Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I Read online

  If Cliff Burton could hardly have been said to be viewing the sights of London (at least not while locked inside a police cell), the same held true for James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich. With the band’s first date at the Marquee fast approaching, on March 23 the pair travelled to the not at all picturesque neighbourhood of Walthamstow, a north-eastern suburb of the city known locally for its art deco dog-racing stadium and very little else, in order to drum up interest in their debut UK performance set to take place four nights later. To do this, the pair handed out flyers to fans gathered at the Royal Standard pub where that night Exciter were playing a headline show.

  ‘Lars and James were just giving out flyers inside of the venue,’ says Malcolm Dome, who was with the pair that evening. ‘They were just walking around asking people if they’d come down to the Marquee to watch them play. I don’t think it was a case that they necessarily thought that no one would come, but more a case of the fact that they just didn’t know what was going to happen. No one knew what was going to happen. There was a bit of a buzz about Metallica but this had taken a knock from the fact that the tour with The Rods had been cancelled. Suddenly from [a proposed date at] the Hammersmith Odeon, Exciter are playing the Royal Standard, which is a tiny place. And while Exciter got a good crowd that night, it wasn’t a huge one. So you can see why no one quite knew what to expect.’

  Hetfield and Ulrich’s willingness to hustle on behalf of their own band in this way – an enterprise one imagines came more naturally to the drummer than it did the front man – lends credence to Martin Hooker’s observation that American bands were willing to work harder than their British counterparts in an effort to engineer some kind of forward momentum.

  The significance of Metallica’s appearances at the Marquee would also have been something that was not missed by the band. Originally opened in 1958 on London’s Oxford Street, since moving the short distance to Soho’s Wardour Street in 1964 the 400-capacity room had established itself as the most iconic live music club in the world, eclipsing the profiles of even New York’s CBGB and the Fillmore in San Francisco. By 1984 the Marquee’s small stage had supported the weight of such acts as The Who, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, The Police, The Jam and Iron Maiden, to name but a few. For any group equipped with any degree of knowledge of musical history, an appearance at the Marquee was an occasion that amounted to more than just another date on a tour schedule. As if this weren’t enough, the headline act on March 27, 1984, might also have been feeling an added degree of pressure. For Metallica to have failed to honour their undercard appearance at the Hammersmith Odeon with The Rods was one thing; to then have managed only a timid splash over two nights at the Marquee would be quite another. A failure of this kind would have done nothing to encourage the charge of electricity that was beginning to crackle around their name.

  They needn’t have worried. As tour manager Gem Howard remembers, ‘pretty much everyone from Kerrang!’ attended the first of the two performances, ‘everyone from the receptionist to the editor’. The band had also managed to attract paying customers in numbers sufficient to fill the room in which they were playing, a feat they would also accomplish less than a fortnight later. As the English winter ceded territory to a more agreeable spring, Metallica placed their first marker in the heart of one of the world’s greatest and most musically significant cities.

  ‘It was quite a typical mayhemic Marquee experience with sweat pouring down the walls,’ remembers Geoff Barton. ‘But I don’t know if I necessarily saw the potential of Metallica at that point, because to me it was just a barrage of noise. It would be great for me to say, “Yes, I could see they were megastars in an instant,” but I don’t think that was really the case.’

  ‘They blew the place apart,’ is the rather more effusive recollection of Malcolm Dome, who bore witness to both of the group’s performances on Wardour Street. ‘The thing I remember most about them was just how commanding a presence James Hetfield was onstage. His personality was still developing at that point, but even then he had a great deal of stage presence. Live, he drove that band. And I remember Cliff looking odd and not seeming to fit in with the group that he was playing with, but in a good way. He just seemed to be a bit different, like a Southern rocker in a thrash band. But you just looked at what was happening on that stage and got the sense that you were watching something monumental.

  ‘At that time there were a number of American bands who were coming over to England and playing club shows,’ he continues. ‘Y&T had been over, as had The Rods and Twisted Sister. All of those bands had been really very impressive. But this was something different. The music Metallica were playing seemed to offer a whole new direction. And onstage, they sounded even heavier than they did on record.’

  But if Metallica’s visceral live performances were of a power capable of thrilling audiences from San Francisco to London, when it came to the recording studio the group were ready to unveil a more nuanced and textured interpretation of their sound. Ride the Lightning met its waiting public on July 27, 1984, a mere one year and two days after the release of Kill ’Em All. The eight-song set was more than the sound of a band growing into their own skin; it was also the work of a group whose musical inquisitiveness had taken them far from the point at which they stood just twelve months previously. Odd, then, that one of its creators spoke of the band’s effort with some hesitation. Informed by an ear trained on what he believed the album lacked rather than what it was outside parties would hear – itself always the sign of a restless creative force – when asked his opinion on Ride the Lightning Lars Ulrich explained with a perspective that suggested he viewed the bottle of vodka as being half-empty rather than two-quarters full.

  ‘We’re as happy [with the album] as we [can] be,’ he said, adding that ‘a few of the songs were only written just before we had to do the album, so I think we might have arranged them a little differently if we had had the opportunity to put them down on tape first, and then gone away and listened to them before doing the album.’

  The very fact that Ulrich is making reference to musical arrangements offers a clue as to the distance traversed by the group over the course of the previous months. While the musicianship on Kill ’Em All is often accomplished in an individual sense, in 1983 Metallica’s technique for summoning volume and force was to emphasise their power by layering instruments atop each other in a manner that produced heat rather than light. As Ulrich himself rather astutely observed, in effect the band’s debut album was like ‘one complete track’, whereas its successor proved that ‘You don’t have to depend on speed to be powerful and heavy.’

  With Ride the Lightning Metallica showed that they could transcend the boundaries of Kill ’Em All with some ease, a point that is made before the album’s opening track, ‘Fight Fire with Fire’, has even really begun. While the main body of this song sees Metallica rallying to a riff that is both precise and relentless, the tracks opens not with power chords or a bass drum beat but rather with the swell of beautifully textured acoustic guitars. The contrast between what is heard in the first seconds and what soon follows is not only deliberately startling, but also serves to set the parameters within which the album itself operates. In 1984 the acoustic-then-electric technique displayed on ‘Fight Fire with Fire’ was sufficiently revolutionary and effective as to be quickly seized upon by thrash metal’s chasing pack and copied to such an extent that within two years it would be rendered a cliché.

  Not that Metallica themselves were above resorting to cliché. Despite displaying a level of musical progression that is rarely less than striking, Ride the Lightning is not an album free from the banalities particular to heavy metal at the time. Twenty-nine years after the fact, ‘Creeping Death’ remains a classic of the genre, and it is a testament to the song’s remarkable musical power that it manages to obscure a lyric – the Biblical tale of the curse of the death of the first-born from the book of Exodus – that while poetically competent is in essence not a g
ood deal smarter than a rock. The same might be said of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, a tale of medieval men fighting to the death over a patch of land, a sentiment accompanied by music of such quality that to this day it remains a particular favourite of Metallica’s audience and a staple of the group’s live set. It is, though, somehow more than magisterial music that rescues a lyric that might have been both brittle and daft; here, the notion that James Hetfield has established an emotional connection between himself and the characters in the song is a difficult one to shake.

  Throughout Ride the Lightning the presence of Cliff Burton permeates, his authoritative but never insistent technique adding texture and depth to songs such as the instrumental composition ‘The Call of Ktulu’, a piece that owes as much to nineteenth-century European classical music as it does 1980s European heavy metal. A glance at the songwriting credits reveals that along with Hetfield and Ulrich (credited as co-authors of all eight tracks) the bassist co-wrote three-quarters of Ride the Lightning – Kirk Hammett is also listed as co-author of four songs – suggesting that Burton’s contribution to Metallica’s ever-developing sound was more fundamental than merely stepping on a Crybaby wah-wah pedal and making a noise that sounded like a lead guitar.

  In fact the two songs on which Cliff Burton’s name does not warrant a writing credit are the album’s weakest selections. As a power-metal anthem that declines to engage thrash metal’s top gear, ‘Trapped under Ice’ – a track that had its roots in the riff Kirk Hammett wrote for the early Exodus number ‘Impaler’ – is a song that manages to be effective without ever quite becoming affecting. That said, compared to ‘Escape’, ‘Trapped under Ice’ suddenly assumes a mantle of unparalleled artistic genius. With its ponderous tempo, uncharacteristically timid chorus and insipid lyric – where the narrator aspires to ‘break away from … common fashion’ desiring instead to be ‘out on [his] own, out to be free’ ‘Escape’ holds the ignominious honour of being Metallica’s first artistically dishonest song.

  ‘In terms of progression [the band] were speeding along,’ remembers Flemming Rasmussen. ‘Their songwriting was just getting better and better. And they did the “Escape” song, which was supposed to be their single. Big mistake. [It was them saying] “This is how much we’re willing to suck up to get a hit.” That was them saying, “This is how much we want to progress in the music world.” But it was their own stuff that did that for them, not a song like “Escape”, which is good … I think they recorded the song to try and get some kind of commercial break. They didn’t realise that that was a total waste of time.’

  The folly of ‘Escape’ is not that it attempts to locate musical ground which its authors may explore, but rather that it does so with a degree of calculation and compromise ill-suited to Metallica’s instincts. In a just and fair world, if one song from Ride the Lightning were to have been regarded with suspicion and even opprobrium by the band’s growing constituency, this would have been it. Clearly this was an opinion shared by Metallica themselves, who declined to play the song in concert for twenty-eight years. In 1984, though, ‘Escape’ was shielded from injurious brickbats by ‘Fade to Black’, a song greeted by many Metallica fans with all the enthusiasm one might associate with being run over by a car.

  Whether consciously or otherwise, ‘Fade To Black’ takes Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Freebird’ as its structural template. In no hurry to make its point, the song weaves its way through a current of subdued guitars and graceful melodies, before the band eventually flood the dam with layer upon layer of rhythm and lead guitars. Despite it being possessed of both grace and fluency, many of Ride the Lightning’s initial recipients viewed the song not as a natural progression but as an outright surrender, a sop to those whose tastes did not run to metal finished to the point of razor sharpness. This would be the first occasion when the intensity felt by some sections of Metallica’s audience would – in principle at least – prove to be a blessing that carried with it a hint of a curse. Those who disliked ‘Fade to Black’ did not react to the song with a sense of disappointment, they did so with thoughts of betrayal.

  ‘When they played “Fade …” for the first time in [San Francisco] on the Ride … tour, some of us waved Kleenex at the band,’ remembers Brian Lew. ‘Cliff was pissed [off]. They lost some of the original fans over it.’

  But if Metallica’s artistic determination was shaking loose some members of their fan base, with Ride the Lightning the group also managed to attract the attentions of a new and wider audience. On Friday August 3, 1984, Metallica joined headliners Raven and opening act Anthrax at the 3,500-capacity Roseland Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan for A Midsummer Night’s Scream, the concert promoted by Johnny Zazula. Located on West 52nd Street and Broadway, just ten blocks north of Times Square, Metallica’s first appearance on the island of Manhattan was an occasion to remember in more ways than one. Performing a ten-song set in front of a sold-out crowd, each member of whom appeared eager to eat raw meat from the palm of James Hetfield’s hand, Metallica were once again met with tangible evidence that their efforts were beginning to pay dividends. And with regard to one member of the audience in particular, the San Franciscans’ appearance at the Roseland Ballroom became the location of a landmark occasion.

  In the summer of 1984 Michael Alago was an ambitious twenty-two year-old A&R man employed by Elektra Records. Alago decided that he would pursue a career in the music industry after passing the doors of the Ritz club on East 12th Street in Manhattan in the spring of 1980. At the time a college student working part-time in a nearby pharmacy, the teenager did not let the fact that the venue was closed for renovations deter him from what was by any standards an audacious hustle. Entering the Ritz, Alago announced that despite the fact that he possessed no previous experience and no CV, he desired to pursue a career in the music business. Impressed by the young man’s chutzpah, the club’s owner handed him a first job in rock ’n’ roll. Not so much living the dream as learning his trade, at first Michael Alago spent his working day making coffee and fetching sandwiches for colleagues higher up the food chain. Soon enough, though, he was dealing with the acts booked to play the 3,000-capacity venue. He spoke with the artists and liaised with promoters and agents. When the time came for a move from concert hall to record label, Alago could now claim to be in possession of both a CV and feet-on-the-ground experience. It was enough to land him a job in the A&R department of Elektra Records.

  It was here that Michael Alago first met Johnny Zazula, who presented him with copies of Raven’s All for One and Metallica’s Kill ’Em All. While believing the former LP to be ‘very good’, Alago felt it was the American band’s debut album that made the deepest impression. Such was the strength of the band’s impact that in late 1983 Alago flew to San Francisco to see the quartet play at The Stone, an experience he remembers as being ‘so exciting and so confrontational [but] in a positive way’ that ‘I lost my mind’. At the culmination of the group’s set, he made his way backstage and introduced himself to Lars Ulrich, with whom he had spoken on the phone just a few days previously. The drummer took possession of the A&R man’s telephone number and learned that the visitor from New York had his ear on the band.

  ‘Being a young A&R person I didn’t know what to do at first,’ admits Alago of his first meeting with the drummer. ‘So we shook hands and I said, “You know, man, I love the record, this is incredible, just please keep in touch with me.”’

  Possessed of an instinctive eye for opportunities, Ulrich did keep in touch with Alago, albeit on an intermittent basis. But with Metallica set to play Manhattan in 1984, the drummer was sufficiently thoughtful and politic to remember to invite the A&R man. For his part, Alago had not forgotten the impression Metallica had made on him at The Stone. But if the sight of the group in a cramped club in their adopted home town had provided the young industry insider with a frisson of excitement, not to mention a hint of commercial opportunity, the sight of thousands of New Yorkers queuing along West 52nd Street in
the crushing heat of a New York summer must have brought to mind the image of an untapped oil well.

  The occasion of A Midsummer’s Night Scream was nothing less than a coming-of-age party for what a number of people were beginning to describe as the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, a moniker that would be quickly eclipsed by a term already making an appearance in the pages of Kerrang! and Metal Forces: thrash metal. And while the bill at the Roseland had as its headliners an English band – for it was Raven that closed the show – the noise that greeted the arrival of local representatives Anthrax and later Metallica showed that in the city that never sleeps a new audience was waking up to the sound of domestic, cutting-edge metal.