JEFF HANNEMAN (Slayer): We were in LA, but we all hated glam. I was listening to a lot of hardcore, but I still loved classic metal like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. Kerry was more into the metal. So when we started writing songs, we combined the best of both.
KERRY KING: When we started Slayer, we did a lot of Priest covers, but then we heard those first two Metal Massacre records and we knew we could write songs that were better than those, so we progressed rapidly.
TOM ARAYA: We met the folks at Metal Blade and they said, “Listen, we’ll put you on this Metal Massacre III album. So we did “Aggressive Perfector” for Metal Massacre III in 1982, and that was the birth and beginning of the Slayer sound. We wrote that song just for that record and we rehearsed it for weeks. We recorded it in one day. We listened to it and compared it to everything else on the record, and we thought, “This fucking rocks!” The only thing we kept saying was, “This needs to be a little faster.” So we kept trying to do stuff that was faster and heavier and more violent.
BRIAN SLAGEL: That was back in the days of no money. Tom’s dad scrounged up $3,000 to record their full-length debut [1983’s] Show No Mercy, and I mixed and produced the record out of necessity. Usually, by the end of a record, you don’t want to hear it again for at least a month or two. But with Slayer, I kept listening to it over and over. I took it to Enigma [our record distributor] and said, “This is going to be the biggest record Metal Blade has ever done.”
KERRY KING: For our first publicity photo we all gathered around this “dead” girl covered in blood. It was supposed to be some girl Tom dug, but she backed out at the last minute. So we ended up using Jeff’s woman.
JEFF HANNEMAN: Yeah. After that, I had to marry her. But we were into the whole Satan gig, so it seemed appropriate. “Ahh, kill the virgin!”
RAT SKATES: You look at the back of the first Slayer record, Show No Mercy, the band have this Misfits kind of makeup and you’re going, “Man, this must be the most incredible thing I could possibly go and see.” But the makeup came off really quick, I believe, because Mötley Crüe was breaking at that time, too, and it was confusing. Bands are always extremely influenced by the fans, especially in thrash, because everyone was so tight-knit, so a few guys too many coming up to you saying, “Man, Exodus kicked our ass last night and they didn’t need makeup.” That’s all it took.
KERRY KING: We may have been young and naïve, but we were determined as fuck. We knew we had good songs, and we knew if you want somebody to look, you have to get their attention. We wanted a wild stage show with explosions. But we didn’t have the budget for that kind of shit, so we improvised. We stole floodlights from any apartment building we could find. We had a fucking agenda—with no money.
TOM ARAYA: Kerry and Jeff would go out at night and rip off lumber so they could build stage platforms by day. We ended up with a smoke machine and live explosions. The stage was like a minefield.
KERRY KING: We used gunpowder with a tube and nails and wire in between. And we just had a switch to turn it on and ignite the gunpowder.
TOM ARAYA: We never knew how much gunpowder to use. Kerry fried his back one time and I almost got a face full of flames. We burned a few ceilings. I’m surprised we didn’t burn any clubs down.
KERRY KING: One time we had a burning trough that was supposed to be a wall of flames, and it only went up about an inch high. It was total Spinal Tap. But the look of the band was really important and I started making these wristbands with nails and spikes. Everyone knows me for wearing this gauntlet full of long nails, and the first time I had that armband on was when we played with Bitch at the Roxy. I had these big-ass fucking nails, and by coincidence, their bass player came out with a wristband of baby nails.
TOM ARAYA: There were times I’d come up behind Kerry, and—scratch! “Fuck!” I’d be bleeding. I probably coulda used a tetanus shot after some of those. We knew we wanted to do something theatrical because we were from LA, and that was the thing.
While Slayer was building a following, Metallica was becoming an international phenomenon. Ride the Lightning received rave reviews across the world, and Elektra, intent on promoting their rising stars, provided the money and resources to back the band, taking out numerous magazine advertisements and pushing the near-ballad “Fade to Black” at commercial radio.
JAMES HETFIELD: One of the first moments I realized things were really happening for us was at my girlfriend’s house right when Ride the Lightning came out [in 1984]. I was waiting for her while her sister was home, and I don’t think she knew I was there. I could hear “Fade to Black” blasting out of her speakers in her bedroom. She was just listening to that because she liked it and it spoke to her. That was pretty big for me. “Fade to Black” was one of those pivotal songs where we had the hardcore fans that said, “Screw you, you sold out, you did a ballad.” That was their simplistic thinking. Then you had the other people that said, “Wow, I totally relate to that and it has helped me.”
GENE AMBO (photographer): Metallica played with Dokken, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and Armored Saint at this big outdoor festival called the Iowa Jam. The show was in the afternoon, so by that night everyone was really fucked up. And we all got invited to see Van Halen at the big arena. Eddie [Van Halen] came into the back room before the show, and we’re all standing around drinking. It was really funny because James was all shy, creeping over to Eddie. We just drank and drank and in the morning James was running around the street bashing parking meters after completely trashing Armored Saint’s dressing room.
HARALD OIMOEN: [On August 31, 1985] they played the Day on the Green festival at a stadium in Oakland [California], which was their biggest show yet. They only had two or three photo passes for the concert and they said if I wanted one I’d have to do their dishes. I found out after that they were just winding me up. We all got shit-faced after the show and they drew a bunch of stuff all over my shorts. I thought they were autographing my shorts, but literally they were drawing big dicks on the back of my leg and they wrote, “Fuck me, I’m tight with AIDS” on the back of my pants. They drew this big hairy butthole on there. I was just clueless. I went to a Nations, a burger place, afterwards, and a cop came up behind me and said he doesn’t appreciate my pornographic garments. I was so drunk I had no clue.
JAMES HETFIELD: When we got back from the Ride the Lightning tour that we did with W.A.S.P. and Armored Saint, it felt like the scene had grown so big. There were at least two gigs every week in the Bay Area that were full-on metal. We had parties at our house. Me and Lars and a friend of ours, Mark, lived in this one house. We would pull all the furniture out of the house and onto the lawn and we would have this big brawl mosh-a-thon in the living room.
As Metallica climbed the ladder of success, Exodus continued to seal their reputation as the Bay Area lords of destruction. While this made for some great stories, it underplayed the artistry of the songs on their 1985 full-length debut, Bonded by Blood. The album was rife with eviscerating hooks and ecstatic chant-along choruses. At the same time, a host of other bands, including Dark Angel, Possessed, Vio-Lence, and Forbidden emerged and happily moshed in the rubble.
RON QUINTANA: Exodus put out the demo for Bonded by Blood the year before it came out. Everyone had a copy and was listening to those songs. If it had come out when it was really done it would have scooped Metallica. If they had followed up with their second album, that one should have been better than Ride the Lightning. But it’s tough being a Bay Area band because there isn’t that label push that Metallica got immediately. Exodus really stop-started, stop-started. By the time [Paul Baloff was fired and Steve] “Zetro” [Souza] was in the band, they should have been on their fourth album like Metallica, and if they had, they probably would have been as famous.
GARY HOLT: I don’t have any sour grapes about what happened. We had a lot of fun doing Bonded by Blood at this studio about ninety miles north of San Francisco, and we were living there in these cabins for two weeks while we recorded.
We had a steady stream of friends coming up for parties. Windows got broken, fights broke out everywhere. The guy who owned the place was mortified.
SCOTT IAN: People talk about the Big Four all the time, but back then it was really the Big Five because Exodus were just as important and just as influential as everybody else. For me, when it comes to debut records, Bonded by Blood might be better than all the rest of our debut records.
GARY HOLT: We were the last people you’d want to invite to your party. We’d kill fish in people’s fish tanks and we’d piss in their shampoo bottles. Awful stuff. We were total juvenile delinquents and I think the reason Exodus got away with it at the time was we all looked like sixteen-year-old angelic figures. We were able to smile and give that “Who, me?” look. We just didn’t look malicious. But there was a lot of evil behind those big, winking eyes. There was a party at this female photographer’s house once, and we took these nicely framed photographs in the hallway and destroyed them.
KATON W. DE PENA (Hirax): Paul Baloff was one of the greatest front men who ever lived. His personality alone could carry any band. He used to carry a baseball bat and beat the shit out of TVs. No TV was safe.
GARY HOLT: Our entire image from the day the band became mine and Paul [Baloff’s] was based on violence, and the crowd lived up to the musical imagery. At Ruthie’s, there was a lot of blood. We had members of our inner circle that we referred to as the Slay Team, and they were legendary for the amount of destruction they would commit at a show. If someone pissed the band off, they would just start beating them in front of everybody. There was a guy named Toby Rage, and he would jump off the front of the stage and make it 20 feet walking on the tops of people’s heads. He was the star of the video we did for “Toxic Waltz.” One person left that shoot in an ambulance with a broken arm. Another had a concussion. And we were just lip-synching. It wasn’t even a real show. We all got into the violence thing as well. We left a party once in San Francisco, and a few of us were heading to my friend’s car and we saw a bunch of guys jumping some dude. At first we ran up to help the guy and it turned out the guy was just some crazed lunatic homeless guy. So we ended up joining in on the fun and next thing you know the cops showed up and we scattered into Golden Gate Park and hid until the cops left. I guess we kind of encouraged violence.
PAUL BALOFF (1960–2002) (Exodus): These two kids in high school were wearing Exodus T-shirts, and right in the middle of the class they got up and were clubbing their teachers with chairs and they were singing “A Lesson in Violence” while doing it. We play and people fight.
GARY HOLT: We preached killing posers, and if somebody happened to show up at Ruthie’s wearing a Ratt shirt, we thought nothing of it to pull out a pocket knife and walk up to him and demand that they let us slice that shirt off their back. It was like, “You can either let us do it or we’ll do it with you wearing it.” If you look at a lot of the old pictures of Paul, on his left wrist he’d have five-inch pieces of cloth tied around it and those were all hair-band shirts. The funny thing though is years later all of us guitar players finally came out of the closet and admitted how much we coveted all of [Dokken guitarist] George Lynch’s and [Ratt guitarist] Warren DeMartini’s licks.
GENE HOGLAN (Dethklok, Testament, ex–Strapping Young Lad, ex–Fear Factory, ex–Dark Angel): Exodus was a big influence. Their whole “kill the posers” approach was big for Dark Angel. We went to parties in the Bay Area with those guys, and yeah, they were crazy psychos. You hear stories about them kidnapping a poser and tying him to a chair and setting him on fire and sticking knives in him. That could have all been great hype, but we thought that was awesome. Our road crew would do the same thing in LA. They’d get their raiding parties on the Sunset Strip. They’d grab a poser and set his hair on fire. A couple of our crew got sent to juvie because of stuff like that. If they didn’t like your band they would go onstage and beat you off the stage.
HARALD OIMOEN: Baloff had these parties where he would invite a bunch of people to somebody else’s house and they’d show up and totally trash the place. He was like the leader of a gang, the Slay Team, and he’d have these guys destroy people’s houses or steal things from them.
KATON W. DE PENA: Speed was a very big thing in the scene. I think that made the music a little bit faster because a lot of people were playing on that stuff. One night I was getting ready to go onstage and I was in the bathroom. And this guy came up and ripped this mirror off the wall. I looked over and it was Paul Baloff. He ripped the mirror off the wall to put it on the bathroom sink so he could do lines off it.
GARY HOLT: We fired Paul because he didn’t have his shit together. We were more successful eventually with Zetro, but I think about how fucked up my own personal situation became much later with alcohol and drugs, and I wish I had been more understanding about Paul’s problems. It says a lot about what a thrash metal icon Paul was because he only recorded one album with us, and then he did the same record again live with us in 1997 [before he died of a heart attack], and he’s viewed, as he should be, as a thrash metal legend.
Every thrash fan knows the Big Four: Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax. If, as Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian suggests, Exodus should be included in the mix, then it’s not much of a stretch to add Testament as well. The band is widely regarded as one of the top bands from the second wave of Bay Area thrash. Actually, Testament was around just as early as Metallica and Anthrax, forming as Legacy in 1982 with guitarist and songwriter Eric Peterson; vocalist Steve “Zetro” Souza; his cousin, guitarist Derrick Ramirez; bassist Greg Christian; and drummer Louie Clemente.
ERIC PETERSON (Testament): We were all in eighth grade and we used to cut school and go to San Francisco. One day we were sitting at this park and we bumped into [ex-drummer] Louie [Clemente]. He had a jean jacket with Iron Maiden patches on. He goes, “You know where I can get a nickel bag?” We ended up jamming together, and we wrote “Secret Agent,” which became the Testament song “First Strike Is Still Deadly.” Then [my cousin, guitarist and vocalist] Derrick Ramirez left and we met Alex [Skolnick].
ALEX SKOLNICK (Testament, Alex Skolnick Trio, Trans-Siberian Orchestra): When I tried out for Legacy, I was just fifteen. I was a totally nervous, shy kid, and they didn’t help me feel comfortable. They didn’t function on that level back then.
ERIC PETERSON: Alex was real awkward, and he wouldn’t look at us. But he picked up his guitar and he was like Yngwie [Malmsteen]. He was in a band called Blackthorn, and he said, “Well, I dunno if I want to leave them.” Then he came to one of our shows and he really liked “Cursed Are the Legions of Death.” So he joined, and me and him wrote “Burnt Offerings” straight off. It was an epic song with all these nooks and crannies [that was on our 1987 album The Legacy]. We made a great team. I had a lot of the darkness in my sound, and he knew more about playing scales on the guitar than I did.
CHUCK BILLY: Steve “Zetro” Souza was my friend from the scene and he called me up and said, “Hey, I just joined Exodus. Here, call Alex Skolnick and tell him you wanna try out.” I was taking vocal lessons and I really wanted to sing. I went to college for vocal and guitar. I didn’t know much about thrash metal. I called him and he said, “Yeah, come on down. I brought this hella PA and a case of beer, and they had a little tiny room. I had to sing in the hallway because I couldn’t fit in the room with them.
ERIC PETERSON: We were tripping because we knew Chuck was the huge guy from Dublin Death Patrol [violent peers of the Slay Team], and we were all scared of him. Me and Louie went, “No way! He’s crazy!” But we went to see the [melodic metal] band Guilt that Chuck was in. Chuck was ripping it out and calling everybody in the crowd pussies. We were like, “Hey, he’s a cool front man.”
Although Testament was on the scene nearly from the start of thrash, it took Metallica’s 1986 landmark album Master of Puppets to expose them and other Bay Area bands to the masses. Master was a watershed album: the band combined the brutality of thrash, technical wizardry
of prog-rock, and epic grandeur of cinematic composers like John Barry and Ennio Morricone with the urgency of hardcore, and did it all in a framework of angry, infectious sing-alongs. It was the first album the band recorded specifically for its new label, Elektra, and, ultimately, it was the disc that legitimized thrash for the mainstream.
LARS ULRICH: Metallica was never just a thrash band. I accept that we had a lot to do with the way that whole scene took off; we were the first band to sound like that. But we never thought of ourselves as a “thrash” band. We were always an American band with British and European metal influences. It’s just that until Master of Puppets, nobody took us seriously.
KIRK HAMMETT: The cohesiveness from one track to the next made perfect sense to us. It was almost as if the album created itself. From the beginning, when we started writing the songs, all the way to the end, really great ideas were just moving and coming out of nowhere in a nonstop flow.
LARS ULRICH: Cliff and Kirk brought incredible depth into the band. Cliff went to music school. We would sit there and talk about Venom or Angel Witch. He’d sit there and talk about Bach, Yes, Peter Gabriel. I guess we slowly started feeling that the fast stuff needed dynamics because if it was all fast, none of it really stood out.
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal Page 24
