Film Review: Get Thrashed

Last week I had the distinct pleasure of attending the New York City premiere of Get Thrashed: The Story of Thrash Metal, a documentary about - you guessed it - the history of thrash from its origins in the 1980s to whatever form it's still kicking around in today. Directed by Rick Ernst, Get Thrashed featured Rat Skates, formerly of Overkill, as associate producer.

The showing took place in a theater on the East Side as a part of the New York International Independent Film & Video Festival. This association probably made the whole showing possible, but it lead to a few problems that very nearly killed the fun of this party before it got started.

First, there was the matter of seating arrangements. Because New York City is one of the world's original thrash capitals, many of the members of the NYC-area bands featured in this film wanted to come to the premiere. Because New York City is a place where class equality is a convenient lie, the organizers decided to reserve the front four rows for the bands and their families, even though there weren't really enough chairs for all of the ticket holders and this wasn't a crowd for acting star struck. Clearly, fire code be damned when there are rock stars involved.

But then the organizers went too far: they informed us - less than a minute before the show was supposed to start - that Get Thrashed would have an unannounced opener, a piece called Bang Bang You're Dead about an indie rock band from Utah. And they even had the director, a neophyte giving his first showing, in the audience to make an introduction.

As you can no doubt imagine, the result was a disaster. The film itself wasn't that bad - it reminded me a bit of Instrument, if Instrument had been Jem Cohen's first film - but anyone with half a brain would know that showing a film with no real narrative and a bunch of disassociated imagery about a group of college-age indie kids to a crowd of mostly 30+ metalheads would go over like a lead zeppelin. I was impressed: the crowd managed to maintain a sullen silence for the first few minutes before the conversation rose to low roar, people started actively booing the endless transitions or announcing loudly they were going out to get popcorn. The film's end after half an hour was a mercy killing overdue by about 25 minutes, leaving us to wonder if we had been the victims of a last minute switch due to poor ticket sales for Bang Bang Your Dead or some sort of bullheaded stupidity by our hosts.

Thankfully, the rest of the evening's awesome was proportional to the beginning's suckitude: Get Thrashed is an excellent, excellent film that gets even better when you watch it with a room full of fans not afraid to show their love for a nostalgia trip down heavy metal memory lane. Focusing on the world's four big thrash areas (LA, San Francisco, New York and Germany) and moving in a rough chronological order that tied the US Big Four (Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax) and German thrash giants Kreator to the scenes they helped spawn, Get Thrashed happily traced the progression of thrash from its roots in Metallica's garage in LA and Exodus's brutal live shows in San Francisco in 1980 to the movement's apogee with the 1990 Clash of the Titans tour, using photos, video and interviews with everyone from Blitz Ellsworth and Rat Skates to Dave Mustaine to Zetro to Lars Ulrich to the members of Dark Angel to those crazy bastards from the Old Bridge Militia to tell the tale.

While all of those interviews are informative, a few go beyond and become truly memorable. Blitz Ellsworth, for example, is either really funny or really, really crazy, but in a way that makes you want to have a beer with him so you can hear some stories. Dave Mustaine is...well, Dave Mustaine, the strange cross between super arrogant guitar god and comic book geek. My favorite moment in the movie was when Mustaine goes on a short rant about how he made the careers of everyone in Megadeth, could play better than everyone in Metallica, was, in fact, responsible for thrash music as we know it today - cue a gasp from the crowd - and then the film makers cut to Scott Ian, who tells the camera, "if it wasn't for Dave Mustaine, thrash music probably wouldn't exist."

There were some nice tribute moments, too: moments of silence written in for the memories of Cliff Burton, Paul Baloff and Dimebag Darrell made even more poignant by the sentiment of the crowd, which gave each man a full round of applause. These moments underscored how much of a community metal can be when it's brought together around something good; when in-fighting and external attacks aren't part of the equation and the mood turns to celebration of what's been done.

All of these moments underscore what seems to be Get Thrashed's underlying purpose: to set down the official story, such as it is, as a monument to one generation of metalheads and the bands they loved. It's a huge strength for the film, but it also underscores the film's one weakness: Get Thrashed puts thrash metal's foundations in a near vacuum, as if it sprang fully formed from the minds of a few guys who liked playing loud and fast, tiptoes around the more difficult issues and ascribes everything that's going on in metal now to what started 27 years ago. Historically it makes the film a little skewed, but that one problem pales in comparison to the enjoyable experience Get Thrashed provides to the viewer. If you can go see it, do; you'll have a great time.

Live! Tonight! Sell Out!

Going back to the topic I touched on two days ago, let's talk about the other side of the experimentation coin: the all-too-frequent accusation by fans that a band has sold out because they changed their sound.

An example: I was in high school when Metallica released Load. As anyone who follows the band knows, Load marked the culmination of a direction hinted by Metallica, but rendered far more shocking to the metal community by new hair cuts, riffs that were far more hard rock than thrash and Kirk Hammett's incredible collection of facial piercings. The most metal dude I knew at the time (the only metal dude I knew at the time) was a guy named Josh Woodard, a true fan of metal who had hair that hung down his back, a spiked bracelet, wicked shredding ability and an "Up the Irons!" sticker on his guitar. He introduced me to Emperor by playing the opening to Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk over the PA speakers in my school's auditorium, instantly sealing a love for all things black and Norwegian in my heart. After Load came out, such was his outrage that he never referred to Metallica as anything but "Alternica" for the rest of the time I knew him. At the time, I was a callow, inexperienced youth and didn't know enough about either metal or Metallica to recognize a departure when I saw one; later on I became a callow, experienced youth and took up the banner of "they were better before..." and "sell out!" with all of the anger of a disappointed adolescent. Hell hath no self-righteous fury like an idealistic, pig-headed, disappointed teen.

What is selling out? Thus rages the debate. I think Greil Marcus said in Lipstick Traces that selling out as a defamation really took flight with punk rock and the punk movement certainly pushed the concept much further into the consciousness of pop culture, justifying the hanging of anti-heroes with sell out rope with generations of youth rage and idealism. Of course, for all that, there's no official punk rock definition; some might say it's making money off your art, others would draw the line at some level of money making that separates punk bands from rock gods who live in excess, spoiling the purity of the music.

Purity seems to be a strong element, as if the ancient Judeo-Christian customs that glorify the clean and the virgin lurked somewhere in the back of pop culture, affecting even those who scorn them. Purity also means avoiding the dirty taint of the suits who run the music business. Ian MacKaye never sold out in popular opinion because he's embraced DIY and used it to keep the purity of his music, even though he runs a record label. Selling out, therefore, is the destruction of the purity of art through the contamination of money and polluted touch of the profit-oriented hive mind, the classic battle of David (the fans) versus Goliath (big corporate interests). With ideological grounds like these, is it any wonder people get so worked up when they smell sell out?

Experimentation

I was reading Blabbermouth today and came across an interview with Kreator frontman Mille Petrozza, where he talks about the backlash Kreator withstood in the 1990s when they attempted to diversify their sound beyond their thrash roots. The discussion go me thinking about these controversial experiments and how frequently they fail, usually with accusations by the loyal fan base that the band has sold out. Selling out has its place, but I think the real problem runs a little deeper.

Let's break things down: in general, most bands will change their sound over the course of their careers, because they get bored putting out the same old album time after time. Change and experimentation are pars for the course of human nature, especially for artists, who are expected to delve into the mutable aspects of the human soul on a daily basis. However - and here's the critical point - the desire to experiment doesn't equal ability to do so; many bands enter an experimental period and either feel the sting of critical backlash because they've either moved so far away from their original sound that they lack the experience to make a cohesive album, or because they don't have the musical ability to play anything but the sound that made them work as a band in the first place.

Case in point: even though I've developed a fondness for Load over the past twelve years, I think Metallica's conversion from thrash to what they've been playing since has been a failure - not because they don't put albums that sound exactly Master of Puppets any more, but because Reload, S & M and St. Anger weren't particularly good albums, lacking in the creative drive that still makes Master of Puppets so incredible 20+ years later. Metallica can experiment all they want to; it's their prerogative as artists and as people who have their own lives to lead, but they have yet to demonstrate the ability to create those experiments and do so with the same ability that they had as an edgy thrash band.