Metallica: Enter Night (8 page)

In keeping with the astonishingly rapid rise the band was about to experience, they also got their first mainstream review for the Saxon shows, in no lesser an organ than the
LA Times
, where music critic Terry Atkinson nailed them when he wrote: ‘Saxon could also use a fast, hot guitar player of the Eddie Van Halen ilk. Opening quartet Metallica had one [in Dave Mustaine], but little else. The local group needs considerable development to overcome a pervasive awkwardness.’ In his gig diary, Lars smugly noted that the band got paid a dollar more than their first gig, adding immodestly: ‘Great sound this time. Dave and me played great. Ron and James so-so. Went down pretty good. Had a good time but never met Saxon.’

‘Of course,’ says Brian Slagel, ‘John [Kornarens] and I were probably the only two people there that knew what [songs] they were playing. Everybody else just thought they were playing originals.’ Everybody, that is, with the exception of Saxon singer Biff Byford, who watched them from the side of the stage with his mouth open. ‘Apparently, Biff was like, “What?
What?
Why are they doing Diamond Head songs?”,’ recalls Brian Tatler. It wouldn’t be for long. By the time Metallica were ready for a return appearance at Radio City in early June, they had added two more original numbers to their set and recorded the first in a short series of what even then were considered groundbreaking demos, beginning in April with the four-track
Power Metal
collection: a round-up of their first four original numbers, with ‘Hit the Lights’ and ‘Jump in the Fire’ now joined by another new Mustaine-driven epic, ‘The Mechanix’ and Hetfield’s ‘Motorbreath’. Later rerecorded for the now legendary
No Life ’til Leather
demo, what’s interesting now about the earlier
Power Metal
demo is the way it captures the band before it had settled into its essential musical shape. James, in particular, sounds very different from the growling bad-ass he would soon portray himself as, holding the notes on the chorus of ‘Jump in the Fire’, for example, very much in the style of Diamond Head’s Sean Harris, though with considerably less finesse.

‘He later figured that he didn’t sound like Sean Harris so he decided to sing gruffer,’ recalled Ron McGovney, who had inadvertently given the demo its title when he took it upon himself to have some Metallica business cards made up to send to possible gig promoters. ‘The card was supposed to just have the Metallica logo and a contact number. But I thought it looked too plain and decided it should say something under the logo. I didn’t want to put “hard rock” or “heavy metal”, so I coined the term “power metal”; I thought it had a nice ring to it. No band had used that term before as far as I knew.’ When he proudly displayed the new cards for Lars, though, the drummer was aghast. ‘He said, “What did you do? What the hell is power metal? I can’t believe you did such a stupid thing! We can’t use these cards with the words power metal on them!”’ James and Dave saw the funny side, however, and sarcastically dubbed their first recording together ‘the power metal demo’. Everything, though, was still in such a touch-and-go state that no one member could afford to laugh long at any other. Hetfield, in particular, was still suffering a massive crisis of confidence over his role in the band. When they landed a gig at the Convert Factory in Costa Mesa, on 23 April, they actually appeared as a five-piece: James was still out front as singer, but now there was a second rhythm guitarist, Brad Parker (stage name: Damian C. Phillips) to help beef up the sound. But as Ron recalled: ‘While [the rest of the band] are getting dressed to go on stage, we hear this guitar solo so we look over the railing of the dressing room and we see Brad on stage just blazing away on his guitar. So that was Metallica’s first and last gig with Damian C. Phillips. Later I think he went on to join Odin.’

It was enough to convince both Mustaine and Hetfield that no one else should be allowed to play guitar in the band. But if James was going to concentrate on rhythm guitar, he argued, they should get a ‘real’ singer in. It wasn’t just his voice he was insecure about. Plagued by severe acne throughout his teens and early twenties, James had grown so painfully self-conscious of his looks that he avoided mirrors, felt uncomfortable around pretty girls and, most lastingly, erected a huge barrier behind which he hid, disguising his minutely sensitive feelings in a cloak of monosyllables and withering glances. Being asked to stand in front of a group as musically confrontational as Metallica, he admitted he didn’t know if he could do that. After a show at Lars’ old high school on 25 May with James trying to sing and play guitar – a disastrous showing which saw them performing to a virtually empty hall – the others acquiesced. Enter yet another short-lived hopeful: Jeff Warner. Again, just for one gig: back at the Convert Factory.

There was an even more brief dalliance with a singer named Sammy Dijon, from another local outfit called Ruthless. ‘Sammy was a good singer,’ said Ron, ‘just not Metallica-style.’

They were still deep in discussion about the best way forward for James and the group when
Metal Massacre
was finally released on 14 June 1982. Although the conversation would continue, off and on, right up to the band’s second album, the idea of bringing in some new guy to front the band increasingly seemed off-point. They were now a band with a track on an actual album – and James was the singer of that song. Still unconvinced, James agreed at least to continue in the role for the time being. Dave and Ron, meanwhile, were determined to ensure they too would make their presences felt the next time the band got anywhere within earshot of a recording situation. They had the
Metal Massacre
album to swan around with and show off to people, along with their name, right there on the back cover: misspelled as ‘Mettallica’. Lars was on the phone to Brian Slagel about that within thirty seconds of spotting the mistake…

One of those nights, 1986, I’m home and I’m high, me and my girlie, when the phone rings – again. Jaded, I pick it up. Pips. Someone calling from a phone box.

‘Hey, Mick! It’s Lars!’

A pause while I mentally shuffle through the deck for a face to go with the name.

‘…from Metallica!’

Oh…yeah, Lars. How did
he
get my number?

‘Hey, Lars. How ya doing?’

‘Yeah, great…’

There follows the usual lengthy exposition in which I get to hear just how great he and his band are doing. There are shows that have been ‘awesome’. There are people that have been ‘fucking assholes’ or, more often, ‘great fucking guys’. There are beers that have been drunk and furniture that’s fallen over and been flung out the window, laughs everywhere, the party never-ending, inescapable. In the background as he rants in his mangled Danish-American accent, the unmistakable sound of a pub in full swing.

And then he gets to the point. ‘Listen, I was thinking, I don’t have anywhere to stay tonight…’

This, I know, is a lie, or an untruth. Everybody knows that whenever Lars is in London these days he stays at his new manager’s posh house. But he wants something and I can already guess what it is.

‘Listen, I was thinking, maybe I could come over to your place, maybe crash on the couch?’

Shit, no. Not tonight. I’ve only just pulled up the drawbridge. But it’s hard to get a word in edgeways…

‘…we could get some beers, maybe, hang out…whaddayasay?’

I look over at the girlie but she mouths the word ‘no’. She has made the mistake of shrugging and saying ‘yes’ too many times before.

‘…or maybe we could catch a gig. What’s on tonight, do you know? I could meet you in Wardour Street, at The Ship. As a matter of fact, I’m there now…’

Finally – finally – I spot an opening and dive in with some half-hearted bit of spiel about needing to get a story finished and maybe next week or some other time perhaps, ’cos let’s face it there will always be another time for someone like Lars.

‘What?’ he says, not buying any of it. ‘You don’t want me to come over?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘of course I want you to come over. That would be great. It’s just…’

‘Oh, man! But I don’t have anywhere to stay.’

‘I thought you were staying at Peter’s,’ I say.

‘Well, yeah,’ he says, ‘but it’s so fucking boring. I need to get out, have some beers, tear it up. Come on, whaddayasay?’

The pips start to go again and so he goes to throw some more money in. But I get there first. ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I really can’t tonight. Good hearing from you though, man. Next time…’

‘Okay,’ he says, utterly unconvinced. And then the line goes dead. Phew. That was close. I mean, nice kid, means well, never shuts the fuck up though. I flop back down on the couch, roll one and try to forget about it…

Released in June 1982, the arrival of the first limited-edition copies of Brian Slagel’s epochal
Metal Massacre
album changed everything for Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield. Before it, they were two teenagers with the bare bones of an idea for a rock group. After it, they were this entity, something to be reckoned with, something called Metallica – or, rather, ‘Mettallica’, as they appeared on the original album sleeve and label. Lars and James didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. A dream come true, yet somehow just a little bit spoiled. Lars bit his lip and accepted Brian’s apologies. James said nothing, just fumed. ‘They understood,’ Slagel insists now. ‘They were not happy about it, for sure. [But] everything they delivered was late and the typesetter made the mistake. There was no way to check it before it went to press. I was furious! We changed it of course on all other versions [and] I apologised over and over to the band. As I said they were pretty cool about it, all things considered. I think it all worked out in the end for them,’ he adds dryly.

At least the existence of
Metal Massacre
gave the nascent Metallica line-up impetus. Moreover, it demonstrated something to Lars and James they had not known before: that they were actually good. It was as if the fact that they didn’t yet exist outside the fevered imaginations of Ulrich and Hetfield had enabled them somehow to be more than the meagre sum of their parts. Yet to be discouraged by poorly attended gigs or a string of rejection slips from disinterested music-biz figures, they just blast it out, as sure-footed as two guys virtually miming in front of their bedroom mirrors can be. Three weeks after the release of
Metal Massacre
, the band thought they had really cracked it when they went in to an eight-track studio in Tustin called Chateau East, where they recorded what they were convinced would actually become their first stand-alone release, following another typically brusque Lars Ulrich challenge to a more established local independent label owner. Unlike Brian Slagel, though, the owner was a punk aficionado – a genre still then diametrically opposed to heavy metal – and this time Lars’ bluff appeared to backfire.

‘[The guy] was a real snake in the grass,’ Ron McGovney would later recall. ‘He had this punk label, which was a division of an Orange County record company. He said he would put up the money to have us do an EP.’ But after hearing the seven tracks they came up with – comprised, essentially, of every original tune the four-man line-up had so far bolted together – he claimed to be appalled that the band had duped him into thinking they were a punk outfit and refused to release any of it. Ever resourceful, Lars suggested the band simply take the tracks and distribute them as a ‘limited edition’ cassette tape entitled
No Life ’til Leather
(taken from the opening line of ‘Hit the Lights’, and inspired by Motörhead’s live album
No Sleep ’til Hammersmith
, which had been Number One in the UK charts the summer Lars was there). Along with its own makeshift sleeve with liner notes written by Lars, plus tracklisting and band logo, you wouldn’t be able to buy it in the stores, in the way you could buy
Metal Massacre
, but it would burn a hole in the tape-trading scene, Lars rightly reasoned, which is exactly what it did. In fact, the seven tracks on
No Life ’til Leather
– ‘The Mechanix’, ‘Phantom Lord’, ‘Jump in the Fire’ and ‘Metal Militia’, all of which would be credited to Hetfield, Ulrich and Mustaine, but which Mustaine would later claim he had essentially written the bulk of alone, plus ‘Motorbreath’, another arrangement left over from Hetfield’s days working with Hugh Tanner but which would now be credited solely to James, ‘Seek and Destroy’, by James and Lars, and in no small measure ‘inspired’ by Diamond Head’s ‘Dead Reckoning’ (a track released earlier that year), plus a new version of ‘Hit the Lights’, this time featuring both Mustaine and McGovney (although they cannily over-dubbed onto it the original Lloyd Grant solo, too) – did everything for the band an official EP might have done, except garner reviews in the mainstream rock press. But it made up for that by the sheer force of its word-of-mouth following, something Lars understood only too well through his own avidness for obscure, hard-to-find NWOBHM releases.

Patrick Scott was enlisted to help send out copies of
No Life
. ‘I was actually really the only person mailing them out,’ he says now. ‘It was a little bit selfish [of Lars] but it was helping a friend, too. I had these pen-pals like Metal Mike from
Aardshok
, and Bernard Doe [at
Metal Forces
], and some other pen-pals…I would just send them demos and T-shirts then they’d send me stuff back…But they were just going nuts over Metallica, even in countries where we thought the cool bands were, they thought Metallica was the coolest band. Not in LA but everywhere else, from other states in the US, to Japan and Sweden and England…it was a fun time, running to the mailbox every day. Lars just kept giving me stuff to send out. He knew what he was doing.’ Lars would never claim to have masterminded any particular strategy, at least not at this stage, but he understood how getting their music out this way fitted Metallica’s developing profile in all sorts of useful ways. Although they would grow with the years into a much more inclusive club, the original music and mien of Metallica was quintessentially the sound of outsiders, positioned so far beyond the borders of the mainstream that they wouldn’t even bother trying to force their way in; an approach so utterly at odds with the prevailing crowd-pleasing LA attitude that it appeared to make no sense at all to most of the people they performed to at the various Hollywood clubs they were now beginning to play on a semi-frequent basis.

Soon, cassettes of
No Life ’til Leather
were circulating all over Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, London, Birmingham and Copenhagen. Band operations still centred on Ron’s parents’ bungalow – with Ron more often than not personally funding those activities, as he was the only one with an active credit card – but it was the start of Lars taking over the business side of the operation in terms of band profile and promotion. As he boasted to
Rolling Stone
years later, conveniently omitting the role played by Scott and others, ‘I was the one who went out and bought all the tapes. I was the one who sat down and copied them. I was the one who sent them out to people. That’s where it started. Somebody had to do it.’ Although they did also send tapes to various record companies, that side of it ‘was never that serious’, insisted Lars. ‘All we wanted to do was send it out to the traders, get mentioned in some fanzines.’ Typical of the reaction among the tape-trading fraternity was that of future Metallica fan club chief K.J. Doughton, who also received a tape from Scott. ‘After hearing the demo, I freaked out. Metallica had a distinctly European slant to their music, at a time when most US bands were light alloy at best. There were heavy Yank bands like Y&T, Riot, and The Rods, but Metallica took on the big, biblical, slash-and-burn, good-versus-evil issues. No party music. No girl-magnet ballads. Just brutal, attack-oriented audio death.’ Says Scott, ‘They were what we were all looking for.’ He recalls playing the tape down the phone for Ron Quintana. ‘I called him one day and played him “Hit the Lights” and he was like, “Oh my god!” He was just going crazy over it.’ When Quintana realised it was Lars Ulrich’s new band he was listening to, he ‘couldn’t believe it’. Says Ron now, ‘None of our friends were in popular bands so I never expected a little metal mad rocker like Lars would ever be in a big band! He talked a good game, but I never heard him play till mid-’82 on tape and LP and live till later.’ When Quintana then asked Scott to write an article on Metallica for
Metal Mania
, Patrick told Lars and they sat down and wrote it together. ‘This was like top secret back then,’ Patrick says. ‘We sat in [Lars’] bedroom and he was like, “You can’t tell anybody!” We were just laughing, saying these things which seemed ridiculous, like the famous line: “potential to become US metal gods”.’ As a reward, Lars gave Patrick a rare copy of
1980
, the one and only album by Danish punk-metal progenitors Brats, the band guitarist Hank Shermann had before he joined Mercyful Fate. ‘I didn’t ask for that but [Lars] had two copies. I still have that. But I sent the article to Ron and it got into
Metal Mania
.’

Musically, Metallica’s influences were obvious to anyone then acquainted with the NWOBHM scene – which most American fans weren’t. Mixed in with obvious touchstones such as Diamond Head and Motörhead, though, were more obscure traces, including hardcore British and American punk. Hanging out after rehearsals, they would mix their Motörhead and Angel Witch records with new releases from the Ramones, Discharge and the Anti-Nowhere League, ‘and no one flinched’, said James. ‘It all belonged together. It was aggressive, it had guitars. It felt good. Discharge’s guitarist Bones was pulling off some serious metal riffs.’ Patrick Scott recalls introducing James and Lars to Accept’s
Restless and Wild
album, in particular the track ‘Fast as a Shark’. ‘They were a little bummed, like, “Somebody beat us to it!” They wanted to take all this stuff they loved and bring it to another level. Mainly Lars. He knew what he liked and what he didn’t like. He wanted to be like them but he wanted to take it a step further and combine Motörhead with the NWOBHM bands. Heavier, faster.’ It was also Patrick who first played them Mercyful Fate. James would play ‘Curse of the Pharaohs’ to get his guitar tone down. They loved Mercyful Fate…they were a big influence on Metallica, as far as an approach to be progressive with time-changes and putting just riffs in. They didn’t want chord progressions, they wanted
riffs
. That was the big thing. Ten riffs in one song you could make ten songs out of.’

The common thread running through all their listening habits back then – certainly the ones that were influencing their own writing – were speed, power and aggression. The first time Lars brought in a copy of Venom’s
Welcome to Hell
album – the original self-styled ‘black metal’ release – it had a huge impact, says Ron McGovney, although not necessarily in the same way for him. ‘The other guys loved Venom. I thought they sucked.’ He concedes, though, ‘I guess the speed of the songs may have been an influence.’ Not just the speed but their fiercely uncompromising, entirely antisocial tenor, exemplified in songs such as ‘Sons of Satan’, ‘One Thousand Days of Sodom’ and ‘Angel Dust’. A trio from Newcastle formed in the late 1970s and similar to Metallica in that they had a burning desire to take the influence of Motörhead, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath and essentially speed it up, by 1982 and the release of their second album,
Black Metal
, Venom’s frenzied shows were attracting a frightening mix of headbangers, bikers, punks and skinheads. Combining ‘the big pyro show’ of Kiss with ‘the satanic lyrics’ of Black Sabbath, as their bassist, vocalist and lead songwriter Conrad Lant, a.k.a. Cronos, explained in 2009, Venom’s credo was bite-size simple yet shockingly effective: ‘Metal is the devil’s music, let’s make it as aggressive as we possibly can.’ The extra twist: where Sabbath-era Ozzy Osbourne was always being ‘a tormented soul chased by demons…Venom wanted to
be
the demon’. The impact of Venom was such that it would help a whole new genre of rock to evolve in the USA; one which Metallica would be credited for inventing, though, as Lars says now, the real credit lies with the melting pot he and his bandmates were beginning to stir up together. ‘A band like Venom had a lot to answer for. Because there were a lot of the songs on their first record that were very fast. Then you say Venom, then okay maybe throw a little Discharge in there, then you throw a little GBH in there. All of a sudden you got a little bit of punk, a little bit of metal, a little bit of Motörhead, who sort of had one foot in each world, then you add the American X-factor – and there you have thrash!’