Report: METAL BLADE Celebrates 25 Years Of Metallic Massacres

Eden Munro of Vue Weekly reports: In 1982, a young man named Brian Slagel decided to put together a compilation album out of his mother's house in Woodland Hills, CA. The album's title was "Metal Massacre", and it marked the beginning of Metal Blade Records. Twenty-five years on, Slagel is still at the helm of Metal Blade as it hosts the Metal Blade Records 25th Anniversary Tour — which lands in Edmonton on Sat, September 22 — celebrating having been at the forefront and in the background of a number of momentous occasions for heavy metal.

Looking back at the label's simple beginnings, though, Slagel admits that he had no real dreams of longevity when he started out. "Absolutely never," he laughs in a voice that is smooth and pleasant — not at all what you'd expect from the guy who set both SLAYER and CANNIBAL CORPSE upon the world. "I don't think any of us back in the early days ever thought really anything. We were all just young kids who were really big fans of the music and we just wanted to help it, but none of us ever thought that it would exist this long, that's for sure."

Slagel took his enthusiasm for music and started up his own fanzine — The New Heavy Metal Revue — moonlighting as a writer for UK magazines Kerrang! and Sounds and working a day job in a Los Angeles record store, where he had access to a slew of releases from The New Wave of British Heavy Metal. From there, it was a short jump to label owner, even if he didn't realize it at the time.

"There was kind of this cool scene that was happening in Los Angeles and nobody really knew anything about it and that was kind of frustrating to me," he recalls. "I was very much influenced by The New Wave of British Heavy Metal and that sort of do-it-yourself kind of attitude, and they had a lot of compilation albums over there. I got the idea to put together a compilation of local LA heavy metal bands and since I worked at the record store I would call the various distributors and say, 'Hey, if I put out this album would you guys distribute it?' and they all said yes. But I wasn't going to start a label or anything — it was really just part of the fanzine and just to help out the scene in LA."

That first "Metal Massacre" compilation — 12 more would follow over the years — was made up of bands that Slagel knew from around LA. Soon after its release, a distributor offered Slagel some cash to put together more records and Metal Blade was off and running. As an independent label, though, the company was faced with the prospect of losing bands to the major labels that held sway back then. METALLICA released its first song, "Hit the Lights", for Metal Blade before moving on, as did SLAYER. Slagel holds no ill will towards either band, however, acknowledging that he's still good friends with the members to this day.

"We were a very small independent label and when the big majors came calling we were happy for the bands as long as they got good deals to move on," he says about the dangerous process of navigating the music industry's rickety ladder back in the '80s. "[Back then] it was definitely a matter of, 'Hey, we're a small label and we're just happy that we were able to start these bands' careers.'"

Read the entire article at Vue Weekly.