Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (33 page)

As Metallica’s lead guitarist fled in the manner of someone fast growing accustomed to not being held responsible for the consequences of his actions, among his possessions was a letter from a fan whose words expressed the kind of attentiveness for which Japanese audiences have become known, if not famous. ‘Dear Kirk,’ the correspondence read, ‘I will go to every [Metallica] show in Japan … The first show in Tokyo was fantastic, but the shows in Osaka and Nagoya were very bad.’

Such a subjective evaluation, however, was unlikely to dent
the undeniable momentum of Metallica’s growing public profile, and little sleep would have been lost by the band as they flew east across the Pacific for Jason Newsted’s first North American tour.

Such was the eventual extent of the group’s dominance of the genre they represented that in retrospect their ascendancy seems inevitable to the point of being preordained. The moves made by the quartet and their representatives were so effective that viewed today it appears as if their route to success was plotted from the bowels of a volcano by a team of military strategists, corporate raiders, brand consultants and media tastemakers.

This impression, though, is deceptive. As with the group waiting until their third album to embark on their first tour of Britain and the Republic of Ireland, the twenty-date tour of North America that began at the mid-Hudson venue in Poughkeepsie on November 28, 1986, was Metallica’s first tour of their home continent to feature themselves as the evening’s sole headliners (even then just seven dates took place on US soil, with the remainder occurring north of the fifty-first parallel). But as the musicians boarded their single-decker tour bus, they could hardly have failed to once more recognise an appreciable improvement in their standing. In Ontario the quartet performed at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, the most famous and storied venue of any city in Canada. Opened in 1931 and at the time home to the
ice-hockey
team the Toronto Maple Leafs, the 15,000-odd seat arena is noteworthy for being the first of scores of major league sports arena at which Metallica would play.

Another milestone performance came in the form of the band’s second appearance on the island of Manhattan. On December 1 Metallica’s equipment trucks pulled up at the loading doors of the Felt Forum, between 7th and 8th Avenues and 32nd and 34th Street amid the constant chaos of Midtown Manhattan. It is here that each day thousands of people every hour are disgorged on to the New York streets from the subway
carriages, New Jersey Transit trains, Long Island Rail Road cars and Amtrak express trains that open their doors to the platforms of Pennsylvania Avenue Station situated a short escalator ride beneath street level. As if this subterranean labyrinth wasn’t itself the epitome of cheek-by-jowl urbanity, directly above one of America’s busiest transport hubs stands a circular, then
nine-storey
building into which as many as 23,000 people ascend on any given evening. Opened in 1968 and built to conform to the brutalist aesthetic of the age, in 1986 Madison Square Garden was not only the world’s most famous arena but also the venue that attracted more bookings than any other on the planet. Operated by the Madison Square Garden Company, the facility houses a 5,600-seat theatre as well. Today known as the Theater at Madison Square Garden, until the mid-Nineties this smaller room was known to all as the Felt Forum, a name derived not from the material that covered seats that tier from the stage in the shape of a fan but rather in honour of the New York sports impresario Irving Mitchell Felt.

For a city populated by people that comprised audiences known for being difficult to impress, New York took quite the tumble not only for Metallica but also for other groups collated in the folder marked ‘thrash metal’. Affording these bands the kind of reception that suggests that as with punk this militant musical movement was a fundamentally urban phenomenon, audiences in the five boroughs would respond to the ferocity emanating from the stage with behaviour that would strike even members of the San Franciscan underground as being unbridled. Thrash shows at the Ritz were often policed by the crouching figure of a densely proportioned skinhead known as Billy Psycho, a man who would calm the sea of limbs and skulls that made up the audience’s front rows by stage diving on top of them. This, though, was as nothing compared to the events of the evening of August 31, 1988, when Slayer performed their own headline set at
the Felt Forum. Touring in support of the pivotal if not entirely convincing
South of Heaven
album, the Californian quartet were forced to cut short their set as many in the audience tore the padding from their seats and used the cushions as missiles. Bootleg footage from the Forum that night shows a band who appear to be performing in the sightlines of a skeet (clay pigeon) shooting range. Standing helpless amid the mêlée, Tom Araya’s exasperated admonishment to the crowd that ‘You guys fucked up!’ is no more effective than a peace sign on a battle field.

During this period,
Kerrang!
had as its New York correspondent a writer by the name of Don Kaye, a critic possessed of a style that combined both a passion and love for metal’s noisiest sub-genre and a sense of critical perspective which meant that on the occasions that he did lunge toward hyperbole – at the time the default setting for the majority of writers that comprised the rock press – he did so with full conviction. Kaye was the kind of writer that not only appeared impossibly exotic to British readers too young to know that CBGB was an airless hell-hole in a sketchy neighbourhood, but he was also a correspondent whose dispatches carried with them a note of the authentic. Where other journalists would eye the coattails of emerging groups for rides suitable for a courtier, Don Kaye would check their rap sheet for charges against credibility, as was the case with his accusation that Anthrax were appropriating the hallmarks of the New York hardcore scene and passing them off as their own (a claim the group denied).

At the Felt Forum on the evening of December 1, 1986,
Kerrang!
’s man in New York was typically resolute. ‘No doubt,’ he wrote, ‘that this [has been] the year of Metallica. No band in recent memory have had such extreme twists of fortune … while at the same time capturing the hearts and minds of a loyal following that has multiplied into a vast, planet-wide legion of fans … The monster that invaded the Felt Forum on this cold December night has been through both heaven and hell in the
past eight months, but has ultimately emerged victorious, its hunger unabated, its power intact.’

If this kind of language appears uncommonly gargantuan, at least the subject about which Kaye was writing conformed to the specifications of his prose. Metallica’s short tour of America and Canada in the weeks of North America’s holiday season had about it the sense of both a lap of victory and a recognition of all the band had achieved and endured in the calendar year now drawing to a close. In this regard New York was no exception. Performing a fourteen-song set that also found space for both the bass solo Newsted had been performing onstage on all but his first two appearances as a member of the band, and a solo spot from Hammett, Metallica were afforded a reception of such enthusiasm that the group was summoned back to the stage for no fewer than three encores, and closed the show with a run through ‘Blitzkrieg’, a case not so much of giving the people what they want as handing to them something most of them did not know.

‘I’ll state right now that next year Metallica won’t be playing the Felt Forum; they’ll be upstairs, headlining [Madison Square Garden],’ predicted Don Kaye, entirely incorrectly. ‘For that’s what being the Kings of the New Age of Metal entails. And the show I saw at the Felt Forum earns them my vote for that title … James, Lars, Jason and Kirk are unstoppable.’

An aspect of the Metallica story as it relates to the outlaw years of the Eighties that has proved indefatigable is that the group’s ascendancy was propelled by their own steam rather than from support from the infrastructure of the entertainment industry. As 1986 ceded ground to a successive year, the majority of radio stations in the United States would sooner utter the word ‘fuck’ on the airwaves than play a track from
Master of Puppets
. As yet the group had declined to film music videos to accompany any of
their songs. Had they done so, it is difficult to imagine a station such as MTV depositing a clip anywhere on the schedule outside the confines of the then recently launched and often entirely gormless
Headbangers Ball
. As such, as the sales of their third album marched towards the platinum landmark of a million, Metallica were still a group the appeal of which went entirely unnoticed by tens of millions of people who regarded music as something that was delivered rather than sourced.

But as Metallica finished the tour in support of
Master of Puppets
, the band were offered the opportunity to appear on what was at the time – and what in many ways, still is – the hippest and most influential TV show on American network television. Debuted as part of NBC’s fall schedule in October 1976,
Saturday Night Live
quickly became a lightning rod for all that was hip and urbane. Filmed in studio 8H on the eighth and ninth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan,
SNL
, as it is more commonly known, distilled the energy of the city from which it broadcast into a comedic sketch show that launched the careers of John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Chevy Chase and, in subsequent years, Tina Fey and Adam Sandler. Married to its distinctive brand of hipster humour,
Saturday Night Live
also prided itself on placing onto the air groups unlikely to be granted floor space on the kind of late-night television fare offered by the likes of the more conservative Johnny Carson. With a booking policy that might reasonably be described as striking, the weekend sketch show has over the years featured acts as such as the LA punk band Fear – an appearance made on the insistence of John Belushi – Elvis Costello and the Attractions, the Beastie Boys and Nirvana. Over the course of its thirty-seven-year history, a number of the show’s musical moments have proved to be worthy of note. It was on
Saturday Night Live
that in 1995 Dave Grohl became a member of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, a tenure that lasted for two songs, with the drummer instead deciding to forge ahead with the then
new Foo Fighters. Six years later, with New York concussed by the physical and psychological battering of the World Trade Center spectacular, SNL’s creator Lorne Michaels requested his friend Paul Simon begin the first episode following the massacre with the Simon & Garfunkel song ‘The Boxer’. In this, the performer was flanked by members of the city’s beleaguered but unbowed emergency services.

In 1987
Saturday Night Live
contacted Q Prime and requested Metallica’s presence on the programme. By any measure this was a significant break for a band who up until this point had been forced to find their own luck and had become fittingly proud to have done so. From the point of view of the show’s producers, the decision to approach Metallica was one informed by a sense of courage and conviction. At that time heavy metal’s stock among trendsetters and opinion-formers – actually, among anyone other than the genre’s core constituents – was so low as to have ceased trading. The previous year had seen the release of the cult film
Heavy Metal Parking Lot
, a documentary consisting of interviews with fans gathered to attend a Judas Priest and Dokken concert at the Capital Center in Landover, Maryland. Featuring a cast of characters of whom many are so stupid that the viewer can only presume they begin each day being milked, the film provides disheartening proof that a number of metal fans (at least at that time) lacked the cognitive skills required to walk and breathe at the same time.

Elsewhere, when it came to rock music, MTV opted for a policy that equated to an aural version of Chinese water torture. During 1987 the channel pumped out videos such as Def Leppard’s ‘Animal’, Mötley Crüe’s ‘Girls Girls Girls’ and Poison’s ‘Talk Dirty to Me’ into the bedrooms of teenagers all over America. A corollary to this was the delivery of the subliminal notion that the heavier a band played – although in these cases, heavy was a relative term – the dumber and more clichéd their music should
be. That Metallica were not just the antithesis of this but actually the antidote itself was a fact obvious to fans of the band who viewed their music as being the nuclear warhead in the battle against pop metal. But for the distinctions that separated Metallica from the worthless mush of most hard rock and metal of that time to be recognised by the coolest programme on American network television showed that the group were gaining traction and notice in the most notable of places. With this Metallica were presented an opportunity as golden as the disc for
Master of Puppets
that hung on the wall of Elektra’s New York office.

But if this booking looked to some eyes like a thing that should not be, it was soon scuppered. On March 26 James Hetfield headed outdoors with his skateboard in hand and returned home with a broken arm – again. Until the fracture healed, the band were placed on hold;
Saturday Night Live
did not call back.