Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (32 page)

Considered more than two decades later, the Arizonian band’s full-length bow is remarkable for two reasons. The first is its cover artwork, which ranks among the worst, if not the worst, in the history of contemporary music. With quasi-religious implications, the image that appears beneath the band’s name features a green lizard-cum-monster squatting atop a boiled-lobster-red Satan. This cack-handed concept is handicapped yet further by a stylistic execution so rudimentary as to make Metallica’s idea for the original front of cover of ‘Metal Up Your Ass’ appear sophisticated. The music contained within was, however, superior to that suggested by the album’s packaging.
Doomsday for the Deceiver
is a solid set
of second-generation speed metal informed more by the hint of potential than by any particular mastery of execution. Despite this,
Kerrang!
writer ‘Harry Headbanger’ – the pseudonym of contributor Mark Putterford, a journalist who on the subject of thrash metal knew not a thing – afforded the album a review of such praise that for the first time the publication permitted a rating of six Ks, one more than the maximum usually allowed. With a tone that rang as hollow as the arguments upon which the review was based, Headbanger’s notice served only to remind
Kerrang!
’s more discerning readers that a number of its journalists were no more aware of the difference between thrash metal and white noise than was the office cleaning lady, that and the fact that some of the title’s commissioning editors could sometimes be heard snoring on the job.

For Newsted, however, Flotsam and Jetsam were about to live up to their name. Following Slagel’s telephone call, the bassist focused his considerable energies on not just mastering Metallica’s songbook but doing so to professional specifications. In the seven days that elapsed between first contact from Slagel and an audition at Castro Valley, Jason claims that he did not sleep once.

‘I may have lain down a couple of times,’ he says. ‘[But] For five days I stayed up and played as long as I could. Blisters on blisters broke [on his hands]. When I could feel the nerve inside [his finger] as I played the string, I stopped for a while. A couple of my friends got together some money to pay for a $140 plane ticket to go do my audition.’

With limbs as thin as the spokes of a television aerial and hair that was not just shoulder-length but also shoulder-width, as Newsted made his way from Arizona to Northern California he could take comfort in the notion that he at least looked the part. The young musician was also savvy enough to understand that on the day of his audition it mattered not at all how he was feeling
– inside he was nervous to the point of physical illness – all that mattered were how his actions registered in the eyes of those who would be watching, and judging, him.

Newsted was scheduled to play music for the first ever time with Hetfield, Ulrich and Hammett in a lunchtime slot during a day of auditions that saw at least sixteen other musicians plug their bass guitar into one of the amplifiers that made up Metallica’s backline. Newsted arrived far earlier than was required and was able to see at close hand the operations of a group that had no time for social niceties. ‘It was a little bit tense, I have to say,’ recalls the bass player. ‘[The band] arrived and they were pretty much already drunk, and this was maybe midday. People were judged very much on the way they looked, the way they carried themselves. [Metallica] were very brutal. If someone’s bass was pink, or if their bass was yellow with green stripes on it, James would be, like, “Next!”’

By the time Jason Newsted came to play with Metallica in the final week of October 1986, forces were beginning to coalesce in his favour, and quickly. An organisation that was as inherently fraternal as it was musical, the band understood that as well as musical compatibility, some order of social cohesion was also required. In pursuit of this, Metallica took their visitor out on the town in San Francisco.

On any other occasion, by the time the four young men rolled into the final watering shed of the night, Newsted would have been drunk beyond measure. But as the party took a table in one of the dimly lit back rooms of Tommy’s Joynt on Geary and Van Ness, the bass player was kept sensate by a beehive of nerves busy with the sense of imminent expectation. Tommy’s was an establishment popular with Metallica: not only did its quiet corners permit discreet misdemeanours, but its menu featured soul food selections that were both affordable and flavoursome, and pumps and fridges filled with beers of a variety sufficient to satiate the most discerning of palates.

As the evening found an unspoken and inevitable momentum, Hetfield, Ulrich and Hammett found themselves gathered in the toilet of Tommy’s Joynt. The drummer has since asserted that the three men were urinating in a line, but given that the bar’s smallest room features just two urinals and one toilet stall, this cannot have been the case. There are, of course, other reasons why three young rock musicians might gather together in the toilet of a city-centre pub at three o’ clock in the morning. Either way, without making eye contact with his band mates, Ulrich asked, simply, ‘That’s him, right?’

The answer came back, ‘Yeah, that’s him.’

As the three men returned to the company of Newsted, Ulrich fixed the man whose life he was about to irreversibly change in his sight and asked a very simple question.

‘So,’ he said, ‘do you want a job?’

8 – BLACKENED

Jason Newsted joined Metallica on October 28, 1986, three weeks to the day after the funeral of Cliff Burton and just
thirty-one
days after his predecessor’s death. On the afternoon of his appointment Ray and Jan Burton travelled down from their home in Castro Valley to meet the young man who was to take their late son’s place. After formal introductions had made been, Jan Burton clutched Newsted to her chest, held him tight and wished him luck.

‘You must be the one,’ she said quietly, ‘because these guys know what they’re doing.’

Metallica made their first public appearance with their new bass player at the 1,000-capacity Country Club in Reseda, California, on November 8. Fulfilling the role of support band for Metal Church – and thus handing their friends in the headline act a chalice brimming with a liquid of the highest toxicity – onstage at a venue which in 2013 plays host to an actual church, Iglesias De Restauracion, the quartet performed a
thirteen-song
set that contained the answer to the future pub rock-quiz question: ‘Name the first composition Jason Newsted performed in concert as a member of Metallica.’ (Answer: ‘Battery’)

‘I was there for Jason’s first show and it was fantastic,’ recalls Doug Goodman, one of the Bay Area metal scene’s original ‘Trues’. ‘Everyone in the audience knew who Jason was because we all knew him from Flotsam and Jetsam. I remember everyone there was looking forward to the show. You have to remember, it was a different situation from when Kirk joined the band. There were some people who didn’t like Kirk when he joined Metallica
because they were mad that Dave Mustaine had been thrown out of the band. I remember at one of Kirk’s early shows in Palo Alto, someone pulled the power on his [equipment] rig. But when Jason joined the band there was no one that felt any animosity towards him. And why would they? It’s obviously not his fault that there was a fucking bus crash that had caused someone to die. It has nothing to do with him that a position in Metallica had opened up in the first place. So Jason is coming in not as someone on hand to save the day, but just as a kid who finds himself in circumstances that neither he nor Metallica could have imagined. And everyone watching knew that, and that’s why they were rooting for him.’

Following their appearance at the Country Club, Metallica retreated to the nearby Franklin Plaza Suites Hotel, a facility popular with travelling musicians. Doug Goodman remembers that on the evening of November 8, the hotel was ‘party central’, with members of Slayer, Anthrax and Overkill on hand to wet the head of the Bay Area band’s newest member. By the time the party’s heads hit cotton-covered pillows, Saturday night had long since blurred into Sunday morning.

For Jason Newsted, these days and nights must surely have sped by in a kind of blur. A month before, in Arizona, he played bass guitar and the role of bandleader in Flotsam and Jetsam; his position of authority was such that on the wall of the group’s practice room he posted a piece of paper on which were written the seven qualities required for a group to succeed. Among these were featured ‘consistency’ and ‘concentration’. Upon learning that his colleague was willing to abandon their union in favour of a job with Metallica, vocalist Eric A. K. defaced the poster, adding the words ‘go try out for another band’ in black marker.

‘It was,’ recalls Newsted, ‘really a bitch.’

Just days removed from having crossed state lines in order to audition for the position of bass player in his favourite band, it
was as a member of this band that Newsted was ferried across the dateline on an aeroplane bound for Narita Airport in Tokyo. Like author Robert A. Heinlein’s fictional creation Valentine Michael Smith, the bass player found himself a stranger in a strange land. Metallica’s first Japanese tour had been booked prior to the events of September 27 and although the death of Cliff Burton forced the cancellation of thirty-five concerts, their dates in the Orient were honoured.

Reviewing the speed at which these events occurred, one is struck by the force of Metallica’s sheer bull-headedness as well as their refusal to permit even genuine tragedy – trauma, actually – to slow them down. It is tempting to wonder why the band’s management did not intervene and encourage them to spend the remaining weeks of 1986 on the intermittently nightmarish but necessary process of mourning the loss of a loved one. But such a query operates on the assumption that had it even been offered, cautionary advice from older and presumably wiser heads would have made the slightest difference. That year the energy emanating from Metallica’s core was sufficient to register the band by turns as both an unstoppable force
and
an immovable object. If Metallica desired to undertake a tour of Japan that began just weeks after the death of a member with whom the three remaining members were evidently besotted, then Metallica would do just that. The consequences of this course of action could go hang.

It is worth noting too, however, that the savvy Q Prime team must surely have been aware of the potential ramifications a decision not to undertake the five-date tour may have had for their charges in one of the world’s most lucrative music markets. In the Japanese music industry, as in all other forms of business, the concept of honour is paramount, and to this day it’s not unknown for western rock bands who choose to postpone or cancel Japanese tours to find themselves blackballed by promoters. In booking Metallica the legendary Mr Udo had placed his reputation on
the line for the young San Franciscans. Even with the shadow of tragedy framing the band, to dishonour the venerable Japanese music business veteran’s invitation to perform in the East, would have been a brave, perhaps even foolish, decision. At least aware of this, on the evening of November 14, 1986, the new-look Metallica touring party checked in to Tokyo’s Pacific Meridien Hotel as originally planned.

Inevitably the next seven days would prove to be something of a baptism of fire for Jason Newsted. The bass player was immediately afforded the sobriquet ‘New kid’ – ‘kid’, you will notice, not ‘member’ or even ‘recruit’ – and subjected to a process of ‘hazing’ of a kind one might associate with fraternity houses at colleges some way south of the Ivy League, or of small-town Canadian ice-hockey teams, rather than young men who, while fast becoming rock stars, were also artists. Like the English football term ‘banter’ and the Afrikaans word ‘klap’, ‘hazing’ is a verb that obscures a multitude of sins. As visited upon Newsted, this ‘hazing’ took the form of initiation ceremonies that cast the bass player in a role to which he was not entirely suited: that of victim.

The pranks to which he fell prey in Japan were, however, informed more by high jinks than cold menace. At a sushi restaurant Newsted’s new colleagues told him that the wasabi on his plate – a foodstuff made from Japanese horseradish, the potency of which is similar to English mustard – was green pickle, only to laugh themselves dizzy as the diner scorched his palate with a portion of a size sufficient to bring tears to his eyes. During the same week Hammett, Hetfield and Ulrich drank themselves to the point of disorder in the bar of their hotel and charged the bill to Newsted’s room, an act not overburdened with consideration given that they were at the time paying him a salary of just $600 per month plus change. The party also took a childish delight in informing anyone who would listen that the new bass player
was homosexual. As if this were not quite enough, photographer Ross Halfin, on hand to photograph Newsted’s first international concerts as a member of Metallica on assignment for
Kerrang!
, maintains that within these seven days, Ulrich took such an intense dislike to the bassist that he unsuccessfully lobbied Peter Mensch for his instant dismissal from the group.

Despite these low-level hostilities and alleged illicit manoeuvrings, when asked if rather too much has been made of the bass player’s initiation into the ranks of Metallica, the man in whose name such capers occurred answered that ‘way too much has been made of it’.

‘It was certainly fraternity stuff,’ Newsted says. ‘How much can you drink? Can we wake you up in the middle of the night and turn all the furniture in your room on top of you and run away laughing and everything’s cool? It was just regular prankster stuff. We were all twenty-two or twenty-three years old. We were all the same age, we had the same heroes, the same drinking habits. It was really all in good fun.’

In autumn 1986 this ‘fun’ obscured the fact that the greenhorn with whom the other members of Metallica were playing merry hell was the group’s most emotionally articulate member, and would be so for the duration of his tenure. In time, though, the attitude expressed by three-quarters of the band towards its newest recruit would harden into spite. But of all the things his colleagues would attempt to strip from him over the years, the one thing Newsted would refuse to surrender was his dignity. In turn the attitude and behaviour displayed by the other members of the band towards the man they would in many ways always regard as being the ‘new kid’ would cast them in a light that might generously be described as ‘unflattering’. With their frequent insistence on striking the pose of big men, Hetfield, Ulrich and Hammett projected an image of small people.

‘I remember we’d do these in-store appearances [to sign
autographs],’ recalls Hetfield, nominating just one example of the casual cruelty visited upon his bassist. ‘We’d sit in a line and we’d have him go first. So he’d write his name and in the beginning he’d write, “Jason, bass face.’ That was his thing. And then as it got down to me I’d scratch the “b” off so it would look like “ass face”.’

When asked to nominate a word to describe the treatment that over time would be meted out to Newsted, Michael Alago is of the opinion that ‘torture isn’t too strong a word at all’. But if Metallica intended truly to move forward as a band, Alago believed that they ‘had to accept this new member’, this despite the fact the effect of his band mates’ action on the bass player ‘didn’t make things easy for him’.

‘At the time it was very much a feeling of waiting for someone to wake me up and go, “Ha ha! Gotcha!”,’ says Newsted on suddenly finding himself in Metallica’s ranks. ‘My being the new guy was multiplied on them because they had to set the example while staying a step ahead of me. And I was all about [being the] first one in, last one out. It worked perfectly – they
had
to have someone who was that dedicated. There was no two ways about it. There were only three other people up for the gig, and if [any] one of them would have got [the job] it would not have been the same thing. I know those people and it’s not a diss to them – it’s just the facts. I mean, I knew all those Metallica songs before anything ever happened, before any of that horrific [bus crash] shit came about. I knew them through and through, so it was meant to be. I was already the biggest fan. I was the guy who was
supposed
to get it.

‘In Metallica, the most important lesson I learned is that you should never be seen as the weak link.’

A less discussed topic of the union between Newsted and his band mates in Metallica is not what he had got himself into, but rather what he had got himself out of. At the time of his departure, Flotsam and Jetsam may have been the kind of act
that few people would nominate as being their favourite band – a status that has remained unchanged for more than a quarter of a century – but it was a union in which the bassist’s hands were responsible not just for the instrument he played but also for the control of the wheel that steered the group’s course. With musical co-writing credits on every track featured on
Doomsday for the Deceiver
and sole authorship of all but three of the ten songs contained on the album, for better or worse Newsted was Flotsam and Jetsam’s alpha male – a position he would in an instant swap for omega status in Metallica.

‘See, that was kind of the big problem,’ remembers Brian Slagel, a man who in that autumn acted not only as kingmaker but also as wise counsel. ‘I remember having this three-and-
a-half
-hour conversation with Jason about this. He said to me, “Hey, you know I think I’m going to do this – what do you think?” And I replied, “Well, there are a couple of ground rules that you need to understand. You gotta remember that you’re going from a band that you control, where you do everything to the point where it can be described as being
your
band, to Metallica, where you’ll have zero say. You’ll be joining a band that belongs to James and Lars. Every single decision about the writing of songs and everything else, for that matter, will be taken by them; you’re going to have to be happy just to be a bass player, and that’s it. You won’t have the power to make any decisions – so can you deal with that?”

‘At the time he said that he thought he could,’ Slagel recalls, ‘but I think ultimately, as time went on, I think he was more and more frustrated by the situation. In many ways, he was very similar to [his band mates in Metallica]. Like them, he started a band from nothing, which was very similar to their experience.’

While Slagel is no doubt correct in his assertion as it stands in principle, in practice in Japan in the declining months of 1986 it is reasonable to assume that Newsted had seen nothing of the like
of his new band mates. While the new recruit’s senses were being heightened by the neon-lit immediacy of Tokyo – ‘the girls are nice … the girls are stylish … it’s fun here,’ were his rather sweet first impressions – the men with whom he now played music were occupied with the business of filling their boots. Following a visit to the Lexington Queen nightclub in the Japanese capital, Hetfield and Ulrich found themselves sharing a taxicab with what the drummer describes as being ‘a Japanese woman of dubious morals’. For men whose own moral code did not always correlate to the standards of the Quakers’ Religious Society of Friends, the brow is raised at the prospect of the kind of behaviour that would be viewed by the pair as lying beyond the limits of the acceptable. To their occidental eyes, however, their fellow passenger quickly revealed herself as being ‘not exactly the kind of person we wished to share a cab with’, leading to the musicians ‘dumping her out at a stop light’. Despite this, the drummer reports that ‘When we got back to the hotel [the woman] was already there waiting for us … a real mystery of the Orient.’ Elsewhere, Hammett recalls the morning after a night before that saw him waking up in his hotel room to the sight of ‘a pile of puke to my left, a pile of puke to my right, all the lights on and [me] still fully dressed. I also found a cup of tea with a tea bag still in it. I couldn’t find my room key, then realised it was in the puke. When I checked out the receptionist asked for the key … and I did a runner.’