Metallica has paid tribute to the late Megaforce Records co-founder Jon Zazula as the band’s father figure, and the captain of the heavy music ship.
Zazula died Tuesday (Feb. 1) at the age of 69, passing a year after his wife and label co-founder Marsha Zazula.
“Heavy music lost one of its great champions today when Jonny Z left this world far too soon,” reads a social post signed by the four band members.
In 1982, the message continues, “when no one wanted to take a chance on four kids from California playing a crazy brand of metal, Jonny and Marsha did, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
Today, Metallica is arguably the most successful metal band of all time. They’re creators of the “most brutal, enduring rock & roll albums of the ’80s and ’90s,” reads the blurb accompanying their induction into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2009.
But without the vision and graft of the Zazulas, the world could have entirely missed the Bay Area quartet.
Zazula was “a mentor, a manager, a label head and a father figure to us all . . . Metallica would not be who we are or where we are today without Jon Zazula and his wife, Marsha,” reads the statement.
