Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I Read online

  Despite his tender years, perhaps, even, because of them Alago’s instincts were given full licence by his superiors at Elektra Records. Following the band’s set, the executive headed to the band’s dressing room to discover that he was the only A&R man within hustling distance. Despite Metallica holding to their hearts a healthy and innate distrust of outsiders in general and of much of the music industry in particular, the fact that the A&R man was the same age as the band he was by now attempting to woo (not to mention the fact that the previous year he had flown five hours coast to coast on his own dime in order to watch them play) meant that Alago was afforded a warm reception. In response, Metallica were met with an invitation to a meeting at Elektra’s New York offices the following afternoon.

  ‘Literally that night, I told them how over the moon I was about them,’ he recalls. ‘And [then] the next day I got beer and Chinese food and the band arrived in the early afternoon. At first we sat in the conference room, which was bigger than my office … and we sat there for a long time and talked about the music. The guys loved that there was a history to Elektra … So I think that excitement, my knowledge of their music, the fact that we were the same age, and that Elektra had a reputation kinda cemented the deal then and there. I don’t remember there being any complications at all in signing them.’

  In a move that speaks of a bygone age for a music industry that today finds itself in rapid decline, Metallica committed themselves to Elektra (and vice versa) in a contract that spanned eight albums. Another remarkable aspect of this union is that the courtship began without any kind of guidance from the band’s management. In fact, Johnny Zazula learned that contact had been made between band and label after the fact, news he greeted with an uneven temper.

  ‘John was furious with me,’ recalls Alago today. ‘Because you know what, I had to fucking tell him, “John, I’ve been talking to Lars.” And [the manager] went off at the deep end. It was almost like I was stealing his first born. He wanted to sue Time Warner [Elektra’s parent company]. He was going to get me fired. He was going to talk to [my superiors] – you know, how dare I, and all that kind of stuff. And of course what happened in the end was that our business affairs people talked to their lawyers, we agreed that the Megaforce logo would be on the next record, and they got a nice percentage …’

  Alago goes on to say that he ‘adores’ the Zazulas, observing that Johnny and Marsha ‘were such incredible people’ who ‘love music the way we all love music. So once we got past that little hiccup, the band was signed to the label.’

  For Zazula, though, this was not so much a ‘little hiccup’ but rather the beginning of the end. The manager’s anger at Michael Alago was misdirected; and the man who supposedly was in charge of Metallica’s business operation could hardly have failed to appreciate that the group on whom he had staked the home in which he and his family lived had in effect taken the biggest decision of their short career without seeking his counsel. Wearily he agreed to pass over the rights to Ride the Lightning once sales of the Megaforce release exceeded 75,000 units.

  As if this weren’t enough, over the horizon troops were beginning to marshal themselves in opposition to Johnny Z’s exhausted forces, as Metallica caught the eye of a man who was quickly emerging as one of the largest and most formidable beasts in the music industry’s feral jungle.

  Then, as now, along with his business partner Cliff Burnstein, Peter Mensch was the co-owner of the management company Q Prime. The pair met in Chicago in the Seventies, when Burnstein launched the Blank label, an imprint of Mercury Records (for whom he had worked for a number of years, signing both Rush and the Scorpions to the company) and invited Mensch to run the label on a day to day basis. The two made for an effective if unlikely couple, with Burnstein possessing the aura of a Buddhist monk adhering to a vow of semi-silence while his partner handed out first impressions of an urban hustler who did not so much suffer fools gladly as leave them filleted and twitching on the floor. When invited by Aerosmith manager David Krebs to take up the position of that band’s tour accountant, Mensch sought his friend’s advice, and was told by Burnstein to ‘take the fuckin’ job, have fun and learn a lot’. Working his way up from this starting point in the company, soon enough Mensch was handling operations for bands such as the Scorpions, Def Leppard and Michael Schenker. Asked in 1979 to take charge of an emerging Australian band called AC/DC, Mensch extricated the quintet from their long-standing deal with producers Harry Vanda and George Young and instead paired them with Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, who had recently recorded the UK no. 1 single ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ with Dublin punks the Boomtown Rats. Highway to Hell, the first fruit of their union, duly became AC/DC’s first million-selling album in the United States. After moving to London in order to be nearer Krebs’s European-based roster, in 1980 Mensch invited Burnstein to leave Mercury Records and move to New York in order that the pair might handle his charges’ business operations in tandem and on two continents.

  Both being capable and ambitious men, it followed that the two friends would soon enough fly their employer’s coop in order to master their own destinies. This they did in 1982 with the formation of their company, Q Prime. But while it is customary music business practice that parties striking out on their own be accompanied by a number of bands with whom they already work, in the case of Burnstein and Mensch only Def Leppard shared the courage of their managers’ conviction. This was small fry indeed. In 1982 the Sheffield quintet had to their name two uneven, commercially underwhelming albums and little about them to suggest that a brighter future lay ahead. Since the managers received only a percentage of the money earned by those they represented, the first twelve months of Q Prime’s existence offered slim pickings indeed. Reflecting on this period, Cliff Burnstein recalled that their budget at the time would afforded only a diet of ‘peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a while’.

  The pair’s fortunes, however, were soon to change, and peanut butter and jelly would quickly be replaced by caviar and truffles. In 1983 Def Leppard released their third album, Pyromania, a set that would sell more than seven million copies in the United States alone and make the name of both its creators and the men who managed them. Produced by Mutt Lange and propelled skyward by the video clip for the song ‘Photograph’ being placed on heavy rotation by MTV, the quintet from the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire found themselves with both a smash hit album and, in Burnstein and Mensch, representatives who understood the crucial distinction between a successful record and a successful career. For their part, the men who had founded Q Prime also understood that their own fortunes depended on the longevity not only of Def Leppard, but also of other bands whose legs were built for marathons rather than sprints.

  Although Q Prime harboured a suspicion of music journalists that has at times been known to cross the border into outright contempt, their initial advances to Metallica were facilitated by a bridge built by Kerrang!’s Xavier Russell. Having spotted a brace of youths in Shades record shop sporting Metallica T-shirts during a summer scouting mission in London, Burnstein sought out Ride the Lightning and heard in its eight tracks a unit with the potential to sell records to both underground and mainstream metal audiences. In the autumn of 1984 a call was placed from New York City to Russell’s flat in London: the man on the American end of the line was Mensch, who told the Englishman that he was thinking about making an approach in Metallica’s direction. Russell’s response was both adamant and incredulous.

  ‘I said, “Thinking? Thinking! You should go for it, they’re going to be absolutely massive,”’ he recalls. Mensch told the journalist that the reason for the delay in connecting with his quarry was that he lacked a contact number via which they might be reached. This was the reason for his call – could Russell act as conduit? ‘I said, “I haven’t got Lars’s number, but I’ve got Kirk Hammett’s mum’s number, so I can phone her up and see if she can get them to phone you or phone me,”’ he remembers.

  ‘So t
hen I got through to Kirk’s mum and said, “Are any of the band about?” She said, “No, but I can get a message to them.” So I said, “Can you get Lars or Kirk to phone me urgently, because it’s to do with management.” Following this, I then get a phone call at about three in the morning. It was the operator saying, “Will you accept a reverse-charge call from a phone box in California?” I asked, “Who is it?” and I was told, “It’s some guy called Metallica.” So I said, “Yeah, okay,” and then, of course, I heard, “Hey, hey, this is Lars – have you got some news?” So I told him about my conversation with Peter Mensch, and he said, “Can you get him to phone us? I’ll hang on here.”’

  Xavier Russell took the number of the phone box in which Ulrich was standing, said his goodbyes and placed a call to Peter Mensch. The next day the drummer phoned the Englishman once more, and told him that ‘I think we’re going to sign [with Q Prime].’

  At the time Metallica were still based on the East Coast. Mensch suggested to Ulrich that the two parties meet at the home of Cliff Burnstein in Hoboken, New Jersey. Picturing in their minds the kind of luxury befitting a man now in full possession of music industry muscle, instead the group were surprised to discover that their prospective co-manager resided in a neighbourhood which by the standards of California was ‘pretty urban’. Along with this revelation, Metallica also found out that despite having owned the property for a year, Burnstein had yet to fill its space with much furniture. Instead of finding themselves held in the comfort of leather chairs in a space designed to executive specifications, instead the house guests were invited to perch themselves on wooden packing crates. While this setting may not have instantly suggested that Q Prime would offer a fast track to the high life, Metallica nevertheless decided to stay.

  ‘I instantly felt that [this set up] was right for [us],’ remembers Ulrich. ‘I was very surprised how down to earth it was. That was a very big word back then, “down to earth”. And Cliff [Burnstein] was really down to earth – we hadn’t met Peter yet – but it just seemed so right for Metallica.’

  Burnstein was struck by the impression made by a band who ‘while only being twenty-one or twenty-two years old’ were in possession ‘of a pretty goddamned good idea of what they wanted’; not only that but had learned from experience ‘how some things can go bad because [a manager] doesn’t have enough money …’

  And so it was that in the shortest space of time opportunity had come calling for Metallica. In order that this might happen, however, a door was closed in the face of Johnny Zazula. Despite having offered the group their first real breaks, and having striven on their behalf almost to the point of bankruptcy, Johnny Z’s role in the story of Metallica was placed into the past tense with immediate effect. It would not be the last time that the band would make difficult but wise choices with both a direct stare and an air of unflinching ruthlessness.

  With a new infrastructure now supporting them, Metallica’s bandwagon began to roll with increased speed and purpose. Speaking to Bernard Doe of Metal Forces as 1984 drew to a close, Lars Ulrich was bullish as to the road ahead.

  ‘Cliff Burnstein who signed us to our new management deal in the States has this big belief that what we are doing will be the next big thing in heavy metal – especially in the States which is something like 80 per cent of the market – and this whole Ratt, Mötley Crüe, Quiet Riot, Black ’N Blue thing will get kinda old and die out, and that Metallica will lead the way in a sort of new “true metal” trend,’ he gushed. ‘One step further out than say Iron Maiden, who are at the moment the most extreme metal band with major success.

  ‘I honestly believe that the kids who are into the Priest, Maiden, Kiss, [Twisted] Sister will take on to what we’re doing. I’m not saying it’s something that’s going to happen overnight, but it could start developing and Metallica could be the front runners of a new branch of heavy metal.’

  6 – CREEPING DEATH

  Each member of any given band carries with them on tour items that help ease the burden of weeks and months away from home. Some have video cameras with which they document the activities of their colleagues and friends. Some have phone numbers of people in each city from whom they may secure drugs, or of women with whom they may keep intimate company before departing for their next port of call.

  Cliff Burton, though, was, in this regard as in so many others, different. Whenever on tour, the bass player kept among his possessions a hammer. On one of Metallica’s early European excursions, as band and crew were negotiating customs at Calais en route to the United Kingdom, a French customs officer plucked the item from Burton’s luggage and regarded first it, and then the young American in front of him, with a quizzical look. Burton nonchalantly met the official’s gaze.

  ‘Hey, you never know when you might need it,’ he drawled.

  Le douanier gave the most Gallic of shrugs and carefully set the hammer back in Burton’s bag, before methodically denuding each band member of their stash of freshly acquired European pornography.

  When the quartet returned to France for the opening date of the Ride the Lightning European tour in November 1984, custody of Burton’s favourite hardware item was entrusted to James Hetfield’s guitar tech Andy Battye, one of a clutch of road-hardened young Englishmen newly appointed to Metallica’s crew by Q Prime’s Mensch and Burnstein. Sound engineer ‘Big’ Mick Hughes, a garrulous and likeable built-like-a-bomb-shelter Brummie who had learned how to translate mush into live music by manning the sound desk for the English punk band GBH was another new addition to the team, while Sheffield-born Robert Allen, Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen’s witheringly sarcastic older brother, came in to take over the duties of tour manager.

  Four weeks into the tour, on December 14, the party arrived in Lieto, a Finnish city with a population numbering fewer than 17,000 people. The group were booked to play at the Ijoharo club, a venue which by day served as a school gymnasium. To no little consternation, the American visitors saw that they had been booked to play the room as the live act in what appeared to be an end-of-term school disco. At one end of the hall stood a DJ of a kind heard and seen at the budget end of the wedding reception market. The disc jockey would play records at a distorted volume, while speaking excitedly into his microphone in an accent of soft consonants and vowels that stretched like melted cheese. Ticket holders were left with spots in front of their eyes from the glare of disco lights blinking to the beat of the music. At the opposite end of the room was the stage on which Metallica would later perform, a space sufficient to accommodate the group and their equipment, but not necessarily at the same time.

  Outside the venue sat the visitors’ tour bus, one berth of which belonged to lighting director Tony Zed. Zed was not only older than the other members of the travelling party but also louder; influenced by a scene from Mel Brooks’ comedy classic Blazing Saddles – a film watched repeatedly by band and crew as they were ferried from city to city – the roadie had adopted the practice of announcing his entrance to a room by whooping at the summit of his lungs. This he did in Lieto as he opened the door to Metallica’s tour bus, only to discover that his actions had caused consternation with a Finnish schoolgirl seated in the vehicle’s front lounge. If the presence of a female yet to reach the age of majority aboard a bus chartered by a band not known for its decorum was a sight to raise eyebrows, this was quickly eclipsed when the girl stood up and punched Zed hard in the face. In what can either be seen as a blow for sexual equality or else the actions of someone old enough to know better, Zed reacted by striking the schoolgirl – also in the face – causing the young student to exit the bus in tears.

  Outside the doors of the tour bus, the girl wasted little time in telling her classmates that she had narrowly escaped the attentions of men who desired to cause her harm. By the time Metallica took to the stage, displeasure with the visiting party had escalated to such an extent that midway through their set the room exploded into a mass brawl, while at the side of the stage a bass speaker was
set on fire.

  ‘The whole fucking place was just this big scrap going on,’ recalls Mick Hughes, ‘and everybody was in the audience, all the band and crew. It was madness.’

  Looking out upon this scene, Cliff Burton decided that he had had enough. Attracting the attention of Andy Battye, he said, simply, ‘Andy, fetch the hammer!’ The guitar technician ran to the tour bus, found the blunt instrument, and returned to place it in the bass player’s hands. This done, Burton then strode through the mêlée of bodies, whirling his hammer in arcs of 360 degrees and telling those in his path that they had better back off. The sight was sufficiently startling to put an immediate end to the wall-to-wall donnybrook, as those who only seconds before had been throwing punches instead made way for Burton as if they were waves at the feet of Moses. Mick Hughes recalls the sight of the hammer-wielding bassist wading into the stramash as being ‘fucking legendary’.

  But while a winter’s night in Finland was the site of a nadir equal to anything experienced on the Kill ’Em All for One tour, elsewhere Metallica’s march into the sightlines of a wider public was beginning to take form. In the United States the initial Megaforce pressing of Ride the Lightning had made it presence known on the lower reaches of the Billboard album chart, selling in excess of 30,000 copies, no mean feat for a record released on a fledgling independent label. On the continent to the right, by the autumn of 1984 the album had been bought by more than 85,000 listeners, with a significant proportion of this constituency residing in the United Kingdom. Such was the impact of this impression that in December Kerrang! decided to honour the group with its first cover story. In doing this, the magazine not only gambled on the fact that sufficient numbers of its readers would accept an emerging group as being worthy of the title’s front page, but also chose to mark this occasion not with a photograph of the entire band but rather a solo picture of Lars Ulrich spray-painted silver and holding in his hands a cake adorned with metal nuts and bolts.