “Wow, that’s a real bowl of rainbows!”

IAN The original Headbangers Ball grew along with the bands, at least during the glory years of, like, ’87 to ’89. We headlined the Headbangers Ball tour in ’89: It was Anthrax, Exodus, and Helloween, and it was an arena tour.

HOLT When [Exodus’ 1987 album] Pleasures of the Flesh came out, we were playing big venues, selling out shows. And then when “Toxic Waltz” came out in ’89 with the whole Headbangers Ball tour, that’s when it blew up for us. That was one of the most fun tours I’ve ever done. We played Anthrax in softball and kicked the shit out of them! I will never let Scott live that down. The score was 21–12, same as the Rush album!

ERNST Testament were like a second-generation band. But their third album, [1989’s] Practice What You Preach, was huge. They looked like they were about to bust out and be the next Metallica, and then the whole scene just fell apart. They put out [1990’s] Souls of Black after Practice What You Preach, and that’s one of the examples I’d use of thrash running its course: They were amazing, they were cool, but then they put out an album that was not as good as their previous stuff.

BILLY With Souls of Black, we were offered the Clash of the Titans tour in Europe with Slayer and Megadeth and Suicidal Tendencies, but the record company said, “We’re not gonna give you tour support unless you guys have a new record out.” So we literally wrote and recorded the record in 10 weeks, start to finish, just kind of whipping out songs fast as we could. I think if we had took a little more time with it, it might have been a little better, but for the time we spent on it, I thought there was some good stuff there. But it was either write a record, or miss that great tour!

KING The year before the Clash, we’d headlined the L.A. Sports Arena with only Testament supporting, and we came within 100 of selling it out. That was cool! I took more pride in that than the Clash, because that had three giant bands—and a fourth band that turned out to be bigger than any of us, Alice in Chains.

ERNST When you look back to 1991’s U.S. Clash of the Titans tour, that was probably the height of thrash, but it was also the end of thrash because you had Alice in Chains opening up. As much as I liked Alice in Chains, I remember sitting at Madison Square Garden thinking, Okay, this is cool, but why isn’t Overkill or Death Angel on this bill? And then, before I could even finish my thought, Nirvana and grunge come along, and it’s all over for most of the bands!

Part V: Countdown to Extinction
With 1991’s multiplatinum Metallica, a.k.a. “The Black Album,” Metallica vaulted themselves forever out of the thrash genre and simply became the biggest hard-rock band in the world. In retrospect, the group timed its stylistic transition perfectly: Just a few weeks after Metallica debuted on the Billboard charts, Nirvana released Nevermind, and thrash metal suddenly became yesterday’s news. Journalists and A&R scouts alike caught the first plane to Seattle to try and cash in on the hot new “grunge” movement, while thrash found itself relegated to the same dumpster as its nemesis, hair metal. The more established acts managed to soldier on, but the twin tide of media indifference and major-label ignorance proved too much for most thrash bands to swim against.

SLAGEL Major labels ruined it. Before grunge came along, metal had become so cool that every major label had to go out and sign a bunch of metal bands. They had no idea of what this music was, what to do with it. They had no real fans at the labels. They just knew that something was happening, so any band that was selling a bunch of records got offered these huge major-label deals. The scene went from being a really cool, genuine scene, to being a huge, corporate-metal, gargantuan thing that was horrible.

JONNY Z All these other bands were coming out, and they weren’t as good as the masters. And it just got to the point where it was getting really stale.

BILLY At the time, there was almost 200 stations across the country that would play metal. And then, just, like, overnight, it went down to, like, 20 stations. Heavy metal was a bad word, you know?

SLAGEL It was such a huge backlash. Thrash got lumped in with hair metal, Poison, and all that other garbage, and that kind of ruined it for everybody. It’s funny, because Metal Blade did marketing for a lot of those grunge bands—Faith No More, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice in Chains. I knew those guys, and they all were huge fans of metal. But they couldn’t say it to the press. They could only talk about their “cool” influences!

MUSTAINE Was the rug pulled out from under us? That’s a good way to put it, but there never really was a rug. That would imply that someone had laid down a carpet for us, but we’d been walking on broken glass the whole time. I look at it like this: When the grunge scene started, it just showed the lack of loyalty of a lot of the fair-weather fans that were there in the Eighties, and it made me understand that your core audience is a handful of your overall sales.

HOLT When Capitol dropped Exodus [after 1992’s Force of Habit], it was the best thing we could have hoped for, except that I was tired of doing it. We could have easily gone back to being a bigger fish on a small label, but it felt like a job, and I just didn’t want to do it anymore.

ERNST To be honest, I think it was time for a change. People had played thrash as hard and as fast as they could, and bands were looking to do different things. Metallica’s Black Album slowed it down a bit, and it was a lot different than …And Justice for All. You look at the Anthrax albums around that time—when they moved from Island to Elektra—[original singer] Joey Belladonna was leaving, and [his replacement] John Bush was coming in. They had slowed down and become almost more of an old-school metal band.

FRIEND Musically and message-wise, I always thought Anthrax got stronger with John Bush. [1993’s] Sound of White Noise may be, song for song, the strongest Anthrax record. But it’s not remembered now, because of the climate in the music industry at the time it came out.

IAN The first sense we had of anything on the negative side wasn’t until late ’94, after the whole Sound of White Noise tour cycle was done, because even that record was huge for us. Elektra had gone through a huge shakeup, and everyone we’d worked with over a two-year period was gone, and the new regime wasn’t thrilled about having us on their roster. They were straight-up like, “We would never have signed you, and we don’t want to release your next record.”

ADLER By ’94, other than replacing the records you’d already worn out, it was tough to find new thrash stuff to listen to. Now, as I look back, there were still good bands out there trying to do it, but it was just so shunned. Nobody cared. At the time, it seemed like everything had dried up, where in reality the support for it had dried up. That’s why [Burn the Priest, Lamb of God’s original incarnation] started jamming in the first place—because we wanted to hear some new thrash, and we couldn’t buy it anywhere.

IAN If Elektra had been behind [1995’s] Stomp 442 like they were behind Sound of White Noise, Stomp would have probably been another gold record, but they just walked away. We were able to get out of our deal, and we walked with our masters. They even had to pay us for the third record, which we never made for them. But the damage was done, because by ’96–’97, the whole music world had changed. We were out there looking for a new record deal, and people were like, “Oh, Anthrax? That’s an Eighties band.” We were like, Hey, this shit’s still big—Pantera had a No. 1 record recently, Metallica’s still huge, and Megadeth’s still kickin’ ass! But everyone was like, “Yeah, but your last record only sold 100,000 copies. We’re not interested.”

FRIEND Pantera really were in line to be the next Metallica, but they chose to stay true to their Texas metal. They just had to write their “Enter Sandman,” but they consciously stepped away from it.

IAN From ’96 all the way through ’02, it was a really hard, hard time for this band, and I think Megadeth and Slayer had their hard times, too. And truthfully, if it wasn’t for Pantera to be the one band of our ilk still flying that flag in the Nineties, the whole thing could have died. But Pantera took us on tour. They took Slayer on tour. They did everything they could to keep that scene from going away.

KING We kept going along. Our shows were smaller, our album sales were smaller, but not to the point where we couldn’t still succeed and be Slayer. Stuff like we were doing was so real and so street, it stuck around.

Part VI: Epilogue
Like Godzilla lying in suspended animation under some desolate arctic ice flow, American thrash metal kept a low profile for the second half of the Nineties and the first few years of the new century, biding its time while nu-metal enjoyed its 15 minutes in the spotlight. But the last few years have seen thrash return with a vengeance, spearheaded by a new generation of bands like Lamb of God, Shadows Fall, Killswitch Engage, Trivium, and Chimaira—who in turn are reverently shining the spotlight back on such headbanging forefathers as Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer, Exodus, and Testament, all of whom are still alive and killing.

KING I kind of forecasted it when Disturbed and Godsmack started getting popular. People get into hard rock—soft metal, so to speak—and then they outgrow it, and they need more. It’s like a drug. They need the faster, they need the heavier. They need the band that sings about things you’re not supposed to talk about. And it’s gonna bring ‘em right down Slayer Boulevard.

HAMMETT It’s great to see that thrash wasn’t just some passing fad, which it really did seem like when grunge came around, and then when the whole rap-metal/nu-metal thing came around. But now we’re in the new millennium, and metal’s back on track!

MUSTAINE Thrash endures because we’re the disenfranchised youth of America, and somebody has to play the music that will soothe the savage beast in all of us.