Original subtitles

[people chanting]

[narrator] The early 1980s.

[reporter]12 million people are unemployed in our country,

1.3 million of them in California,

more than 150,000 right 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.

[Regan] I regret to say...

that we're in the worst economic mess since

the Great Depression.

[upbeat music plays]

[narrator] 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,

to 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.

[interviewer] 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. [laughs]

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... Ah!

Exodus had the destruction recipe. [laughs]

If Exodus was playing, we were there.

[whispers] 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?

[theme music plays]

[Kirk Hammett] 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.

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

take the Alameda across the county bus transit

to the BART station, take BART to Berkeley,

and walk up to Telegraph.

Instantly 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 met at his house to 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 to 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.

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.

[heavy metal music plays]

[audience applause]

[Lars Ulrich] I was hanging out up in Berkeley

in April or May of 1980,

and I was walking along Telegraph Avenue.

[Erik Lannon] You'd see him down on Telegraph and Berkeley all the time.

[Lars Ulrich] As I was walking, I heard a Motorhead song.

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

[Lars] A total character.

There was this crazy skinny tall dude.

[Erik] Denim vest on, long hair,

big Thin Lizzy Chinatown patch on his back,

and he was playing Motorhead on his boombox.

You know, 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--

[Erik] Blasting Motorhead,

and that was Rich Birch.

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

Whoa, who's that guy?

That seems like somebody we should know.

[Kirk] 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 Kallen.

It was the beginning of getting to know

that crew of people that were all the

IronMaiden/Motorhead/ Saxon/Diamond Head/ Merciful Fate fanatics.

By 1980, music sucked. 1979 sucked worse.

Being a kid in San Francisco,

radio was going downhill disco.

So radio stations were really bad.

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, Venom,

Diamond Head, and Sweet Savage demos.

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

like, Tower Records.

Back then you'd be hanging out in the record store for 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 see all these like minded people that were there, too,

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

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.

It was like, oh, shit, look at that.

Down in Southern California,

my place was called Middle Earth Records.

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 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.

[narrator]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 for 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 for the other person's list and trade tapes.

Back then it was snail mail, tapes,

stamps, and handwritten letters.

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

England, New York and Chicago.

It just opened up this whole worldview.

I had been now trading with so many people, getting tapes

and fanzines from England, mainly.

This list kept growing from two, three, four, five, six pages.

Then I realized, "Well, I want to do a fanzine,"

and I started to add pictures in July.

And it became Metal Mania by August of 1981.

When I first met Ron,

he made me a compilation tape.

I mean, it was the thing to do.

It was part of the conversation back then in the early '80s.

The thing that maybe has become the misconception over the years about

the tape-trading network is that we weren't dubbing albums.

We were dubbing live bootlegs.

You know, at that time part of being a music fan,

is you wanted to own the record.

You wanted to own the seven-inch single,

because it made you feel part of something bigger.

In high school,

they had a guitar class,

and it was literally 30 people learning how to play guitar.

And in that class was Mark Biederman,

who was eventually in Blind Illusion, and Kirk.

Before Gary was in the band, you know,

when it was just Kirk and them.

They sometimes rehearsed at our rehearsal space.

And Kirk and I were in Mr. Bee's class together, the guitar class.

We were kind of just mostly learning our instruments.

And you know, Kirk turned me on to so many different kinds of music.

Like, I had never heard UFO or the Scorpions.

All we had was music, you know?

And then when we got into the music,

all we had were each other.

We wanted to take it to the next level, so we got instruments.

And I think that the anger of being in a place

that just didn't have enough to offer, you know,

the frustration of being bored.

I think a lot of that got channeled into our instruments.

[rock music playing]

[narrator] In Los Angeles,

a new heavy metal was beginning to rise.

In December of 1980, a friend of mine and I--

Who were the only two people, by the way,

at the time who knew anything about the new wave of heavy metal.

Went to see Michael Schenker Group play at a place called the Country Club in Reseda.

After the show, my friend John was in the parking lot,

and he saw some kid wearing a Saxon European T-shirt.

Now, in 1980 nobody knew who Saxon was in L.A.,

let alone had a European T-shirt.

And that of course was a kid named Lars Ulrich.

Fast-forward to when James and I had the band.

One thing led to another, and we started playing in L.A.

A year-and-a-half or so later,

we got the idea to do a compilation album.

Lars called me up one day and said, "If I put together a band,

can I be on your album?" Like, of course. Absolutely.

So Lars and me are always talking about doing a magazine.

We need a store, man.

Let's just start a club and hang out.

And Lars, in his way, you know, he was like,

"Oh, that's cool. That's a good idea, man."

He showed me a list of his future band or club names.

So he had, like, generic, hot-rod-y

American car names:

Thunderbolt,

Metal Mania, Metallica.

He had a huge list of names.

That ended up being some band that starts with an "M".

I think it was Metallica,

that we misspelled on the very first [laughs]

version of the record.

Lars always was able to make things happen.

Somehow he landed them a gig opening for Saxon.

James didn't play guitar. He just sang.

And Dave Mustaine played guitar.

Their set consisted of "Hit the Lights,"

"Blitzkrieg" by Blitzkrieg, and about five Diamond Head covers.

That was pretty much it.

The selection of the cover songs we did

I think was a little bit more involved,

because we all kind of had a say in what bands we liked.

When Metal Mania 5 came out right after Metallica

played their very first shows ever.

So, Lars helped write an article about his show

and this great new band, Metallica.

He wrote this little article

about L.A. heavy metal

and young metal attack Metallica,

and this is the very first article ever

of Metallica.

and of course it was written by Lars. [laughs]

But they never really quite fit in with the L.A. crowd.

We got gigs when we could, as many as we could.

You know, we got kicked out of a few clubs

because they thought we were a punk rock band.

With Brian Slagel's help,

we were able to go up to the San Francisco area

with a few other L.A. bands.

Man, it was on.

[heavy metal plays]

[Sven Soderlund] When they came up to San Francisco,

and they saw the energy that was involved,

they just wanted to be in that element.

And it helped them tremendously,

and it helped us grow as a scene

in San Francisco and the Bay Area, as well.

A lot of bands came out of the East Bay.

A lot of musicians came out of the East Bay.

The East Bay is a fucked up place.

In the '70s and early 80s,

it had high unemployment,

high crime rate,

and it was a boring place.

My mom worked a lot,

so like in the daytime I had a lot of

free time to myself to just jam out at home.

We were ghetto kids, you know?

We stole shit, you know?

Like, there's the time the Wagon Wheel liquor store

in Pinole burned down, right?

You know, most people stay away from burnt out buildings.

Not Exodus. We crawled through the wreckage,

because there was dozens and dozens of bottles of alcohol in there.

I actually met Gary shoplifting

when we were going to junior high school.

We had nothing given to us.

We stole some of our first equipment.

Gary was a friend of mine from Richmond,

and he was kind of helping us out

with gear and stuff like that.

Then Kirk gave him a guitar lesson, and...

[explosion] Wow.

Taught me how to play guitar, you know?

I hold a pick the way I do,

I fret a bar chord the way I do.

We do it exactly the same, because he showed me.

Here's how you hold a pick. So, all right,

I'll hold a pick like that, then.

It was Kirk saying yeah, I want to jam with people

finding guys that played, and making it happen.

I remember walking into this party, not knowing anyone,

seeing this one short guy

with hair that was just like mushroom-shaped, super long,

[raspy voice] and he was talking like this

[normal voice] and was cracking jokes, and some of it was pretty funny.

And he started talking about music. He's like,

[mimics voice] "Oh, yeah, Judas Priest. So heavy, so heavy.

Oh, Maiden is so heavy, so heavy."

And I said to him, "Hey, bro, you know UFO?" He goes...

♪ Rock bottom! ♪

♪ Rock bottom! ♪

And starts singing "Rock Bottom" to me.

♪ Seventeen and nature's queen ♪

I looked at him and said,

"You're going to be the singer of our new band, Exodus."

He's like, "Okay."

Then from that minute on we were inseparable.

His name was Pablo Nikolaivich Paulakersokoff.

It means, Son of Nicholas in Russian.

He was a blue blood Russian.

He was a little tiny guy,

very aggressive. A strong, thick,

100-percent Russian man.

Paul was Paul, take it or leave it.

I mean, he had so much charisma and so much energy

that you just wanted to be around him.

[heavy metal plays]

He couldn't sing that well, but he could sing good enough.

[singing thrash metal]

That's where the line-up really came together,

you know, it's when we found the band's voice.

Baloff wasn't a singer when we met him.

He was just a headbanger like us.

When Exodus played, they just got the crowd completely insane.

[Ron Quintana over radio]

[heavy thrash metal plays]

Paul's first show was at the Ducal Palace in Alameda,

which is some little hall pizza joint kind of place, you know?

And I remember, like, I knew he was the right guy for the job

because it was one of those places that's got a stage that's about a foot high.

And next thing you know, he's over on top of the tables,

and he's just rocking them fiercely like that,

trying to break them. It was just fucking awesome.

He checked everyone's attitude

and made sure that if you're hanging out with us,

you're into the music, you knew the music,

and you weren't an F'ing poser.

[heavy metal plays]

[Brian Slagel] I was friends with all the people in San Francisco.

There was a really great scene going on up there,

so I was able to put together a Metal Massacre show

at the Stone in San Francisco, which was one of the big clubs there.

So it was going to be three bands from L.A.

and I called up Lars and said, "Hey, one of the bands dropped out.

We have this gig up in San Francisco. You guys want to do it?"

We weren't one of the three bigger bands.

We weren't even first on the agenda there,

but we got invited when somebody canceled.

[Dave Mustaine] So we hopped in Ron McGovney's pickup truck with our gear,

and off we went with a trailer in the back.

[Dave Mustaine recorded]

[audience cheering]

[Erik] There were only a handful of people there.

I know a lot of people claimed to have been there.

I was actually given this shirt by their original bass player, Ron McGovney.

And that was the most amazing evening I ever saw,

because in L.A. they were outcast. Nobody knew.

And we went up to San Francisco, and that place went crazy.

[narrator] In September 1982,

Metallica played their first show in San Francisco.

The reaction was immediate and explosive.

My mom didn't let me go.

[Ron Quintana] Dave had this charisma that just took over the band,

and when Metallica played,

I thought he was going to be the next superstar

because he was so crazy on stage,

and funny.

Who the fuck's the frontman, you or him?

And I liked it because, you know, I've got a big mouth.

I like to talk. [chuckles]

[heavy metal plays]

Some of those people that I had befriended

for the previous year or two came,

and you felt there was a scene,

sort of a collection of people that were really fans of the music,

which was a really different thing than

what was happening in L.A. at the time.

So it was a very, uh,

surreal,

transformative experience for us.

[Brian Lew] We were all teenagers. They were in a band onstage.

We were teenagers in the crowd.

And at the time, Metallica were doing Diamond Head covers,

you know, one of those bands we didn't think anybody else knew about.

And when they launched into "The Prince,"

that's when the bond with that band

and the Bay Area happened. If you know that band, you're a brother.

That was the switch.

Yeah, I remember that first show,

seeing fans that didn't care what they looked like.

I mean, they had cutoff denim and stuff.

They didn't care.

And they were at the front of the stage,

headbanging, because the music did that for them.

They weren't gathered around the bar scene or anything.

They were there for the music.

I think we had a much different relationship with our fans,

because we were salt of the earth.

Metallica came up to the Bay Area to play the Old Waldorf,

and I remember watching them thinking,

"Fucking pretty cool."

Then Laaz Rockit came on and played for literally, like, 25 people,

and that said a lot to me.

It said a lot to Baloff. It said to everyone in Exodus.

We were like, okay.

All right, we know what's working here, and we know what's not.

Yeah, so Metallica, I first got hip to them through the demo.

So shortly after that, the band I was playing with at the time,

Laaz Rockit, we were playing a show together.

They were playing before us. Mistake.

Something about Metallica. They had that special--

That kick,

and you know?

They got that extra boost of adrenaline that

I think made everyone step up their game. Everyone.

Then we played a show the next day,

and it was a benefit for Metal Mania.

It was kind of a hodgepodge thing

that was put together in 24 hours. They needed to find bands.

They had got Metallica.

They asked us to open. We said sure, we'll open the show.

This is at the Mabuhay Gardens.

We played our show.

Then Metallica came on, and they played.

And they were just fantastic.

That's when I first met James,

and that's when I first met Lars.

You know, it's funny because it was a window into things to come in my future,

because as I was talking to Lars,

he got undressed and changed right in front of me.

I was like, wow, why is this guy doing that?

Then I realized, oh,

this is, I guess, what European people do.

[laughs] Because...

You know, I lived in the East Bay.

All I had to contend with was rednecks everywhere, you know?

[narrator] Metallica's legendary demo cassette, "No Life Til Leather,"

was recorded in the summer of 1982.

It immediately became a stapleof the tape-trading underground

and established the band as a force to be reckoned with.

[Lars] First we did a four-song demo called "Power Metal,"

and then the infamous "No Life Til Leather" tape

came a couple months after.

I just started sending it to all the same people

that I'd been trading some of this other underground metal stuff with,

Like the KJ Doughtons of the world.

Oh, my God, this is tape is amazing.

It just crushes. It's unbelievable,

they've come so far.

And I sent Brian the first Metallica demo,

and I think that's the first taste he got of it.

[Tony Isabella] While working at the club,

one of my coworkers had started to do a Monday night event

called Metal Monday,

and these bands that later became thrash were presented.

And it was clear this was a new direction.

[Craig Behrhurst] Attendance on a Tuesday morning in any of the high schools

across the Bay Area was pretty poor.

I can attest to that, because a lot of us were still in high school.

[Harold Olmden] The Bay Area people were so loyal to the band that

if they didn't like the band, they would actually

turn their backs on the band while they were playing.

[Brian] There was a band called Hans Naughty.

They were based in San Francisco

but with a very much Los Angeles Sunset Strip aesthetic,

and they were on the bill with Metallica.

There were fans that had patches of

obviously their favorite bands on and what not.

They would show how much they liked the band or didn't like the band.

We might've flipped them off a couple times, and that got boring.

[K.J. Doughton] They just quietly turned, and that was I guess silent protest.

They got across that hey, you're not a favorite band,

and we're waiting for this one, the one that's on my back patch.

[Ray Burton] Cliff came to us and said,

"I'd like to learn to play bass guitar."

Jan and I said yeah,

so we got him a cheap guitar and a cheap amplifier,

then started giving him lessons.

And from then on...

it was all Cliff.

I knew about Cliff Burton from his previous band, Trauma,

because Baloff knew about Trauma.

Baloff had seen Trauma and said, "Oh, you got to see this band.

They've got a killer bass player and a killer guitar player."

He said to me one day, "Hey, let's--

you want to go

to San Francisco to see a show at the Stone?"

"What's going on?" He goes, "Well, let's see this band Metallica."

Maybe a couple months later, I was talking to Lars.

He said, "Do you know any good bass players out there?"

I said, "Well, there's this band from San Francisco

with this amazing bass player named Cliff Burton.

I saw him at the Troubadour a while ago, coming down and playing again.

"You guys should come." So Lars was like, "Okay, cool."

The show happens. Lars and James were there.

I didn't know how far into the set, but it was pretty early.

Maybe the second or third song Lars goes to me,

"That's going to be our bass player."

[bass plays]

[James Hetfield] Cliff represented the Bay Area.

He represented a freedom.

He represented a freakness

that I didn't know

so much growing up in L.A.

I went and saw Cliff play with Trauma at the Keystone Berkeley,

and it was no secret that the band knew

that Cliff was about to be poached from them.

That's where Cliff belonged, was in Metallica.

[Ray] Cliff would be talking to somebody on the phone.

And just talk, talk.

And this went on for,

oh, golly, I'd swear a month.

Finally I said to Jan,

"Who's Cliff talking to on the phone so much?"

And she said, "Well, there's a band from Los Angeles

that wants him to join them."

And Cliff said,

"No, I'm not going to go down to L.A., I said,

"If you guys want me to join your band,

you can come up to the Bay Area."

And by golly, here they did. [laughs]

Then one day...

[phone rings]

Baloff called me up and said,

"That guy Cliff Burton, bass player for Trauma,

is in Metallica now!" And I said, "No fucking way."

And then I saw them at the Stone,

you know, Cliff's first gig at the Stone. I was just like--

[Gary Holt] It was kind of like looking in a mirror.

Here's another band playing, like,

kind of what we are, you know,

their own stamp on it. But, you know,

I remember just hanging out and getting hammered that night,

and we just all kind of said the same thing.

We kind of found our kindred spirit, you know?

[James] There was a lot of integrity

in the metal scene in San Francisco.

Besides going up on the hill by the park

and just blasting whatever music we were loving,

booze and music, you know?

That was our collective. That's where we got to know each other

and really feel like we had a family.

[man] Cliff is the one that brought us to the Bay Area.

If you want me in the band, you got to come up here.

[narrator] On December 28th, 1982,

Cliff Burton was invited to play in a small house in El Cerrito

that would later come to be known as the Metallica Mansion.

Part audition, part rehearsal,

only a lucky few were there.

No audio exists, but fortunately for history

Brian Lew brought his camera and photographed the new band lineup.

[Brian] At some point Lars probably called me and said,

"You know, we're going to be playing with our new bassist."

Ron Quintana was there. Rich Burch was there.

Ian Callin, who did Metal Mania with Ron, was there.

There was a group of maybe five or six of us.

There's this little room in El Cerrito,

and that was the living room where Metallica played with Cliff for the first time.

And that was it.

Jamming with Cliff for the first time in the living room there,

hearing "Seek and Destroy," and all of a sudden he's doing some stuff.

It's like, oh, my God, this is going to be awesome.

It sort of catapulted Metallica to another level.

[narrator] In early 1983, Metallica moved from Los Angeles to the Bay Area.

A very short window of time

with Mustaine in the band and Cliff in the band,

and rehearsing and a few really great shows in the Bay Area.

[Dave] That was one of the things that you could tell when we played together.

When the lights are off and the guitars are roaring, there's a respect.

Just the whole area, being up there,

getting Cliff onboard, it felt like home.

Then it came time for us to play the show at the Stone.

We went on, and we had a great show.

The place was packed.

And then Metallica came on.

[heavy metal playing]

And it was the first time that I'd actually been able

to watch the whole show.

As I'm watching them, I thought,

"These guys are fucking great.

They'd be so much better with me."

[narrator] In the New York area,

Anthrax was proudly flying the flag of the new heavy metal.

[Charlie Benante] I think we felt kind of out of it

because we were the only band

on the East Coast that wanted to do something like this.

We thought it was so cool that in the Bay Area,

there was this kind of club

of this type of bands

that were gigging around and just making music.

And I remember Exodus being one of the first bands,

beside Metallica,

that I thought were fucking great.

I just started getting the tape out there,

and then we started getting some good response.

And eventually this tape ended up in the hands of Johnny Z.

Around that time we were meeting with Johnny Z in New Jersey,

giving him demos.

He was bringing the band from San Francisco to come over.

[Kirk] Johnny Z came down to the house with a demo tape,

which was "No Life Til Leather." We were blown away.

Metallica was always ahead of us and the other bands, you know?

They were always six months to a year ahead of us.

They came out with "Kill Em All"

before any other band had their records out.

I think "Kill Em All" really set the tone for what was going to come.

[narrator] In April 1983,

Dave Mustaine was let go from Metallica

and replaced by Kirk Hammett.

We had obviously started hanging out with Exodus,

and Kirk was definitely very musically gifted.

And he was also very up for whatever was going on.

Yeah, Kirk and I were at this party.

He's like, "Hey, man, come here. Mark Whitaker just called me.

They want me to audition for Metallica."

You know, it's like a passing of the torch, you know?

Like, Kirk giving me the keys to the family car and saying,

"Here, it's yours now. Don't blow it up."

As far as the music was concerned,

Exodus's music was similar

as to what Metallica was doing already.

I had the chops to be able to play all that stuff on "Kill Em All,"

no problem.

That was the least of my worries,

because even then I knew that when you go into a band, there's a certain dynamic.

And if your personality doesn't work within that band dynamic,

it just won't work. You won't go anywhere.

[narrator]A group of die-hard New Jersey metal fans

known as the Old Bridge Militiatook Metallica into their home,

the Funhouse.

It's pretty amazing that the house got a nickname,

which was the Funhouse because of all the things that we did down there.

[Ray Dill] The place was all about fun, because what did you do there?

-You had dirt bikes happening. -oh, Yeah.

You had canoe rides. We hooked a canoe up to a chain.

[Mark] We were welcome to quite a few places

that maybe shouldn't have. [laughs]

-The Funhouse-- -Not much to pick from.

-They didn't have much. -A house with no heat, sometimes.

[Mark] You know, they supplied us with the things we needed.

[laughing]

You know, everybody knew that

we would have these crazy parties

with the music going crazy.

The sound system was...

I believe it was a four-channel Onkyo.

[Joe] Yeah, I had the SAE, but we bought a regular--

-Rack system. -Yeah, a whole rack system.

Yeah, we just didn't have the regular speakers.

I guess they were monitors, right?

Two 12s, two 14s-- whatever.

It went up to the ceiling of the house.

Run a demo, and then you're in your bedroom.

It was like, wow, this is pretty wild.

[narrator]nMeanwhile back in the East Bay,

Exodus quickly took hold

as the Bay Area's go-to heavy metal band.

Ruthie's Inn became home to the burgeoning scene.

Looks like someone's trying to make a respectable location out of this place.

Let's open it back up, Ruthie's Inn. [laughs]

Last time I was down here, it still had the marquee,

and you could still see Ruthie's Inn on it.

This place was as much the epicenter

of the Bay Area thrash scene as CBGBs was to the New York punk scene.

I mean, there were so many clubs prior to Ruthie's,

but this is where the violence took off.

[laughs] This is where "Murder in the Front Row"

really did take place.

[Durelle Ali] My father was Wes Robinson, born in Port Arthur, Texas.

Came out to the East Bay about 1933.

He grew up in a household that was full of music,

and they were hardcore jazz aficionados.

They would sneak out late at night to go see Ella Fitzgerald or the classics.

A lot of the greats. That started his love of music.

It wasn't so much that he had a club,

but rather that he would foster relationships

that would allow him to use different venues for performances.

He was a promoter,

and that was the beginning.

And Wes Robinson, you know,

the late, great Wes Robinson, you know,

booked Exodus at the first ever show at Ruthie's, a blues club.

[Durelle] His joy for something

always led his actions into getting involved with it.

He never got involved with something just because

he might be able to make some money at it.

He saw something in it.

I'm not sure what he saw.

Maybe he recognized from when he was a music fan,

being younger.

Obviously much different music,

but I think he saw some of that same energy.

So he really helped nurture the scene.

There were battles along the way.

There were battles from the neighborhood.

There was a parking lot across from Ruthie's that is--

The business is still there. Big O Tires.

People would throw up in there, in that parking lot,

and break bottles.

After a while I was like, these people never complain.

They never call the cops. They never do anything.

After thinking about it, I'm like, well, they do sell tires there, so.

We would party right across the street at the Big O parking lot.

Someone would roll up in their Chevy Nova,

crack the trunk, and there'd be coolers of beer

and bottles of Jack and what not. And we all hung out.

Half the bands would wait with us and drink with us, and then,

Oh, got to go into the show.

Well, Exodus shows at Ruthie's were really crazy.

I mean, I don't think I ever paid once to get into the show.

Wes would be sitting at the door.

I would walk by, and he'd just kind of go like that.

Connie, Pam,

Rebecca, Leah,

those girls were something else,

because there weren't very many of us at all.

[Conie Taylor] We would go to the bar. We would sit down. We would drink.

We didn't have IDs. We weren't old enough.

But it just sort of happened.

You know, people were dancing, and the bands were playing so hard.

It became very human, very fast.

[Gary] That's when we found our home,

because it was kind of where we were from.

You know, Rick and Paul were both from Berkeley.

Robbie was from Berkeley.

Tom and I were from San Pablo.

[Brian] Exodus at Ruthie's Inn, a random person would

just record it and send it off to our pen pal friends.

So you know, pre "Bonded by Blood,"

this is how Exodus's music got out.

[Alex Skolnick] It very quickly became a scene.

It was the place to go. They have great kamikazes.

You knew never knew what was going to happen.

You know, some crazy shit was going to jump off.

Of course, I was young, and we were all just raging.

It was a party.

[Harold] The place was really dark,

and you kind of get away with almost anything there.

I'll never forget one time going through the crowd, headbanging and going crazy.

I actually tripped on some people.

There were some people having sex.

The shows were classic, dude. I mean,

it was like Ruthie's Inn,

so hot and humid in there. The walls would be sweating.

People are hanging off of plumbing pipes and sprinklers,

and toilets were getting broke.

The place would just get fucking destroyed,

and they'd still have us back like two weeks later.

Toby Rage, Andy Anderson, Lonnie Hunolt...

You know, we'd all take turns.

We called it bowling ball.

It's where people jump on stage,

and you're crouched in a ducking position by the drums.

You get a running start and just linebacker them as hard as you could

down into the crowd, you know? That was fun.

We were hanging out at the Big O across the street.

This cat Toby Rage comes up,

and he sees Leroy with his Mike Tereo hair

and his white Capezios.

And he walks up, and he just goes...

[spits]

Nice shoes.

Toby Rage was,

again, I never saw him break character.

I don't know how he... lived at that level.

I just remember feeling claustrophobic in there,

but if the music was good, that was all that mattered.

[Mark Osegueda] Exodus just owned, and the pits were violent as hell.

It was just--

It was glorious.

[Brian] You know, Exodus's group of close friends,

you know, they were called the Slay Team,

and literally if someone showed up at Ruthie's Inn

wearing a Motley Crue or a hair metal band shirt,

they would literally tear the shirt off the kid's back.

They would cut strips off of the shirt and tie them around their wrists,

like scalps, and those aren't fucking friendship strips.

Those are like war trophies.

[Harold]Lizzie Green, Baloff's girlfriend,

actually did a comic book that was based on the Slay Team.

It was just them going out and killing posers, literally.

Paul and I had this idea that we were going to make money.

So I draw up this whole comic.

She would sit there and draw these little comics,

which have now become the Slay Team comics, which are famous.

"I can't believe this. That car just ran him down.

Someone wants to kill us all.

It's the Slay Team, and they will kill us all unless we strike back."

So we start a poser war.

This is actually a real person. We called him Poser Bob.

I don't remember what Bob's real name is.

He did dress like this. He had no problem being a poser.

[record scratches]

[narrator]By the way folks, she's now a nuclear scientist.

I research explosives for the government, is the party line,

but I blow shit up for the government is my line.

[Baloff]

[Mark Devito] Toby Rage, I mean,

it's like nobody was going to try posing

if all of a sudden you were going to get a Converse footprint

on the side of your head.

I got off the plane the one day, went to Ruthie's the next day.

People were jumping on the PA stack.

They were jumping off into the crowd.

People were standing with their backs against the stage,

holding their hands like this,

throwing people on.

We had never seen anything like that in Europe.

[man]

[Pam Behrhorst] No stage diving for me.

Most of the time I stood just on the outside

and let some other guys push the guys in the middle.

Just close enough so you could still see the band but not get,

you know, run over.

Ruthie's was insane.

We were never real crazy about

keeping people offstage at that point, you know?

That's what they did, and they had a damn good time doing it.

If you were a poser or a dippy girl or something like that,

they could be terrifying, but if you were

a friend of theirs and understood them or accepted them,

their hearts were so big.

[Brian] One of those defining moments in any scene,

where that was the show that inspired the lyrics to "Bonded by Blood."

I remember it was us and some rock band playing, right?

And the rock band, they were up there rocking out for their sister's band

or whatever with their drink glasses and left them on the front of the stage.

When we come on, everybody starts smashing all the glass.

So people's hands got cut,

-so there was literally-- -Blood upon the stage.

There's literally blood all over.

And I remember this one girl who was there to see the rock band

must've saw something she liked about the band,

and she was up front and was rocking out, you know, this is kind of cool.

And Paul reached down and got a big smear, a handful of blood,

and just wiped it down her face.

And she just ran out, ah, screaming.

[Brian] Bonded by Blood is written by a band who were in the thick of it.

That song and that album resonate so much because

it's a product of the scene.

[man singing]

[Brian] You know, if you listen to it, it's almost like a documentary in some ways

about those brief years when this whole Bay Area scene was just getting going,

like '83 to '85.

[heavy metal music plays]

[narrator] Nobody, and I mean nobody,

had ever seen anything like...

Slayer.

[thrash metal music plays]

I remember thinking this is really interesting, okay?

They're from Southern California,

but they're faster than... [chuckles]

any band I've heard.

The imagery, the speed,

and just the heaviness of it all just kind of took me into this.

Fucking Slayer.

[Dave Lonbardo] When we went to the Bay Area, that's where we felt at home,

because L.A. was saturated

and Hollywood was saturated with glam rock.

We all know what that is,

compared to thrashers and metal heads.

We were opposite.

When we played,

all I remember is the enthusiasm of the crowd,

their intensity. Kids jumping on the stage,

and then they'd just start walking on people's heads and shoulders, you know,

because everybody was just stuck together.

We went up north and did a show with Exodus,

which blew me away.

[Gary] There's nothing wrong with imports.

The Bay Area was the epicenter of the thrash scene,

and if your own region was not welcoming of you, we would be.

Being from L.A., nobody did what we did.

So to be there, hear them,

and think, "oh, my god, these guys are doing the same thing we are."

Really heavy music, awesome.

The sounds are awesome. The band is fucking awesome.

The guys were really cool, and we got along great.

L.A. was more where the hair metal was going down.

So we're kind of in O.C.,

and the O.C. crowd was very similar to the Bay Area crowd,

but the Bay Area crowd was far more advanced.

I first became aware of Slayer when Brian Slagel,

who runs Metal Bay Records, sent me an advanced tape of Show No Mercy,

their first album.

It was almost like a demo.

Again, it was at the time when

all we cared about were bands that played fast.

Slayer came up here and played their first three shows in January '84,

and the first one was at the Keystone Berkeley.

If you look at the back cover of Show No Mercy, they were wearing eyeliner.

Why do you wear makeup? [laughs]

You can't call it glam,

and it wasn't really makeup, but it was eyeliner.

[Tom Araya] Somebody made the remark, "Why are you guys wearing that makeup?"

My thought is I'm not really wearing makeup.

You don't need to be wearing that stuff, man.

They're all in makeup,

and they have the spandex and all the trip going on.

I think Kerry might've had spikes at that point.

Whether you don't know me, whether you don't know the guitar,

whether you don't know much about Slayer, you know those nails.

They had some shit going on that I was-- "What the fuck is this?"

People like Andy Anderson and Toby Rage, like, the original Slay Team.

They noticed it and started a chant of "take off the makeup."

Andy even went as far as going to the men's room and getting paper towels.

We waved the paper towels at them.

Slayer did two shows.

They played the Keystone Berkeley the night before

and then played Ruthie's the following night with Exodus.

The Keystone Berkeley show was the last show they wore the makeup,

because we told them that shit won't wash at Ruthie's Inn.

That was it for me. Took all that shit off.

Was like, "Fuck it, I don't need that shit."

So I just stuck with black shirts and leather pants.

[laughs]

[Greg] And after the Keystone Berkeley show, we destroyed their hotel.

It was a swath of destruction.

It had to be admired and appreciated.

It was awesome.

[Fred Cotton] They had a hotel room at the Berkeley Plaza Hotel,

and we just destroyed that place.

Showed up with Tom Hunting,

and these guys were nailing pizza to the ceiling, man,

and jamming everything they could in the toilet.

You know, we actually tunneled a hole through the wall

into the manager's hotel room.

They trashed this motel room that I had under my name,

because I was the oldest guy in the band.

So we had two rooms, and they trashed them.

Not too many years ago now Kerry and I were having a conversation,

and somehow that came up. He was like,

"Yeah, I got in a lot of trouble for that."

That was kind of our first introduction

to traveling away from home.

[narrator] In 1984,

Wes Robinson organized a mini-festival

bringing together various types of bands.

Although called Eastern Front, the festival was affectionately known as

Day on the Dirt,

a sly nod towards Bill Graham's

much larger Day on the Green shows.

[man] It was how we would envision what a day on the green should be,

because these were our heroes. These were our bands.

[Brian] And Wes Robinson, who ran Ruthie's Inn, organized it.

It was kind of like the Woodstock moment of the Bay Area scene.

He wanted people to be able to do what they wanted to do

and hopefully make some money at it,

and if you didn't make any money,

at least there was the show.

[Mark D] This was all at an aquatic park, which is at the bottom of Berkeley,

right across this estuary that flanks the 80 Interstate.

The lineup was...

Slayer, Exodus,

Possessed, Suicidal Tendencies.

It's kind of a defining moment historically,

because that's a crossover moment.

Like, Suicidal was a hardcore band,

and they were playing with Exodus and Slayer, who are metal bands.

I know for a fact that the band could not play L.A.

when I first joined the band.

And uh, basically

Suicidal Tendencies was banned from Los Angeles.

Everyone sort of went like, "Hey, we're not that different."

We love extreme music. We fucking hate glam rock.

We hated all the bullshit about poser-type shit.

It was kind of a defining moment,

because everyone who was there were like,

"Wow, this is pretty cool."

And you can see all the photos.

I mean, all those guys were fast friends already,

and if not, that solidified it.

[Tim] That was one of the first shows where

I started seeing the camaraderie of the bands and stuff,

and I think that's one of the things that shows in the pictures, too.

[Robert Trujillo] It was just amazing, you know, the spirit up north,

experiencing that positive energy.

And for me it was all brand new,

because again, I didn't even get a chance to play L.A. yet

with this band that was from L.A.

[Brian] It was a fast and furious pit. We had plenty of room.

The dirt was flying, and it was a great show.

[Dave Mustaine]

[narrator]Dave Mustaine began his new band, Megadeth,

with a vengeance

and immediately played the Bay Area,

where he was welcomed with open arms.

This is Megadeth's first demo

that Dave recorded after getting

the original Megadeth together.

He sent them out to maybe a half dozen fans and people.

He handwrote the track listing on it.

Dave had this friend Brian Lew

who offered to run our fan club,

which basically consisted of a post office box.

One day this letter shows up that says,

"Hey, Dave, I hope your new shit's faster than Metallica."

And that night, I kid you not,

we went to rehearsal and sped every song up

by 10 to 20 beats per minute. I mean, every song.

So things like "Skull Beneath the Skin," which were like...

[vocalizing bass]

Kind of this Sabbath groove...

[vocalizing drums]

[guitar plays]

[man] We'd been to the Bay Area enough times. I couldn't tell you how many,

but we'd been there enough to where me showing up in Megadeth

is going to make people think of Slayer, too.

I saw Mustaine playing Metallica.

Me and Jeff would both sit in the crowd and go, "How's he do that?

How's he playing that fucking shit and not looking at his fingers."

You know, we would just be amazed that he's just up there ripping,

looking over there.

So I was flattered when Mustaine came calling.

[Dave] There's a lot of crazy folklore

about those first couple of days, weeks, and months after I left New York.

When I got on the bus,

I rode all the way to California.

Did a lot of soul-searching.

I had already started writing lyrics.

The first lyric I wrote was to the song "Set the World Afire,"

which was called Megadeth.

And I saw a piece of paper on the floor of the bus

that was from Senator Alan Cranston.

It was a handbill that he had put out that said,

"The arsenal of Megadeath can't be ready."

He was talking about nuclear armament.

Arsenal of Megadeath, that's a great line,

so I wrote it down and put it in the song.

Didn't think that, you know, that would one day end up being the title.

My first show was with Megadeth,

and I remember the first time watching Mustaine play.

I just couldn't believe it.

As a band, that was the first place

that we went up there was Ruthie's.

That was interesting, because Ruthie's was so small,

we'd built this crazy stage over at Kerry's house.

You know, I'd ask Kerry if he would help us until we'd find a permanent player,

and we built the stage because I wanted this war scene kind of thing.

When we got up there, the roof was about this tall,

and we're trying to figure out how we're going to get all our stuff in there.

It's like, well shit.

And borrowing every marshal in the community

and everything we could buy out of the recycler.

You know, you got to kind of keep your head down.

If you jump up in the air, you're going to stick your head in a light socket.

He's like, "I'm going to put together this super group

that is just going to take fucking no prisoners, man."

[heavy metal music plays]

What I noticed around town is there were a lot of people posing, primping,

and wearing their studded wristbands from the shops on Hollywood Boulevard.

And everybody looked like Vince Neil or David Lee Roth, but Dave was the real deal.

[speed metal music plays]

Everybody was really surprised that Mustaine got booted out of the band,

because back then he was almost like the frontman.

He really had something to prove after he left Metallica.

It was incredible how quick he got it together.

Megadeth was a band that was conceptualized before it was ever a band.

It was an architectural blueprint of what the band was going to be,

and I think because that was drafted in Dave apartment's and my apartment,

we've had this vision of what we've been aiming for.

It's really creative.

It's a great blend,

and it's got that punk energy.

[plays speed guitar]

When we debuted the band in the Bay Area,

to see that frenzy happening.

A kid reached up and actually grabs he string and breaks it off my bass,

right in the middle of the song.

I'd never seen anything like this,

and people were literally bleeding on the stage from headbanging

and thrashing down front.

You could feel almost a tension, you know?

He's up there trying to prove himself.

[indistinct chatter]

[Brian] They moved here maybe January '83.

They were gone in April.

They came back for I think a month in June,

after recording finished.

Then they were on tour. So that first year that they quote-unquote

moved to the Bay Area,

they were probably only here a couple months.

We really had just come from out of the underground.

We recorded Kill Em All.

We ran back to San Francisco to give it to all the people who were our core group.

It was our opportunity to

put the scene on the fucking map.

Kill Em Allcame out in December of '83, you know?

In our second issue I made the review.

You know, we had record reviews.

I said Metallica are going to get a whole page.

Nobody knew at the time how big they're going to get,

but I said, "This band is a killer."

So I made the headline, "Metal Album of the Year:

"Kill 'Em All."

[narrator]Exodus recorded their definitive thrash metal masterpiece,

Bonded by Blood, in 1984.

Bonded by Blood? How do you not like Bonded by Blood?

I love Exodus,

especially from that time.

That's my favorite Exodus record.

"Bonded by Blood" was kind of more anticipated than

Kill Em Allin a lot of ways,

just because we spent more time with Exodus than we did with Metallica.

Basically I ended up replacing Kirk.

We were never in the studio before,

so we're learning the process, you know,

the whole mike thing and how to keep the guitars in tune,

because the mike hears everything--

Just learning from the very ground up how to record an album.

When we recorded Bonded by Bloodat Prairie Sun studios,

our friends would come up from the Bay Area,

and we'd party at night.

They'd get too drunk,

and there were fistfights and windows getting broken.

The whole thing with "Bonded by Blood" was it's like,

it's a chemistry that five kids had.

Not knowing nothing about recording.

We got nine songs together,

and we just want to put everything we have into these songs

and just capture this vibe.

It's the craziest thing. The very first note, man, is just like...

[thrash music plays]

Bonded by Blood is an amazing album.

The riffs, the speed.

That's my Exodus record.

That's the Exodus record.

It captured that kind of youthful angst and anger.

That was thrash metal.

That was a Bay Area thrash metal record, you know?

So Kill Em All and Bonded by Blood

they're kind of like twins, in a way.

To this day, people are just like, man,

Bonded by Blood, forget about it.

There are quite a few covers from that period of time

where you kind of look at them and are like, wow, really?

But none the less,

I mean, what was inside that sleeve

was nothing but pure Bay Area thrash.

What do you guys do with posers?

-Poser. -What?

That guy's a poser.

What do you teach them?

[audience] A lesson in violence!

Here's a poser right here.

Some places don't know that you kill posers.

Break a poser's leg. It makes me smile.

Posers must die!

There's only one Paul, man.

[thrash metal plays]

[Sven] He's the epitome of what a singer should be,

because if you weren't into it,

he's all, "Pummel that poser."

He'd go on one of those rants about killing posers onstage,

and if there were posers in the crowd, they worried.

My grandmother makes more noise than that!

[audience screams]

[both] My grandmother makes more noise than that, and she's dead.

He would go to people's houses and completely trash their house.

The Exodus guys would be there, and Paul would kick people out.

One of the prerequisites to getting into the party

was you had to bring a two-by-four so you could destroy the place.

I remember grabbing a beer bottle and firing it straight at the fireplace

right when we walked in, and it just erupted.

[Harold] He kind of got away with a bunch of stuff,

stuff that was kind of messed up actually, to be honest.

He handcuffed someone to a tree like this.

He let a live sewer rat loose in my house one time.

We'd cut people's hair.

If you had a Ratt pin.

A Bon Jovi shirt.

A Motley Crue shirt or something like that.

He'd strip you right where you stood.

I'm gonna slice that shirt up. We'll slice you with it.

If that's all he did, they were lucky.

I remember his place.

He lived in just a-- He lived on a concrete slab.

His wolf lived with him, Bidor.

Bidor and Paul were pretty much inseparable.

He had a house-wrecking party.

Some pretty crazy shit happened at these parties.

A lot of beer, a lot of liquor.

Pictures getting smashed.

Walls being kicked in with holes.

Just slamming our arms down the hallways,

just punching in all the plaster.

Houses dismantled,

you know, piece by piece.

Paul Baloff passed away following a stroke in 2002.

He's beloved by his friends and metal fans everywhere.

Paul, for what he lacked in pure musical talent,

he had all the drive and passion that you'd ever want,

could we have done more to keep him around?

Probably yeah, might've been a failure in attempting it.

I'm happy. I've got a million memories

and five billion photographs worth of fucking awesome times to look back on.

He's like the greatest thrash metal frontman of all time,

and he made one album twice.

We were all by his bedside in the hospital,

and Rick and I lowered him into the ground.

Fuck, you know, I miss him.

The legend.

I miss him every day.

See you, buddy.

[narrator] In the mid 1980s,

Lars and James lived at the infamous

Metallica mansion in El Cerrito.

Yes, the Metalla-mansion,

and that is certainly not one of our cars right there.

That Porsche was not parked there because of us.

You know, at least with the Metallica mansion,

it was literally almost a straight shot back from Ruthie's Inn.

So if there was a show or whatever at Ruthie's Inn,

it was a straight shot almost down San Pablo Avenue back to their house.

Definitely a bachelor pad.

You don't dare go into the bedrooms at all.

The front room's covered with posters and beer bottles.

I remember pulling all the furniture out the front door right here

and hosting this party.

We left the turntable and maybe a couple chairs, maybe a couch,

and obviously the booze.

[laughs]

So music, booze, and we would just go insane.

Wrestling and have these crazy mosh pits in the house.

Usually we're out partying in the streets or whatnot,

so to actually have a place to go and hang out was pretty cool.

Even the Metallica house--

I think Exodus were there more than Metallica,

because they were already on tour constantly.

[narrator]While touring, lonely Metallica members wrote postcards

to keep in touch with the scene back home.

Aww.

[Mike] Yeah, postcards, letters, that was the only way you could keep in contact.

We'd get in town and write down what's happening,

then just send it off.

All those early Ruthie's Inn shows

that were kind of laying the foundation for the Bay Area scene were happening.

Hey, John, how you doing?

We're jamming and playing.

Okay, we're going to go party, go drinking.

Then you'd flip it over.

Hey, John, it's 2:00 AM.

We're here. We're ranging. We're getting drunk.

We're drinking beers and hanging out with Venom.

Metal up your ass, right-stack Marshall,

Lars Ulrich, drummer in parentheses.

In hindsight, it was probably them dealing with all the shit

that was happening with them. You know, they were going to the next level,

thousand of miles away from home.

Being away from home, being away from your friends,

being away from your girlfriend. It was a big deal.

And they liked to write letters.

You know, back then we all wrote letters.

Flying the flag for the Bay Area in San Francisco in the scene.

So it was important for us to stay in touch with everybody

that was back at home, holding the fort.

[man] See if you know this one.

I want you all to scream it back at me!

this is titled,

"Seek and Destroy!"

["Seek and Destroy" plays]

Cliff would write me really long letters from Copenhagen

in his horrible writing

and just talk about how good things were going.

This tour is great.

First Aardschok festival I called Lars.

If he wanted to open up for my festival

because I thought it was a great band.

You know, I'd send them money for plane tickets and stuff.

It definitely made a big impression.

You could already tell that these guys were going to go somewhere.

Everybody knew. I mean, we all knew.

Some old black and white pictures of Metallica at that show.

They were so nervous there around that time to do the show.

Even though they were aware, they were still part of the scene.

You heard that the band was blowing people away,

just like they did when they started here.

Lars said no. We didn't have the cover.

It was just Kirk on there.

Tapes were being copied the next day,

and they were sent to Germany, Belgium,

France, all over the world.

[Lars] It wasn't really until James

started getting some European shows under his belt

in the spring of 1984,

where he started being able to command the big, European crowds.

That's when he became James Hetfield, the frontman.

Are we fucking nuts tonight!

[audience screams]

[Mike] This was certainly not the shy kid that was in high school, hating life.

This was the kid that

finally found his voice

and got to be in a band that was able to help express it for him.

We were very aware there was something brewing in San Francisco

that was a little heavier, a little angrier.

Exodus, you know, were definitely part of that.

[narrator]Blown away by what he saw in the Bay Area,

Andre Werheizen booked Exodus into the Dynamo Club.

The show has passed into legendspread by numerous bootlegs.

I want to dedicate this one to Andre over here.

Who's here because of Andre?

That was Exodus's first tour of Europe.

[man] The only club show they did was at the Dynamo,

and they did 300 or 350 people by themselves.

More people in there than I think officially were allowed,

maybe three times as much,

because everybody wanted to see those bands,

and Dynamo Club was the only place you could see them.

From my pen pals, Brian Lew and Andy Airborne Anderson,

who was very close with Exodus, I got some live tapes.

And we were fascinated. They were even faster than Metallica.

They were even a little bit more intense. Word got out,

and word by mouth is the strongest promotion that you can get.

[narrator]While Metallica were away touring,

Pam and Connie were house-sitting the mansion.

[Connie] We had sort of screwed up their finances along the way.

We weren't very good at balancing checkbooks.

Mark had just left the checkbook.

He left a checkbook that was signed with checks,

and we were just supposed to deposit money and then give them the checks.

I had to go to my very conservative, Republican mom and dad

and ask for them to bail out Metallica.

So I like to say that my mom, Mike and Carole Bryant

sort of saved the Metallica band.

-Sorry, guys. -So there you go.

-It all worked out. -It all worked out, yeah.

New bands were rising everywhere in the Bay Area,

inspired by the scene they were living in.

Bands like Testament, Death Angel,

Violence, Forbidden,

and Possessed all made their mark on the metal scene.

Each year there'd be a band that would kind of step up

into the role of being able to headline a show at, say, Ruthie's or the Stone.

Metallica came out with Kill Em All,

and they were doing the Kill Em All For One tour.

We stood right on the edge of the pit,

and we head-banged for the entire fucking show when it was Cliff Burton,

and he's doing "Anesthesia Pulling Teeth."

We're like, these guys are fucking amazing.

And the whole way home it was like,

we're going to start a band,

we're going to start playing shows,

and we're going to play thrash.

All those people would be going to the shows at Ruthie's

in the Bay Area clubs and stuff,

and basically they kind of looked up on stage and said, "I can do that."

You always hear the old cats talk about the Beatles on Ed Sullivan

and how they picked up a guitar after they saw that.

That was my Beatles/Ed Sullivan moment,

but if we wanted to be something, if we wanted to matter,

we had to get into Ruthie's.

And if we could survive Ruthie's,

and not get killed,

and not get booed off the stage,

and not get the mike ripped down in front of it like people were prone to do,

and survive the Slay Team,

then that would be the ultimate.

You can't tell the story of the San Francisco metal scene

without talking about Debbie Abono.

She managed one of the most hardcore bands to come out of the Bay Area,

which was Possessed, you know, super Satanic speed metal.

This is metal mom right here.

I know there's a few metal moms across the globe,

but this was ours.

I broke my leg at a DRI show.

She basically nursed me back to health at her house.

She was the mom of the scene, you know?

Every show she'd be there for every band.

She lived at a house in Penol,

and after parties we'd be at her house.

[Alex] She really saw everybody in that scene as human,

whereas there was a lot of demonization...

of the youth.

She knew that we needed a safe place,

and Debbie Abono's house was always a safe place.

-You know, a party would-- -Last a couple of days.

Last a couple days.

I know sometimes I'd be going to school the next day,

walking through the people who were still hanging out at my house.

They all knew that Debbie would take care of them

if they didn't have anywhere to go.

The word-of-mouth kind of got-- Because you go hey, I need this

or I need that for my band.

And my mom would go out and get it for you.

For me personally, she helped me a ton.

I started taking guitar lessons from Joe Satriani. I couldn't afford it.

She paid for it,

and I couldn't thank her enough.

There's no way I'd be anywhere I was right now without Debbie,

so I'm eternally grateful for everything she did.

For young, 16-year-old Larry Lalonde,

he's in tenth grade in high school,

and they have a record out.

You know, imagine being a tenth-grader,

and you have an actual album.

And you're playing in clubs.

I remember kind of showing up at high school and going hey, I've got a record,

and them being like, yeah, big deal.

People kind of being like, what, you think you're hot shit now?

Then she'd get tapes constantly in the mail.

She'd get hundreds of them from other bands,

wanting her to manage them.

Really looked out for everybody, you know?

When she managed Forbidden,

she would go on tour.

I think she was 57 years old when she was doing this.

I mean, just going out on tour in a van for two months across America

at 57 years old.

Like, that's fucking crazy.

And it's everything that the horrors probably that you've heard of.

She put up with a lot of shenanigans from us, you know?

One time I guess they had a porno magazine in the back of the van,

and they taped a bunch of pictures to the inside windows of the van.

And we come pulling into a gas station,

and here's this grandma, you know, this older lady, pulling in.

And then here's the most obscene pictures on the windows.

And she couldn't believe we'd do that stuff.

I always considered us the third wave of thrash.

So it's like Metallica, Slayer, and Exodus was the first wave.

Then Testament, Death Angel, and Violence Forbidden.

I started auditioning and just went from band to band to band, you know?

And finally it clicked with Forbidden Evil.

A band that young could get a show at Ruthie's Inn,

and no one would bat an eye.

We're hanging out Ruthie's Inn and the Stone.

We're not supposed to be there, because we're 14.

My first show ever was November 24, 1984,

Megadeth and Death Angel.

When they were loading in, you know,

we were making fun of them.

Like, you know, your mom's driving you to the show.

Then we'd get all pissed off.

Why do they always refer to us as just so young and stuff

and just focusing on the fact that we're young?

It was hard to put a band together,

especially if you're 15.

I also knew that if I could just get through one show,

it'll be a positive experience. I need to do this.

Alex history-- I'm sure he told you.

You know, he's 15 and didn't have teenage years.

He toured the whole time, you know,

from the first record to the fifth record.

We did a record every year and toured ever year: five records, five years.

[narrator] Possessed is credited withstarting the death metal genre.

You know, the whole Satanic theme was kind of funny.

I don't think anyone was actually into Satan.

It just freaked people out, so.

[narrator]In August 1985, Metallica played Bill Graham's

legendary Day on the Green festival.

On a bill that featurednScorpions and Yngwie Malmsteen,

Metallica stole the show.

I was there. It was insane.

Did we all come here to kick some fucking ass or what?

The fact that Metallica got a chance to play at Donington

and then two weeks later at Day on the Green

was just a total mind fuck.

Me, what I remember is going in there kind of cold,

not really knowing what's going on

but blown away

at the consumer satisfaction.

The audience had so fervently embraced

this from the minute that band set stage that

it wasn't even a matter of whether I understood it or not.

I could tell that these people understood it,

and I witnessed the extraordinary fervor and enthusiasm.

It was hard not to be swept up in it.

[Alex] With most other bands, bass is sort of a background role,

but with that version of Metallica,

it was featured.

[playing speed guitar]

Cliff had a very serious attack to his strings.

His technique was very abrasive,

and there was a lot of power in it.

It was almost like this punk attitude coming out of his fingertips,

and yet he was very graceful with his connection to classical music.

[heavy metal plays]

It can't be overstated what a huge moment that was

for not just Metallica but for the whole Bay Area scene.

The fact that Metallica were playing at Day on the Green,

it was like all of us were playing Day on the Green.

[James Hatfeild] Day on the Green has been around since the '70s.

For us to be asked to be part of it.

Didn't care where we were on the bill.

Ratt was placed above Metallica, which was sacrilegious,

to say the least.

So I painted this banner with the Metallica logo

crushing down on this rat that was flipped upside down

with a little spiked wristband,

and it was sitting next to a thing that said rat poison.

And I got berated by a couple overweight ladies in spandex.

You know, fucking Metallica came out, and they just took over.

As soon as they got on stage,

it was the stone in the pond.

Concentric circles of violence spread throughout.

I remember standing there stage left and going there's Metallica,

and there's 60,000 people. It's 1985.

It's like, yeah, this is really cool.

[Metallica playing]

I don't think anyone had seen a mosh pit,

and it didn't occur to me to go,

"And there's going to be a mosh pit."

So for the both of us,

to be there onstage on Day on the Green,

it was a huge accomplishment.

[James] The whole metal community was excited and supporting us,

especially for Cliff

being from the Bay Area. It was like heaven for him.

[Connie] Everyone knows about that worldwide, so, he was excited.

After the Day on the Green show, we did our normal stuff, you know?

James and I went out to the crowd to throw fruit.

Fred Rotten Cotton and a few of the others,

you know, had some beverages and just went crazy.

Took avocados and crammed through vents.

Air-conditioning vents.

Just wrecked the backstage dressing room.

You know, you're supposed to trash shit.

So we did. We destroyed it.

I called the Metallica house,

and James answered the phone.

And I was like, "We're in trouble."

Had no clue that, you know, there's another day after ours.

You know, another band has to use your trailer.

You're going to have to go over there and talk to Bill.

I was like, oh, shit, like I'm being called in.

He sat me down and said, "Hey, I know you're a rock and roll band at heart,

and breaking shit and destroying things, you know,

it might be fun for a little bit."

What would you do if

people came in your home and behaved this way?

And James goes, "Well, pretty much they do every weekend."

[James] I didn't quite get what he was trying to say.

He said, "You guys are talented, and you're on a path to destruction."

He knew.

He said, "I've had this same talk

with Sid Vicious and with Keith Moon,

and they didn't listen.

Maybe you'll listen, maybe not."

What really happened was James totally manned up,

and Bill completely respected it.

[James] So I said, "You know, I'm young. I'm stupid.

And thanks for that.

I appreciate the talk, and I'll do my best."

Years later he would go to me,

"How's James?"

Well, I haven't really talked to him lately,

but I'm sure he's fine.

To this day I still never said thank you to him,

because it did enlighten me a little bit.

He made it right to the best of his ability.

The next time we came to play in the backstage area,

he put Visqueen, Clear plastic,

over everything.

The ceiling, the walls,

the floor, the table.

He even wrapped bottles of beer in it, so...

it would be protected.

[narrator]1986 was an ear-shattering year

for thrash metal.

Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer,

followed by Anthrax, all released landmark albums.

I was asking Lars where this was taken,

and he says, "I'm pretty sure it was in Copenhagen."

[Corinne Lynn] He would wake up

and put on his little boxer shorts.

And he had a little amp and his white guitar.

And it looked like a Gibson, but it wasn't.

And he would play.

He could not wait to get on the road.

And Cliff was excited, as much as he didn't want to go to Europe.

It was a short tour.

He wanted me to look at houses.

At this point we had really developed and were going to live together.

So he wanted me to look at houses just around,

in the East Bay.

[narrator] On September 26th, 1986,

Metallica played a show in Stockholm, Sweden

supported by their friends, Anthrax.

Anthrax went on ahead to the next show.

Metallica never made it.

In the early hours of September 27th,

their tour bus crashed, and Cliff Burton was killed.

He was 24 years old.

I went home and started calling Cliff

in Sweden at the hotel.

I had the itinerary.

"Oh, no, they haven't checked in yet."

Okay, that's weird.

Try again an hour later.

That's when she told me.

It just wasn't even real. It wasn't possible.

So I immediately called Cliff's parents.

I didn't want to be with anyone else, you know,

wanted to be with his parents

and smell his things.

We don't sit back and say oh,

I hope we're big next year or I hope this or hope that.

We just go and do it

and don't put a lot of thought into

what might happen or what could happen.

We try not to think too much about the future.

[James] Cliff was such a character,

and he was with us for that short amount of time.

Thank God there were some people filming

and some friends around that had cameras.

To respect that time greatly.

I am so glad that he was in my life

and I got to share some times with him.

Someone so close

and someone who...

I saw my future with.

And it was awful.

It was just awful.

Most of us were so young back then that we...

we really hadn't dealt with death before.

[Tim Healy] The first thing I did was I got up and headed out to the Vault,

because I was working the next day at the store.

From the minute that we opened the door,

it was a constant flood of people coming in.

It was the place where people came to grieve.

It was the place were people came to reflect and tell stories.

And it was almost the perfect place to find out,

because it was home for all of the scene,

also for him and those guys.

What made us survive it was

that community of those thrashers.

[Sven] No one ever thought about

the perils of rock and roll

or the fact that tour buses crash

and people die out there

doing what we were all aspired to do, and doing what he ultimately loved.

[Charlie Benante] I know we felt bad,

but I could only imagine what each one of them personally felt.

Yeah, it was a terrible time.

A terrible thing.

[Dave] What I know about Cliff was that he was a very gentle soul,

and we laughed.

Man, we would laugh.

You can't ask more from your kids,

particularly when you don't have to say much to them.

Cliff would just decide he knew on his own

what was right and what was wrong,

and he...

practiced it just like he'd practice his music.

People forget what you do this.

It's because think back to those days when you guys were in a shitty rehearsal room.

Nothing else mattered but just making something.

That's all you lived for.

So Metal Allegiance we're just the guys from the neighborhood.

We're the friends that all shared the same record collection.

It was just a great spirit.

We said, you know, maybe we should make a record.

Just to see what it sounds like if all of us can actually write and record some music together.

The marching orders for that record, though,

is we're writing a thrash metal record.

Obviously Alex is involved in that scene.

We're getting Mark Osegueda,

Gary Holt, and Chuck Billy.

We're getting the Bay Area's best.

You would hope this happens everywhere,

but we're like, you know, do you think it does?

Like, no, it's the Bay Area. It's a special place,

and we've got some special people that are backing each other.

Why don't we ever get to do any jams with people, you know?

And I got approached,

I'm like, absolutely, please.

[narrator] Since the 1980s,

thrash metal music that was nurtured in the Bay Area

extended its reach around the globe,

inspiring metal fans everywhere to crank it up.

[explosion]

[heavy metal plays]

In 2013,

Gary Holt replaced the late, great Jeff Hanneman in Slayer.

It's kind of weird, you know?

I got the call from Kerry to come help them out.

People who don't know the background between the two bands will ask me,

wow, how's it feel to be playing with such metal legends? They're my buddies.

I think metal fans are the most devoted of any fans there are.

They're not fickle. They like what they like,

and I think a Slayer fan is that fan times ten.

To me it's about humility,

and I'm more humbled by the fact that people

have such an admiration for the band.

You hear stories about some of these people

that your music made me strong and held me together

to get past a certain point in my life.

I'm very grateful for that.

You're getting me all teary-eyed.

[narrator]In 2017, Megadeth won the Grammy for best metal performance for their album,

Dystopia.

[Dave] One thing is for sure,

This community has a way of taking care of its own.

I'm honored that the fans still like what we're doing.

It's great to hear. It feels good.

Oh, my God!

-Like wrestlers. -We're wrestlers.

[Robert] When we put on our instruments, we're like teenagers again.

We have a good time. We joke around. We laugh.

Everything we do revolves around the jam.

There seems to be a certain energy

and magic that's very pure about this music.

In 2016,

[narrator] Metallica released Hardwired... to Self-Destruct

to massive critical and commercial acclaim.

We are super grateful to still be where we are, you know?

We're in Mexico City right here playing in front of 60,000 to 70,000 people

in one show.

It blows my mind.

[chanting]

[James] It's pretty remarkable for bands like Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer,

and Exodus are still around and still playing gigs.

I tell you, whatever you think is going to happen to you,

you have no fricking idea. You just don't.

If it wasn't for Cliff and wasn't for those early Metallica records,

I would not be there, that's for sure,

and there would be no Metal Allegiance.

Cliff was a fun bass player,

and you can feel that onstage.

For me, I'm honored and blessed to be able to play his bass lines

and celebrate him and his bass playing to the world.

All over the world.

To take it there and share it.

If you and I were sitting in 1982,

having a conversation about the East Bay days,

obviously nobody at that time

would ever slow down long enough

to believe that the music could have

and the scene could have that kind of impact and that kind of longevity.

[Sven] There's a shirt that says, I think,

"Four Albums And Still No Ballad!"

And they meant that, because they weren't about that, you know?

They weren't going to do it.

I love those guys. They're still my friends.

They're like my brothers.

[heavy metal plays]

We didn't invent music. We didn't invent metal.

We just took what we loved,

and we stood on the backs of giants

and put our own two cents in.

That's all we did, and out came thrash metal.

[Kirk] It was a real happening that had

real far-reaching impacts

over music culture over time.

See, this wasn't here.

I'm wondering if the stage was kind of where the bathroom was.

I think it was, and this wall was exposed.

You know, we're talking 35 years ago and shit or more.

I'm surprised how nice the park looks. It's pretty awesome.

We did a lot of cover tunes. We did "Gets Your Rocks Off"

by Def Leppard and "Wasted" by Def Leppard.

Half of the first Maiden album.

Our friend bought Iron Maiden Ijust because of the cover.

It was so fresh and new back then that a lot of people thought "Running Free"

was an Exodus original for a little while.

We're like, no, sorry. Can't take credit for that one.

Yeah, "Prowler." Like, I love that song "Prowler."

That song rocks.

Kirk used to sing "Another Piece of Me" by the Scorpions.

That was in my high school band room,

back when I still went to school.

[Kirk] It was a perfect storm of all the people that we needed

to form a long-lasting musical scene that went on to do great things,

and the amazing thing about it was we were all young, innocent,

and didn't know what the fuck we were doing

or where it all was going.

It just happened.

It was like from heaven.

It was one of the greatest times of my life.

You know, I was telling somebody this morning

that I thought Metallica played here.

No, no. Kirk Hammett from Metallica,

when he was a member of our band Exodus, played here when we were 16 years old.

-No, you guys are Exodus? -Yeah.

I've been a fan forever.

That is so awesome. You're back.

[narrator]Exodus continue to play on around the world,

and still no fucking ballads!

[theme music plays]