Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (34 page)

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.