Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (35 page)

Every thrash fan knows the Big Four: Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax. If, as Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian suggests, Exodus should be included in the mix, then it’s not much of a stretch to add Testament as well. The band is widely regarded as one of the top bands from the second wave of Bay Area thrash. Actually, Testament was around just as early as Metallica and Anthrax, forming as Legacy in 1982 with guitarist and songwriter Eric Peterson; vocalist Steve “Zetro” Souza; his cousin, guitarist Derrick Ramirez; bassist Greg Christian; and drummer Louie Clemente.

ERIC PETERSON (Testament):
We were all in eighth grade and we used to cut school and go to San Francisco. One day we were sitting at this park and we bumped into [ex-drummer] Louie [Clemente]. He had a jean jacket with Iron Maiden patches on. He goes, “You know where I can get a nickel bag?” We ended up jamming together, and we wrote “Secret Agent,” which became the Testament song “First Strike Is Still Deadly.” Then [my cousin, guitarist and vocalist] Derrick Ramirez left and we met Alex [Skolnick].

ALEX SKOLNICK (Testament, Alex Skolnick Trio, Trans-Siberian Orchestra):
When I tried out for Legacy, I was just fifteen. I was a totally nervous, shy kid, and they didn’t help me feel comfortable. They didn’t function on that level back then.

ERIC PETERSON:
Alex was real awkward, and he wouldn’t look at us. But he picked up his guitar and he was like Yngwie [Malmsteen]. He was in a band called Blackthorn, and he said, “Well, I dunno if I want to leave them.” Then he came to one of our shows and he really liked “Cursed Are the Legions of Death.” So he joined, and me and him wrote “Burnt Offerings” straight off. It was an epic song with all these nooks and crannies [that was on our 1987 album
The Legacy
]. We made a great team. I had a lot of the darkness in my sound, and he knew more about playing scales on the guitar than I did.

CHUCK BILLY:
Steve “Zetro” Souza was my friend from the scene and he called me up and said, “Hey, I just joined Exodus. Here, call Alex Skolnick and tell him you wanna try out.” I was taking vocal lessons and I really wanted to sing. I went to college for vocal and guitar. I didn’t know much about thrash metal. I called him and he said, “Yeah, come on down. I brought this hella PA and a case of beer, and they had a little tiny room. I had to sing in the hallway because I couldn’t fit in the room with them.

ERIC PETERSON:
We were tripping because we knew Chuck was the huge guy from Dublin Death Patrol [violent peers of the Slay Team], and we were all scared of him. Me and Louie went, “No way! He’s crazy!” But we went to see the [melodic metal] band Guilt that Chuck was in. Chuck was ripping it out and calling everybody in the crowd pussies. We were like, “Hey, he’s a cool front man.”

Although Testament was on the scene nearly from the start of thrash, it took Metallica’s 1986 landmark album
Master of Puppets
to expose them and other Bay Area bands to the masses.
Master
was a watershed album: the band combined the brutality of thrash, technical wizardry of prog-rock, and epic grandeur of cinematic composers like John Barry and Ennio Morricone with the urgency of hardcore, and did it all in a framework of angry, infectious sing-alongs. It was the first album the band recorded specifically for its new label, Elektra, and, ultimately, it was the disc that legitimized thrash for the mainstream.

LARS ULRICH:
Metallica was never just a thrash band. I accept that we had a lot to do with the way that whole scene took off; we were the first band to sound like that. But we never thought of ourselves as a “thrash” band. We were always an American band with British and European metal influences. It’s just that until
Master of Puppet
s, nobody took us seriously.

KIRK HAMMETT:
The cohesiveness from one track to the next made perfect sense to us. It was almost as if the album created itself. From the beginning, when we started writing the songs, all the way to the end, really great ideas were just moving and coming out of nowhere in a nonstop flow.

LARS ULRICH:
Cliff and Kirk brought incredible depth into the band. Cliff went to music school. We would sit there and talk about Venom or Angel Witch. He’d sit there and talk about Bach, Yes, Peter Gabriel. I guess we slowly started feeling that the fast stuff needed dynamics because if it was all fast, none of it really stood out.

JAMES HETFIELD:
On
Master of Puppets
, we started getting into longer, more orchestrated songs. It was more of a challenge to write a long song that didn’t seem long. The riff for “Master of Puppets” was pretty messy—constantly moving. It works good live. People love to scream “Master!”

By the time Metallica was opening for Ozzy in 1986, big things were happening for other bands as well. Megadeth was about to release
Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying?
; Anthrax was touring for its major label debut,
Spreading the Disease
; Slayer was being courted by Rick Rubin and Def Jam Records; and Testament was on the verge of its first big break.

ERIC PETERSON:
We were talking to Megaforce about doing a record as Legacy. All these people wanted to sign us because of our 1985 demo.

MARIA FERRERO:
Elliot Cahn, a lawyer, sent a cassette, and I was like, “Oh my God, this is great!” I kept playing it over and over, and Jonny was like, “Get it the fuck off, you’re driving me crazy!” Finally he said, “OK, we’ll sign this, we’ll sign this.”

CHUCK BILLY:
Jonny Z was like, “Send me a demo of the new singer.” So I went and did a demo of “Over the Wall” and “The Haunted.” He’s like, “Okay, we got a deal.” So Jonny and Marsha flew out to San Francisco to see us at this little tiny room. They looked beat up and were all down because the night before they got a call that Cliff Burton had died. And we couldn’t be excited either because Cliff was our good friend.

JONNY ZAZULA:
We were completely devastated. We didn’t believe it at first—then we found out it was true and that Cliff had died, and we had already made this appointment to go out and listen to Testament. We already knew we were going to sign them and this was just to seal the deal. So they did this showcase, and they were a lot better with Chuck Billy than they had been with Zetro. We told them they had a deal. But everyone was just too upset about Cliff to celebrate.

Cliff Burton’s death is one of the metal world’s greatest tragedies. Metallica was enjoying breakthrough success, and Burton was in his prime as a musician. Some say he was the main force behind Metallica’s sound. Sadly, the world will never know what Burton would have contributed to a post–
Master of Puppets
Metallica. On September 26, 1986, the band was in the middle of a European tour and heading to a show in Copenhagen. Shortly after 5 a.m., their driver skidded on black ice and lost control, and the bus rolled over into a ditch. Burton was ejected through his bunk window while he slept and crushed under the bus.

JAMES HETFIELD:
I saw the bus lying right on him. I saw his legs sticking out. I went to pieces. The driver tried to take Cliff’s blanket and give it to someone else. I just screamed “fuck that!” I wanted to kill the guy. I don’t know if he was drunk or if the bus had skidded on ice. All I knew was Cliff was dead.

SCOTT IAN:
We were on tour with Metallica when that happened. We left halfway through their set the night before. I said goodbye to them before they went onstage because I knew we weren’t going to see them when they got offstage. We got into the hotel that morning and I saw our tour manager Mark talking to some guy. I walked up all bleary-eyed looking for my room key, and he’s like, “There’s bad news.” I said, “What?” He goes, “Metallica’s bus crashed on the way here last night and flipped over and Cliff was killed.” It didn’t even register in my brain. It made no sense. I said, “Bullshit. They probably just got super drunk and made up some story about a bus accident because they’re going to be late or they can’t make it to the gig.” I was in complete denial. Then fans started showing up as the word got out. There were hundreds of people around the hotel because somehow people knew this is where both bands were gonna be staying. Later that day, James and Kirk got brought to the hotel and they told us the whole story of how Lars had broken a toe, but outside of some other scratches and bruises that was it. Cliff was killed. It was completely insane. We spent a really horrible night in Copenhagen with James and Kirk. James was inconsolable and uncontrollable. He was smashing things in the hotel. So we took him outside to walk him around and he started smashing things in the street. We didn’t know what to do. Obviously, we didn’t want him to get arrested. The cops don’t give a fuck that his best friend was just killed. So we stayed up all night with those guys in disbelief, and then they got on the plane the next morning to fly home.

MARIA FERRARO:
Marsha [Zazula] called me from California to tell me. I was standing in my old house where I grew up, on the steps in my kitchen on the phone, and I sunk to the floor. The first person I thought to call was Mustaine, because, you know, he wasn’t in Metallica anymore, but I knew he cared. I called him, and I know he mentioned that in his book.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
Maria told me all about it. I just stood there clutching the phone, feeling like someone had punched me in the stomach. I hadn’t talked to Cliff in a while but still considered him to be a friend. If I harbored some lingering anger toward Lars and James, well, it was impossible to work up the same degree of animus toward Cliff. He was just too decent a person. For whatever reason—guilt, anger, sadness—I hung up the phone, got in my car, and went out and scored some heroin. I got loaded, sat around and cried for a while, then picked up my guitar and in one brief sitting I wrote an entire song, “In My Darkest Hour,” which wound up on Megadeth’s next album, [1988’s
So Far, So Good . . . So What!
]

SCOTT IAN:
I was out there with those guys for the funeral and then with them for days in San Francisco, and the mood was very much, “Who are we gonna get and what are we gonna do and how are we moving forward?” They set their minds to it immediately because they felt that the last thing that Cliff would want would be for the band to end, and that’s absolutely 100 percent true. So they charged right back into it and we were back out doing shows together in February of 1987 when Jason [Newsted] was in the band. We went back and made up some of these dates that got canceled, and that’s just six months after Cliff died. So they never took the time to grieve. Maybe in retrospect taking three months off and dealing with it would have been the thing to do. But they were Metallica. At the time, how could they have stopped? They were on this path that led them to where they are now and there was no way to stop the machine.

MICK WALL:
[Cliff] was incredibly important [to Metallica]. I think without him, there would be no
them
. But because he died, people trot out a lot of clichés about what happened. And the biggest cliché is that they had to carry on, because that’s what Burton would have wanted. That’s bullshit. They carried on because that’s what Ulrich and Hetfield wanted. The other thing [about Burton] is how his death freed them to become the monster success they became. I think had he stayed in the band, they would have made a much more interesting album than . . .
And Justice for All
. But the fact that he wasn’t around really did leave Ulrich and Hetfield to run the show without any interference. And Ulrich and Hetfield have run the band ever since. That’s how the
Black Album
came about. I have serious doubts that the
Black Album
would have happened had Burton not died.

JOEY VERA:
People think that I auditioned for Metallica, but the truth is that they were basically having cattle calls and it was depressing for them. I think that they just wanted to play with people that they knew personally, to get more friends to come out. Armored Saint were my buddies from school and we were on a major label, making our third record,
Raising Fear
, even though, in hindsight, maybe the business wasn’t going so well. Still, you can look at it as some sort of job security, because you’re still signed, you’re in a band that’s working. So I declined the invitation because I wasn’t in a place in my mind to say about Armored Saint, “This is enough, I’m done with this. I need something different.”

MICHAEL ALAGO:
Lars called and said, “We’re going to move forward. Do you have anybody in mind?” Funny enough, I had just signed Flotsam and Jetsam. I was crazy about them. [Bassist] Jason Newsted was their spokesperson. It bothered me for a moment because I knew it was going to upset the apple cart with the boys in Flotsam, but he had that same kind of charm, integrity, and his bass playing was wild and animated, and I knew he would be the perfect fit for the guys. I also suggested Phil Caivano, who was playing bass in Blitzspeer [and later joined Monster Magnet as a guitarist].

LARS ULRICH:
I called up my friend [Metal Blade label owner] Brian Slagel, who had given Metallica their first break. I asked him, “Who are the hot young cats out there?” All roads were leading to this guy Jason Newsted. We were auditioning bass players right down where Cliff used to live in Hayward. And Cliff’s mom and dad were hanging around the rehearsal rooms. It was a pretty beautiful thing, but it was also a little intimidating for the bass players. Jason Newsted came in and he didn’t look a day over fourteen. He was very serious and fired up and knew all the songs. He had tremendous energy, enormous tenacity. He was the kind of guy that you could tell, “Okay Jason, you’ll get the gig in Metallica on one condition. You have to go lay in the street and get run over by a truck.” I mean, he would have done that.