Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  Impaired by substance abuse and past dabblings with the occult, but hardly incapacitated, Megadeth entered the studio in 1986 to record its second album, Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying? It was originally funded by Combat and produced by Randy Burns. Impressed by Mustaine’s charisma and the band’s songwriting, Capitol Records bought out Combat’s deal, signed Megadeth to a multi-album contract, and re-produced the album, which would catapult Megadeth to the upper tier of the thrash hierarchy. The video for the title track became one of the first big thrash clips on MTV’s Headbangers Ball, and the song’s rapid-groove bassline was used in the opening theme music for MTV News for years.

  DAVE MUSTAINE: Things were looking up, but we were still living like junkies. David Ellefson was living with the singer from Détente [the late Dawn Crosby]. Dave told me nightmare stories of him being over there and her making him sleep on the floor while she had sex with another girl.

  DAVE ELLEFSON: In ’86, we had just made Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying. We had a rehearsal studio downtown in LA. We built a loft there, and I’d sleep between there and any girl that would have me. One of them was a prostitute in LA; she told me she was a cleaning lady. I’m thinking, “This chick really likes me,” and then I find out she’s shooting pornos and then copping heroin from a taxi driver. The day that I had to take her down to do a photo shoot with [porn star] John Holmes was when I knew my days were numbered.

  DAVE MUSTAINE: [In 1988], we canceled seven Monsters of Rock [support-slot] shows in [European] soccer stadiums. Why? Because Dave Ellefson ran out of heroin. When I ran out, I would tough it out. I’d be sick for a couple days, I’d drink some Jack Daniel’s, and I’d be over it. He came up with some excuse that he sprained his wrist in the shower and the tour ended. So did our run for a long time. We took the gnarliest hit to our credibility.

  DAVE ELLEFSON: I was fucked up for a long time. I was lucky I never got busted for drugs. But there were times I’d be copping bags of heroin, swallowing them because the cops came along—and then getting interrogated by the cops and getting away with it. Then I’d have to stop off at a Mobil station and puke my guts out and weed through my barf to get the balloons of heroin out. I’d immediately pop them open and get high, and celebrate the victory of not getting busted. After a while, I was hanging out in apartment bathrooms smoking crack and doing heroin with people I didn’t know. And I was looking around and thinking, “How did I get with these people? I hate these people.”

  DAVE MUSTAINE: We just did not want to, no matter what, quit or give in. And sadly, we encountered some situations that were of the magnitude that other people would probably say “forget it.” We ran over a person in a taxi going 60 miles per hour—creamed the guy dead as a doornail. The driver in the taxi said, “Whoa. Huh. I hit that sucker clean in the head. Better send a meat wagon.” He had an absolute disregard for life, and that kind of stuff affects people, and it affected us very badly. But the thing is, we kept making good music through all this. We just put our heads down and stuck it out.

  DAVE ELLEFSON: When Dave set out to start his band after Metallica, there was a lot of pressure on him. It wasn’t until the early nineties that we stepped out of that shadow. People had to get their mind around the idea that Metallica didn’t have to fail in order for Megadeth to be successful. Once that happened, people embraced Megadeth and the competition stopped.

  STEFFAN CHIRAZI: For some reason, Dave seems to never have gotten over being kicked out of Metallica. It’s like he’s got some sort of illness. I could never understand why he could not move on. If you’ve been tremendously hurt in a relationship, I think you’re allowed a few years to work it through. Whenever I would interview Dave, I would turn the tape recorder off when he would start complaining about Metallica. I would say to him, “Dave, I’m not here to talk about that. I don’t want to write about it.” Then I’d turn it back on when he was done. It’s weird because Dave is a unique and wonderful guy and yet, to this day, he’s so tortured that he was kicked out of Metallica. To the best of my knowledge, he still gets his publishing [royalties] from the songs he helped write.

  While Mustaine was wrestling with the shadow of Metallica, his former bandmates were proving why they were the kingpins of the healthy West Coast thrash metal scene. After touring for Kill ’Em All, Metallica flew to Copenhagen to work with producer Flemming Rasmussen (Morbid Angel, Evile) at Sweet Silence Studios. There, the band tracked Ride the Lightning, which was more musically intricate but just as heavy as Kill ’Em All. In September 1984, less than two months after Megaforce released Ride the Lightning, Elektra Records signed the band, making Metallica the first thrash act on a major label. It reissued the record on November 19 with the wheels of promotion spinning faster than the churning guitars on the opening track, “Fight Fire with Fire.”

  LARS ULRICH: We wrote Ride the Lightning in a garage in El Cerrito, California, with egg crates on the walls and no heat. The last four songs of that were done in a cold cellar in nowheresville New Jersey at my friend Metal Joe’s house, where we were cold and hungover all the time. So there was no luxury there. We just wanted to tear everything up and play shows and get drunk.

  MICHAEL ALAGO (ex-A&R Elektra, Geffen): I picked up Kill ’Em All at Jonny Z’s record store and I was blown away, so I went to the Stone in San Francisco to see them play, but I didn’t tell anybody I was going. . . . It was amazing. James [Hetfield] was an extraordinary, raw ringleader. He has the most charismatic, wild smile. And those songs! I was sold. I was friends already with Jonny and Marsha Z at Megaforce, and when I came home and told them I had been to see Metallica and I wanted to sign them, they lost their minds. They were furious.

  JONNY ZAZULA: Metallica played in New York at the Rio Theater and that was a big show. Everything came together perfectly, and they were the greatest band in the world. There were about 800 people there. The next night was the Roseland Ballroom where we had Metallica, Anthrax, and Raven and had 3,500 sales. I think it only held 2,500. That’s the night Metallica got signed with Elektra.

  MICHAEL ALAGO: I knew there were other A&R people there from other labels, so I bolted the door shut and wound up being the only one backstage early in the evening. I said, “Look, I’m freaking out. I love you guys and you have to come to my office tomorrow.” They got there bright and early. I ordered Chinese food and beer for them and we talked. I think they liked that I was their age and I was that enthusiastic, and that I would take the right care of the band. And I did, from day one.

  MARIA FERRERO: We had Metallica, Raven, and Anthrax playing that show at Roseland, and that night Jonny and Marsha signed Metallica to Elektra, Anthrax to Island, and Raven to Atlantic. I was like, “Wow, that’s a big deal,” ’cause those are big, mainstream companies. So for me, that was the moment I said, “Oh, wow! This is real.”

  Despite the hype surrounding Metallica, Anthrax seemed to come out of nowhere with their 1984 ragged-but-raging Megaforce record Fistful of Metal, which led to their deal with Island Records, where they released four critically and commercially successful albums. But Anthrax was hardly an instant success. When high school classmates Scott Ian and Danny Lilker formed the band in 1981, even Jonny Z repeatedly tried to shoo them away. At the time, Anthrax was a rotating door of musicians with dreams of greatness and just enough talent to leapfrog the obstacles they kept creating for themselves. Steadily, though, they improved, and with the help of Megaforce and a never-say-die mentality, they were able to clamber their way into metal’s Big Four, alongside Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer.

  SCOTT IAN: Dan Lilker and I were always totally about metal. We used to drive sixty miles from Queens to this metal bar called 516 in Old Bridge [New Jersey], and that’s where all the guys in the Old Bridge Militia used to hang out. We’d all stand there in this shitty little bar, sometimes with fake cardboard guitars, drinking beer and headbanging. That’s what we did for fun—listen to this music and bang our heads and jump around like idiots. It was so nerdy, but it
was the greatest feeling ever.

  DAN LILKER (Brutal Truth, S.O.D., ex–Nuclear Assault, ex-Anthrax): The first show we did was a battle of the bands in a church basement. Cease Fire was the other big band, and we won by doing Priest and Maiden covers, and we might have had a few originals.

  CHARLIE BENANTE (Anthrax): In the early eighties, I had some friends in Queens who knew of this band called Anthrax that played locally in schools, but they hated them. There was talk of me auditioning for them, and my friends were like, “Don’t you dare do that, dude. They suck.” I was like, “Well, lemme just go try.” Scott and Danny came over to my house and we jammed and it wasn’t perfect, but I could see there was a lot of potential.

  SCOTT IAN: We were looking for a drummer because our old drummer [Greg D’Angelo] had left. Someone recommended Charlie, who was in Throgs Neck in the Bronx. We went to Charlie’s house and he had this drum kit up in his little room at the top of this four-family house. We jammed “Fast As a Shark” by Accept and “Invaders” from Iron Maiden. We said, “Can you play double bass?” and he went dumma-dumma-dumma-dumma-dumma with his feet flying. We said, “All right, you’re in the band.”

  JONNY ZAZULA: Anthrax would constantly bring their demos to us at the flea market and they were a real royal pain in the ass. One of the only reasons we even allowed them to hang out there was because Danny Spitz was the lead guitarist for Overkill at one point, and he was quite a character. But I wouldn’t even listen to their stuff. One day I went to breakfast with Marsha at an IHOP in East Brunswick, New Jersey, where [the] flea market was, and parked there waiting for me at the IHOP was a car that had “Anthrax” license plates. They asked if they could play their tape during my meal. I told them after I ate I’d meet them in the store and we’d talk. That’s when we put it on. They were so persistent. I liked production by Ross the Boss (ex-Manowar, Dictators) on “Soldiers of Metal.” I didn’t really want to release it, but Scott had used $2,500 of his bar mitzvah money to produce the song, so I printed up two thousand singles and sold all of them in two and a half weeks. That was really surprising, so we signed them.

  SCOTT IAN: [Ex-lead guitarist Dan] Spitz was working at a guitar store on Forty-eighth Street before he joined. I used to go in there all the time. He was this cocky little fuck, and one time he said, “Yeah, I’ve heard about your fucking band. I’ll fucking blow away your lead guitar player. You should have me in your band.” I was like, “Uh, dude, I just came in here to check out an amp.” A month later we auditioned him. Before him was a guy named Greg Walls. He did a bunch of demos with us, but he just wasn’t into it.

  JONNY ZAZULA: The money that came from Metallica went to Raven and Anthrax. Then Raven got signed [to Atlantic Records], so I placed everything on Anthrax and stayed with them. Metallica were gone. They’d been signed by Elektra. Then Anthrax got signed [to Island]. So everybody was signed and Anthrax owed me $250,000 from [recording, traveling, everything I had paid for in their career to date]. I never took a dime for the first three or four years. Then we did a merchandise deal for $1.5 million, and not only did I make myself a very good commission, but they paid me back that day. That’s the moment I made money with Megaforce.

  SCOTT IAN: Our first tour was the summer of ’84 with Metallica, and [ex-vocalist] Neil Turbin took it upon himself to make that decision that Danny Lilker wasn’t going to be in Anthrax anymore. Granted, when I got the call from Danny saying, “Hey man. What’s going on? Neil just called and told me I was out of the band,” I was like, “What the fuck?” But I kind of knew it was coming. Neil so had it in for him at the time because he didn’t think Danny was responsible, and I know this sounds crazy, but truthfully, Danny was taller than Neil and Neil didn’t want someone in the band taller than him because he was the front man. But Neil did have a point. When it came to the responsibility department, Danny was a bit lax. It’s one of those things that eats me up to this day. I wish I would have stood up for my friend and told Neil to go fuck himself, but Neil gave us an ultimatum and said either Danny went or he went. We couldn’t afford to lose our singer. We had a record out and he had us over a barrel. Finding a new singer would have been impossible at the time.

  DAN LILKER: Three days after Fistful of Metal came out, they asked me to leave the band. Ninety-nine percent of the reason was because they wanted to keep Neil and he couldn’t deal with me because he had no sense of humor. When I realized he could never take a joke, that made it more fun to poke fun at him. In the end they decided it was better keeping the front man than the dude who wrote three-quarters of the record. So I got the short end of the stick.

  NEIL TURBIN (DeathRiders, ex-Anthrax): Even though I have no regrets about doing Fistful of Metal or the first tour, there was nothing pleasant in any aspect about it. Scott had aspirations of wanting to be the central figure in the band, being the front man—and the guy is not even a lead guitar player. And there weren’t lots of song ideas coming from him. This was my agenda: I was there to rock. I came there to kick some ass and thrash. Scott admitted to the rest of the band that Dan Lilker had to be let go, but it was a lot easier for him to use me as a scapegoat, especially after I wasn’t there anymore. Everybody knew that Dan just wasn’t cutting it on a number of levels. He took thirty takes to play the [Alice Cooper cover] “I’m Eighteen” in the studio. But there was this great resentment because I was getting a lot of attention, so I was completely undermined. I was foolish because I decided to weather the storm. But the momentum that was created, the excitement level was definitely something that I contributed to, and that can never be taken away from me.

  SCOTT IAN: We did a tour with Neil, opening for Raven in the fall of ’84, and we realized we could not survive as a band if he was our singer. He was a dictator. It was his way or the highway. The rest of us all bonded on the road and he was this total outcast. He would bring two huge suitcases out with him, one for his stage stuff and one for his day-to-day clothing. We were doing the tour in a van that we would take turns driving. He would take the backseat and put his suitcases there and wouldn’t allow anyone to sit back there with him. And he couldn’t sing past the first song. He’d blow his voice out. So we knew right then and there, “You gotta go.”

  CARL CANEDY (producer, the Rods): Neil is a tough singer to replace. Matt [Fallon, who later sang for Skid Row, prior to Sebastian Bach] was inexperienced and really not the right fit for the band. But we were now past the preproduction stage and several weeks into recording their [second] album [Spreading the Disease]. I was very surprised by their decision to hire Fallon, and I admired their choice to let him go. They called me and asked me to get Jon and Marsha on the phone. Jon simply said, “Put him on a bus” [as he had with Dave Mustaine]. In that short, three-minute meeting with their manager, Matt’s career with Anthrax was ended. They’d just made the ballsiest move I’d ever seen a band make, and now they needed to get back to work with a new singer right away. I put out the word, and as luck would have it my good friend Andrew “Duck” MacDonald (the Rods, Blue Cheer) told me about this kid [Joey Belladonna] who was a great singer he was considering for his new project.

  SCOTT IAN: We had everyone looking for singers for us. Our plan B was to have me and [bassist] Frankie [Bello] sing. But Carl said, “I saw this dude play in a band here. Let me see if I can find his number.” He ended up getting a hold of Joey Belladonna, who was living in upstate New York. We were recording in Ithaca and he drove down a day or two later. He had never heard of us. He didn’t know who Metallica was. We just put him in a studio and said, “Sing what you know.” He was singing Journey, Foreigner, and Deep Purple. And we were like, “Wow, he’s got an amazing voice.” As much as we loved hardcore and other thrash bands, we came from the Judas Priest/Iron Maiden school of wanting a real singer.

  NEIL TURBIN: With Joey Belladonna, I didn’t think they put in someone who could sing with more passion than me, or who had the range I had. I don’t think they put in someone who had a connection with the fans or audien
ce, or someone who is a writer. Basically, they hired a puppet.

  JOEY BELLADONNA: I had no clue who Anthrax were. I had never even sung anything remotely in that kind of range. But it was cool to me because I came up with my own vocal twist that sat overtop the music. I wasn’t sure about the heaviness of the music at first, but once we got going it was great.

  SCOTT IAN: [1985’s] Spreading the Disease was just the right record at the right time. Everyone was waiting for that kind of music to surface, and we were suddenly the big kids on the block in New York.

  DIMEBAG DARRELL: The sound on Spreading the Disease, with songs like “Gung Ho” and “Medusa,” and Charlie Benante’s feet flying off the handle—that was huge for me. It was like somebody hit you with a two-by-four across the face.

  In Los Angeles, the city that initially shunned Metallica, something faster, heavier, and more sinister was congealing. Slayer—bassist and vocalist Tom Araya, guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman, and drummer Dave Lombardo—formed in 1981 as a classic metal cover band, but over the next five years they took the intensity of Metallica and combined it with the ferocity of hardcore and the occult lyrics of Venom; to date they remain one of the most brutal, uncompromising bands on the scene.

  KERRY KING: [Slayer bassist] Tom [Araya] was in a band with my guitar teacher and their guitarist got the axe, and they got me in to play, probably just to fill space. But I knew the songs, so I stayed. I was sixteen at the time, and then that band fizzled when I was seventeen. So I was looking in the Recycler for bands to jam with. I tried out for this band that was rehearsing right above where [guitarist] Jeff [Hanneman] worked. They were these Spinal Tap dudes—old guys that had no business doing anything. But I heard Jeff practicing guitar during some downtime at work, and he was playing songs I knew. So I got Jeff’s number and we started hooking up. [Drummer] Dave [Lombardo] lived right down the street from me. One day he stopped at my house and said, “Hey, you got some guitars?” I guess he heard me playing. And I said, “Yeah, you wanna see?” So me, Jeff, and Dave jammed in his garage a couple times. I got back in touch with Tom, and we jammed, and that was it.