DN:FILM Murder in the Front Row: The San Francisco Bay Area Thrash Metal Story
Metal, like punk, is a disgruntled noise. It explodes from the misfit’s bristling at a world that operates with brainless conformity and insufficient outrage. Songs fixate on death, war and monsters, real and imagined, self-loathing and the sweet release of debauchery. Metal’s sociopathic veneer is part disgust, part theater—commodified rebellion. It’s the sound of a sustained tantrum, and, in many ways, it’s kid’s stuff. And you should see those kids, the snarling, hair-lashing, alcohol-guzzling upstarts in the febrile yet startlingly sane MURDER IN THE FRONT ROW: THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA THRASH METAL STORY, Adam Dubin’s time capsule of a localized 1980s metal scene that unleashed such teeth-grinding, Marshall-rumbling pioneers as Metallica, Exodus, Testament and Possessed, and seminal offshoots Megadeth and Slayer.
Today those kids are fifty-something rockers, still garbed in black band t-shirts, sporting goatees and soul patches and reminiscing about their headbanging heyday. The musicians evince both amazement and hearty chuckles at what they pulled off as teenage thrash gods in a nascent scene that influenced global metal. Dubin relies less on archival concert footage from a pre-smartphone age than the chattering mugs, but the upshot, passionate insights into how the movement mushroomed, proves viscerally gratifying.
Why the Bay Area? Why metal? The simplest answer comes from Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett, formerly of meteoric club band Exodus: It was “the anger of being in a place that just didn’t have enough to offer; the frustration of being bored … that got channeled into our instruments.” But that smacks of stock teen disaffection, and the film’s soft psychological insights into what stokes such violent culture—consider today’s micro-scrutiny of music, movies and video games—is a blind spot. Dubin instead anatomizes the culture that inspired the pimply headbangers. Hole-in-the-wall record shops sold imports of British groups like Motorhead, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Venom, UFO and Saxon. The music was fresh, complex, loud. The bands had chops, from virtuoso musicianship to literary lyrics (fantasy and the occult were big). It struck a sweet spot Bon Jovi and Poison failed to hit. The stores became singular outlets for fanzines and bootleg and demo tapes of Bay Area thrash bands.
The most important demo was Metallica’s game-changing doozy “No Life ’Til Leather.” The quartet formed in Los Angeles—a poor fit. Unlike their glam L.A. counterparts, Bay Area metal was into Satan before sex, mayhem before mascara, the apocalypse before Aqua Net. Metallica fled L.A. to the East Bay, promptly becoming a reigning thrash deity with superior songcraft, summarily graduating from clubs to world tours. Right behind Metallica was the scrappier Exodus, which helped turn Berkeley’s Ruthie’s Inn into a fabled cauldron of mosh pits and stage dives, rare footage of which is as electrifying as it is terrifying. And that might be as good a summation of this snapshot of a subculture, which does it with a streak of apt aggression and a snarl. The film has crunch. It has sweat. It has bite.