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  As metalheads gathered like swarming bees, homemade cassette tapes were the pollen through which they relayed the genetic codes necessary to expand the hive. “I really got into the whole NWOBHM scene around 1979,” says Brian Slagel. “I used to trade live tapes and demo tapes with people all over the world. I got into that British heavy metal because a couple friends of mine over in Europe went, ‘Oh, here’s a new band called Iron Maiden,’ and put a couple songs on the end of a tape. Once you met one guy, he’d recommend someone else, and I just took it from there.”

  Across America the story was the same. A few devout believers in every area preached the word of the NWOBHM and desperately sought news of new bands and concert activity. Headbanger litanies gleaned from dog-eared copies of Kerrang! held the tribes together. “We’d have trivia contests all the time. We were like secret societies,” says Ron Quintana. “If you met anybody from England or Europe, like when we met Lars Ulrich, we’d be quizzing them on every single band ever: ‘What does Dragster sound like? Who is this Wrathchild band?’ Most of them like Dragster were shit, but you’d see their name in a magazine and think they were heavy.” Being a metalhead required an unusual commitment just to get new music. “Even the punks weren’t reading the English papers,” says Quintana, “because they had enough of a scene over here. It was the metallers who were having to look elsewhere to find anything heavy.”

  With no real American counterpart, the London press had the power to introduce North American bands to their home countries, like Toronto’s hard-driving Anvil and New York’s rough Twisted Sister. “Just because we were in Kerrang! a lot, we became affiliated with the NWOBHM,” says Dee Snider. “Then we broke out in England, and when we came back here [to America], we were constantly being asked ‘Where’s your British accent?’ Like Hendrix, Joan Jett, and the Stray Cats before us, we went to England to find fame and fortune and broke in reverse out of England.”

  Following positive coverage in Kerrang!, Twisted Sister’s business-minded guitarist, Jay Jay French, traveled to England to land the group a European recording deal. This unconventional but necessary journey was a success, and brought a heavier British influence evidenced on 1982’s You Can’t Stop Rock N’ Roll. “Jay came back to New York with a cassette tape of Iron Maiden’s Killers,” says Dee Snider, “and he gave it to me because bassist Mark Mendoza and I were the metalheads. I just put that thing in and said, ‘Damn!’ And then I also became a big fan of Saxon.”

  By 1980, to play anything remotely like heavy metal in Los Angeles and not be Van Halen … sucked. While touting the virtues of bikinis and sports cars, even the ultimate California hard rock band had its origins in Europe. Eddie Van Halen and brother Alex were immigrants from Holland, who moved to Pasadena in 1962 as Dutch-speaking elementary-schoolers. Perhaps the pair’s inventive approaches to music came from the experience of moving from one culture to another— struggling through transition, they divined an entirely innovative discipline that broke from the confines of convention.

  In many ways the sporty American counterpart of Led Zeppelin, Van Halen was an entity too cocky to be believed. Over their first four albums, Van Halen became the successful face of sunshine, selling the wild Hollywood lifestyle with an exuberant party-hearty attitude that did not diminish its obvious talent. The band’s mascot, aerobic, lionmaned singer David Lee Roth, appropriated the unbelievable screams of Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan and the horny down-home posturing of Black Oak Arkansas’s Jim Dandy Mangrum. Though untouchable, they had common desires, and still ate hamburgers and drank cold beer like ordinary folks.

  Van Halen was supremely exciting thanks to the brilliantly kinetic Eddie Van Halen. He made technique the guiding light of his guitar playing, and showy solos like “Eruption” took heavy metal guitar to the brink of rocket science. Instead of running blues scales up and down the neck, Van Halen attacked from all directions. “I was a big fan of Van Halen, Judas Priest, Jimi Hendrix, and Michael Schenker of UFO—players with a special feeling,” says George Emmanuel, aka Trey Azagthoth, a later guitar hero from Morbid Angel. “It was extreme at that time. Eddie Van Halen came out with such flash and feeling—there was something electrifying about his sound and the way he phrased things.”

  The few other heavy metal bands in Los Angeles also attempted to combine more profound heavy metal with homegrown showbusiness flair. Diligent small-fries Quiet Riot, Snow, and Xciter mimicked the concussive anthems of Judas Priest’s British Steel while nodding to Van Halen when showcasing their own guitar heroes. Quiet Riot featured fluid soloist Randy Rhoads, and Snow had hyperactive Carlos Cavazo, who later replaced Rhoads in Quiet Riot. Xciter displayed the haunting, melodic guitar leads of George Lynch, who later formed Dokken.

  Ozzy Osbourne: The Madman of Metal (jet Records)

  An unlikely bridge between European and American influences came in the provocative person of Ozzy Osbourne, a Los Angeles resident since moving there with Black Sabbath in 1976. After his departure from Sabbath, Ozzy rebounded from near-total self-destruction with his solo endeavor, Blizzard of Ozz. Penniless after a series of bad business arrangements, Ozzy was rescued through his relation ship with Sharon Arden, daughter of Sabbath manager Don Arden. Breaking with her father to represent the alcoholic rock star, Sharon bought out Osbourne’s contract, and the pair started from scratch.

  The experience of being blown away by Van Halen during his final tour with Black Sabbath seemed to impress Ozzy. On Blizzard of Ozz he emulated Van Halen’s metallic rock with hotshot guitarist Randy Rhoads and session men Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake. Dressing the riff-oriented Black Sabbath style in a melodic, radio-friendly California sound, Ozzy’s band recorded two albums in 1980, Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, the latter titled after a short story by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. Many early fans of Black Sabbath were no longer listening, but there was a new generation ready for a fresh start and a liberal dose of something heavy.

  Minor chords and darker metal swept over America as AC/DC’s Back in Black reached number four in the U.S. charts in November 1980. The album was a clamorous revolt against the rock-star death by drunken asphyxiation of its longtime singer Bon Scott on February 20, 1980. Scott was a coarse, barroom diva, and after the coroner’s report established the cause of his demise as “death by misadventure"—Ozzy and Randy Rhoads wrote the antialcohol song “Suicide Solution” in his honor. Instead of being quieted by the accident, AC/DC came spitting furiously out of the crypt. Without neglecting party anthems like “You Shook Me All Night Long,” Back in Black rolled out heavy metal thunder with the ominous ringing chimes of “Hells Bells” and the slow crawl of “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution.” Angus Young, the tiny lead guitarist, jabbed his riffs one breath ahead of a tight rhythm section led by his brother Malcolm—a simple wizard whose only tool was a large guitar with all controls removed except the volume knob.

  Back in Black proved that heavy metal appealed to audiences in huge, previously unrecognized numbers. As it turned out, there was an entire generation of people who were sick of disco. When offered something heavier, they rushed to grasp it tightly. Also in 1981 the reissue of AC/DC’s 1976 Australian album Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap sold 5 million copies, and the late-year studio album For Those About to Rock, We Salute You sold 3 million. While Eddie Van Halen married sitcom star Valerie Bertinelli and entered the ranks of

  EARLY AMERICAN METAL

  There was a homegrown hard-rock scene in Los Angeles in the 1980s, struggling against disco in the name of Van Halen. Some bands took up outlandish stage antics in order to break the monotony—most just soaked up the rays, dyed their hair blond, and tried to blend into a sea of club clones waiting for the big score. In New York nobody knew what to do with bands like Riot and Twisted Sister. Nonetheless, it mattered that these groups were competing with the English wave. For all intents and purposes Ozzy Osbourne’s new band was an American entity. Along with Van Halen, Ozzy helped usher out Aerosmith, Heart, and the rest of the ha
rd rock straphangers at the beginning of the 1980s. Soon Motley Crüe, Ratt, and the Metal Massacre gang took heavy metal in a whole new direction.

  Hot Rockers

  Lita Ford, Out for Blood (1983)

  Motley Crüe, Too Fast for Love (1981)

  Ozzy Osbourne, Blizzard of Ozz (1980)

  Ozzy Osbourne, Diary of a Madman (1981)

  Quiet Riot, // (1979)

  Ratt, Ratt EP (1983)

  Riot, Fire Down Under (1981)

  Twisted Sister, Under the Blade (1982)

  Van Halen, / (1978)

  Van Halen, Women and Children First (1980)

  Various Artists, Metal Massacre (1982)

  Y&T, Earthshaker (1981)

  celebrity musicians, AC/DC singer Brian Johnson had trouble getting past security to enter his own gigs. Yet the disturbing Back in Black went on to sell nearly 20 million copies in America in the next two decades, besting the sales of the first four Van Halen albums with David Lee Roth combined.

  With Angus Young still wearing a schoolboy uniform, squirming and shaking in an interpretive dance of boundless dementia, AC/DC became the stadium-stunning heavy metal replacement for Led Zeppelin, who had disbanded after its own rock-star death by drunken asphyxiation of drummer of John Bonham on September 25, 1980. Both bands were steeped in amplified blues and, though not especially sexy, traded on heaps of hormonally charged song material. As Led Zeppelin faded into the 1970s, AC/DC became the stepping-stone that led huge numbers of hard rock fans into heavy metal perdition.

  For Americans who witnessed AC/DC live, or saw photos or a rare video of Motörhead or Saxon performing in Europe in front of thousands of fans, the good times of Van Halen could not compare. Preoccupied with finding limited-quantity records by little-known bands, Ron Quintana wrote a letter to Kerrang! requesting pen pals. “I wanted to network with other Americans who were into heavy metal,” he says, “rather than Ted Nugent or even just the same generic Lynyrd Skynyrd hard rock that everyone was into. Writing to an English paper was the only way to get in touch with other hip Americans to trade heavy demos and bootlegs. They printed my letter in Kerrang! No. 4. That summer I started averaging ten to twenty letters a day, so every day would be just like Christmas. I’d get amazing packages with amazing bands that nobody had ever heard of.”

  Inundated with new recordings, Ron Quintana expanded his massive Xeroxed tape-trading list to include photographs and longer reviews of new records and bands. Six months after his distress signal appeared in Kerrang!, Quintana’s list metamorphosed from a simple collector’s inventory to a full-fledged fanzine, complete with live reports and editorial essays. From a long list of potential names, Quintana chose Metal Mania. “I was going to call my magazine Metallica,” he says, “but Lars Ulrich liked the name better for his band, so he borrowed it.”

  Quintana’s friend Lars Ulrich, a beginning drummer, had recently begun jamming with guitarist James Hetfield. Their new band name, “Metallica,” was derived from Encyclopedia Metallica— the sole overview of hard rock and heavy metal then available in bookstores. It was an improvement over what Hetfield had named previous ensembles: Leather Charm and Phantom Lord. Not that it mattered much—the group’s activities were limited to playing choppy Diamond Head covers in a bedroom on nights when Hetfield came over to tape LPs from Ulrich’s exhaustive collection.

  Metal Mania fanzine

  In August 1981 in Los Angeles, record-store clerk and radio disc jockey Brian Slagel launched the fanzine New Heavy Metal Revue, which covered local bands and the NWOBHM records he had been playing and importing for sale. “Slagel did a really good job with his magazine,” says Ron Quintana, “but the L.A. scene was so bad that he didn’t have much to work with musically.” The local malaise was only occasionally punctuated by concerts, like a sold-out August 1981 appearance by influential rock/metal bridge band UFO with support act Iron Maiden before 14,000 fans at Long Beach Arena.

  As Slagel’s record store attracted metalheads in the region, it fostered a regular network for streams of formerly isolated metal rats. “A couple guys came in and told me about local bands,” Slagel says. “Prior to that it was only Van Halen and Quiet Riot. They told me about Mötley Crüe, and Bitch, and I started going out to see them. There was finally a metal scene in L.A., and it was kind of unbelievable. We started to cover that in the fanzine, and I started to play a lot of the local bands on the radio station, too. It got bigger and bigger, and I started putting on dates at some of the clubs around here.”

  Soon a Los Angeles club scene developed to compare with what Kerrang! trumpeted from London. Every Wednesday night at the Troubadour in Hollywood, Mötley Crüe and Ratt played for a one-dollar cover charge. Unlike the melodic rockers Van Halen, the new heavy metal club acts were clued in to the rapid and thundering sound of Iron Maiden. “All those bands, Ratt and Steeler and Mötley Crüe, started out really heavy,” explains Slagel. “Especially Ratt—they were basically Judas Priest. They would all wear black, and they had two guys playing Flying V guitars. [Future Ozzy sideman] Jake E. Lee was in the band. Later those bands kind of evolved into the hard rock metal thing.”

  The very punk Mötley Crüe in particular kick-started the scene with a wild, occult-inspired stage show, as bandleader and bassist Frank Ferrano, aka Nikki Sixx, borrowed liberal amounts of blood, smoke, and fire from earlier shock rockers Alice Cooper and Kiss. As Sixx later admitted, he also inherited trappings from Sister, an early band led by Steven Duren, aka Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P. “Our logo was a pentagram, and I used to set myself on fire,” says Lawless. “When I decided that I wasn’t going to do those things anymore, Nikki Sixx came to me and he asked would I mind if he did those things. I said, ‘No, they’re all yours,’ but I cautioned him about both.”

  Mötley Crüe at Square One

  (Coffman & Coffman Productions)

  The primal version of Mötley Crüe had the monstrosity of Kiss, the dead-end energy of the Plasmatics, and the umlauts of Motörhead. The band gave English bands a run for their money, and local metalheads rallied in support. “James Hetfield got me into Mötley Crüe because he was way into them,” says L.A. headbanger Katon W. DePena. “We used to go see them all the time. They were good for a total hair band.”

  As the popularity of heavy metal spread, Ozzy Osbourne’s first two solo albums quickly went gold, despite having been initially rejected by a succession of disinterested record labels. Two incidents soon propelled the lovable singer into national infamy. First, seeking to impress his new label, CBS, Ozzy bit the head off a live dove during a 1981 meeting with executives. Then in January 1982 he chewed the head off a bat thrown onstage by a fan in Des Moines, Iowa. For that indiscretion Ozzy endured multiple rabies shots in the stomach and took Alice Cooper’s throne as top rock bogeyman. Previously “acid rock” had been a playground myth, a gross-out story bragged about behind school cafeterias over furtive cigarettes. Unfounded rumors that Cooper drank a bucket of LSD-laced phlegm or that AC/DC’s Angus Young impaled himself on a Gibson SG set child standards for rock mystique. With his biting antics, Ozzy Osbourne became a willing spokesman for rock-star insanity and earned the fierce loyalty of heavy metal misfits.

  Parents were repelled by Ozzy’s reputation, but his music after Black Sabbath was much kinder than his image. Still hoping for peace, an unfashionable sentiment in the Reagan-Thatcher era, in “Crazy Train” he commiserated “heirs of a Cold War, that’s what we’ve become.” Young teens trusted Ozzy’s knowing voice in songs like “Goodbye to Romance” and “Over the Mountain,” and they adored the sweet songwriting and guitar solos of Randy Rhoads, whose trademark design motif was polka dots, not pentagrams. Sadly, the crazy track of Ozzy’s career was rerouted to tragedy when gifted twenty-five-year-old Rhoads died in a plane accident during the Diary of a Madman tour in March 1982. While attempting to buzz over the Ozzy tour bus, the pilot lost control and careened into a nearby house. The loss was devastating, and especially traumatic to Ozzy’s already
pummeled psyche.

  There were few overnight successes in heavy metal, but bands that broke new ground were eventually paid their just rewards. Backed by steady touring, Judas Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance, Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast, and Def Leppard’s High ‘ri Dry all charted in America in 1982. Along with German interlopers Scorpions, whose Blackout broke the Billboard Top 10, these marauding English bands registered just a slight tremor in the pop music scene, but their new prominence was the genesis of something great. To heavy metal’s staunch supporters, there was a constant infectious sense that the music grew bigger by the day. “As we progressed into the eighties, it just exploded,” says Rob Halford of Judas Priest. “Once the Americans got hold of this thing coming from Britain and took it into their own kind of style and approach, everything went global.”

  Energized by the upswing of activity and inspired by do-it-yourself records from the NWOBHM era, New Heavy Metal Revue editor Brian Slagel set about producing Metal Massacre, the first LP on his brand-new Metal Blade Records. “I called all the distributors that I worked with at the record store,” he says, “and asked if I put together a compilation of metal bands, would they sell it?” With assurances of support on the business end, Slagel approached local bands for whom he had booked shows, including Ratt, Malice, and Steeler. He also tossed in “a couple of ringers” culled from the home-taper circuit, such as Alaska’s Pandemonium and the weird Ventura, California, band Cirith Ungol.

  The riotous Mötley Crüe nearly appeared on the bedroom release as well. “I booked a lot of shows for them,” says Slagel. “They had a song that was all ready to be on the record, but by the time we got around to doing it, Too Fast for Love [the band’s self-released debut] had really taken off. Their two managers came to my mom’s house one day and said, ‘We’ve got nine hundred records we pressed of this Möt-ley Crüe album. What do you think we should do with them?’ I sent them to a distributor, and the rest is history.” Pumped by exposure in a licentious Oui magazine photo spread (an honor afforded Motörhead the same year), Mötley Crüe’s Too Fast for Love sold 20,000 copies in six months, leading to a deal with Elektra Records and landing the number 157 spot on the Billboard album chart.