If regions were like parents and music genres their offspring, thrash metal would be the Bay Area's redheaded stepchild. The psychedelic sound of '60s San Francisco tends to snatch all the glory in local music lore, while the confrontational metal forged during the Bay Area's '80s thrash heyday by bands with names such as Exodus, Death Angel and Possessed never quite achieves the canonization it deserves.

"It's music that people on the outside looking in don't understand," says Gary Holt, the pioneering lead guitarist of Richmond's Exodus. "It's too fast, too aggressive, too in-your-face."

Or as Chuck Billy, lead singer of Oakland's long-standing band Testament, puts it, "There's always been this cloud of taboo that hovers over thrash metal for some dark reason."

Searching for the terms "jerry garcia grateful dead" in the San Francisco Public Library's online database yields no fewer than 38 results. But plug "gary holt exodus" into the search bar and you'll get only one hit - a CD of the band's latest album.

With the rock-crit establishment turning up its collective nose at thrash, the task of documenting the Bay Area's '80s metal maelstrom for posterity has been left to fans. Brian Lew and Harald Oimoen - two thrash survivors who snapped countless shots of the unruly, burgeoning scene - are doing just that with their recently released book, "Murder in the Front Row," a photographic odyssey through the inception of Bay Area thrash.

"The thrash scene, as far as metal goes, is one of the most influential scenes ever," Lew says. With its insistence on pushing metal to new extremes, thrash prefigured all the genres that would crop up in its wake, including death metal, black metal and any other style that ratchets up the revolting possibilities inherent in heavy metal. "A lot of it started here, and it's not really known."

With contemporary music fragmenting into ever more insular subgenres, thrash metal's legacy seems more salient than ever.

The Bay Area's thrash scene coalesced in 1982, born from miscegenation between unrelenting American punk and the brutality purveyed by British heavy metal bands like Diamond Head, Angel Witch and Iron Maiden.

Lew says, "Thrash was sort of like the bastard child between the original hard-core bands and the early metal bands." Though its influences were easily spotted, thrash's defining characteristics - punishing chromatic riffs, lyrics that touch on everything from the occult to conformity, breakneck drumming, aggressively shouted vocals and rapid-fire lead guitar work - added up to an utterly new sound.

"Fast, loud, kind of obnoxious," Oimoen reels off when asked to describe thrash. "They're probably the best three words."

Making waves

Lew and Oimoen had barely graduated high school when thrash started making waves. The two grew up in Sunnyvale, but they never met until they each became immersed in the thrash scene.

Like countless other teenage misfits, they began frequenting thrash shows at now-defunct venues like the Old Waldorf, Mabuhay Gardens, the Stone and Ruthie's Inn. They shopped for imported records and bootleg T-shirts at the Record Vault on Polk Street. They joined in on the wild post-concert keggers that bands threw at their houses. Though they didn't know it at the time, Lew and Oimoen were knee-deep in a scene that would explode into an international phenomenon.

"I probably could've done better if I'd been more serious," says Oimoen about his documentation. "I was more interested in having a good time. We tended to drink quite a bit, even though we probably weren't of age back then."

It's remarkable how unassuming the photos included in "Murder in the Front Row" are. We see pimply Metallica members unloading their own gear before a show. We see Dave Mustaine from Los Angeles' Megadeth scowling goofily at the camera. We see the guys from Slayer on a plywood stage, playing a DIY show at Berkeley's Aquatic Park.

Like punk before it, thrash was both revolutionary and reactionary. With one arm, it pushed forward into musical extremes that had never been heard before. With the other, it pushed back against certain trends in mainstream music.

If thrash stood for anything, it would be an insistence upon taking music past the brink of good taste.

"It was always about being as extreme as possible musically," says Ron Quintana, an early thrash champion and the man who gave Metallica its name. As the host of "Rampage Radio" and the creator of the Metal Mania zine, Quintana dedicated airtime and print space to emerging local bands, helping expose thrash to a wider audience. "There was so much bad pop music in the '80s. It was a reaction to that, and the blandness of late-'70s music. And to the Reagan era, it was a big 'f- you.' "

"The lyrics were anti-religion, anti-government, anti-everything, pretty much," says Exodus drummer Tom Hunting, who was 15 when he started jamming with Holt and Kirk Hammett (who would go on to join Metallica) in the band room at Richmond High School. "We wanted to sound like something that had never been done before."

Gleeful offensiveness

The music's gleeful offensiveness strongly appealed to a young Lew. "When I was growing up in the suburbs, I was attracted to dark things," he says. "It wasn't like I wanted to be part of a punk or political movement. I was listening to it to escape."

In order to understand what thrash stood for, you have to understand what it stood against - what Lew and fans like him wanted to escape from. Above all else, thrash positioned itself as a backlash to the hair metal coming off record industry factory lines in Los Angeles.

"If somebody would show up at a Ruthie's Inn show wearing a Mötley Crüe or a Ratt shirt, Paul Baloff (Exodus' lead singer at the time) would go up to them and literally rip the shirt off their back," remembers Lew. "He and Gary Holt would cut pieces off the shirts and wear them around their wrists, like scalps."

Thrash diehards hated hair metal's beefed-up brand of insipid pop, but they resented the heavy emphasis on image even more. "We definitely felt like the delinquents and outcasts in the metal world," Holt says. "Everyone else had the frosted hair, and we were grimy and dirty."

Bands from Los Angeles playing in the Bay Area quickly learned that audiences here frowned upon any kind of pageantry. "If you look at the first Slayer album, they were wearing mascara," Lew says. "Kerry King has said in interviews that when they played the Bay Area, it was a game-changer. They realized it was about the music, not about the image." After playing in the Bay Area, Slayer never wore makeup onstage again.

A slippery issue

Politics is a more slippery issue for thrash - while politics crops up repeatedly in thrash, the ideology isn't as easy to pin down as it is in punk. Ask 10 thrash musicians about their political beliefs, and you'll probably get 10 very different answers, from staunch conservative to liberal rants to "politics is boring."

Even if you can't get thrash musicians to agree on any one issue, they were all clearly going against the optimistic political tone of the time. President Reagan insisted that it was "morning again in America" - a morning in which everyone wore pastel clothing and smiled behind white picket fences. Thrash shattered that cheery veneer, presenting a gruesome view of a culture plagued by violence, moral decay and social unrest.

"I think that goes back to our upbringing in the blue-collar working class," Holt says. "All that prosperity didn't trickle down to us. We were the longhaired kids that lived in ghettos and didn't fit in where we lived. The only place we did fit in was with our friends at shows."

But that tight-knit community didn't last forever. Testament was signed to Atlantic Records in the early '90s, lined up to have its single played on drive-time radio. But once Nirvana took off, record executives and radio programmers swooped on a suddenly hip Seattle and abandoned metal. "The whole scene really did change overnight," Billy says. "The next thing you know, every radio station across the country was saying, 'We're changing our format.' "

It was just around this time that Metallica began exploring its pop potential with the "Black Album," and bands such as Exodus were going on hiatus. Thrash seemed dead in the water until 2001, when Billy was diagnosed with cancer. Friends quickly put together a benefit show called Thrash of the Titans to help cover his medical bills.

Local heroes

Featuring local heroes Exodus, Death Angel and Vio-lence, the concert was just the rallying cry thrash needed to respark the movement. "It really revived it," Billy remembers. "Everyone put aside their differences and came together to help me out. They all matured and put their differences together. This music stood the test of time."

Still, the question remains: With such a rich history, and such an enduring legacy, why isn't thrash more closely associated with the Bay Area in the public perception?

"This is going to be the eternal argument: Where did it start?" Lew says. "The East Coast will say Anthrax started it. But I think it started in California mainly because the punk bands and the metal bands started playing shows together out here way earlier. D.R.I. and Slayer in '85, Exodus with Suicidal Tendencies in '84.

"If you look at music history, you have to ask, 'Why have so many bands come from California?' For whatever reason, bands are willing to try different things. People are a little more open-minded here or something."

Lew hesitates for a moment, wanting to make sure he doesn't come across as too pedantic.

"We didn't want it to be a history book, like, 'This is the way it was.' The last thing we want to come off as is pompous authorities on the subject. Because we're not. There is no authority." {sbox}