1985: Metal’s Formative Year
By Ray Van Horn, Jr.
1985. Forty years ago. Let that simmer in your head a moment.
The Night Stalker Richard Ramirez began his reign of terror over Los Angeles, notching the first two of his twelve counts of murder. The thaw in the long-dragging Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union began with a pivotal meeting in Geneva, Switzerland between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Hail, perestroika.
“We Are the World” became the philanthropic mission statement of the decade, with pop megastars of the day such as Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper, Steve Perry and Lionel Richie united under the creative umbrella USA for Africa, raising millions of dollars to help starving Ethiopians.
Not to be outdone, the metal community responded with their own charity for famine relief as the 40-man Hear ‘N Aid. Assembled and recorded in ’85 before releasing a full album the following year with the showcase single, “Stars,” Hear ‘N Aid featured a Who’s Who of metal legends: Ronnie James Dio, Rob Halford, Vivian Campbell, Geoff Tate, Don Dokken, Kevin Dubrow, Paul Shortino, Mick Mars, Vince Neil, Blackie Lawless, George Lynch, Yngwie Malmsteen, Vinny Appice, Jimmy Bain and Craig Goldy, amongst others. Jetting in from their 1985 World Slavery Tour, Iron Maiden guitarists Dave Murray and Adrian Smith dropped into the recording sessions to lend rhythm pieces. Hear ‘N Aid would later take top honors in VH-1’s 100 Most Metal Moments.
Suffice it to say, 1985 was a monster year for heavy metal music.
Anthrax was spreading an infectious thrash disease. Lizzy Borden loved us all to pieces. Ratt was invading our privacy. Japanese metal favorites, Loudness, alongside Earthshaker, brought the thunder from the east. David Lee Roth was crazy from the heat after shoving off from Van Halen. King Kobra was more than ready to strike. Accept had the metallest of hearts. Yngwie Malmsteen marched out right behind them with his mind-blowing neoclassical shred. Leatherwolf? The craziest band name ever, but Lord, did they smoke!
Metal Blade Records dropped their sixth Metal Massacre compilation, always a must for the in-the-know headbanger. Corrosion of Conformity (still C.O.C to their original punk fanbase) shoved a ton of animosity at us. Grim Reaper feared no evil, while Iron Angel was caught between the spray of a hellish crossfire. All while Blackie Lawless and W.A.S.P. issued their last command. Tell that to the Jesus-toting Stryper, who only took orders from their own divine liege that year.
Death metal pioneers Dark Angel had arrived with something brash to say before the darkness descended. Chuck Schuldiner replaced Kam Lee as the vocalist of Death and forever altered the band’s course—and death metal, accordingly. Fastway was waiting for the roar—and so were we after that flatulent mess. That was, until Fast Eddie Clarke, future Flogging Molly mastermind Dave King and company shocked us all ‘round midnight a year later with their banging soundtrack for the metal-horror shlock favorite, Trick or Treat.
Bon Jovi was still suffering from 7800-degree Fahrenheit fever before raising hands around arenas worldwide on their way to fifteen times platinum in the United States alone, on the heels of commercial powerhouse singles you can still hear on FM every day. Keel was still fighting for a right to rock. Virgin Steele were a bunch of noble savages if there ever were. Trouble became a covert missing link for doom metal between Black Sabbath, Pentagram and Saint Vitus, the latter two also releasing albums in ‘85.
Katon DePena and Hirax broke the color lines before Living Colour and 24-7 Spyz. As it happened, Living Colour’s Vernon Reid would also establish the non-profit Black Rock Coalition that year. The future Queen of Metal, Doro Pesch, in league with Warlock issued their debut album Hellbound, positioning alongside femme rockers Lee Aaron and Girlschool in 1985. Picking up what Lita Ford, post-Runaways, was laying down a year prior with Dancin’ on the Edge.
Helix had a synth-splashed pathway to heaven and left several metalheads scratching their heads in confusion, yet Omen issued a warning of danger most fans not only took heed of but embraced. It was no wonder thrash not only found its footing in 1985; it bashed the damn pit apart for the right to slam in metal, rebranding the punk-borne whirlpool dance as “moshing.”
Take a moment, especially if you were there, and think how the genre began to change that year with the ushering of thrash and death metal into a standardized power metal and commercial heavy rock script. A cash cow mold about to become soft-soaped by the L.A. glam scene only two years later.
You had heritage roots albums like Metallica’s Ride the Lightning, Slayer’s Hell Awaits, Exodus’ Bonded by Blood, Anthrax’s Spreading the Disease, Overkill’s Feel the Fire, Helloween’s Walls of Jericho and Megadeth’s Killing’s My Business…and Business is Good! All game-changing signals of future greatness, whipping a collective beacon at topflight from an entire generation of speed addicts.
Effectively, thrash found its momentum in 1985, as did death metal. This while Ronnie James Dio was holding the torch for traditional heavy metal with that year’s slick and often vivacious Sacred Heart. On the other end of the spectrum, there was the gruesome terror dome of Celtic Frost’s blackened masterpiece, Into Mega-Therion (the Emperor’s Return EP being released the same year) along with Danish thrashers Artillery’s Fear of Tomorrow (and its blueprinting predecessor, By Inheritance).
Fates Warning shoved their twin guitar attacks and varying time signatures on their concoctive second album, The Spectre Within, recognized by many fans as the first step evolution of the quickly developing prog metal scene. Agent Steel’s Skeptics Apocalypse and Malice’s In the Beginning… went one step further, fusing melody into their varying velocities.
Teutonic titans Kreator and Destruction were to be outright feared with their brutal Endless Pain and Infernal Overkill respectively. Even more extreme, Possessed’s Seven Churches plus Sodom’s In the Sign of Evil and Impaler’s Rise of the Mutants EPs. Sacrilege’s 1985 spinner Behind the Realm of Madness was a crustpunk manifesto of bombast that never gets its due for bridging two subcultural demographics. Sacrilege also being one of the first punk acts to cross over with DRI, Suicidal Tendencies and Broken Bones.
Following their magnum opus Powerslave, Iron Maiden, in 1985, dropped what is considered by a massive portion of metal fans to be the greatest live document ever presented on album and video, Live After Death. Finding life of their own after a presumed demise, Aerosmith let their music do the talking with a triumphant return in ’85 on their comeback slab, Done With Mirrors. The Scorpions, riding the time of their lives, locked in right behind Maiden the same year with their mighty World Wide Live.
As politically incorrect as it gets, thrash-core supergroup S.O.D. (Stormtroopers of Death) served the underground a savage and uncomfortably hilarious riot act with Speak English or Die! Riffs from the album would be culled two years later for commercial breaks during MTV’s Headbangers Ball, a two-hour weekly religious metal experience held at midnight on Saturdays. For its inevitable selling out under an ozone of hair spray and payola, Headbangers Ball was nonetheless the definitive haven for metalheads to get their weekly metal video fixes, catering to all tastes ranging from Kix to Savatage, Y&T, Lȧȧz Rockit and Magnum, who all dropped new slabs in this year.
The beginnings of profiteering hair metal were, for better or worse, staked in 1985 as Motley Crue nixed their leather and combustion in exchange for spandex and pop rocks on the gimpy by comparison (if highly profitable) Theatre of Pain. Kiss, who had successfully banked their rebranded careers sans makeup, switched to frills and poofy hair with their AOR-driven Asylum. Already proving they still had monster mojo in the tank with powerhouse singles like “Lick it Up” and “Heaven’s on Fire” prior to.
Following their lean and mean classic, Tooth and Nail, L.A. staples Dokken softened their attack considerably, weaving melodious cuts as set up for George Lynch’s sparkling guitar shreds with Under Lock and Key. ZZ Top proved to be pliable moneymakers with the slick titanium shining over Afterburner while AC/DC continued to boogie down their boisterous sleaze machine with an album both loved and hated by fans, Fly on the Wall.
Rush’s Power Windows was a mega success, yet the problem for most intransigents was finding the fanbase had expanded to uncomfortable lengths where jocks, preppies and popular kids in school were parading around in Power Windows tour shirts instead of 2112 and Hemispheres. The same trendies would later be found sporting Motley Crue Girls Girls Girls shirts and Judas Priest Turbo tees. The most polarizing album each band dropped in their venerated careers.
The biggest loser of the ’85 metal sweepstakes was easily Twisted Sister and their unexpected flop, Come Out and Play. The fang-banged title cut and heavy hitters like “The Fire Still Burns” and “Kill or Be Killed” wasn’t enough to satiate fans fed the comical goofing on 1950s rock ‘n roll, tag-teamed with Alice Cooper, “Be Crool to Your Scuel.” Nor the bouncy “You Want What We Got,” a recall of their then-lost track, “I’ll Never Grow Up Now.” It was their ill-fated cover of The Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” which spelled doom for Come Out and Play before it had any chance to thrive. By the time Twisted Sister unsuccessfully tried to fall in line with the mainstream rock status quo on 1987’s colorless Love is for Suckers, it would be nearly two decades before people cared again.
That being said, it was Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider, who put himself on the frontlines in Washington, DC circa 1985 to challenge one-time Vice President Al Gore’s wife, Tipper and her reprehensible censorship group, the Parents Resource Music Center (PMRC). Snider not only defended himself and other rockers in the month of September that year, he put his own rep against Tipper Gore’s shameful targeting of Americana singer John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” as a drug song. Primarily training their sights on heavy metal and hip-hop acts for suggestive and blatant lyrics, the PMRC successfully (for a while, anyway) implemented the federally mandated usage of “PARENTAL ADVISORY” labels on major label record releases. Luckily, Tipper and her political cronies never got their mits on Bathory’s The Return, Venom’s Possessed nor Onslaught’s Power from Hell.
Aside from USA for Africa, the biggest music event of 1985 was its massive companion festival, Live Aid. Staged over two continents in the United States at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Wembley Stadium, England, the two-day marathon featured superstar musicians Queen, U2, Madonna, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, The Who, Hall & Oates, Elton John, Bryan Adams, Elvis Costello, Adam Ant and a slew of others including a pomp and circumstance “We Are the World” culmination by USA for Africa.
For metal’s purposes, Judas Priest slew their early-on set at Live Aid and a highlight of the entire event (aside from Freddie Mercury’s gallant push to glory in Queen’s Wembley set) was the reunion of Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath. Decades before 13 became a thing. Live Aid never knew what hit them after that magnanimous occasion.
If there was one carryover resonance from metal 1984 into the new year, it was the us versus them mentality of metal fans. Not merely headbangers versus the straight kids of the world but the hardcore devout taking Piledriver’s Metal Inquisition diatribe against posers to elitist levels. It’s a wonder Manowar didn’t have anything to say in 1985, despite dropping Hail to England and Sign of the Hammer the year before.
Metal was beginning to subdivide between party rock and that which could be labeled “true” metal. It was a hotbox topic which became only more heated as the decade wore on and the major labels sought the next Poison and Guns n’ Roses, championing Aqua Net-poofed androgyny and watering down the best of metal’s B-tier bands. Celtic Frost’s 1988 Cold Lake being an “abomination,” as quashed by the mastermind himself, Tom G. Warrior.
Blind Fury, Kick Axe, Waysted, Icon, Zoetrope, Phantom Lord, Savage Grace, 220 Volt, Rough Cutt, Dirty Looks, Znowhite, Sinner. Bands you may have forgotten about who mattered in 1985 and in most cases, very little thereafter. Faith No More cared a lot in 1985, though it would take a change in vocals from Chuck Mosley to Mike Patton before they broke huge. Let’s not forget Peter Steele found his first success before Type O Negative with trash-thrashers Carnivore’s debut album in November that year. As fond then of the onstage hockey gear as power metal legends Raven, who issued the hot and cold Stay Hard well beforehand in February.
1985 was thus one of the seed planting years of metal and one of its greatest. The genre would only stand to boom faster and louder a year later.
