Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (34 page)

‘I was skateboarding with some friends in El Cerrito and got going a little too fast, lost control and fell off: landing on my arm trying to break the fall instead I broke my arm,’ Hetfield wrote in a note to his insurance company. ‘I have since hung up my skateboard.’

There are, though, worse places than the Bay Area in which to find oneself with idle hands. To cries of anguish from every thrash metal musician from San Francisco to San Jose, equal in volume only to the cheers of the neighbours next door, Metallica had recently handed back the keys to the landlord of 3132 Carlson Boulevard and probably did not receive in return their cash deposit against fixtures and fittings. After having been told by Cliff Burnstein that the fruits of their union’s labour were of a size sufficient to enable each member to buy a house, instead Lars Ulrich rented an apartment just 200 yards from the Metallica Mansion, and on the same street.

Surrendering their first home in the Bay Area presented
Metallica with a problem. In moving out of the place in which they had lived, the group had also lost the location at which they wrote and practised music. In literal terms Metallica were no longer a garage band.

This, though, would be a change of circumstances that would be as short-lived as it was keenly disliked. As befits upwardly mobile professional musicians, the group found for themselves a professional rehearsal space, one of a number of soundproofed cocoons housed in a multi-room facility in Marin County. The musicians moved in their equipment on March 23, and practised on this and the following day. Their neighbours during this period were local rockers Night Ranger and Starship, the latter act being the Eighties incarnation of Jefferson Airplane that had adapted to the Reagan era by switching from a policy of turning on, tuning in and dropping out to calming down, shutting up and cashing in. Suffice to say Metallica were not greatly enamoured of their surroundings; when Hetfield broke his arm on the fourth day of their tenancy, the decision was made to eschew the polished floors of the professional rehearsal studio. Instead Ulrich placed a phone call to his new landlady and asked if she might consent for him and a group of drunken long-haired males to convert the garage of her property in order that it might be used as a practice facility for one of the world’s loudest and most unrelenting heavy metal bands. As any sane person would, the landlady replied with words to the effect of, ‘Sure, what’s the worst that can happen?’

Under the leadership of Jason Newsted, Metallica set about transforming the garage to their own specifications. This task mostly involved soundproofing the structure to an extent that would prevent the tenants from being shot to death by neighbours at the end of their wits. Despite being temporarily handicapped, Hetfield was also on hand to help.

‘I remember trying to saw things with one arm and help
build the thing,’ says the front man, painting a touchingly comic picture.

After experiencing the strange sensation of a buzz saw cutting a plaster cast away from a limb without violating the skin it covers (and for the second time in nine months, at that), Hetfield was once again ready to play with Metallica, while Metallica were once more a garage band. In returning to this state, the quartet had gone from a rehearsal facility with floors buffed to the extent that one could see one’s face in them to a place where one could not always be guaranteed to see the floor at all.

‘The term “garage” isn’t something you can really define,’ believes Ulrich. ‘It’s more to do with vibe and feeling around a project and a band in general. We’ve always considered ourselves to be kind of different to whatever else is out there at the moment, in so much as we do things for fun, and for ourselves; for our own enjoyment.’

As time marched on, membership of Metallica would be seen as exclusive to people whose behaviour was often self-centred to the point of dysfunctionality; the result of hearing the word ‘no’ fewer times than is good for them, combined with the nasty habit of taking gratification only in its instant form. As this selfishness relates to matters of creativity, however, Metallica had few traits in their collective make-up of such valuable currency. It is an irony of this group’s magnetic appeal that the reason so many members of its audience believe the band speak for them is in fact because they do quite the opposite; Metallica speak only for themselves, and the music they make is made first to please the men who play it. At least as much as the abundance of talent to which the band can lay claim, it is this authenticity that listeners find so compelling. Representing a genre where rebellious poses were struck by groups whose music adhered to a blueprint that was conservative, in both in its thinking and its execution, in an artistic sense – as well as in a few other senses – Metallica were outlaws.

They were, though, outlaws who craved recognition. That this was the case could be gleaned from a glance at the back cover of
Master of Puppets
, which contained a picture of the band onstage at the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum performing at an event they did not headline. Theirs was an appetite for adulation that was keen even by the standards of those who desired to write the words ‘rock star’ on their passport application form. The band, though, wanted the glittering prizes of success without the endless compromises normally associated with such pursuits. While other groups made merry idiots of themselves on video tape, for example, Metallica simply opened up a four-pack and merrily kicked the spent cans in the opposite direction.

The quartet’s next stride towards the destination of world domination came with the decision to record an EP of cover versions the originals of which would be familiar to only the slimmest minority of their audience. The tracks would be recorded quickly by the band themselves, rather than slowly by Flemming Rasmussen. This do-it-yourself approach was born from the group’s DIY work in renovating Ulrich’s garage from a place where a car might park to a space in which it sounded as if a combustion engine was exploding. In this space the four musicians practised their way back to form by playing not their own songs but rather a selection of tracks composed by others. From this standing start, within a month the
$5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited
was conceived, recorded and mixed.

‘We never had these huge group meetings planning just how we should come across or look, you know?’ says Ulrich. ‘It’s just the way we are that people see, and the EP wasn’t any major planned thing … We did it all in six days down in LA, which was very quick for us. We usually like to take our time on stuff, but we wanted this to be as spontaneous as possible … The time it took us to record the EP … was the [same] time it took us to set up the gear in the studio for the last album!’

But just as at the outset of their career Metallica neglected to point out to LA audiences that the songs they were hearing were New Wave of British Heavy Metal cover versions rather original tracks, so here Ulrich omitted to mention the fact that the original impetus behind his band’s decision to record in this distinctly punk rock manner came out of conversations with a major international corporation.

In spring 1987 Q Prime negotiated a new European home for Metallica.
Master of Puppets
had marked the end of the quartet’s licensing deal with Music For Nations and so, without waiting for MFN boss Martin Hooker to prepare an improved contract, Peter Mensch offered his group to Phonogram, the British record company which released Def Leppard’s recordings. When Hooker approached Mensch with the offer of a new one-
million-pound
contract for the band, he was brusquely informed that their Phonogram deal was a fait accompli.

‘The band actually wanted to stay at MFN,’ maintains Hooker, ‘but Q Prime wanted them to go to Phonogram so that they’d have all their eggs in the one basket and have more clout. And I could understand that at the time. But they ended up signing with Phonogram at a time when nobody at Phonogram liked heavy metal in the slightest. People at the label didn’t get it, they just didn’t understand the music. I remember talking to people at the label at the time and they admitted that they’d never even heard of [Metallica], despite the fact that they’d already got three gold albums.’

If Phonogram, whose roster in the mid-Eighties included Dire Straits, Soft Cell and Swing Out Sister, thought they were landing themselves the new Def Leppard they were swiftly disabused of the notion by Mensch, who with some bluntness told the label’s departmental heads that he fully understood that they knew nothing of his band, and therefore would play no role in their creative development. Nonetheless the shrewd New
Yorker listened calmly as the cowed executives timidly enquired if perhaps they might be allowed to deliver a hit single for his band. Senior product manager Dave Thorne pointed out that with Metallica already booked to return to the United Kingdom that summer, their visit would provide an excellent marketing opportunity to sell the band afresh to British metal fans. The sole problem, as Thorne saw it, was that
Master of Puppets
was now almost eighteen months old, and the band had no spare material in their vaults. He politely enquired as to whether a solution might be found. At which point the idea of an EP of cover versions was first raised.

Despite its title, then, …
Garage Days Re-Revisited
was recorded at studios the specifications of which resided at the highest end of professional music making. While its creators never claimed that the five tracks they committed to what was at the time still tape were rough and ready to the extent of actually being
recorded
in a garage, nonetheless as regards the making of the
$5.98 E.P
…, while speed was of the essence the same could hardly be said for the cost. For a release that took less than a week to complete, Metallica utilised the services of two top-line recording facilities: A&M Studios in Santa Monica and Conway Studios in West Hollywood. At the latter establishment, Metallica were gifted recording time by Ted Nugent, where the ‘Motor City Madman’ had finished work early on his
If You Can’t Lick ’Em
…
Lick ’Em
solo album, a set which would flop the following year on Atlantic Records.

Amid the hospital-white walls and small but verdant gardens of Conway Studios, Metallica attacked the task at hand like workmen on a makeover television programme. Recording at a rate that equated to a song a day, in less than a week the quartet had placed in the can the tracks ‘Helpless’ by Diamond Head, ‘The Small Hours’ by New Wave of British Heavy Metal tadpoles Holocaust, the exquisitely titled ‘Crash Course in Brain Surgery’
by Welsh rock act Budgie, a rendition of ‘The Wait’ by English post-punk cult Killing Joke, plus a cut ’n’ shut melding of ‘Last Caress’ and ‘Green Hell’, two chalk-and-cheese selections from the Misfits (who, despite having disbanded four years earlier, were fast becoming the punk rock group most beloved of metal fans, owing mainly to the fact that Metallica wore the band’s T-shirts with almost perfect ubiquity).

The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited
sees Metallica showcased with a naked clarity that borders on the blinding. From the front cover showing four young men and three guitars framed in a communal shower stall – this at a time when it was most uncommon for metal releases to feature a photograph of the artists as a front sleeve – and represented by a logo that appears to have been written by the tip of a rollerball pen, to Hetfield’s handwritten expositionary notes on the back sleeve, even before the listener had removed the twelve-inch single from its cover the effect was to present the image of a band that were clinking together beer bottles on a cloudless summer’s day. For a group positioned at the high table of a genre most other representatives of which were photographed with facial expressions that appeared to betray the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome – the
high-water
mark of which had been attained by a gurning Slayer as seen on the back cover of
Reign in Blood
– this change of approach was as appealing as it was refreshing.

Oddly, of all of Metallica’s releases from the Eighties, it is this slight and carefree offering that has best weathered the passing of time. It may be that a collection as unvarnished as this has little to lose by way of lustre, but the urgency with which Ulrich’s drumbeat propels itself from the speakers on ‘Helpless’ is as startling for listeners today as it was more than a quarter of a century earlier. Embedded by rhythm guitar parts that are drawn tighter than a high wire – the barely audible shriek that accompanies Hetfield’s fingers as they adjust their
position on the wholly unforgiving ‘Green Hell’ is a moment of intensity equal to anything in modern metal – underpinned by Newsted’s relentless bass lines and resplendent from the attention of Hammett’s dazzling yet rarely gratuitous guitar solos, with a panache that seems entirely effortless in just five tracks Metallica pummel home the point that it was by design rather than accident that theirs was the name first on the lips of metal’s emergent fan base.

Not for the last time, with the release of
The $5.98 E.P: Garage Days Re-Revisited
Metallica desired not only to be successful but also to be seen to be successful. In pursuit of this end, in order to be deemed eligible for certification on the UK singles chart,
The $5.98 EP
… (which on CD was re-titled
The $9.98 CD
…, this despite the fact that compact discs are cheaper to produce than vinyl records), Metallica’s debut single for Phonogram, emerged on British shores shorn of ‘The Wait’. Six days on from its release on August 21, 1987, the band’s name was duly heard on the official singles chart as announced each Sunday on BBC Radio 1 for the first time, as their late summer release gatecrashed the pop party at no. 27. And while Metallica could not lay claim to being the first group of their type to be rewarded with a British hit single – in this they were beaten by Anthrax’s ‘I Am the Law’, released earlier that year – the quartet could with some certainty be sure of the fact that they had deposited the most offensive lyric in the then forty-seven-year history of the British singles chart. A decade after Johnny Rotten had excited and appalled the nation with his observation that the Queen ‘ain’t no human being’ in ‘God Save the Queen’, virtually no one seemed even to notice Hetfield’s announcement in ‘Last Caress’ that he had ‘something to say’, that he ‘raped your mother today’ and that ‘it doesn’t matter much to [him] as long as she spreads’.