Phil Kettner remembers the first time he saw Metallica live. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh wow, it’s punk rock with long hair,’” says Kettner, who was guitarist with San Francisco proto-thrashers Lääz Rockit at the time. Kettner’s own band were tipped as the Bay Area ’s next big thing, but this was something completely new.
Metallica played their first show in San Francisco at The Stone in September 1982. Within a few months, they had relocated to the the city from their native LA, recruiting bass wunderkind Cliff Burton the process. A brand new scene quickly grew up around them, and the Bay Area became the epicentre of the fastest, loudest, heaviest music in the world: thrash metal.
“‘Thrash’ wasn’t used that much as a term in 1982,” says Ron Quintana, one of the architects of the Bay Area thrash scene. Quintana was the editor of the seminal Metal Mania fanzine, which exhaustively covered the San Francisco metal and punk scenes in a rage of caustic humour, slapdash cut-and-paste layouts, and inky newsprint. He was also a DJ at KUSF, a community-run radio station that operated out of the University of San Francisco. “I think it was more in 1984, with speedsters like Exodus , Slayer, Possessed, and Suicidal Tendencies, that we called them thrash and not just metal or punk.”…