Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [79]
For Robb Flynn and his pals there seemed to be no discernible link between the new thrash bands and metal bands of the past: ‘It didn’t have any history.’ No one else outside his circle of high school buddies had even heard of it. ‘When we started a band and were doing backyard parties we’d cover “A Lesson in Violence” [by Exodus] or “Fight Fire with Fire” [Metallica], and all these twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds were just fuckin’ not into it at all! Like, “You guys suck, man. Play some fuckin’ Zeppelin!” When Death Angel came along,’ an even younger band of Bay Area thrashers than Metallica, whose early demos were produced by Kirk Hammett, ‘for us that was, like, amazing. Wow, here’s kids our age playing this fuckin’ thrash shit and playing it killer. They were fuckin’ awesome!’ Everybody that came along after could be traced directly back to the Big Four, though: ‘When Exodus started to get heavy we were like, wow, Exodus are starting to get like Metallica, that’s cool. With Possessed, we were like, oh, they’re trying to sound like Slayer, they’re cool.’
With very few records out there yet to buy, the early thrash scene thrived still on tape-trading and, most important of all, live gigs. As with the music, audiences divided up pretty evenly between hardcore punks and long-haired metallers. In LA, where promoters and club owners were frankly baffled by the new scene, emerging thrashers such as Megadeth and Slayer would often get shoehorned onto punk rock bills. In the Bay Area, where the culture clash was more easily recognised, the bands themselves often insisted on playing together. The result was often chaos, with the pogoing of the punks taken to a new, more violent level by the crowd-surfing of the metallists and the birth of what later became known as the mosh pit. Recalls Robb Flynn, ‘You’d come out of the pits and, like, I broke my nose, I fuckin’ broke my arm, come out with a sprained jaw. Just from stage-diving and pittin’. You didn’t come out going, “Ouch that hurt.” You came out going, like, “Fuck! I got a war wound!” It was fuckin’ brutal. There’s this kind of myth about the thrash thing that it was all friendly violent fun, but it wasn’t. There was such an element of danger, such an element of violence. It wasn’t safe to go to.’ Flynn recalls one particularly memorable occasion during an Exodus show at Ruthie’s Inn. ‘This dude had a cow leg bone and he’s in this pit, running around, this big dude, fuckin’ clubbing people with this fuckin’ cow-bone. Or people would set up chairs at the back of the pit and run from the back of Ruthie’s and jump off the chair and launch on stage and take out the guitar player. Take out the fuckin’ singer. And this was like showing affection – like, we love you guys, you’re awesome. Dudes would take a beer bottle and break it on the table, take off their shirts and open up their chests with it, fuckin’ bleeding, like “Yeah!” You’d be watching this, going “Holy fuck!”’
In this respect, Metallica could not claim to lead the way. That honour, such that it was, fell to Kirk Hammett’s former band Exodus. Recalls guitarist Gary Holt, ‘When we played our first show together with Metallica [in 1982] it was still a lot of fist-banging audience. Once Kirk left and [vocalist]