Bay Area Thrash Metal

You're asking about riffs, not songs. Bay Area thrash took the NWOBHM template and hardcore's tempo and made the rhythm guitar the lead instrument — downpicked, palm-muted, arranged in blocks rather than verses.

It's a local musicians' scene before it's a style: the same dozen players swapped bands, the same four clubs hosted them, and the records are a paper trail of who was in which room that month.

Metallica moved from Los Angeles to El Cerrito in early 1983 and found Exodus, formed in Richmond in 1979 by Tom Hunting and Kirk Hammett, already playing it. Hammett left Exodus for Metallica that April; Exodus pulled in Rick Hunolt and Paul Baloff.

The infrastructure was local and cheap: Ruthie's Inn in Berkeley, The Stone and the Old Waldorf in San Francisco, Ron Quintana's Metal Mania fanzine, Rampage Radio on KUSF after midnight.

The labels came from elsewhere — Megaforce in New Jersey, Combat and its Torrid subsidiary in New York, Enigma and Metal Blade in Southern California, Shrapnel across the bridge in Novato.

By 1986 it had an Elektra platinum album and a template copied in Germany, Brazil and Florida. By 1991 the bands who stayed thrash were playing to the crowd that had left.

Who: Metallica, Exodus, Testament (as Legacy until 1986), Death Angel, Possessed, Vio-lence, Heathen, Forbidden. Mark Whitaker managed Exodus and ran sound; Alex Perialas and Flemming Rasmussen cut the records that defined the drum sound.

What: downpicked eighth-note riffs, start-stop arrangements, mid-song tempo breaks, solos traded between two guitarists, vocals shouted on the beat. How a record gets in: it came off the local club circuit between roughly 1983 and 1990, the riff does the writing, and the personnel overlap with another band on this list.

Lineups churned — Zetro left Legacy for Exodus, Chuck Billy replaced him, and the records followed the swaps.