Murder in the Front Row: The San Francisco Bay Area Thrash Metal Story

The early 1980s.

12 million people are unemployed in our country,

1.3 million of them in California,

more than 150,000 fight here in the Bay Area,

like this self-styled Reaganville near the railroad tracks in Berkeley.

Those are the conditions for tough times and real struggle.

I regret to say...

that we're in the worst economic mess since the Great Depression.

The San Francisco Bay Area,

located on the Western edge of the continental United States,

has a long history of supporting new music and free expression,

from jazz experimentation,

in beat poetry, to rock and roll.

By 1980, with the American economy in recession,

a new group of teenagers came of age,

and they wanted a new music.

Something faster, something heavier,

something that mirrored their own lives and not the previous generations.

From far away Europe, heavy metal sounds were slowly rippling westward,

carried by word of mouth,

a few rare, imported records,

some bootleg cassette tapes,

and music magazines.

But California was too far away for most of these bands to tour here.

So the young music fans of the Bay Area did what we do best.

We didn't wait for the music we wanted.

We created our own.

Are we rolling?

Right, I just want to say one thing first:

Posers must die!

We were out of our minds. We were kind of crazy.

We were just kids.

Kids run amok.

It was scary, and it was dark.

It's this outlet for angst.

I'm Alex Skolnick,

born and raised in Berkeley, California.

Hey, I'm James Hetfield from Metallica.

This is the music you don't want your parents to hear.

Gary Holt.

David Ellefson, bassist for Megadeth.

I don't need to say my name. Everybody watching this knows who I am.

We were doing it for chicks and beer, and I didn't drink.

My name's Chuck Billy. I grew up in Dublin, California.

And the pits were violent as hell.

Mark Osegueda from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Phil Demmel from Dublin, California.

The volume, the craziness, was epic.

Wow, we've got to do more of this.

Robb Flynn, Oakland, California.

My name's Rick Hunolt. I played guitar for Exodus.

People have passion for the metal.

There's no distinction between the bands and the fans.

We called it The Land Of Misfit Toys.

People in our scene, we felt invincible.

It was about survival. It was like... Aah!

Exodus had the destruction recipe.

If Exodus was playing, we were there.

That's Paul Baloff.

Kirk came up with a name, and we were just like-- wow.

What was the question again?

My name is Lars Ulrich, and I'm from Denmark.

- Tom Araya. - Fucking Slayer.

Singer and bass player for Slayer.

I got goosebumps talking about it right now, man.

My name is Paul Bostaph.

Larry Lalonde, El Sereno, California.

Charlie Benante, and I'm from the Bronx, New York.

Dave Lombardo, South East, L.A.

There was an aura of watching history happen.

East Bay guys. They played before us, and that was kind of a mistake.

I am Robert Trujillo. I'm from Santa Monica, California.

There goes that guy who was in Metallica. What's he up to?

It wasn't as exciting as you thought it would be, was it?

We were far away from the city. We were isolated.

There was nothing to do.

All we had was music, you know?

It was a pilgrimage, you know.

We would mow a few lawns, save a few bucks,

take the Alameda across the county-- bus transit-

to the BART station, take BART in Berkeley,

and walk up to Telegraph.

It's the-- Uh-- W-we went to all the hard rock stuff,

you know, Aerosmith, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath,

Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy.

Anything and everything that was around that had an edge,

that was loud and energetic,

I just went to.

Kirk was the first guy to ever play me, like,

Uli Roth-era Scorpions,

and that was the first day we ever hung out.

And that was when we metal his house in go see Ted Nugent and the Scorpions.

But there was other stuff coming out of England and Germany

that nobody was really was partial to on a large scale,

other than the kids that I knew.

The kids of my age, uh, were listening to disco.

They were listening in pop,

and I just wasn't really interested in that.

We all went to the same record stores. There was very few.

There was something that I just wasn't getting enough of

until I heard this one band called UFO.

And they had the heaviness. They had the intensity.

They had the energy.

They had the musicianship.

They had a guitar player that was sent from heaven

named Michael Schenker.

Me and John Marshall became obsessed with UFO.

I was hanging out up in Berkeley in April or May of 1980,

and I was walking along Telegraph Avenue.

You'd see him down on Telegraph and Berkeley all the time.

As I was walking, I heard a Motorhead song.

You could hear him coming from a block or two away, you know?

A total character.

There was this crazy skinny, tall dude.

Denim vest on, long hair,

big Thin Lizzy Chinatown patch on his back,

and he was playing Motorhead on his boombox.

You know, up--up on his shoulder.

This is back in the day when you'd carry a big boombox

that needed, like, D cells, like, ten of them.

He had this boombox about this big on his shoulder, and he would just be--

Blasting Motorhead,

and that was Rich Burch.

This shit was so loud it was like a Memorex commercial.

Whoa, who's that guy?

That seems like somebody we should know.

Very quickly I got invited to hang out with some of his crew

and ended up in a place

in the Golden Gate Park called Strawberry Hill,

where I met Ron Quintana,

Ian Kellen.

It was the beginning of getting to know that crew of people that were all

the Iron Maiden/Motorhead/Saxon/ Diamond Head/Merciful Fate fanatics.

By 1980, music sucked.

Being a kid in San Francisco,

radio was going downhill disco.

And so, radio stations were really bad.

And luckily there was KUSF, which could play harder punk stuff.

So that's where you'd first hear UFO maybe once in a while.

And at high school I ran into a friend,

and he said, "You've got to go to this store called the Record Vault.

It's amazing."

I got on the bus. I headed up, walked in,

and it was like walking into Mecca.

It was dark. It was cool.

There was Motorhead playing,

and all over the walls was everything that I was into.

We'd find all this great, imported metal, you know?

Budgie, and Venom, and Diamond Head, and Sweet Savage demos.

All this stuff that we really loved that you weren't going to find at,

like, you know, Tower Records.

Back then you'd be hanging out in the record store [or two, three hours.

You only have $20 bucks in your pocket,

so you were trying to figure out which two records to buy.

You know, it took a while.

It was the place everybody came to find out things.

It was the place everybody came to buy their new release,

to get their copy of Metal Mania, Ardschok, Kerrang!, whatever.

And it was awesome.

It was an amazing experience just to go there

and-and see all these like minded people that were there, too,

shopping for the same stuff, and they're all wearing vests,

and back patches, and into metal and into all this underground stuff.

The record stores would have the albums set up on the wall

and on a little shelf, so you could see the cover,

and there was the first Iron Maiden album cover with Eddie on it.

You know, it was, like- Oh, shit, look at that!

Down in Southern California,

my place was called Middle Earth- Middle Earth Records.

And, you know, you'd have to go in and order the record.

There was such an anticipation around getting it.

All the different bands, you know,

all these different, unique sounds and styles,

and we were just-

we just dove head first into it.

I gravitated towards these metal bands because they were an escape.

You listen to an Iron Maiden song, and they're talking about

a fantasy, that was no different, in my head, to a Stephen King novel.

Yes, there were murders. Yes, there were Satanic things.

It was fantasy.

It didn't make me want to go out and slaughter babies or anything.

It was an escape from my suburban, teenage life.

This is a-- just a drawing of Eddie.

I was a huge Iron Maiden fan,

and obviously I should've been paying more attention in geometry.

I got a 27 out of 52.

The compact cassette tape came of age in the 1970s.

Inexpensive and easy to record,

tape-traders quickly adopted it as a means of spreading the newest sounds.

In the pages of Kerrang!, they would have pen pal ads.

Kerrang! would run them [or free. That's what started everything.

That's how I found out about Brian Lew and KJ Doughton.

KJ had a ton of Maiden, and so did Brian.

So that was cool.

That was another big staple of the movement.

Everyone had their demo and bootleg list,

and they'd ask [or the other person's list and trade tapes.

Back then it was snail mail, and tapes, and stamps, and handwritten letters.

All of a sudden I was getting letters from people in Germany, Holland, France,

England, New York, Chicago.