Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [77]
Speed metal would certainly have worked as an accurate description, however, of the band that would rival closest Metallica’s place at the forefront of thrash – Slayer, formed in Huntington Beach, the same surf city suburb Metallica had found Dave Mustaine in, in the same year, 1982. Led by vocalist/bassist Tom Araya and lead guitarist Kerry King, augmented by a second lead guitarist, Jeff Hanneman, and a frighteningly talented, jazz-trained drummer named Dave Lombardo, Slayer – originally known as Dragonslayer, after the 1981 fantasy film – had started out as an Iron Maiden-style sword-and-sorcery metal band. Like Metallica, they had an abiding interest in the NWOBHM, but it wasn’t until seeing Metallica opening for Saxon at the Whisky in the summer of 1982, that they shortened their name to Slayer and refocused their music towards a more original, much faster and more powerful sound, built around the screamingly atonal twin lead guitars of King and Hanneman, Lombardo’s monumental drums and Araya’s – unlike Hetfield’s at the same stage – already fully formed grizzly bear vocals. In common more with Venom, they would cultivate a ‘satanic’ image, which featured pentagrams, make-up, spikes and inverted crosses. While Hammett was perfecting his Joe Satriani-tutored technique, Hanneman likened his own guitar sound to that of a ‘slaughtered pig’. Slayer’s lyrical themes also took on a much darker hue than Metallica’s, early hair-twirling stage favourites including titles such as ‘Evil Has No Boundaries’, ‘The Anti-Christ’ and ‘Black Magic’. In 1983, at the same time as Metallica was working on Kill ’Em All, Slayer were invited by Brian Slagel – who had been impressed by their performance opening for Bitch at the Woodstock Club – to contribute to the Metal Massacre III compilation. The track, ‘Aggressive Perfector’, led to a fully fledged deal with Slagel’s Metal Blade label.
Similarly, Anthrax, who had buddied up with them during their time with Jonny and Marsha in New Jersey, would also have Metallica to thank for the radical change in direction that positioned them right at the forefront of the coming thrash phenomenon. ‘Anthrax always just wanted to be Metallica,’ says Marsha Z, who went on to co-manage them with Jonny. The band had been formed in 1981 by guitarist Scott Ian (nicknamed Scott ‘Not’ Ian at school) and another extremely talented drummer named Charlie Benante, along with bassist Dan Lilker, lead guitarist Greg Walls and vocalist Neil Turbin. Their debut album, Fistful of Metal, was recorded within weeks of Kill ’Em All hitting the street and would even be released on the same label, Jonny and Marsha’s fledgling Megaforce, in January 1984. But it was a staid affair by comparison, although it did contain one proto-thrash classic in its hilariously apoplectic cover of Alice Cooper’s ‘I’m Eighteen’. It wasn’t until Turbin, Walls and Lilker departed (Lilker to another new group of thrash wannabes, Nuclear Assault) and were replaced by singer Joey Belladonna, former bass roadie Frank Bello and guitarist Dan Spitz, recording the impressive Armed and Dangerous EP, that they began to be considered in the same musical ballpark as Metallica and Slayer, developing their own quirky style, less involved with mock-horror and more indebted to the comic book and skateboard culture which also sprung up around the genre. By this point, ‘We really felt that we were part of something,’ said Ian. ‘The energy was palpable.’
Last out of the traps but viewed with as much reverence, often more, than their peers, by dint of the fact that their creator had also been one of the originators of Metallica, came Dave Mustaine’s band Megadeth. ‘Truthfully, I just wanted to out-metal Metallica,’ Mustaine would tell Bob Nalbandian in a 2004 interview for Bob’s Shockwaves website (the twenty-first-century version of his fanzine The Headbanger). It was a typically flippant Mustaine remark, which nonetheless held more than a grain of truth. But if Megadeth had begun