Thrash Producers: The Sound And The Fury

When the music of the Eighties comes to mind, people often think of hair bands and one-hit-wonder new wave groups. In fact, the mid-to-late Eighties was a hotbed for the evolution of metal and punk music. Both genres were born in the Seventies, but it was during the Eighties that they morphed into hardcore, speed/thrash/death metal and numerous other genres and subgenres, spawning the diverse scene that typifies metal and punk in the first decade of the 21st century.

In the mid Eighties, for every Metallica that led the charge there existed innumerable smaller, if not more interesting, bands trying to get their music out into the world. There were also several go-to guys working behind the scenes who understood the music and knew how to record it right—guys like Randy Burns (Megadeth), Scott Burns (Sepultura), Casey McMackin (Randy Burns’ engineer), Alex Perialas (Anthrax) and Colin Richardson (Carcass, Machine Head). Anyone who wants to understand why extreme metal sounds the way it does today needs to start here, with the men who shaped the sound of the music heard on countless metal- and punk-influenced records. In this Guitar World exclusive, each producer and engineer speaks for the first time about his career and tracks the development of metal- and punk-based music from the Eighties to today.

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If you were a thrash/speed/death metal fan back in the Eighties, you saw the names Randy Burns and Casey McMackin on the back of a lot of albums, including releases by the Crumbsuckers, Dark Angel and Megadeth, to name just a few. Burns usually produced, while McMackin engineered. Their partnership was born on what is among the most defining albums of Eighties metal: the Megadeth classic Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying?

Before their merger, Burns played guitar in bands and had a little home studio. He wasn’t looking to be a producer, but as a favor he recorded a neighbor’s punk band. Soon, word got around that Randy Burns knew what he was doing. His next assignment was in 1981 as the engineer on a punk compilation called Hell Comes to Your House (the album reportedly cost $550 to make and featured Social Distortion, among many other L.A. punk bands). Burns’ production work on Hell got him another engineering gig, the self-titled 1983 debut from Suicidal Tendencies. The band had just added guitarist Grant Estes, who had long hair and played a Les Paul through a Marshall—characteristics that even then had been long associated with rock and roll. On Suicidal Tendencies classic track “Institutionalized,” Estes soloed throughout, making for an even more unconventional approach to punk.

“Suicidal were venturing away from what was traditionally considered okay to do in punk rock,” says Burns. “There were some really straightforward fast and simple punk songs on there, but they were also moving in a different direction. They really did merge some of the qualities of heavy metal and bringing that into the punk thing. Punk started going less garage and toward more of a produced sound.”

Burns loved the fact that punk and metal were starting to come together and saw no reason why it shouldn’t happen. “I always found sticking people in these musical pigeonholes really ridiculous,” he says. “There were people in punk bands that would literally say to me, ‘We can’t do that, that’s too heavy metal.’ But it seemed pretty clear to me that those two worlds were merging in a big way, and I was kinda right in the middle of that.”

Still, the walls separating punk and metal didn’t come down easily; neither side could get past the stereotypes and hear the music for what it was. Metal was bloated with Spinal Tap–like clichés, and the punks resented metalheads trying to infiltrate their scene. At the same time, those who didn’t understand punk in those early days dismissed it as a bunch of noise—a joke perpetrated by people who couldn’t play their instruments.

Possessed were one of the first American death metal bands, and they set the template for innumerable bands to follow. Jeff Becerra, Possessed’s lead vocalist and bassist, was also the inventor of the term “death metal;” he reportedly came up with in his high school English class, and the phrase became the title for the group’s 1984 demo. (So young were Possessed’s members that lead guitarist Larry LaLonde, later in Primus, was still in high school at the time Seven Churches was recorded.)

The album was recorded at Prairie Sun Studios in Northern California, which also had a chicken ranch on the grounds. In the book Choosing Death, a history of death metal and grindcore written by Albert Mudrian and published in 2004, Beccera recalled every time the band blasted out their music, the chickens fled in terror. “We got some complaints about disturbing the farm animals!” Burns recalls with a laugh. Seven Churches, was recorded in a week for $10,000, a typical budget at that time for a Combat band.

Although a lot of heavy bands came from San Francisco, the Bay Area thrashers didn’t know what to make of Possessed at first. The group became very popular overseas from tape trading and was even dubbed “the San Francisco Slayer” by some fans, but back at home it took a while for Possessed to catch on. A lot of Burns’ production peers also couldn’t understand why he worked with the bands he did, but Burn was one of the few who clearly understood where his groups were coming from. “I think it really helps if you’re a fan,” he says. “You have to appreciate something about what they’re doing. It’s a lot more fun if you like ’em, I’ll put it that way.”

Burns always took a “documentary” approach with the bands he worked with: “I used to tell them that the record will sound exactly like them, only better than they’ve ever imagined. I didn’t go in and say, ‘You guys need to rewrite this song.’ I think the reason why bands liked me is I assumed they knew where they were going with this stuff, my job was to figure it out. What are they trying to do? What is the band trying to say? And how do we get that? So I don’t think I was responsible for the success of Possessed. That was them; that’s what they did. What I did was facilitate getting it to tape.”

Burns wanted to make the guitars wrap around the rhythm section instead of the other way around. Once the bass and drums were laid down, the guitarist had to perform two tracks of guitar as tight and clean and precise as possible. If mistakes were allowed for the drums and bass, Burns wouldn’t let anything slide when recording the guitar tracks. “I would really beat up on the guitarist and make ’em play the whole thing right,” he says. “Speed metal really has to be tight. It takes time and it’s very tedious, but if you get it right, it will jump off the speakers at you.

At Sinclair’s urging, Burns went down to SIR studios in Hollywood, where he saw Megadeth rehearsing what would become their 1986 sophomore album, Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying? Burns’ hiatus from the music business was over then and there. When working with bands, Burns never predicted an album would be a hit, but with Megadeth he says, “I knew right then it would be a hit record. I was just blown away.”

Because Combat had high expectations for Megadeth’s next album, the label gave the band a bigger recording budget than the average thrash band (recording and mixing ultimately cost $22,500). Peace Sells was recorded at the Music Grinder, a now-defunct studio that was located on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. It was the primary studio where Burns produced most of the bands on his résumé, and it’s also where he forged a strong partnership with Casey McMackin.

The most fun song to record was Megadeth’s cover of the Willie Dixon blues classic “I Ain’t Superstitious.” Burns often liked to lay down the bass and drum tracks at the Grinder, then go around to smaller studios in Hollywood and pay $25 to $30 an hour to overdub guitars and vocals. Poland laid down his solos in several different studios and told McMackin, “I like the beginning of this solo from this studio, but I like the second phrase from this studio and this phrase from this one…”

Peace Sells was released in the fall of 1986, when a number of great speed thrash albums seemingly all came out at once, including the big daddy of the genre, Slayer’s Reign in Blood. With the help of Burns and McMackin behind the boards, L.A.’s Dark Angel would also record their best album, Darkness Descends, which came out right after Reign in Blood and today remains a relentlessly brutal classic. Drummer Gene Hoglan, currently in Strapping Young Lad, was Dark Angel’s leader and he proved to be an intelligent lyricist as well. Hoglan loved to use a lot of big SAT words in his lyrics and a lot of speed/thrash bands at the time were also going thesaurus crazy when they got bored using the same old adjectives to describe something evil. Says McMackin, “I learned a lot of words from Gene.”

“Music America was a social club in Rochester back in the Thirties,” Perialas recalls. “It was basically this big, empty, nasty building that needed a lot of work, and Anthrax were staying there. Paul Curcio, who produced Kill ’Em All and was going to produce Fistful of Metal, was supposed to get new equipment for the studio, but it didn’t arrive when Anthrax was slated to start, so they went on the prowl looking for studios in upstate New York. When they happened upon my place, I kinda knew the name Anthrax from the grapevine and the first thing they heard was that this studio could actually make something aggressive.”

Perialas was always a fan of heavy music, and he was excited to work in the brave new world of thrash/speed metal. “I was always interested in hard edged music growing up,” he says. “I listened to Priest, Maiden, Accept, harder edged, riff-driven bands.” At the time, riff-masters like James Hetfield and Scott Ian were introducing an even faster and tighter form of rhythm playing that blew Perialas away. “I had never really heard rhythm guitar quite like that before,” he says.

Like Burns, Perialas paid close attention to gear and looked into everything that made the sound. “We were into hearing the real girth of the strings and wanted to hear all the notes in the chord,” he says. “Pickup height was something we played around with a lot. We’d actually sit there and keep striking the chord and tweaking the height of the pickup until we found the right spot where the magnets affected the string.”

When Perialas worked with Anthrax, they used custom-made Jackson guitars. Scott Ian’s primary studio guitar was a Pearl White Randy Rhoads model with a single pickup, a Seymour Duncan JB model in the bridge and “NOT” painted in big blue letters on the body. Amps were Marshall JCM800s and JMPs, including some of the early JMPs from the Seventies. In fact, Perialas still has the Super Lead master volume JMP that Ian used on his infamous side-project, S.O.D.

Scott and drummer Charlie Benante were both big hardcore punk fans and attended numerous weekend hardcore matinee shows at the legendary New York City club CBGB. After laying down his guitar tracks for their 1985 Spreading the Disease album, Ian was bored waiting for the rest of the record to be completed. With a lot of free time on his hands, he began to come up with crazy, intense riffs and short hardcore tunes. Perialas was duly impressed.

“We were putting the finishing touches on Spreading the Disease and I heard these riffs that Scott was messing around with,” Perialas recalls. “I said, ‘Man, those are sick.’ Johnny [Zazula] asked me what I thought, and I said, ‘This is crazy, we need to make this record.’ He told us to go ahead, and he said, ‘You gotta do it in three days, though. That’s all I’m gonna pay for.’

Although the thrash/speed metal scene peaked in 1986, great albums were still being released in 1987, including Anthrax’s Among the Living and Testament’s debut, The Legacy. Perialas was turned on to Testament by Megaforce staffer Metal Maria Ferrero, who was Johnny Zazula’s girl Friday. “Maria was really a huge champion of that project,” Perialas says. “The minute I heard them I said, ‘I need to make a record with this band.’ ”

Perialas loved working with Testament’s guitar team of Eric Peterson and lead guitarist Alex Skolnick, who was just out of high school when the band recorded The Legacy. When recording his solos, Skolnick “had such a great grasp of the instrument that you could do six takes with him, and all six would have a common thread, but each one of them would be brilliant in its own way. So it was just a matter of steering his young energy.”

That year also saw the release of another crucial album in the death metal genre produced and engineered by Burns and McMackin: Death’s Scream Bloody Gore, which again was released through Combat. Burns has fond memories of working with Chuck Schuldiner, the late founder of Death. “I thought Death took it to another level,” he says. “They were definitely groundbreaking, and I really liked Chuck’s guitar playing. He was a lot of fun to work with. He was a real hard worker, and he was really efficient in the studio. He really took to it.”

The year 1987 would also see the album debut of Napalm Death. Released through the British indie label Earache, Scum put Napalm Death on the map and established grindcore, a genre that pushed the envelope for speed and brutality like nothing before it. Early grindcore releases weren’t known for great production; that everything sounded so noisy and frenzied was initially part of its charm. Yet there was one producer who understood where the sound was coming from and was able to give it more clarity without stripping away its brutality.

Colin Richardson started out as a gopher at a studio in his hometown of Manchester England. His first engineering experience was with the U.K. hardcore band Discharge on their legendary 1982 album Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing, the influence of which could be heard in many speed/thrash metal bands that followed. As Scott Ian put it, “There was just a level of brutality on that record that I had never heard before. I could list 15 bands that if it wasn’t for that record wouldn’t even be bands, including Anthrax.”

Richardson recalls being left on his own to mix the album. “I really wasn’t quite sure what I was doing back in those days. I was just trying to find out how everything worked. I remember putting the guitars through the studio graphic EQ because I didn’t think they were quite as full sounding in the tracking. I hadn’t recorded a guitar sound like that, so I just tried to get something together that was pleasing to my ear.”

In fact, Pantera’s razor-sharp production was a big influence on Carcass when they went in a more melodic direction with their Heartwork album, which was released in 1994. Carcass guitarist Bill Steer brought a copy of Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power to Colin and told him, “We want to get our own sound, but we really like the clarity on the guitar and the punch on the drums.” While laying down the Heartwork album, Richardson and Steer would compare/contrast a Carcass track to a Pantera song to try and capture the same clarity and precision.

Burns (no relation to Randy) brought the first band he produced to Morrisound Studios in Tampa, Florida, in the early Eighties because it was the best studio he could find in the area, and a lot of local death metal bands went to the studio for the same reason. Morrisound specialized in high-tech production because, as Burns explains, the studio’s founders Jim and Tom Morris “were very progressive. They were very much into cutting-edge technology and buying good equipment.”

Burns produced Beneath in Sepultura’s home land, Brazil, in December 1988, and by the time he got back to the States in early 1989, the tides for heavy music finally started to turn. Like the peak of thrash in ’86, a lot of great death metal albums all seemingly came out at once from bands that included Carcass, Entombed, Morbid Angel and countless others. “It was a peak period for all the bands,” Burns says. “It was a big scene and it was a great time.”

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