Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I Read online

  The roster amassed by Secret could hardly have been more different from that of Hooker’s last place of work. While his previous employers had hurriedly hit the eject button on the Sex Pistols, Secret signed the Exploited, a Glasgow-based punk quartet so unreconstructed as to make the Pistols look like the Charlie Daniels Band. Despite not being in possession of a single artistic bone in their bodies, in 1981 the Exploited scored a Top 40 hit with the song ‘Dead Cities’, an occasion marked with a startling appearance on the BBC’s flagship early evening music programme Top of the Pops (a booking which suggested that, in an age where the musical mainstream was becoming increasingly timid, ‘Auntie Beeb’ was still capable of stirring shards of glass into a bowl of vanilla cream).

  ‘I just loved [that period],’ recalls Hooker today. With not a little sarcasm, he adds that ‘just for a change’ the financial straits through which Britain was sailing were ‘crap’, a state of affairs that meant that the music offered by his label spoke more to the kids on the dole rather than to a nation hypnotised by the sinister fairy tale of the 1981 wedding of Charles Windsor and Diana Spencer.

  ‘Bands like the Exploited, who were our big act at the time, were having hits with the likes of “Dead Cities”,’ remembers Hooker. ‘And when you went on tour to places like Sheffield and Liverpool, you really did see horrific poverty. Everywhere places were closed down, there were kids sitting in gutters sniffing glue. It was quite the eye-opener. So [the kind of music made by the Exploited and others like them] had a valid place at the time. We put out nine albums and all of them went Top 40.’

  At the same time as the Exploited were thrilling football hooligans and those for whom Johnny Rotten’s proclamation that there was ‘no future’ had become a deadening reality, listeners who preferred to grow their hair long rather than spike it to the rafters with sugar and water were rallying to the sound made by groups lumped together under the awkward acronym that was NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal). But while Hooker admits that the sound made by Iron Maiden was that of a ‘great band’, for the most part the collective whole as represented by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal left him cold. That this was so might have made Hooker’s decision to take Kill ’Em All under licence on his new label, Music For Nations, an odd choice, what with so many of that album’s component parts bearing such close resemblance to the sounds that had emerged from the United Kingdom just a year or two earlier. But while Hooker recognises this irony, he is also quick, and correct, to point out that Metallica brought to their sound ‘an excitement and energy’ that gave their music a sense of uncharted vitality, if not quite originality. For while even the most frenetic of New Wave of British Heavy Metal turns did carry with them a whiff of something hoary, Metallica roared from the speakers with the pure amphetamined energy of the kind of punk that had never been near an art school.

  So smitten was Hooker with Metallica that in his pursuit of the group the label owner broke a number of his own rules. ‘Unusually I went against my own instincts,’ he admits. ‘Usually I’d have long talks with the band and go and see them play live, but time-wise I wasn’t in a position to do that. I just wanted to get them signed up before anybody else was interested. So, yeah, I went about it a bit arse-about-face, and it was a bit of a gamble. But obviously it was one that paid off for me.’

  But as with his decision to leave EMI in order to build Secret, and then Music For Nations, Hooker understood that in order to accumulate first he must speculate, and that Metallica were a prospect upon which it was worth placing a bet. The Englishman liked the fact that the group themselves were not English, observing that US bands were so much more to his personal taste.

  ‘American musicians were so much easier to work with than English guys,’ he maintains. ‘They were so much more hard-working, Lars Ulrich being a perfect case in point – you just wound him up and let him go. Whereas a lot of English bands that I worked with would be, like, “Right, I’ve signed a record deal, now make me a star.” They would just sit back and let it all happen around them. But the American bands were more inclined to put in a twelve-hour day to make things happen.’

  Metallica’s decision to record their second album not in America but at Sweet Silence was aided by the fact that February 1984 saw the band perform their first live shows in Europe. Ticket holders who attended the Volkshaus club in Zurich, Switzerland, on February 3, 1984, can lay claim to being members of the first audience to see the quartet perform outside the United States. The group had travelled to the mainland as special guests on Venom’s Seven Dates of Hell tour, a tour which confusingly comprised of just six dates. As well as visiting Zurich, the caravan also made noise in the cities of Milan, Nuremberg, Paris, Zwolle and Poperinge.

  The quartet were guided through this short European trek by tour manager Gem Howard. A friend of Martin Hooker’s and a colleague since the days of the Secret label, in 1984 Howard held the position of general manager of Music For Nations. The aspect of the job that Howard most enjoyed, however, was being out in the field, travelling with and taking care of bands touring Britain and mainland Europe. This he had been doing since 1976, when as an employee at Secret he would shepherd around the continent the kind of groups parents dread their daughters might one day bring home. Eight years on, Howard was still traversing the motorways and autobahns of his home continent in the service of Music For Nations’ growing roster of bands, many of whom were not just young and American but also in Europe for the first time.

  It was a life free of any particular luxury. But as the man in charge of a tour – a role he describes as being ‘part parent, part babysitter, part boss and part organiser, all rolled into one’ – Howard was afforded his own room in the low-rent guest houses in which his charges were invariably booked. The reason for this was that as tour manager it was his responsibility to guard the money from light-fingered groupies and other flotsam and jetsam attracted to the dim lights of rock bands.

  In this regard at least, though, Metallica differed from the norm. Howard remembers the group as being one rather more interested in ‘the process of playing gigs’ than ‘the groupie side of things’, noting that he had ‘met so many bands who just want to get on the road and get laid as much as possible, and who have no real interest in anything other than that. But [Metallica] were always interested in other aspects regarding the craft of what they were doing. They still got trashed on the road and all of that, but they were always primarily interested in the musical side of things. Everything else was just kind of a bolt-on.’

  Metallica’s expectations came without frills. In 1984 the group desired only a venue in which to play, enough money to buy food and (understandable given the events in Boston just a month earlier) musical equipment. These criteria were met. Perhaps realising he was in the company of a man who even in the mid-Eighties was beginning to bear the hallmarks of a grizzled veteran, Lars Ulrich even managed to keep a lid on his oft-repeated assertion that Metallica were destined to become the biggest band in the world. But while Gem Howard has no recollection of such brazen talk from the smaller man, twenty-nine years after the fact other seemingly insignificant details have been filed to memory.

  ‘There’s one thing that always stands out,’ he says, ‘and this can be related to really any young band. It actually comes down to what they listen to. I’ve been out [on tour] with lots and lots of bands. I’ve sat in tour buses with them, minibuses and all the rest of it. And the ones that tend to come through are the ones who are listening to stuff that isn’t necessarily what you’d expect them to listen to. If you go out with a very average British thrash metal band, all they tend to listen to is thrash metal; so all of their influences come from the same kind of music that they’re making. There’s nothing new in there. But with Metallica, at one minute they’d be singing along to the Misfits, while the next minute they’d almost be crying their eyes out listening to “Homeward Bound” by Simon & Garfunkel. And they’d be listening to Ennio Morricone, which, of course, th
ey used as their intro tape before they came onstage [in the form of “The Ecstasy of Gold”], and in time they’d develop acoustic intros to their songs that were influenced by Ennio Morricone. They really were picking up stuff from all over the place, which is how they developed. They were listening to all this different stuff that they then figured out a way to incorporate into their music. And that made them stand out above the others.’

  The difference between a band that John Gallagher viewed as being ‘borderline out of control’ and the at least semi-professional young men encountered by Gem Howard just six months later is striking. There is a notion that if people are treated like animals then they will act accordingly, a self-fulfilling prophecy that was afforded full expression on the Kill ’Em All for One tour. But in Europe at least, three-quarters of the group were suddenly strangers in a strange land, and there are few types of people more easily discombobulated than young American musicians who find themselves in a foreign-speaking country for the first time. They were under the wing of a tour manager equipped with a sense of calm and authority. They were riding around, not in a Winnebago propelled by the wind and reliant on WD40 but rather in a minibus that, while sparse, was amenable. At the end of their working day, the bed linen underneath which their bodies rested may have crackled with static electricity, but it was at least clean.

  Metallica were also a different band in a musical sense. During that autumn of 1983 in San Francisco, the group had done more than drink beer and vodka while imagining themselves to be an all-conquering force. Instead, they had worked to amass material that stood years rather than months ahead of the compositions heard on Kill ’Em All.

  ‘The Hetfield/ Ulrich/ Mustaine/ McGovney Metallica was a pretty one-dimensional musical unit,’ says Ulrich. ‘When Burton and Hammett joined in the space of three months, they added a lot to our sound. Cliff joined in February ’83 and right away we started working on songs that expanded our horizons. Cliff was studying music at college and he talked about Beethoven or Bach as much as he talked about ZZ Top or the Misfits. And Kirk also added a lot of elements. And we realised that we could be “heavier” by actually slowing down.’

  Metallica arrived to begin work on the album that would become Ride the Lightning in a freezing Copenhagen on February 20, 1984. As with its predecessor, time was not the band’s friend. Not only were the sessions constrained on one side by the kind of limited budgets familiar to any young group recording on the dimes afforded by an independent record label, but allied to this Metallica’s window of opportunity was also hemmed in by a series of European live dates scheduled to begin just twenty-nine days after the band had convened at Sweet Silence. Clearly, then, time and money were both in short supply.

  ‘I’m pretty sure that what Metallica paid to record in [the studio] would have been more than it would have cost to get into the studio today,’ says Flemming Rasmussen. ‘Prices for studios then were a lot more than they are now, actually. We’re roughly talking Eighties prices right now, so this is not a lucrative business. Everybody and their uncles thinks they can do it on their computer, but then they can’t understand why what they’ve recorded doesn’t sound like Metallica.’

  The producer then leans forward and with the air of one who knows, and the timing of a natural comedian, says, ‘Well, then let me tell you why …’

  On a bright and warm early September morning, Flemming Rasmussen met this book’s authors on the arrivals floor of Copenhagen’s International Airport. Of slim build and medium height, with his fine sandy hair and discreet eyewear the fifty-four-year-old producer has about him the cultured air of a university lecturer rather than someone who has spent his adult life attempting to set and record a perfect guitar tone. As is the case with almost all Scandinavians, Rasmussen’s spoken English is fluent and crisp, with verbal intonations that remind the listener of a slightly older Lars Ulrich (whom the producer reveals he is to visit in San Francisco in just a few days’ time). Unlike Ulrich, however, Rasmussen has no qualms about depositing sentences in an order that causes the sentiment held within to come crashing down with immediate force. Of his first impressions of the group that gathered to record Ride the Lightning he recalls ‘I thought they were pretty childish. I thought they were kids.’ Pausing to consider this memory, the producer allows himself a small smile and says, ‘I liked them.’

  Today what was Sweet Silence Studios is an unremarkable-looking apartment block situated beside a main road that leads to the centre of Copenhagen. Parking his car, Rasmussen walks to the walls of number 85 Strandlodsbej and paints an image with words and pointed fingers. ‘You see that room over there?’ he asks. ‘Well that’s where Lars recorded his drums. The guy living in that apartment is living in the exact spot where Lars used to play.’

  By agreeing to produce Metallica, Rasmussen reached a point at which all working people arrive: that is, for the first time in his professional life he was older than the people with whom he was collaborating. At the time of the recording of Ride the Lightning, Rasmussen was still a relatively green-horned twenty-six years of age. His charges, though, were younger still, with Cliff Burton being the oldest member of the group at twenty-two, and with both Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield having yet to celebrate their twenty-first birthdays.

  The first task Rasmussen faced was to ensure that Metallica were not choked by the mouthful of ambition on which they were attempting to chew. The producer quickly and rather astutely recognised that the band had in their minds a clear and resonant idea of exactly how their second album should sound. What he also realised was that the quartet lacked the fundamental skills required to realise what could justifiably be described as their ‘vision’.

  ‘My job was just to get them to perform as well as possible,’ remembers Rasmussen. ‘The reason for this was because at the time Metallica’s ambitions were higher than their technical abilities.’

  One of the first challenges came in the diminutive form of the person who might well have understood most clearly what it was the group were striving to achieve. In the years that have elapsed since the release of Ride the Lightning, Ulrich’s technical abilities as a drummer have been both greatly discussed and largely derided – mostly by people who have never themselves held a pair of drumsticks. There is something rather gratuitous about the blood-lust that surrounds what has now long been the self-fulfilling prophecy that not only is Ulrich Metallica’s musical weak link, but that the Dane lacks the proficiency of even the most inadequate of drummers. There is to this scenario a subtext of the ‘tall poppy syndrome’, that to counteract Ulrich’s indefatigable energies and his unquestionable success as ‘the little engine that could’ a weakness must be found. Given that his own capabilities as a drummer are one of the few subjects about which the musician has not publicly voiced an opinion, it is into this vacuum of silence that a derogatory consensus has swept.

  That said, the case for Ulrich’s defence is not entirely aided by Hetfield’s observation that his band mate and occasional friend ‘will admit’ to not being a particularly accomplished player. (Hetfield is also of the belief that he himself ‘is not a very good singer’ – itself a statement that isn’t quite just – but that when he and Ulrich combine forces ‘there’s something that [just] happens …’) What can be said with some certainty is that in learning to play his instrument, Ulrich took care to master certain elements of the craft while paying no heed whatsoever to other, more fundamental aspects: minor things, like the ability to keep time.

  ‘Lars’s drumming wasn’t quite up to the standards needed for the recording studio,’ is Rasmussen’s recollection, a state of affairs the producer reckoned to be ‘really really strange’.

  ‘I think the first recording we did was [a rough take of] “Creeping Death”, and after they’d done it I got the band into the control room so they could check the sound,’ remembers the producer. ‘They were delighted with it. So then we took Lars into the back room – a big ten foot by ten foot room where the drums
were set up with mics all around the kit – and the first thing I asked Lars was, “Why are you starting on an upbeat all the time?” And he looked at me and said, “What the fuck is an upbeat?” … [But] I quickly realised that Lars – and this pretty much defines his attitude to drumming – what Lars lives for in his playing is doing all the fills. All of the stuff in between, he never gave a thought to. But all of his fills were fabulous; they sounded really good and they were in time. But every time he had to do something simple, that’s when we’d have problems. Lars is a good drummer, but he’s not a good timekeeper.’

  In the years that have elapsed since the recording of Ride the Lightning, it has become almost a hanging offence to utter a single negative word regarding the musicianship of Cliff Burton. For his part Rasmussen describes Burton as being ‘the best bass player I ever worked with’, while at the same time acknowledging that he too ‘had some issues when it came to keeping time’.

  As drummer and bassist hacked their way towards some kind of rhythm (with Ulrich receiving guidance from Flemming Larsen, then the drummer in Danish thrashers Artillery, who later became his drum tech) in Sweet Silence’s other studio, Freddie Hansson, Rasmussen’s business partner and studio co-owner, would be recording Danish jazz musicians. These players would hear the music being played in the other room and react with vociferous disdain. ‘These musicians would hear Metallica and go, “God it’s so fast, it’s so loud and it’s so untight”,’ remembers Rasmussen. ‘And I’d be going, “But it’s fucking brilliant!” Me, I didn’t just like it, I loved it. And the jazz musicians were saying, “Yeah, but they can’t play!”’