Jon Zazula, who co-founded Megaforce Records with his wife Marsha and was a major figure in the rise of heavy metal music, which gave Metallica, Anthrax and other bands their start, died Tuesday at his home in Clermont, Fla. He was 69 .
Maria Ferrero, the pair’s first employee at the label and later the founder of Adrenaline PR, which specializes in promoting metal bands, said the cause was chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, a neurological condition. Marsha Zazula died in January last year at the age of 68.
Metallica commemorated Mr. Zazula in posts on her Twitter feed.
“In 1982, when no one wanted to risk four kids from California playing a crazy brand of metal, Jonny and Marsha did, and the rest, as they say, is history,” the band said.
At the time, the Zazulas were trying to make some money selling records from their collection of hard-to-find albums and picture discs at a flea market in East Brunswick, NJ. Their stock was heavy on metal, and their cubbyhole shop, Rock N Roll Heaven, became a gathering place for metalheads. At the urging of their clients, they started a DIY concert promoting some of the bands whose music they sold; their first concert, in 1982, featured Canadian band Anvil and attracted nearly 2,000 people.
At one point, someone brought them a demo tape of an unknown West Coast band, Metallica. The Zazulas loved what they heard, so much so that they contacted the members of the group and urged them to come east and play a few shows. They soon formed Megaforce, which released Metallica’s first two albums, “Kill ’em All” in 1983 and “Ride the Lightning” in 1984.
Megaforce also released the first albums of Anthrax (“Fistful of Metal”, 1984), Testament (“The Legacy”, 1987) and others.
Heavy metal was just beginning to take hold in the United States when the Zazulas got involved, and it was sometimes dismissed as mere noise. But in a 1983 interview with The Courier-News of Bridgewater, NJ, Mr. Zazula pulls the pull.
“It’s music that’s pure emotion,” he said. “Heavy metal is super talent at breakneck speed.”
The music, he said, was destined to endure.
“New wave music changes every week,” he said. “Metal gives people something they can count on.”
Jonathan David Zazula was born on March 16, 1952 in the Bronx. His father, Norman, was a ship’s clerk and his mother, Helen (Risch) Zazula, was director of recreation at a nursing home.
He grew up in the Eastchester Gardens complex in the Bronx and attended Lehman College. He married Lisa Weber in 1972, but the marriage ended in divorce. In 1979 he married Marsha Jean Rutenberg.
He was working in financial planning and she in marketing when they left New York in 1980 and settled in Old Bridge, NJ. His financial career ended the following year when the company he worked for, which dealt in metals, was raided by authorities and everyone there was charged with fraud, accused of passing on scrap metal as the rare metal tantalum. Mr. Zazula served in a Newark shelter for six months, during which time he and his wife began selling at the flea market, trying to make ends meet.
“That’s how we started Rock N Roll Heaven,” he said in an interview for “Moguls and Madmen: The Pursuit of Power in Popular Music,” a 1994 book by Jory Farr. “Out of that pit of hell came everything we did.”
Their fledgling concert promotion company – Crazed Management was their company name – was very practical; they personally covered telephone poles with kites, and band members often crashed into their homes.
“I remember having to sell every club we worked in with the idea of presenting an original heavy metal show,” recalling the early days, Mr. Zazula told The Home News of New Brunswick, NJ, in 1988. days all clubs wanted cover bands.”
Creating Megaforce Records, he said, was a fallback, after the pair did some more demos with Metallica and tried to interest existing labels.
“They thought we were crazy,” he told The Courier-News in 1987. “‘What kind of music is this?’ And we were forced to start our own record company to promote Metallica.”
Bands started by Megaforce tended to move to more mainstream labels once they got big; after the first two albums, Metallica signed with Elektra.
The pair sold their stake in Megaforce in 2001, although Mr. Zazula continued to promote an occasional concert until retiring in 2018.
mr. Zazula leaves behind three daughters, Danielle Zazula, Rikki Zazula and Blaire Zazula Brewer; two brothers, Evan and Robert; and five grandchildren.
