Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I Read online

  As gratifying as all this must have been for Metallica, without question, their two most significant live appearances of the year took place in the warmer months of 1985. The first of these saw the band fly once more to England in order to honour a booking on the bill at the Monsters of Rock festival held at Donington Park, a motor racing circuit just outside Nottingham in the East Midlands. The brainchild of promoters Paul Loasby and Maurice Jones, the then annual, then day-long, event had been born in 1980 as an outdoor concert, the line-up for which had been designed to appeal solely to fans of hard rock and heavy metal. The first Monsters of Rock bill was headlined by Rainbow, atop a docket that also featured Scorpions and Saxon. Other groups that appeared at the muddiest festival site of the English summer in the early to mid-Eighties included AC/DC, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, Whitesnake and Twisted Sister.

  With a line-up of headliners ZZ Top, English progressive rock quintet Marillion, Ratt, Bon Jovi, Metallica, and Brummie pub rock footnotes Magnum as the day’s opening act, the roster for the 1985 Monsters of Rock festival remains the most muddled bill of the festival’s first decade of existence. Despite the world-class quality of the headline act – a group which featured the talents of one Billy F. Gibbons, a player once described by no less an authority than Jimi Hendrix as being the finest guitarist of his generation – too often the 55,000 people gathered on the uneven ground within the inside corners of a concrete racetrack on Saturday August 17, 1985, were subjected to music that tended towards the ponderous and mediocre, lightweight in its tonality and occasionally plain inane. Among this number, Metallica stood out like a severed thumb. The group may have had just nine songs and less than an hour to make their point, but in front of the largest crowd they had yet faced the San Franciscans proved they were fast becoming masters of a first impression of a form both defiant and unyielding.

  ‘If you came here to see spandex, eye make-up, and the words “Oh baby” in every fucking song, this ain’t the fucking band,’ announced Hetfield to those in attendance. ‘Forget that Spandex shit, we came here to bang some heads for fifty-five minutes.’ The front man then added that if the audience planned ‘to throw shit up here, just make sure that you don’t hit our beer – that’s our fuel!’

  More than a generation removed from the Monster of Rock festivals of the Eighties, it is difficult to re-create in words the kind of sight that met the eye at Donington Park. Suffice to say, it was no place for the faint of heart. Before the racetrack’s gates had even opened to the public, the roads leading to the site would be strewn with the bodies of young men already drunk to the point of unconsciousness. Whereas festivals in the twenty-first century see literally hundreds of bands spread over several stages for three or more days, in 1985 rock fans gathered at Donington were provided with just one stage and a handful of acts; anyone not partial to the group occupying the stage at any given time had no choice but to listen to the music being played until something better came along. Ticket holders did not always accept this state of affairs gladly, and would bombard the stage with whatever objects happened to be at hand. During Metallica’s first visit to the site, the component parts of an entire pig were hurled onstage; other objects that met the faces and fingers of more luckless groups included plastic bottles filled with warm urine in numbers sufficient to warrant the drawing of a black mesh curtain across the stage after each set in order that the stage could be swept clear of detritus. Needless to say, Metallica loved the place. But by the time Hetfield bid the English crowd farewell on the penultimate Saturday of August 1985, the group had found their spiritual home.

  ‘I’m still trying to work out why I love this band so much,’ wrote Xavier Russell in his Kerrang! review of the group’s Donington set, before adding in his distinctive and uniquely irritating style, ‘I have to put it down to one word: ENERGY. Even though [next act on the bill] Bon Jovi were surprisingly half-way decent, there was no way they could follow Metallica. [The San Franciscans possess] a natural ability to drain an audience, their music is so intense that one kan’t [sic] help but be moved, shocked and stunned by the noise they churn out.’

  Two weeks on from an appearance beneath the grey skies of an English motor racing track, Metallica would mark their second outdoor performance of the summer on the bill of the first night of the prestigious Day on the Green festival. Spanning two nights and headlined by the Scorpions, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s English pop duo Wham!, Day on the Green was the signature event of the German-born music promoter Bill Graham, the man responsible for staging that summer’s United States Live Aid concert at RFK Stadium in Philadelphia. Resident of the Bay Area since the early Sixties, Graham staged his first Day on the Green in 1973, after which the event took place each August for the next nineteen years and attracted performances from such names as the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, to name but four of many.

  The site for the late summer festival was the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum, a now ageing but not entirely charmless concrete bowl of a stadium that has as its principal tenants the Oakland Athletics baseball team and the Oakland Raiders American football franchise (in 1985, the Athletics were the facility’s sole sporting tenants). On the final day of August, however, an audience in excess of 50,000 people gathered not to witness home runs but to see an event that would immediately be recognised as the Californian coming-of-age party for a group that were locked in on the title ‘hometown heroes’.

  Alongside headliners Scorpions, the bill for the first night of 1985’s Day on the Green comprised Ratt, Oakland’s own Y&T, Rising Force – a group led by the Swedish guitar virtuoso Yngwie J. Malmsteen – and German metal group, Victory; Metallica’s slot was just two positions beneath that of the headliners.

  Regarding the bill for that first night today, one is struck by the fact that, of all the bands who played, Metallica were the only group whose circumstances continued to improve from this point on. Theirs is also the only name that might cause a ripple of excitement among rock fans younger than twenty-five (or even thirty-five) years of age. The rest of the day was committed to groups who would soon come to be seen as yesterday’s men. While Scorpions would continue to perform in arenas in the United States, it is fair to note that by 1985 the group had ceased to attract to their cause the allegiance of new and younger fans. Instead, this constituency surged towards Metallica. Despite the fact that Ride the Lightning was yet to secure a position in the US Top 100, its authors were nonetheless already casting covetous glances at Scorpions and Ratt’s ivory towers.

  More than a headline slot at the Hollywood Palladium, more than a place on the bill at Donington Park, even, Metallica’s appearance on the stage of the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum confirmed to scores of thousands of people gathered in one stadium that the ground on which they stood was shifting.

  From the front row to the back of the stadium’s third tier, Metallica’s set was met with emphatic acclaim. The level of volume summoned by the crowd – a gathering that included Mike Dirnt, future bassist with Green Day, and Robb Flynn, who would go on to form Machine Head – exceeded that reserved for the bands that followed. As if to emphasise their allegiance, by the time Ratt began their set the Los Angeles quintet faced volleys of clumps of grass and mud torn by hand from the baseball field and hurled by the audience in their direction.

  ‘I remember watching the band’s set that day and being made really aware of just how popular this band might eventually become,’ recalls Malcolm Dome, who was once again in the correct place at the appointed hour, in order to review the festival for Kerrang! ‘The response they got from the crowd was phenomenal. It would have been phenomenal if they’d had an album that was in the Top 20, or if they’d had a single on the chart, or a video being played on MTV – but they had none of these things. All they had was a growing word of mouth, which meant that people in the stadium who hadn’t seen them play before had a real sense of anticipation about what might be in store.
It was obvious that this wasn’t just “A. N. Other band”.’

  Backstage, following their nine-song set, Metallica basked in the glory of being afforded a reception befitting rock stars by acting like rock stars, or at least by acting in a manner they believed befitted a rock star. On a trestle table in the band’s dressing room sat a platter of cold cuts as well as a tray of chilled fruits. Seizing this produce in his hands, James Hetfield attempted to force the food through the air vent in one of the walls of the dressing room. Realising that the laws of physics were not on his side and that this quantity of food could not pass through such a restricted space, Hetfield instead decided passage would be best secured by smashing a larger hole into the wall. His decision attracted the attentions of Bill Graham himself – not a man with whom any sensible person would choose to tangle – who took the singer aside for a frank de-briefing. ‘The attitude you have – I’ve had the same conversation with Keith Moon and Sid Vicious,’ said Graham. If Hetfield’s first response was to offer up his patented goofy grin at being associated with such VIP-room rock-star company, his elation soon subsided upon recognising that the ‘attitude’ of which Graham spoke had led directly to each man ending up dead.

  Elsewhere on site Cliff Burton was allowing Lars Ulrich to feel the sharp side of his tongue. Dome remembers hearing the Dane wondering aloud why he was the only member of his group not to have a girlfriend, and Burton replying, ‘Lars, there might be a reason for that. Go and take a look in the mirror.’ That same day, the English journalist recalls the bassist telling the drummer that if he heard ‘one more word from you then I’m gonna fucking punch you’.

  ‘Lars was a spoiled brat,’ says Dome, with a shrug. ‘In fact, he still is.’

  This he may have been, but as the Scorpions climbed into limousines for the twenty-yard journey from their dressing room to the stage, Ulrich was, as ever, plotting the moves that would take his group from third on the bill to the position currently occupied by the German group.

  The day after the group’s appearance at the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum, the members of Metallica flew from San Francisco International Airport to Copenhagen. Or rather three of them did; Cliff Burton, for reasons known only to himself and never fully outlined to his colleagues, failed to report at checkin and missed his flight. Two days later, when the bassist finally appeared at Sweet Silence, the group began work on the album that would eventually succeed Ride the Lightning. Following the culmination of the tour with Armored Saint, the quartet had spent months at work inside the musty confines of the garage in the grounds of 3132 Carlson Boulevard exploring musical avenues, leaving no riff unpicked. As if completing a complex jigsaw puzzle, the group pieced together ideas, guitar parts, verses and choruses until material of a quality and duration sufficient for a studio album had been sewn in place.

  ‘I would like to say that there was something magical in the air in the summer we wrote Master of Puppets, something that hasn’t been there before and has never existed since,’ recalls Ulrich. ‘But that would be a lie. I guess we just had the right attitude and the right openness to ideas. The whole band was getting more confident.

  ‘Most of the record was written in May and June of 1985, from the best ideas that were kicking around on our riff tapes from the previous year,’ he continues. ‘It really wasn’t any different this time than before – it’d basically be me and James sitting down with a bunch of tapes and sorting through the details of his ideas and Kirk’s ideas. But Cliff had [also] been in the band for a few years and he brought in a lot of harmonies and melodies. It took a little while for James and I to open up to some of Cliff’s ideas about harmony and melody because we’d never played stuff like that before. But after a while we got it and that’s when we started experimenting more.’

  For his part Kirk Hammett recalls the songs on which Metallica were working coalescing into form in Metallica’s practice garage and recalls, ‘When [the group] started getting the songs together and rehearsing them, I can remember getting a huge lump in my throat, just from the emotion from playing these great tunes.’

  Metallica then committed these songs to demo tape, a copy of which was sent from Oakland to Copenhagen to be heard by Flemming Rasmussen.

  ‘Lars phoned me up and told me that they’d written the [next] album,’ the producer recalls. ‘Then when they sent me the demos it was pretty obvious that they wanted me to produce it.’

  There was, however, one caveat. After spending four weeks in the frigid embrace of a Danish winter making Ride the Lightning, for their next album Metallica desired a warmer location in which to record their next collection of songs. Los Angeles was nominated as the city of choice, a place far enough away from home that the group would not be distracted from their work but close enough to the Bay Area that the four men might fly home on any weekend they desired. To their laconic and unflappable producer, this sounded like an idea he could not only accommodate but also to which he could be sympathetic. Recalling the recording of the band’s second album, Rasmussen is of the opinion that ‘It must have been really boring for Kirk, who didn’t play anything on the album apart from his lead guitar parts’, adding that the idea of returning to Sweet Silence Studios for an even longer period was a prospect to which the guitarist would respond with the words ‘I really don’t want to go to Denmark again!’

  In preparation for the making of the album that the world would soon enough know as Master of Puppets, Rasmussen flew to Los Angeles so that he and Lars Ulrich might spend a week scouting studios potentially suitable for the task. In this pursuit the pair had little luck. As with every single aspect of Metallica’s operation, the group’s drummer held in his mind an exact image of what it was he was looking for, in this case a sound room similar to that of Sweet Silence in which he could replicate the drum sound heard on Ride the Lightning. But beating a path from Redondo Beach to the San Fernando Valley, the two men could find no facility that matched these specifications. By default Sweet Silence Studios – quite apart from the declining temperatures of Copenhagen as the city headed towards winter – began to shift into focus as the place at which Metallica would convene.

  ‘I think it’s a pretty safe bet that Lars was instrumental in persuading the rest of the band that they had to record the new album in Sweet Silence,’ says Rasmussen, not without humour.

  This being so, at least Metallica could take solace in the fact that in the autumn of 1985 the group’s improved commercial standing equated to a higher class of creature comforts. Rather than laying their bodies inside sleeping bags in someone else’s apartment, instead the visitors were ensconced in the relative luxury of the Scandinavia Hotel in Copenhagen’s lovely city centre. Here the band split into two camps, with Ulrich sharing a junior suite with Hetfield, while Hammett roomed with Burton. As with Ride the Lightning, recording sessions stretched through the night, beginning at seven in the evening and lasting until first light of the following morning. Before each shift would begin, though, Metallica would first eat dinner at the home Rasmussen shared with his wife, Pernille, who cooked for the musicians throughout the making of the album.

  ‘They were really quiet and really nice,’ remembers the producer, an impression that suggests this was a band quite adept at modulating its behaviour to accord to the circumstances in which it found itself. ‘At the time I lived with my sister, so we had my sister there as well, and at times there’d be quite a crowd there for the evening meal. But [Metallica] all had really long hair, and I remember the first time Cliff came over, when we put the plate down in front of him he’d just put his head down to eat and his hair would just fall all around the plate. You couldn’t see the food or his face; he just stuck his fork in and started eating.’

  Rather than dine for months on end with such an image in her line of sight, instead Pernille decided to invest in scrunchies in order that her guests could tie back their hair while eating at the dinner table. This, though, was not quite sufficient to fully domesticate the dining
habits of a group who in 1985 could still lay justifiable claim to the title of America’s most feral metal band. As is traditional in Scandinavian countries, the meals fed to Metallica each evening comprised more than one dish; and as is traditional in the United States, the guests would then pile the different items on to one plate before not so much eating the food as inhaling it. Ironically, however, the worst offender for this happened to be Danish, not American. So egregious were Ulrich’s eating habits that on one occasion his evening meal was served to him in a blender.

  At Sweet Silence Studios, the sessions for Master of Puppets began with the recording of covers of Diamond Head’s ‘The Prince’ and ‘Green Hell’ by the Misfits (with these versions of both tracks remaining unreleased to this day). The decision to run through songs authored by other groups was taken in order that Metallica might re-acclimatise themselves to the rigours of studio recording without this relearning curve coming at the expense of their own material. The process also served to identify any teething problems with regard to equipment and quality of sound. One such issue concerned Lars Ulrich’s snare drum, which, according to the producer, ‘sounded like shit’. Rasmussen suggested to his countryman that they see if a better sound could be found among the drums belonging to the studio, or else that the pair could head out to look for a replacement in the music shops of Copenhagen. Ulrich, though, had a better idea. He placed a call to Q Prime and requested a loan of Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen’s Tama ‘Black Beauty’ snare, widely regarded as the finest (and rarest) model of its kind on the market. At the time Allen was recovering from a car crash so serious that it had severed his left arm at the shoulder. According to Rasmussen, Ulrich reasoned that the English band’s drummer was ‘in the hospital so he’s not going to need it!’