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Alas, that scraping along the guardrail of chaos, of the abyss: it’s something you don’t hear in metal anymore.
More than athletic, it was downright gladiatorial, and Vio-lence were the Conans of the pit. But great thrash bands like Vio-lence never made it sound easy they made you hear the blood and sweat that went into the music. That’s not to say the band isn’t tight they could never play like this if they weren’t tight as hell. Nightmare is a record that drives all over the road, swerving from guardrail to shoulder and back: we listen for the anticipated collision. The near-impossible tempos, of course and even more, the way the rawness of this record-a rawness that characterizes the first records of so many thrash bands-allows us to hear the musicians straining against the limits of their collective ability. So many things about Nightmare contribute to the “live” feel. It is the sonic correlative to what Exodus expressed so admirably in the words of the chorus to “Bonded by Blood,” and which comes closer than anything to articulating the ethos of the scene as a whole: “Murder in the front row/ The crowd starts to bang/ There’s blood upon the stage// Bang your head against the stage/ And metal takes its price/ Bonded by blood.”§ It sounds like what Demolition Hammer called, in one of their finest song titles, an orgy of destruction. If I focus on Nightmare for the remainder of this post,† it’s only because I want to highlight something about it that no other thrash record does, or does to the same degree: it captures the pandemonium of a great live metal show. In the thirty-plus years between that show and today, those two Vio-lence records have never left my rotation.
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As did our conversation: we talked about the awesomeness of the guitar leads on Masses, which, like a true gentleman, and in a comment that reminded me of something Glenn Tipton once said about the guitar solos in Judas Priest-that people tended to throw “Beyond the Realms of Death” at him (with very good reason: it may be the most perfect guitar solo in the history of the genre), forgetting that some of the best Priest solos were the ones where he and Downing traded off-I say, like a true gentleman, Demmel emphasized the same with Flynn, highlighting “Engulfed by Flames,” where the solos are linked by way of an ascending series of trills played in harmony, and which he was good enough to both sing and half-air for me, there in the parking lot of the Network.* I guess this was important to him, and is maybe part of the reason, aesthetic ones aside, he and Flynn moved on to bigger things. I explained this to Demmel after the show I remember him claiming that the band had been outdrawing Voivod on that tour. The date was mis-advertised there was almost nobody there.
With the release of their second album, 1990’s Oppressing the Masses, the band found themselves headlining the national club circuit. Be that as it may, Vio-lence quickly jumped onto a tour opening for Voivod and Testament and when Voivod had to withdraw due to Piggy’s illness, they moved up to the second slot at L’amours at least, Blood Feast filled in as openers. I remember at least one genre ‘zine balking at the hoopla, claiming band and album were overrated. But they forget, or perhaps never knew, these whippersnappers, the hype that surrounded Eternal Nightmare, Vio-lence’s maiden effort, when it was released in ‘88. Today, on their Facebook page, fans call Vio-lence “criminally underrated” and “virtually unknown.” I suppose that, compared to Machinehead, the band guitarists Rob Flynn and Phil Demmel went on to found after the scene crumbled, that is true. Would that those San Franners had built grunge-resistant edifices … San Andres be damned: it was that northern tribe, the Cascadians, who would shake the thrashers into the sea.
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They were the meridian of the subgenre’s day, to put it in the terms of Judge Holden from Blood Meridian, whose discourses should be compiled into a pamphlet titled How to Listen to Heavy Metal. If hindsight is 20/20, then Vio-lence was the greatest thrash metal band, period: the band in which the subgenre climaxed, and in particular the Bay Area sound that was its epicenter and still, I think, its purest expression.
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