‘Metal Matriarch,’ helped launch careers of Metallica, Anthrax, others
Marsha Zazula, who with her husband, Jonny, founded Megaforce Records at the front end of a heavy metal wave and gave Metallica, Anthrax and other pivotal bands their start, died Jan. 10 at her home in Clermont, about 20 miles west of Orlando. She was 68.
Maria Ferrero, a longtime friend who was a key figure at Megaforce and its associated management company, Crazed Management, said the cause was cancer.
The Zazulas became important players in the early days of the 1980s metal boom, signing and promoting bands through their seat-of-the-pants business, letting musicians crash at their house in Old Bridge, New Jersey, and releasing breakthrough albums, perhaps the most important of which was Metallica’s debut, “Kill ‘Em All,” in 1983.
“We took ourselves out of a comfortable place, rolled the dice – had nothing to lose but nothing to gain necessarily – and put our hearts and souls into doing it,” Marsha Zazula said in an interview last year with the website the Metal Voice.
James Hetfield, Metallica’s guitarist and lead vocalist, writing on Instagram, called her “the metal matriarch of the East Coast.”
In an interview for “Moguls and Madmen: The Pursuit of Power in Popular Music,” a 1994 book by Jory Farr, Scott Ian of Anthrax spoke of the dynamic that allowed the couple to become successful in a wild and fast-moving corner of the music world.
“Without Marsha, Jonny would be the blimp without the tether,” he said. “Marsha brings Jonny back down to earth.”
Jonny Zazula acknowledged as much in his 2019 book, “Heavy Tales: The Metal, the Music, the Madness.”
“People spoke differently to Marsha than they did to me, and that is what kept things going,” he wrote. “She doused fires between me and bands,” he added, “me and partners, me and the world. I felt like I was a bull in a china shop knocking everything around, and Marsha was right there making sure nothing got broke or knocked off the shelf.”
Marsha Jean Rutenberg was born on April 21, 1952, in Brooklyn, New York. Her father, William, was a furrier, and her mother, Ramona (Friedman) Rutenberg, was a jeweler.
She graduated from James Madison High School in Brooklyn and from the State University of New York in Farmingdale, where she studied childhood education.
In his book, Jonny Zazula wrote that he met Marsha when she was dating a friend of his. They hit it off thanks to a mutual love of jazz. Sometime later, when both were unattached, the relationship turned romantic. They married in 1979.
In 1981 they took a stall at a flea market on Route 18 in East Brunswick, New Jersey, hoping to sell from a modest inventory of hard-to-find music they had accumulated.
“We were selling predominantly picture discs from Europe by bands like the Kinks,” Jonny Zazula said in an interview quoted in “Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal” (2013), by Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman. “But there was one picture disc I really loved, and it was Judas Priest’s
‘Sad Wings of Destiny.’ Someone gave me $200 for it. I said, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’ I realized there was a real market for metal.”
The Zazulas also began staging concerts with heavy metal and thrash metal lineups at skating rinks, bars and other venues. In the days before cellphones and social media, promoting the shows was hands-on work in the most basic sense.
“Marsha and I would go to bars and change all the flyers every two to three days,” Jonny Zazula wrote in his book, “and we would poster telephone poles as if we were running an election.”
In 1982 someone brought a demo tape to the shop by a West Coast band. The Zazulas realized they were hearing something special and urged the unknown band, Metallica, to come east to play some shows. The group did, crashing at the Zazulas’ house for a time, “and things got a little crazy with women following them home and running through the house,” Marsha Zazula told The Courier
Post of Camden, New Jersey, in 2009. The Zazulas started Megaforce to release the band’s “Kill ‘Em All.”
Hetfield, in his Instagram post, alluded to that time, and to Marsha Zazula’s role. “She was our mother when I had none,” he said. “She made great sacrifices for Metallica to grow.”
And the band, or its popularity, did grow, so much so that after releasing a second Megaforce album, “Ride the Lightning,” in 1984, Metallica moved to a bigger label, Elektra. Other bands, including Anthrax, followed a similar path, breaking in on the Megaforce label (Anthrax with the 1984 album “Fistful of Metal”) and then moving to a bigger one.
Other groups that released albums with Megaforce (sometimes in partnership with other labels) included Testament, Ministry and Raven. The couple sold their stake in Megaforce in 2001 and eventually retired to Florida.
In addition to her husband, Marsha Zazula is survived by three daughters, Danielle Zazula, Rikki Zazula and Blaire Brewer; a sister, Hedy Tehrani; and five grandchildren.