Eric Parsons / Star staff "Sometimes it seems like it was yesterday, and other times it seems like it has been a long time," Brian Slagel says of Metal Blade Records' 25 years in business.

After 25 years as a key player in the heavy metal scene, Metal Blade Records head Brian Slagel thinks that the genre is poised for a second coming like the one he helped launch in the 1980s.

He can also report that one of his label's stalwarts, the band Gwar, no longer throws uncooked hamburger at its audiences.

"No raw meat, but they still have plenty of liquids," Slagel said.

Slagel would know; he saw Gwar play in Louisville, Ky., two days before this mid-August interview at the independent label's Simi Valley headquarters. Before the week was out, he was off to Europe tending to business affairs there.

Slagel, 46, is still busy poking fingers in the metal pie even as current events — the label's 25th anniversary tour kicks off tonight in New Orleans — offer cause for a pause or two to reflect on bygone salad days.

They were something; Slagel's saga might be one of the genre's best shoestrings-to-success stories. He's widely credited with giving Metallica its first big break; heck, he was hanging out with Lars Ulrich before the band ever existed. Slagel also worked with Slayer, Ratt, Mtley Cre, the Goo Goo Dolls and others before those groups became big.

Today, Metal Blade is still considered an important part of the genre. It has called Simi Valley home since 1993 and now has offices in Germany and Tokyo. Slagel counts 53 bands, including overseas acts, on the label's active roster. Last week, the label scored a Top 10 hit on the Billboard 200 album chart with As I Lay Dying's "An Ocean Between Us." The disc sold 39,000 copies to debut at No. 8.

Gross annual sales for his label now top $16 million worldwide, Slagel said. Not bad for someone who began this endeavor as a headbanging fan upset that the L.A. metal scene was being ignored by the major record labels.

Slagel started Metal Blade out of the back of his mother's Woodland Hills home. The event he traces back as the label's genesis, the 1982 release of "Metal Massacre" — the first album to feature songs from Metallica and Ratt — was a bare-bones compilation effort that Slagel finished only after borrowing money from an aunt.

Several years ago, the e-zine metalupdate.com stated that "the story of American (heavy) metal necessarily involves Brian Slagel" and called his story "downright amazing." It called Metal Blade "one of the most important sources of metal today."

"Sometimes it seems like it was yesterday, and other times it seems like it has been a long time," Slagel remarked of the last quarter-century, sitting at his desk in a comfy corner suite with a view across Simi.

Metal Blade occupies two stories of an anonymous, cookie-cutter building in a quiet office park. No signs out front boast of its presence. Inside, strip the walls of the numerous posters and album covers depicting gore, blood, monsters and the usual bits of malfeasance that metal musters into its image and you might think that you're at the dentist's office.

Nonetheless, it's a nerve center of noise.

Why a GOP president is good for metal

Slagel comes across as a smart player who knows his heavy metal back and forth like expert fingers gliding on a fretboard. Like others across the music industry, Slagel worries about declining record sales in an era of iPods, downloading, CD burning, cell phone streaming and the like.

But he thinks that heavy metal might be insulated. He said his gross annual sales — some $10 million-plus in the States and another $6 million-plus abroad — have been growing at 4 to 5 percent a year recently. Fans still want T-shirts and CDs, and there's no shortage of new metal bands.

"What's happening now reminds me so much of the early '80s," he said. "I think there will be a second big wave of heavy metal."

As for why, Slagel cited two theories. One goes that everything in entertainment comes back 20 years later. The other is that every time the Republicans have the presidency, metal and punk are big.

"I guess everyone's angry then," he said with a laugh.

And older metal purists might want to hang on tight to their leather and chains — Slagel thinks that today's artists have the same type of musician chops of such yesteryear guitar gods as, say, Michael Schenker and Yngwie Malmsteen.

"The players are every bit as good now as they were then," he said, citing Chris Petersen, a guitarist in the speed-metal band Cellador, a Metal Blade artist.

If metal gets big again, Slagel concedes that Metal Blade might face the same issue it did in the '80s — losing bands to major labels. Back then, about 15 bands defected (although some would later crawl back). Slagel admitted that sometimes that hurts, after doing "all the dirty work" to help bands grow. But part of it, he added, is natural career progression.

In fact, Slagel said he's happy being an independent niche label that isn't a be-all, end-all entity.

Free from that, he said, Metal Blade can concentrate on marketing and promotion — two things he learned at a tender age.

A young fan acts

Slagel swears that he did not put out "Metal Massacre" with grand visions of going big.

"It started something," he noted, "but I didn't put out the record to start a record label."

Slagel, who was born and raised in Woodland Hills, got hooked on the heavy musical stuff at age 11, when a friend played him Deep Purple's "Machine Head," an album widely cited as a big influence on metal.

He traded tapes with others, scoured racks for rare singles and eventually took a job at the now-defunct Oz Records in Woodland Hills. He was into the so-called New Wave of British Heavy Metal epitomized by bands such as Iron Maiden, Motrhead and Def Leppard — which dropped the bluesier base of, say, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath in favor of a more uptempo, hard-core sound. He brought such imports into the store.

He also started a fanzine called the New Heavy Metal Revue and wrote for Kerrang! magazine and others as a Los Angeles correspondent. Slagel came to know many of the bands in the nascent and largely unpublicized L.A. metal scene.

"The frustrating thing was that no one cared," he recalled.

So Slagel went to the bands with a simple question: "If I put together a compilation album, would you be on it?" Many opted in, including a new band named Ratt. Mtley Cre, a group Slagel did some promo work for, initially said yes, but backed out after deciding to put out its own record.

Another who asked to be on Slagel's "Metal Massacre" album was a Denmark transplant named Lars Ulrich. A friend had met Ulrich, clad in a Saxon T-shirt, in the parking lot at a Schenker show; a few days later, Ulrich was at Slagel's house listening to records. Ulrich, a drummer, was jamming with soon-to-be Metallica singer-guitarist James Hetfield, but they were far from an act.

"He'd always say, I'm gonna start a band,' and I'd be like, Yeah, sure you are, Lars,' " Slagel said. "Then Lars said, If I put together a band, can I get on the compilation album?' "

Metallica was born; its song on "Metal Massacre" was "Hit the Lights." The album, with help from money supplied by Slagel's aunt, became a minor hit, selling out all 2,500 copies printed.

Slagel landed a distribution deal; Metal Blade was up and running. In the early days, it was just Slagel working out of the back of his mom's house; bands would come by and drop off demo tapes. It was 17- to 18-hour days; the house did not have air conditioning.

"Honestly," he recalled, "I didn't care. It was new and it was fun."

It would be three years before he got his first employee, an engineer. He now has 33.

Metal mania

Things grew. Metal Blade put out an Armored Saint EP; another big moment was doing thrash-metal band Slayer's debut 1983 album "Show No Mercy." Soon, the bands and others were talking up Metal Blade.

Around the same time, heavy metal exploded in popularity. Slagel recalled seeing Metallica at a mid-'80s gig at the Los Angeles Coliseum. The crowd went crazy "and I'm sittin' there thinking, Wow, a few years ago, I was one of the few who knew them.'"

These were heady times. Slayer and other successful acts left Metal Blade to go to other labels. Slagel got into punk and landed the Goo Goo Dolls on a side venture called Death Records; one of his employees was from the band's hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., calls were made and that was that. They later put out "A Boy Named Goo" with the smash single "Name."

Ups and downs with distributors eventually led to a deal with Warner Bros. Records. As it so happened, this was around the time that Warner Bros. was caught up in the controversy surrounding its release of Ice-T's 1992 song "Cop Killer." After that, Slagel noted, Warner Bros. had a lawyer "look at every single lyric and decide if it was Time-Warner friendly."

By chance, the first album Metal Blade gave them was from Gwar. Warner Bros. wanted some lyrics removed; Slagel sided with the band, and that ended that deal.

Heavy metal lyrics have been called raunchy, satanic, misogynistic — a lot of things.

"My thing is we let the artist say what they want to say," Slagel said. "We're not going to stifle them.

"I think a lot of this stuff is so tongue in cheek. I like the shock part of things, as long as the people have an element of humor in it. None of them are doing this seriously. It's no different than watching a horror movie. It's all fictitious."

He likened the bands to characters acting in a play. Slagel takes particular umbrage at claims that metal bands advocate white supremacy, saying, "We don't have any bands that come close to that." Metal Blade, he added, also has several Christian bands, among them San Diego's As I Lay Dying.

Coda

Looking back, it's been a topsy-turvy blur. If metal exploded, he was one who helped light the fuse. "Whatever part I played in that is fine with me," he said humbly.

Part of him is still the fan that listens to his old UFO albums. He still keeps in touch with old pals. He recently had dinner with Slayer guitarist Kerry King and spoke to members of Metallica.

"The Metallica guys are still really good, down-to-earth people," he said.

He's seen a lot. He even survived metal's Big Hair-Glam-MTV-darling phase, when the Poisons, the Warrants and the Cinderellas of the genre got their day in the sun — bands that seemed less interested in musical chops than being male Barbie dolls or comic book characters.

Said Slagel: "It needed to go that way, then go back underground and reinvent itself."

That it has, and Slagel's expecting another big jolt. He's still plugged into the socket of the headphone-blasting sound, even if it's in the relative quiet of Simi Valley.