Whiplash: the Rise of Thrash

SLLLAYERRRRRRRRRR!

It isn’t often I get into a major heavy metal mood, but this year, perhaps as an antidote to the saccharine ubiquity of Christmas carols, I’ve found myself completely immersed in not just metal but the hardest of the hard, the early albums of the whole crossover/thrash movement.  It’s put me in a reflective mood about the beginnings of thrash and what a strange and alien beast it was to me at first.  As I’ve repeatedly asserted in this blog, punk and metal were anathema to one another to me and my friends in Southern California the early 80’s.  The divide between punk and metal was a deep one, and wasn’t just musical/cultural, it was economic and geographic in Southern California in the early 80’s.  Punk and new wave were the sounds of the wealthier beach communities, while heavy metal was the sound of the lower middle class inland kids who were bused to the better beach schools.  In the accelerated high school program I belonged to (where I was in turn bused to a much worse school near downtown Long Beach, CA, for part of the day before returning to my “home” high school) there was only one heavy metaler kid, a guy named Bill Adams.  My friends and I, even though we were dedicated new wavers, actually liked Bill a lot; he was funny and cool in the sense that he was comfortable enough in his own skin to be proud of his adherence to heavy metal music. 

(Of course, there weren’t many true punkers in my AP courses either; nearly all of the true punkers at either of the high schools I attended were socioeconomically even worse off than the lower middle class metal kids; most came from broken families and lived in cheap apartments in the fringe areas of Long Beach.  Of course, the major exception here was the fact that the three best looking, most gorgeous and lusted after girls at my high school were tall model types who were into punk.  I believe I’ve already mentioned in a previous blog my one brush with these girls, when I was drunk and my ride abandoned me at a high school party and the party got raided by the police and these three girls gave me a ride home and somehow knew where I lived, a fact that I found, and still find to this day, oddly arousing.)

There was a very small list of heavy metal songs it was acceptable to like.  “Mental Health” by Quiet Riot was one of them, perhaps because in the video for this song the person wearing the iconic mask in the concert footage looked more like a punker than a metaler.  Another acceptable song was “Panama” by Van Halen, again partly, perhaps, because of the video, which in this case was goofy and funny.  A third song that I think more people liked than would admit was “Photograph” by Def Leppard.  I certainly liked it, though I would never admit it; the guitar riff at the beginning was extremely catchy and the dual guitar attack throughout the song was really awesome. 

One thing about heavy metal that perhaps an outside observer like myself can appreciate almost more than a true fan is how exponentially it grew.   While it obviously had lots of antecedents, heavy metal burst forth as a strange new entity with Black Sabbath’s first album.  Many bands had been migrating toward a heavier, louder sound in the late 60’s, but nearly all of these bands (such as Cream, the Yardbirds, and Humble Pie) still were playing a heavy or amplified take on American blues.  Sabbath was the first band to break almost completely from this blues tradition, and to me this is the major hallmark of true heavy metal; it’s NOT simply louder blues, it comes from a completely different place sonically and particularly lyrically.  Specifically, the use of the tritone, the so-called “doom chord” or diabolica in musica, gave them more in common with medieval classical music than with blues.  In some ways their first album sounded more like Stravinsky and Hildegard of Bingen than John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters.

Lyrically of course Sabbath introduced another innovation:  song lyrics that focused on dark and negative imagery, particularly war (“War Pigs”), negative emotions (“Paranoid”), and most particularly on evil and satanic concepts.  “Black Sabbath”, the first song on their debut album, was the first song to really baldly evoke Satanism and devil worship in popular music, a theme that Sabbath (and of course their many musical descendants) would return to often across their storied career.  It’s difficult to understand today how radical this was at the time; the 60’s had just ended in the paroxysm of Altamont and Manson, but most people were still floating along on the positive vibes of peace, love and flower power.  This is still one of my all-time favorite songs because it’s such a stark and extreme break sonically and lyrically from everything else of that time.  Sabbath had taken a giant step forward toward what would be heavy metal.

If Sabbath established the basic blueprint—music that was loud, heavy, and dark—Judas Priest codified it.  With the huge exception of “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming”, which was another quasi-acceptable heavy metal song among me and my friends in high school, I was never much of a Judas Priest fan.  But over the years as I’ve gone back and re-explored their canon I’ve come away ever more impressed at their influence on heavy metal.  Priest added three key ingredients to the Sabbath stew of volume, heaviness, and darkness. First, Priest was one of the first heavy metal bands to write songs that celebrated what would become the heavy metal lifestyle—songs about motorcycles and speed (“Heading Out to the Highway”), law breaking (“Breaking the Law”, duh), rebellion (“Hellbent for Leather”, “Living After Midnight”, “Running Wild”), and heavy metal itself (“Metal Gods”, “Rock Forever”).  Second, whereas, with notable exceptions such as “Paranoid”, Sabbath primarily mined a sonic landscape centered on slowness and sludginess, Priest was one of the first to add speed to the heavy metal repertoire, and furthermore added Rob Halford’s multi-octave, operatic range to the metal vocal palette as well.  And third and arguably most important, Rob Halford developed the whole look of heavy metal based on leather, studs, and S&M imagery (which ironically for such a macho genre came from his homosexual lifestyle). 

But with the exception of Priest and their continental counterparts the Scorpions, by the late 70’s heavy metal was starting to languish.  The godfathers of metal, Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Rainbow, etc., had broken up, mellowed, or undergone major personnel changes, and were releasing albums that had less punch and impact.  However, another generation of musicians was surging into the fore, particularly in England.  The New Wave of British Heavy Metal, or NWOBHM, started at this time as a reaction to the stagnation of metal in England.  These bands hewed to the sonic formula of Priest but added the rawness and DIY ethic of the then-dominant punk scene. NWOBHM bands like Praying Mantis, Raven, Holocaust, Blitzkrieg, Diamond Head, and Tygers of Pan Tang were faster, rougher, harder, and more street-level than their 70’s predecessors.  However, with two glaring and notable exceptions—the pop metal of Def Leppard and the operatic and melodic heavy metal of Iron Maiden—most NWOBHM bands made only the tiniest splash in mainstream metal circles.  However, they were a major influence on several American bands who would eventually take metal to its next level. 

They also inspired the top two English heavy metal bands to raise their game.  After the departure of Ozzy Osbourne in 1979, Black Sabbath appeared over as the new decade dawned, but they regrouped and added outstanding metal yowler Ronnie James Dio and released one of their best albums in five years, Heaven and Hell, the next year.  The album re-established Black Sabbath as a force in metal circles, and songs like “Neon Nights” displayed a newfound fluidity and speed that would soon be imitated by bands like Iron Maiden.  The same year (1980) Judas Priest released what is arguably their magnum opus, British Steel, an album that pushed the boundaries of metal still further with songs like “Rapid Fire”, “Grinder”, “Breaking the Law”, and “Living After Midnight”. 

Meanwhile, in America, heavy metal and punk were moving inexorably towards one another.  My first recollection of the merger of punk and metal was the 1983 song “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies.  The song, with its almost lilting rhythm and angry anti-establishment lyrics, is clearly punk.  But the squirrelly, noodling guitar backing by Grant Estes has a distinct metal sound to it.  ST and other Dogtown bands like Excel, Beowulf, No Mercy, Los Cycos and Uncle Slam would continue to mix the melodicism and intricacy of metal with the anger of punk and hardcore throughout the 80’s.  Meanwhile, first-run hardcore bands like Black Flag were also migrating toward a sludgier, more metallic sound.  I can still remember reading an article in Rolling Stone magazine in ’84 or ’85 on the SST bands and how they were obsessed with previously unthinkable non-punk bands like Black Sabbath and the Grateful Dead and being freaked out at their blasphemy; this was not the punk of 1981, of “The Decline of Western Civilization”, where Lee Ving of Fear famously starts their section out by saying “So how come they let all you long hairs in here tonight, what’s the problem?  Its 1980, can’t you afford a fuckin’ haircut?”

Then I started getting flashes of the other side of the coin, of metal that was converging on punk, and to me that’s where true thrash began, and where heavy metal evolved once again.  My first inkling that something new on the horizon was from almost this exact same time, 1984 or 1985, when I was going with my friend John to the legendary Long Beach Mexican food dive Casa Sanchez and saw a young hessianette (i.e., a female metaler) wearing a “Metallica ‘Metal Up Your Ass Tour’” (Metallica famously wanted to call their first album this, but the record label balked) concert t-shirt.  I can remember being absolutely APPALLED by the title (which was accompanied by a crude drawing of a hand thrusting a knife out of a toilet) and thinking, “Metallica, man that’s a hessian band name.” 

A year or so later there were more rumblings.  First was an article in BAM magazine, a free California music publication, on Metallica, which described how they were fans of GBH, the Exploited, the Misfits, etc.  This shocked me; as mentioned above, metal kids hated punk and punk kids hated metal.  For a bunch of unrepentant metallers to be espousing a passion for some of the hardest of hardcore punk imaginable was shocking.  Shortly after, in mid-’86 or thereabouts, Spin magazine ran an article on Metallica, further describing their enjoyment of punk.  The article also talked about how Metallica had opened for Ozzy on his tour and blown him off the stage; their fans had ripped out seats to form a slam pit at some Texas arena. 

Now I was intrigued.   This sounded like a band I had to hear.  In fall of ’86 I bought what I thought was one of their first albums, their 1984 sophomore effort, Ride the Lightning.  At first listen I was completely put off—whatever punk or hardcore influences Metallica had where obscured by the out-and-out, unadulterated metal aspects—the shrieking vocals, the highly technical solos, arpeggios, guitar harmonies, and riffing.  I set it aside, but I kept coming back to it, sometimes just to spite my roommate Steve, who was an obstinate punk fan.   I started to appreciate it for what it was, a really really REALLY squirrelly, extreme metal album.

I often wonder if my opinion of Metallica would have been different had I started with 1983’s Kill ‘Em All, which I bought a couple of years later.  While still very much a metal album, Kill ‘Em All is much rawer, rougher, cruder, closer to punk.  The most obvious influences on this album were the NWOBHM bands that drummer Lars Ulrich worshipped like Diamond Head, Blitzkrieg, and Holocaust.  However, even at this early stage Metallica was showing how better and more proficient they were than these influences; Kill ‘Em All is head and shoulders faster, angrier, more technical and more violent than anything these or any other NWOBHM band had recorded.  In a single swoop Metallica had raised the bar considerably, and songs like “Metal Militia” and “Whiplash” set a new, almost startingly high standard for heavy metal.  Their lightning fast tempos and insanely rapid supersonic riffing were light years faster than anything else recorded prior to this, and they remain to this day the hallmark for all subsequent speed metal and thrash bands.

Metallica’s first album was astonishingly good, a raise-the-bar answer to the NWOBHM bands.  But their second album, the aforementioned Ride the Lightning, was unbelievable.  Has ANY band ever improved like Metallica did between Kill and Lightning?  I think you’d have to look all the way back to the mid-70’s to find one; that would be Judas Priest between 1974’s dull, limp Rocka Rolla and 1976’s stronger Sad Wings of Destiny.  Kill ‘Em All was an outstanding NWOBHM album; Ride the Lightning was a landmark heavy metal album, one that raised the bar for the entire genre.  Gone was the tinny, thin production, the shrill teenage vocals, and the short fast songs. The production was full, loud, resonant; the guitars leap out of the speakers, as does Lars Ulrich’s staccato drumming.  James Hetfield’s vocals have matured amazingly; he’s still young and angry but there’s a new, more mature malevolence to his vocals that brings him into Ozzy’s aura, and a surprising range to boot. 

But it’s the songs that blow you away.  Sonically and lyrically Metallica is like an entirely new band.  Gone are the angry, snarly odes to “thrashing all around, acting like a maniac”, gone are the sillier NWOBHM affectations.  Every song has taken the energy and anger of their debut and ratcheted up the intensity a thousandfold.  Most notably there’s a newfound maturity, a broadening of scope, of the lyrics.  The lyrics are intelligent and the themes are adult—nuclear holocaust, capital punishment, the horrors of war, and suicide are the focus now.  This, after more than a decade of party odes, Satanism, and generic rebellion, is arguably one of the first intelligent and relevant heavy metal albums, a worthy companion to anything Black Flag or the Germs ever wrote. 

One thing I also love is the pacing of the album.  This is not just a collection of songs randomly tossed onto vinyl; its intricately laid out and structured. Side one starts with “Fight Fire With Fire”, a faster-than-light lightning riffing song that takes the speed of “Whiplash” and ups the ante, but also lends itself to a more socially relevant topic, nuclear war.  However, it starts, surprisingly enough, with a lilting, almost medieval sounding acoustic guitar intro that utterly belies the guitar holocaust to come, then launches into the mind bogglingly fast riffage of the main body of the song.   Has any song ever so effectively evinced sonically its lyrical content?  Sonically this song is a jet attack, an atomic holocaust so complete and effective it’s hard to believe they can top it.

And to their everlasting credit, they don’t even try.  The second song, “Ride the Lightning” is a mid-temp chugger that, while lacking the blitzkrieg temp of “Fight Fire”, nevertheless is its equal in terms of intensity and drive.  The theme is no letup either; death by electrocution in the electric chair is the focus and Metallica’s lyrics explore both the personal horror of involuntary death as well as the ethical issues (‘who made you God to say, ‘I’ll take your life from you’?”) behind capital punishment.  Utterly different from “Fight Fire with Fire” it still maintains the relentless intensity of the first song.  If “Fire” is a jet attack, a nuclear firestorm scorching the earth flat, “Lightning” is a panzer attack, the sound of five thousand tanks rolling across the plains of Poland, crushing saber-wielding men and their horses under tread.  But here too there are elegant touches, the guitar harmonies that begin the song and fill the bridge and solo and reach another chugging crescendo before resolving back into the relentless headbanging lurch of the main body of the song yet again. 

The album’s third song slows the tempo down further, but still there’s no letup.  “For Whom the Bell Tolls” starts with a literally tolling bell before launching into one of the most famous instrumental pieces in all of rock, Cliff Burton’s magnificent, massive, brutally distorted amplified bass (which most people mistake for a guitar, and which Ulrich and Hetfield famously heard him playing in his band Trauma and which prompted them to ask him to join Metallica.  There’s a YouTube video of a teenage Burton playing the same thing for a high school talent contest nearly a decade before this, amazing to think of him keeping this with him all this time, and there’s also a great YouTube video of Cliff playing this live at such an apocalyptically loud volume that it sounds like the universe melting, before his tragically untimely demise in 1986).  “Fight Fire with Fire” is an F-14 strike, “Ride the Lightning” is a tank attack; “Bell” is the slow, steady, deadly slog of the foot soldier who is the topic of this song. The horrors of war have been the topic of many rock and in particular metal songs—Iron Maiden has written almost a dozen, most notably “The Trooper”—but none capture so masterfully both the pointlessness yet inexorability of war.

Throughout the first three songs, Metallica deftly shifts the tempo ever downward without losing intensity.  On the final song on side one of this album/cassette, they downshift further and make their boldest musical statement yet:  a ballad, “Fade to Black”.  Delicate without being dainty, contemplative without being mellow, “Fade to Black” was a total game changer, moving Metallica beyond the speed-for-speed’s-sake thrash of their peers into a whole new metal realm.  As metal became ever more popular and formulaic, in the 80’s it became required that every cheap copy hair metal band have their one ballad to show their soft side (and more importantly to sell albums and tickets to female fans), and the true power of these ballads to actually mean anything became diluted and weak, prom songs for middle American heshers to slow dance to.  When Metallica put “Fade to Black” on Ride the Lightning, this formula was by no means established and they were taking a huge risk, particularly in the thrash realm, possibly alienating their hardcore fans and losing whatever momentum they’d gained until then.  Amazingly, the exact opposite happened; they not only kept their existing fan base, they opened themselves up to a whole new fan base.  The song remains one of the most popular Metallica songs of all time.

Metallica get back to thrash business on side two, with three magnificently blistering songs, “Trapped Under Ice”, “Escape” and “Creeping Death”, which focus on more of the standard horror/fantastical metal theme of Iron Maiden.  But it’s the first four songs of “Ride the Lightning” that established Metallica as the premier heavy metal bands not just in America but in the world.  At this point only England’s Iron Maiden could even come within hailing distance of Metallica’s metal prowess, and while it would be three albums until Metallica would equal (and then surpass) Iron Maiden’s worldwide commercial success, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight it’s obvious now that a torch was being passed even then.  From this point onward in their career, Metallica had mastered metal to the point where no other band could be their equal, from now on they were only competing with themselves.  Ride the Lightning was a watershed, a stunning step ahead not just for themselves but for metal itself, its power and grace a monumental statement to the metal world.

Interestingly, I got into Metallica right when Master of Puppets came out, but this is still one of my least favorite Metallica albums to listen to even as I appreciate its complexity and musicianship were yet another step forward for the band.  The songs are just too long, too intricate, not catchy enough.  Ride the Lightning remains, in my opinion, their greatest moment, their most definitive metal statement.

Metallica had, of course, precedents, but few were as influential as Iron Maiden.  Formed by bassist (and only continuous member) Steve Harris in 1976, Maiden went through several lineup changes before releasing their 1980 self-titled debut album.  Much like Kill ‘Em All, Iron Maiden and its 1981 followup Killers were a shot across the bow of metal, a bold statement that Maiden were a major emerging power in metal.  What’s most interesting to me is what pioneers they were, particularly with respect to Metallica.  Their sound, like Metallica’s on Kill ‘Em All, was very rough and street level, especially on songs like “Runnin’ Free”, “Sanctuary”, “the Prowler”, and “Charlotte the Harlot”, “Killers”, and “the Drifter”; the vocals of Paul Di’Anno in particular have a raw, punkish, street tough aspect to them that was missing in the falsetto world of heavy metal. However, Maiden was a metal band through and through; their compositional skills, time signatures, twin guitars, guitar melodies, and the complex, melodic bass playing of Harris all were firmly heavy metal in intent and outcome.   And even at this early stage Iron Maiden was playing with more grandiose fantastical and literary themes on songs like “Phantom of the Opera”, “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “Genghis Khan”, and “the Ides of March”.   They also predated Metallica’s evolution by including instrumentals and ballads on these early albums, and while “Remember Tomorrow” and “Strange World” lack the timelessness (to me anyway) of Metallica’s “Fade to Black” they nevertheless were landmark steps.

It was Iron Maiden’s third album, 1983’s Number of the Beast that, like Metallica’s Ride the Lightning, was a total game changer.  Exchanging Di’Anno’s passionate but limited vocals for the multi-octave range and theatrical personality of Bruce Dickinson, former lead singer of the NWOBHM band Samson, Iron Maiden took their game to an entirely new level, reaching the rarified air of Sabbath, Rainbow, and Priest.  Dickinson’s soaring range and leather-lunged shrieks, along with his larger-than-life stage persona, finally gave Iron Maiden a frontman to match the ever-increasing technical proficiency of their music and the grandiosity of their lyrical themes.  Lyrically the band was moving past the street anthems of the Di’Anno years toward more emphasis on the literary (and particularly horror and science fiction) themes they’d played with on their previous two albums.  However, they also beat Metallica to the punch in terms of adding even more sophisticated fare to their songs, such as the song detailing the plight of Native Americans that vaulted them to the top of the charts, “Run to the Hills”, with its galloping rhythm and soaring vocals still one of the greatest Maiden, and metal, songs ever recorded.  I have to admit, Iron Maiden was so totally metal in the day that they were anathema to me, and yet even I found myself compellingly attracted to this song.  This and the title song have long been my favorite Maiden songs, though admittedly I didn’t start listening to Paul Di’Anno era Maiden until about 10 years ago and they haven’t had as much time to integrate into my musical DNA.  “Hallowed be Thy Name” explored the theme of capital punishment well in advance of Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning”.  More recently I downloaded “The Prisoner” and “22 Acacia Avenue” and am greatly enjoying these too though it may be difficult to ever topple “Run” and “Number” from my all-time Maiden top ten list.

Maiden were pioneers in other ways as well.  Aside from their musical talents, they (particularly Harris, who has always been the brains and driving force behind Maiden) were always very focused on the non-musical end of things.  Most bands hate dealing with anything except for writing, practicing, and performing the music; the business end is tedious and usually left to the band manager or some other factotum.  But Iron Maiden from the start seemed to have a plan, and everything from the packaging to the stage show was developed with a shrewd eye toward pleasing, and expanding, their fan base.  Perhaps the most obvious example is Eddie, Iron Maiden’s now ubiquitously recognized mascot.  Eddie instantly became a highly visible visual trademark for the band; indeed, his presence on the early albums was probably the best signifier of what kind of music this was.  But Maiden continued to develop Eddie, and everything about their product, constantly investing money in more professional album covers, larger and more fantastic stages and stage shows, better production for their studio albums, and so forth.  This was an extremely shrewd, business-savvy approach and it allowed Maiden to exponentially expand their fan base with every release on their first few albums. 

It’s obvious that Metallica had a similar mindset; each of their albums also sported more professional graphics, better production, etc.  Metallica, like Maiden, were also the consummate professionals:  they gave frequent interviews, and were intelligent and friendly to fans and journalists alike.  More importantly, like Maiden they were devoted to their fans--early concerts were less like a musical event and almost more like a group meeting of the band’s fan club.  And Metallica soon achieved renown for the loyalty their fans showed in return; their fans bought their albums in droves, driving Metallica to commercial success in a notoriously harsh and non-commercially friendly genre (thrash) and despite almost no airplay on radio or MTV whatsoever until And Justice For All.  I can also remember my favorite part of Metallica’s episode of VH1’s Behind the Music, where they were talking about touring with Guns ‘N’ Roses in the late 80’s and how often Axl Rose would walk off stage in a snit, and how stupefied the band was about that:  to Metallica you NEVER walked out on your fans, the people who paid to come and see you.  I also remember how gracious Metallica was after the greatest injustice in Grammy history, when Jethro Tull was awarded the Grammy for Best Hard Rock album of 1988.  I can remember watching that broadcast and yelling at the TV, finally turning it off in disgust; it was literally a decade before I would deign to watch the Grammies again.

That’s not to say Metallica hasn’t made some missteps of late.  Their group image remodel in the 90’s was widely derided as a marketing move, and even though they denied it at the time, it seems obvious that all four members of Metallica didn’t go out and choose to get alterna-rock makeovers independent of one another.  That lost them some credibility with their fans, as did their now-legendary attempts to sue their own fans over illegal digital downloading of their music.  And finally, they are receiving nothing but scorn for their awful album with Lou Reed this past year, an album that on paper sounds like an intriguing idea but the execution wasn’t there.  But starting out, Metallica did everything right and kept their focus on their fans, and on delivering a quality product, and it earned them some of the most fiercely loyal fans in music.

The only other band to even approach the intensity of Metallica’s first two albums was Slayer.  My first Slayer album was 1986’s Reign in Blood (which I didn’t buy until 1988), and it remains for me the definitive musical document by this band and one of the greatest, most brutal metal/thrash albums of all time.  The very first song, “Angel of Death”, showcases the tremendous power and intensity of this band and illustrates that Metallica had changed heavy metal irrevocably.  Metallica’s influence is all over this song and album, from the blistering tempos to the chugging riffs to the intense subject matter.  “Angel of Death” is still the only song that can come close to equaling the intensity and magnificence of early Metallica, the only other song that could go toe-to-toe with “Fight Fire with Fire”:  “Fire” is more technically proficient but “Angel” is angrier, more brutal.  Like the Ali-Frasier heavyweight fights of the early 70’s, there’s no clear favorite here, either song could take the title on any given day.

Lyrically, Slayer also toed a fine line, between prurience and documentation.  Their obsession with all things evil, violent, disgusting, etc., walks a very fine line between these two domains.  “Angel of Death” could be heard as a condemnation of the atrocities of Josef Mengele, or as a lurid fascination with them.  And nearly every other Slayer song slides along this same razor’s edge.

  My other two favorites off this album are “Jesus Saves” (which has more in common with the staccato jackhammer rhythms of Suicidal Tendencies and the Dead Kennedys than it has with Iron Maiden or Judas Priest) and “Raining Blood”.  “Raining Blood” is like the omega to the alpha of “Black Sabbath”; both songs center on the supernatural and Slayer takes Sabbath’s original tale of demonic horror into the modern day, cranking everything up to 11.  This entire album is as uncompromising and brutal as music gets for me—literally. Slayer sits on the knife edge between listenable and unlistenable for me; I know bands have expanded upon their distillation of the hardest, harshest aspects of punk and metal (most notably grindcore bands like Napalm Death, Carcass and Nasum as I wrote about in a recent post), and while I have some of this other music, I rarely listen to it as its simply not pleasant.  Slayer could never be called pleasant either, but as I said to me their sound delineates the boundary between acceptably harsh and unlistenable noise. 

In the same way I wonder if I’d have gotten into Metallica even sooner if I’d bought Kill ‘Em All first, I also wonder if I’d have gotten into thrash sooner if I’d heard Slayer’s Reign in Blood first.  Tom Araya’s harsh, angry, shouted vocals and Slayer’s proto-hardcore guitar blasts are far closer to punk than anything Metallica recorded.  Still, Slayer is, and was then, undoubtedly a metal band, striving for metallic technicality in their solos and riffing, so perhaps not. 

 I now firmly believe that next to Metallica, Slayer is probably the greatest metal band that ever existed.  I think a big part of why I think this is because my wide ranging explorations of nearly all forms of rock music have made me very obsessed with DISTILLATES.  The Sex Pistols were the ultimate distillate of sneering punk derision; Joy Division was the ultimate distillate of post-punk anxiety, depression, self-loathing; Black Flag were the ultimate distillate of suburban hardcore rage; Talk Talk was the ultimate distillate of somber post-rock optimism.  And then you have Slayer:  they took everything that was dark, fantastical, Satanic, heavy, loud, and fast from all their precedents, and cooked it down to something even more pure.  It’s just truly the most extreme form of metal.  Their subject matter rarely strays from Satanism, serial killers, war atrocities, and horror. Now, I know others have built on what Slayer did, and grindcore in particular took things even more extreme in its way, but that gets away from true metal. 

 

Here's another thing:  "South of Heaven" may be the greatest metal song of all time.  Think of all it has.  It has fast parts, it has slow parts.  It has chugging, it has power chords, it has minor chords, it has doom chords, it has majestic chords, it has hooky riffs.  It’s dark, scary, evil, Satanic. It’s got a solo by Hanneman, it’s got a solo by King.  It ends on an infinite Nigel Tufnel go-out-and-get-a-bite-and-come-back sustain. And there's this:  Dave Lombardo's drumming is MAGNIFICENT, utterly MAGNIFICENT.  He's got the 200 bpm machine gun drumming, he's got staccato fills, he's just everywhere in that song in the best possible way a great drummer is, fleshing everything out perfectly without being overbearing. 

  And you know what?  Slayer was REVOLUTIONARY.  Slayer's musical sound is/was WAY farther from metal than, say, the Pistols' supposedly revolutionary punk rock sound was from ROCK.  You really find very few sonic precedents for Slayer.  They make Black Sabbath sound like the Carpenters or Starland Vocal Band.  It was really almost QUALITATIVELY different from nearly all metal that came before because it was so QUANTITATIVELY extreme.  Slayer and Metallica finally put a stake through the heart of the blues-based heavy metal of the late 60's and early 70’s.  Like Sabbath, their music has more in common with Stravinsky than it does Leadbelly; hell, they've got more in common with the Germs than they do with Led Zeppelin, and that's truly magnificent.

Slayer’s first two albums, 1983’s Show No Mercy and 1985’s Hell Awaits, were good but not game changing.  Most notably, the production is muddled and isn’t up to the power of the music, and Araya’s vocals are tinny and often lost in the mix.  They sound like a copy, slightly better admittedly but a copy nonetheless, of the pioneering English NWOBHM band Venom, who single-handedly created the black metal genre (which is named after their 1982 song and album of the same name).  I own a few Venom songs (the aforementioned “Black Metal” and “Countess Bathory”) but mostly for their historical value; unlike Metallica or Slayer, Venom never transcended their boundaries like Slayer did and their canon remains fairly modest in terms of its quality and impact.

Slayer’s secret weapon was, of course, producer Rick Rubin, who produced Reign and its followup, South of Heaven.  I’ve never figured out how Rubin, an East Coast rap impresario who started Def Jam Records in his NYU dorm room with Russell Simmons, got hooked up with a Satanic thrash band from the lower middle class suburban wastelands of Southern California, but it is his production of Reign in Blood that took Slayer from the minor leagues into the big time.  His production is crisp and elegant, cleaning up Slayer’s sound while maintaining their rawness and intensity.  He brings Lombardo’s outstanding drum work to the fore, and takes Araya’s vocals from muddy and cheesy to harsh and in your face.  The difference between Reign in Blood and Hell Awaits is nearly as large as the difference between Kill ‘Em All and Ride the Lightning.  This has to be one of Rubin’s finest moments behind the board in a long and storied career—if he could make Slayer sound this crisp and professional, he could make ANYONE sound good. 

Rubin also did two other things that put Slayer more on the map.  First, as mentioned above, he sampled the fantastic bridge from “Angel of Death” for “She Watch Channel Zero” by Public Enemy on their breakthrough album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, giving them massive additional exposure (as mentioned, it was the reason why I personally bought Slayer’s album).  Second, he had them cover “In A Gadda da Vida” on the best-selling soundtrack he produced for the movie Less Than Zero, giving them still further exposure.  The band famously do not like this song but it’s always been a favorite of mine, humorous in how it distills the essence of this long, indulgent hippie era classic into a 3 minute blast of classic Slayer rage. 

Were it not for a few quirks of fate, the Bay Area band Exodus, contemporaries with Metallica and Slayer, might be held in the same regard by the general population as these two bands.  Exodus famously gave up founding guitarist Kirk Hammett to Metallica after Metallica’s falling out with Dave Mustaine.  Their album Bonded by Blood was recorded in 1984, midway between Kill ‘Em All and Ride the Lightning, but wasn’t released until 1985, well after these two albums had established the canon.  I like the title track and “A Lesson in Violence”, but neither to me achieves the heights of Metallica or Slayer.

People often talk of the “Big Four” of thrash; there was even a tour named this last year.  This is, of course, Metallica and Slayer, along with Megadeth and Anthrax.  However, I dismiss any claims to a tetrarchy here.  Metallica and Slayer reign supreme, and neither of these other two bands came anywhere close.  Anthrax I can dismiss easily enough; they were an East Coast band and had little if any impact on the fertile West Coast metal scene until much later (their mash-up of “Bring the Noise” with Public Enemy was a landmark in metal/hip hop fusion, a thrash answer to “Walk This Way” by Aerosmith and Run DMC).  Megadeth, aside from two noteworthy exceptions, never put out a song that came close to achieving the grandeur or influence of anything by Metallica or Slayer.  The two exceptions are “Peace Sells”, one of the angriest metal songs ever recorded, and “In My Darkest Hour”, with its breakup despair. 

Like mushrooms sprouting in fertile soil, thrash bands started popping up all over the world:  Voivod  (I love “Voivod” and “War and Pain” off their eponymous 1984 album) in Quebec, Celtic Frost (I have “The Usurper”, an utterly insane song, and “Dawn of Meggido” off 1985’s To Mega Therion) in Switzerland, Kreator in Germany (my favorite is “Ghetto War” and the title track off 2001’s Violent Revolution; “Ghetto War” may be my next most favorite non-Metallica or Slayer thrash song ever) and many many others everywhere else.  Testament (another good Bay area thrash band), Nuclear Assault (who were formed by a former member of Anthrax; I like “Rise from the Ashes” from 1987’s Survive), Cryptic Slaughter (I have “Lowlife” off 1986’s Convicted, recorded when the band were still all high school age, and “Money Talks” off their 1987 album of the same name),  Phoenix, Arizona’s Sacred Reich (“State of Emergency” and “American Way” off their 1990 album American Way), Stormtroopers of Death (a side project of Scott Ian of Anthrax; I like their politically incorrect 1985 song “Speak English or Die”), Crumbsuckers (“Life of Dreams” off the album of the same name from 1986), Carnivore (formed by future Type O Negative bassist/singer Peter Steele; I have “Inner Conflict” and “Retaliation” off their 1986 eponymous album) Death Angel (I love “Bored” and their cover of “Cold Gin” off 1988’s Frolic through the Park, which I bought when it came out)—there were many many bands who sprouted up after the initial onslaught of Metallica and Slayer.  But none of them truly captured the intensity and power of either of the “Big Two”.

If you had told me 25 years ago that Metallica and/or Slayer would be one of the biggest bands in the world I’d told you that you were insane.  As good as Ride the Lightning was, it wasn’t anything that would have made you think they would one day end up in the company of U2 and R.E.M., but here we are.  As mentioned, Metallica continued to evolve beyond their speed metal origins and became an insanely popular general rock band.  Slayer has maintained their long standing reputation as the most intense thrash band and continue to make a deservedly lucrative living recording and touring. What was particularly fascinating to me was to watch as pop or hair or glam metal (whatever you want to call it) rose, became the dominant pop music paradigm, but eventually crashed on the reef of grunge, meanwhile thrash continued to soldier stolidly along and maintained or even increased its popularity. It is still amazing to think that a band I’d first seen on a “Metal Up Your Ass” concert t-shirt would one day become the biggest rock band on earth.