On July 27, 1984, indie record label Megaforce Records released Metallica’s Ride The Lightning in the US. Days later, on August 3, a show at New York City’s Roseland Ballroom, billed as “A Midsummer’s Night Scream,” took place. It featured three underground bands: Raven, Metallica, and Anthrax. It was a coming out party for independent metal in America, and a legendary event in Metallica’s and Anthrax’s histories and metal music lore.
It is commonly known among the bands’ fans and music industry insiders that a young guy named Michael Alago, an A&R man for Elektra Records, was in the audience. Soon after seeing this show, Alago signed Metallica to Elektra. The group was on its journey to something unprecedented.
A new book, "No Big Deal: Chasing the indie music dream in the last days of the record business," by former music industry executive Dean Brownrout, offers a deeper look into the story. It was Brownrout who, along with Steve Martin, now a leading music business agent, convinced well-known promoter John Scher that a Raven/Metallica/Anthrax bill could work at Roseland Ballroom, a 3,500-capacity venue in the heart of Manhattan.
Said Brownrout, “In 1983, at 21, I’d recently moved to NYC, and found work as a talent agent, signing and booking music acts. I became aware of an underground heavy metal scene that was ready to explode, and started working with Megaforce Records, a small independent record label deeply involved in this community. Their artists included a little-known group called ‘Metallica.’”
Brownrout continued, “Steve Martin (an agent, not the comedian) and I talked John Scher into booking the concert, but Scher and his staff remained skeptical that these three obscure bands meant anything in ticket sales. The show sold out.”
2024 marks the 40th anniversary of this groundbreaking concert.
In his memoir, “No Big Deal,” due out October 1 on Guernica Editions, Brownrout gives little- known details of how this event came to pass, as well as offering the reader a bird’s-eye view into this transformational era in the music business.
Brownrout was born in the early ’60s and raised in the Buffalo, NY area. By the time he was a teenager, he was promoting rock concerts and managing local bands. From 1980 to around 2000, he had an uncanny habit of finding himself at the forefront of cultural shifts―from the emergence of new wave and thrash metal music to the dawn of the commercial internet. Brownrout would go on to work with other up-and-coming talent as an agent before starting his own record labels (he signed the Goo Goo Dolls to their first recording contract).
“No Big Deal” is a humorous and nostalgic journey through a seminal time in the music industry.
