Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (29 page)

RON McGOVNEY:
When this thing from Brian Slagel came up about doing a song for
Metal Massacre
, Lars didn’t have a complete band and I thought Lars was a horrible drummer, so I told James and Lars, “You guys just go ahead and do whatever you want.” But they were at my house, so I’d sit there and watch them play. They would try out bass players, and one night I’m watching a guy try “Hit the Lights,” and I’m like, “Wait a minute, let me plug in here and I’ll show you how to play it.” And James and Lars go, “Why don’t you just be in the band?” I said, “OK.” When
Metal Massacre
came up, Lars knew [guitarist] Lloyd Grant from somewhere. I didn’t know him. So, there’s a knock at the door and there’s this black Jamaican dude standing there, and it’s Lloyd. He plugs in, and he’s a ripping guitar player. He did lead guitar on the first pressing of
Metal Massacre
for “Hit the Lights,” and James played my bass and did vocals, and Lars played drums. My name is misspelled and Metallica is misspelled. When they reissued
Metal Massacre
, we had already done the
No Life ’Til Leather
demo, and they just took the song off of that. Of course, by then Mustaine was in the band.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
I was leafing through
The Recycler
and an ad caught my attention. It was the first to reference, not one or two, but three of my favorite bands: Iron Maiden, Motörhead, and Budgie. I would soon discover Lars was an avid collector of music from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Deep down inside, a very long time ago, we really were kindred spirits. We met a few days later at Lars’s condo in Newport Beach. We shook hands and went right upstairs to his bedroom. Lars played me a rough demo of “Hit the Lights.” The song wasn’t bad. The afternoon ended with a handshake. Lars called again a few days later, wanting to know whether I’d be able to meet him and the other guys in Norwalk, where Ron McGovney lived. There was a weird vibe almost from the moment I arrived. While I set up, everyone else went into another room. I plugged in my amp and warmed up. I kept playing, faster and louder, figuring somebody would walk in and start jamming with me. But they never did. Finally, after a half hour, I put down the guitar and opened the door into the house. The entire group was sitting there, drinking and getting high, watching television. Lars smiled at me and waved [and said] “You got the job.”

RON McGOVNEY:
I remember Dave calling my house, and I answered and this guy starts spouting off about all these guitars he’s got and all these amps and everything, and I remember saying to James and Lars: “If either one of you want to take this, this guy’s head’s not going to fit through the door.” Within a couple of hours he was over there, and he had a B. C. Rich guitar and a fake Marshall amp spray painted with a Marshall logo on it. He plugged in, and we were like, “Wow, this guy’s smokin’.” But all he did was rattle on about himself.

By the early eighties, Metal Blade was the premier West Coast indie label for underground metal. As ambitious as it was financially challenged, the label released four
Metal Massacre
compilations before 1983, and soon after, put out albums by Bitch, Slayer, Voivod, Fates Warning, Hellhammer, and others. The East Coast equivalents were Jonny Z’s Megaforce, initial home of Metallica, Anthrax, Overkill, and Testament; Combat Records, which released albums by Megadeth, Possessed, Dark Angel, and others; and Shrapnel, which focused on shredders like Steeler (which included a young Yngwie Malmsteen), Cacophony (featuring future Megadeth axeman Marty Friedman, and Racer X (showcasing Paul Gilbert). In the UK, Music For Nations distributed Exciter, Manowar, and Metallica; and Neat Records released Venom, Raven, and Tygers of Pan Tang.

JOHN GALLAGHER (Raven):
Neat Records was a little project studio [in England] that used to do recordings for the local bands playing the workingmen’s clubs so they could have a 45 vinyl single to sell at shows. In ’79 they put out a record by Tygers of Pan Tang [“Don’t Touch Me There”] that did really well. Tygers manager Tom Noble saw us play and said, “Would you like to do a record, too?” and we said, “We certainly would.” We did the “Don’t Need Your Money” single [in 1980] and it took off, so we never looked back. Except, by the third record we were still unsigned, and we were making no money and getting zero promotion, and we were really frustrated. Then we got the opportunity to come to America with Metallica.

JONNY ZAZULA:
The owner of Neat was a jolly good fellow named Dave Wood, and when I brought Raven over to America, Dave wanted to come too, so I had to pay for Dave. From that, he gave me approval to book concerts for Venom, who had never done any American shows. In fact, they had done six shows in their life. When their first album came out, they weren’t even a band. Dave stayed in our house in a room across from my bedroom and one night at about 3 a.m., he wanders into my bedroom and starts peeing all over my wife Marsha. He thought he was in the bathroom.

CONRAD “CRONOS” LANT (Venom):
We always used to say that Venom was all of our favorite bands thrown into a pot and mixed up—the stage show of KISS, the lyrics of Sabbath, the speed of Motörhead, the look of Judas Priest. We were trying to use as many influences as we could to make the ultimate metal band, but also be original.

JOHN GALLAGHER:
Venom’s vocalist and bassist, Conrad—or Cronos, as he called himself—was the tape operator at the studios at Neat. That’s how he eventually got recorded. He bugged the guy who ran the studio: “Can we do a demo? Can we do a demo?” So, of course, they finally did. But Venom had a master plan, which was to never play live and just build this mystique, and to a large degree they succeeded. There was such a demand for them to play live. When they finally did, they got paid outrageous amounts of money. But they were terrible and did stupid things. When they first came to America, they brought black [explosive] powder over on the airplane. You try that now and you’re in jail for twenty-five years.

JONNY ZAZULA:
They brought all this pyro that they were told not to bring. But they convinced me it was safe. Kids waited for them for two and a half hours while they were busy stringing bombs to everything. When the bombs went off the whole front row turned black. I went up to the balcony to get my head together, and two of the explosives were up on the balcony. [That pyro] could have taken kids’ heads off.

SCOTT IAN:
For me and all my friends, [1981’s]
Welcome to Hell
was our first exposure to Venom, and it was a huge eye-opener. It was one of those “holy shit” records. Like, “Jesus Christ, listen to this. These guys are fucking insane.” There were songs like “Sons of Satan,” and the title track. It was so, so evil. This was a new kind of insanity.

JONNY ZAZULA:
We brought Venom over to our house. When they came in, Cronos took glasses out of the kitchen cabinet and started chewing them and everyone freaked out. He left a few of the broken glasses in my cabinet as souvenirs. He wanted me to have them one day to put in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

CRONOS:
Venom was unlike anything at the time. People credit us with starting [the thrash metal] movement and all, but the truth is, I think it was inevitable. Punk had died. Metal was lame. There could only be one new way to do this—for metal bands to get some fucking balls again.

Venom’s pyrotechnic performances, Satanic lyrics, and occult imagery were hugely inspirational for Slayer, Possessed, Hellhammer, and others. However, Venom was musically limited, and when they tried to be anything but a really evil Motörhead, they fell on their snarling faces. It took Metallica’s blend of razor-edged New Wave of British Heavy Metal riffs and hardcore punk to really ignite the thrash movement. But first they had to break out of the cock-rock scene in LA.

JAMES HETFIELD (Metallica):
So we get this gig—our first ever. The crew at sound check steal a keg from the place. The venue calls us up and says, “Well, you’re canceled.” We said, “Oh, we’ll bring the keg back, hold on!” It was our first run-in with what you were supposed to do and not do in the music business. But yeah, basically seek and destroy. Drink, smash stuff up, feel good.

LARS ULRICH:
Initially [for our fans] it wasn’t just about identifying with the songs. It was also identifying with what the band represented. We were the antithesis to what most of the bigger bands were doing at that time. In ’83, ’84, ’85, the music scene in America was still dominated by the major labels. We were the big fuck-you alternative to Loverboy and Journey and REO Speedwagon. At that time we were pretty fucking vocal about it, too. We made sure that everybody understood that we were the anti-Mötley Crüe.

RON McGOVNEY:
In the beginning, James just wanted to be a singer. I was the only Metallica bass player who had to play without a rhythm guitarist. But James was really not comfortable. He needed something in front of him, so he decided, “You know what, I don’t want to be the singer anymore, I just want to play guitar.” We started auditioning singers. We wanted to get John Bush from Armored Saint, and he wouldn’t do it. Finally, James said, “The heck with it, I’ll just play
and
sing.”

JOHN BUSH:
Lars was a real big Armored Saint fan so he asked me to join Metallica, and the reason I was reluctant was that Armored Saint was
happening
. The wheels were going and we were moving. I was like, “These are my buddies I grew up with, I’m not going to just quit Armored Saint. Yeah, Metallica’s happening too, but this is
my
thing.”

KIRK HAMMETT (ex-Exodus, Metallica):
We were all looking for the most extreme stuff, and back [when I was in Exodus], the most popular music was Mercyful Fate, Venom, Motörhead. . . . Then this band came into town called Metallica. That was the sound that everyone was looking for but no one could actually execute until Metallica came along and showed everyone how to do it. There were pockets of bands in LA and New York that played heavy metal, but it was Metallica that brought it up to the next level.

LARS ULRICH:
We played faster and heavier and louder and more obnoxious and more out there than any of the rest of them. And slowly people started taking notice. In the beginning, it’s not that they actually appreciated what we were doing. It was more like, “What the fuck is that?”

BRIAN SLAGEL:
We’d go to Hollywood and drink, and then we’d end up at Betsy Bitch’s mom’s house. We’d have big, gigantic parties: Bitch, Armored Saint, Metallica, Savage Grace. We’re all drinking heavily. One night they were playing “Ace of Spades” by Motörhead [on the stereo] and there was a huge dog pile. That was the thing back then. You’d tackle somebody and everybody else would jump on top. Literally, there’d be thirty people. At the end of the night we noticed that [guitarist] Phil [Sandoval] from Armored Saint was limping. He had broken his ankle in the dog pile. He claims that Dave Mustaine broke his ankle on purpose.

JOEY VERA:
I think Dave saw Phil in the pile and jumped on his leg in a way where he knew that it was going to cause some hurt, which is why he felt guilty about it for so long. I thought it was an accident for the longest time. We were all pretty drunk, and he was no exception.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
Harmless verbal jousting gave way to nasty, personal insults, paving the way for a physical confrontation. They targeted Lars, probably because he was the smallest. . . . As the guys from Armored Saint dog-piled on top of Lars, I ran across the room and applied a side kick to the first person in my path, Phil Sandoval. The first thing I heard was a loud
crack!
Like the sound of a branch snapping in half. I’d broken his ankle. I tell this story not to brag, but simply as a way of pointing out how I felt about Lars, James, and Cliff. I would have done anything for them.

RON McGOVNEY:
LA was kind of a bust. I remember playing a gig at Lars’s high school. It was an auditorium. The stage was set up for a school play, so it looked like the inside of someone’s house. Lars was in the living room, I was in the bathroom, James was in the kitchen. The place was full when we started, and by the time we ended, there was probably about ten people there. They all walked out. In LA, everybody was trying to do the Mötley Crüe thing, standing there with their hair teased, and we’d come out looking like we just walked in off the street. But every time we made trips to San Francisco, the audiences went wild. There would be more and more people, until we were headlining.

KIRK HAMMETT:
When people say thrash started in LA, it really didn’t start in LA. Metallica was kicked out of LA because they weren’t understood. I’m sure that after the fact, it was really convenient for people to say, “Oh, yeah, it started in LA.” But no, it started in San Francisco.

BRIAN SLAGEL:
As Metallica got better, Lars called and asked if I knew a bass player. We had just signed Trauma from San Francisco, which Cliff Burton was in. I put them on
Metal Massacre II
. They played a show at the Troubadour. Cliff was just amazing. I told Lars about him, and Lars and James went to see the show and Lars said, “That’s going to be our new bass player.” Cliff wanted them to move to Frisco and they said, “Fine.” They’d had a huge reaction up there that they didn’t get in LA, so they moved. In fact, when Metallica was playing in LA they were deemed too punky. They got banned at the Troubadour for being too heavy.