Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I Read online

  ‘I knew it was going to be heavy,’ says Kornarens, ‘because when Brian and I were setting up in which order the bands appeared on the record I was talking to Lars and I said, “Lars, it’s going to be heavy, right?” And so I said, “I’ll put you last on the album because we want to go out strong.” So when I heard it I thought, “Well, it’s definitely got energy and intensity.” The production sounded pretty bad and James’s singing was kinda streaky, but who cares? It had the energy and the explosion at the very end was the perfect way for the album to end.’

  Only in subsequent weeks did Lars Ulrich admit to his friends exactly how close Metal Massacre came to being a nine- rather than ten-track showcase of the Los Angeles underground metal community. He and Hetfield had committed the song to cassette on a borrowed TEAC four-track recorder only the day prior to the album’s mastering date. And though Hetfield had supplied both rhythm and bass guitar tracks for the recording, come the morning of deadline day ‘Hit the Lights’ had yet to be furnished with lead guitar breaks. In desperation, Ulrich called upon a gifted Jamaican guitarist named Lloyd Grant, with whom he had jammed earlier in the year (Grant having responded to one of the drummer’s ads in The Recycler) to supply lead guitar flourishes. As Slagel and Kornarens sat in Bijou Studios overseeing the first stages of the mastering process, Ulrich and Hetfield were still sitting in Grant’s front room, watching the guitarist nail his solo in just one take. ‘He was a cool guy with a great attitude,’ Hetfield recalled, ‘and he could really shred. But he could not play rhythm guitar, which was really strange. So on the way to dropping our tape in to Brian, we stopped off at his house, he threw down a solo and off we went. And that was it for him.’

  Though it would be early June before Metallica would receive the initial pressings of their vinyl debut from Brian Slagel, Hetfield and Ulrich now at least had a professional demo tape to play to interested parties. They did not, however, have a band worthy of the name. While Hetfield could adequately cover for the absence of both a guitar player and bassist in a studio environment, he and Ulrich recognised that in order to take their fledgling union beyond the realms of recorded music and out on to the Sunset Strip and beyond, Metallica would require an injection of new blood. To secure a bass player, Hetfield cast his net in the smallest possible arc, leaning on Ron McGovney to help out once again, despite his friend’s repeated protestations that he really wasn’t interested, having decided instead to pursue a career in photography. The quest for a guitar player, meanwhile, sent Ulrich back to the ‘Musicians Wanted’ section of the by now invaluable The Recycler. This time his advert specified that interested parties should be a fan of Iron Maiden, Motörhead and Welsh power trio Budgie. It was the mention of the last band which led a young guitarist from the recently dissolved Orange County group Panic to pick up the phone and introduce himself to McGovney as ‘the best guitar player you’ve ever heard’.

  David Scott Mustaine was born on September 13, 1961, in La Mesa, San Diego County, the fourth child, and first son, of parents John and Emily. John was the West Coast branch manager for Bank of America and an alcoholic, an affliction that exacerbated the breakdown of his marriage in 1965, when Dave was just four. The boy’s childhood was unsettled and unhappy: post-divorce, John determined to make his former wife’s life a living hell, and so Emily and her children were forced to adopt an itinerant lifestyle, moving all over California in order to stay one step ahead of her vengeful ex-husband. ‘For the most part,’ recalled Mustaine, ‘we were a family on the run.’

  This fractured lifestyle did little for Mustaine’s schooling, but the perennial new kid learned to make friends quickly and had a talent for sports and music. Upon graduation from elementary school, he was rewarded with a gift of an acoustic guitar from his mother, a thoughtful and generous gesture at a time when the family were subsisting on food stamps and Emily’s meagre earnings as a domestic maid. He dutifully set about teaching himself the basic chord shapes.

  At the age of fourteen Mustaine joined his first band, teaming up with his brother-in-law Mark Balli and guitarist John Vorhees to play Bowie, Kiss and Zeppelin covers at backyard parties and barbecues. Soon enough, to his delight, he discovered that his chosen instrument made him popular with females other than those to whom he was related.

  ‘I knew this cute girl who was going out with a friend of a friend, and as soon as she knew I played guitar she dumped him and became my girlfriend,’ he recalled. ‘I thought, “This is great. You mean I get laid just because I can play this thing? Cool.”’

  Having discovered sex and rock ’n’ roll, it was perhaps inevitable that Mustaine would soon secure access to the third vital component of a typical Seventies Californian adolescence: drugs. The guitarist was just thirteen when he first got high, by fifteen he was dealing marijuana out of his family’s Huntington Beach apartment. The trade earned Mustaine money, new friends and a reputation: for the first time in his life he felt important and valued.

  ‘I was a rock ’n’ roll rebel,’ he later recalled in his best-selling autobiography Mustaine: A Life in Metal. ‘I had a guitar strung across my back, I had a knife in my belt, and I had a sneer on my face. And that was it. That was enough.’

  ‘My first impression of him was, “He’s a conceited asshole,”’ recalled Ron McGovney. It was McGovney who answered the phone to Mustaine when the guitarist answered Lars Ulrich’s Recycler ad: the bassist stuck his head into the garage where Hetfield and Ulrich were jamming and said, ‘Which one of you wants to get this telephone call, because this guy’s head will not fit through the door if he ever shows up over here.’

  ‘The first time I met Lars I went to his house in Newport Beach and we listened to the “Hit the Lights” demo that Lloyd Grant had played on,’ says Mustaine. ‘I remember telling Lars that it needed more guitar solos. A little later I got a call to come down and jam with James and Ron. I was warming up and they just walked off into the other room, which I thought was pretty rude. I said “Are we going to audition or what?” and James said, “No, you’ve got the job.”’

  ‘Things are happening a bit over here now,’ wrote Ulrich in a year-end letter to Diamond Head’s Brian Tatler. ‘This geezer in LA is doing a compilation album of ten new, young LA HM bands and our band are on it with a track called “Hit the Lights”. Good break … Anyway, our band is called Metallica and I’ll send you a copy when it comes out. The lead guitarist is pretty fast. I think you’ll like him … We rehearse six nights a week so we are getting pretty tight and we are (tryin’ to) writing some pretty good songs, where we try and stay away from the norms and be a bit different, so at least we won’t be slacked [sic] off as being too predictable and stuff like that. Let’s see what happens.’

  There is a story told about the Los Angeles rock scene circa 1982, which has long since passed into Metallica lore. According to legend, Lars Ulrich found himself at the famous Troubadour nightclub on Melrose Avenue one summer evening when Metallica’s candy-floss-haired nemeses Mötley Crüe strode into the bar with their entourage. The story has it that the Crüe party were intoxicated, obnoxious and in high spirits, having freshly inked a lucrative major label deal with Elektra Records; Ulrich, meanwhile, was said to have been drinking alone to numb his growing frustration over his own band’s failure to detonate a bomb under the Strip. The sight of Crüe bandleader, songwriter and bassist Nikki Sixx, and his coterie holding court in the club that night then served only to inflame the drummer’s sense of injustice. Drawing himself to his full height, the five-foot-eight-inch Dane allegedly approached Mötley Crüe’s table and informed the group’s towering bassist that his band ‘sucked’, at which point, to howls of laughter, Sixx grabbed the impertinent critic by his lapels and threw him halfway across the room.

  It is an amusing anecdote, one which feeds nicely into the received wisdom that at this time Metallica were fearless lone wolves who prowled the hair metal jungle in search of a kill. In truth, however, the incident never happened. The reality of the
story is rather more prosaic. As James Hetfield remembers it, Metallica did indeed cross paths with the Crüe one night at the Troubadour, but their encounter was made on uneven terms.

  ‘We were outside a club, sitting on a parked car, pissed off and drunk,’ Hetfield recalled. ‘We didn’t even have enough money to get into the show, so we were sitting outside trying to weasel our way in somehow, meet someone, you know? Then those guys [Mötley Crüe] come walking out with high heels and grandma’s jewellery on. They walked by, and we yelled, “You guys suck!” They turned around like tough guys and just stood there. They looked like fucking giants ’cause they’ve got their Elton John heels on. Meanwhile, we’re standing there in our fucking tennis shoes going, “Huh?” They flicked a cigarette on us and walked away.’

  At this time Mötley Crüe were a band of unhinged delinquents as unlikely to back down from a fight as they were to decline a line of cocaine deposited in the cleavage of a stripper. That they chose not to crack Metallica’s skulls against the Melrose Avenue sidewalk that evening said everything about the two acts’ respective fortunes in the summer of 1982. The Crüe, to borrow a title from their first seven-inch single, were the toast of the town: LA natives whose self-financed, independently released 1981 debut album Too Fast for Love had already sold more than 20,000 copies on their own Leathur Records imprint. Metallica, by contrast, were a glorified covers band with a singer who could barely look an audience in the eyes, a drummer who could not keep time, a self-obsessed, damaged guitarist and a bassist who didn’t even want to be in the group. As Ulrich has often insisted, Metallica may well have defined themselves as the ‘anti-Mötley Crüe’, but in the haziest days of 1982 the chasm between the two parties was so vast that the more established group were barely aware of their snotty brethren’s existence. To Mötley Crüe, Metallica were invisible men, a life form unworthy of even the most common of Sunset Strip courtesies: contempt.

  In truth, one could easily view this casual humiliation as representative of Metallica’s status across the Hollywood rock scene as a whole. For while James Hetfield would once describe Los Angeles as being a place that ‘didn’t show [his group] a lot of love’, neither did the city show them any measure of discernible hatred. Instead, the group were met with the most galling of receptions, one of indifference.

  ‘In those days no one was even paying attention,’ Hetfield admitted. ‘We were playing, and people would just have this lost look on their faces,’ he said. ‘We’d go, “Man, what the fuck is the matter with you? Give me the finger, spit on me, yell, smile, do something” … That made us angry.’

  Metallica’s first concert took place on March 14, 1982, at Radio City, an unprepossessing, 150-capacity club situated at 945 S. Knott Ave in Anaheim. On the afternoon of the show, Hetfield, Mustaine, McGovney and Ulrich assembled in the garage of 13004 Curtis and King Road, pressed down the ‘Record’ button on a boombox, and ran through a nine-song set featuring ‘Hit the Lights’, a new Mustaine-penned composition titled ‘Jump in the Fire’ and seven New Wave of British Heavy Metal cover versions, including no fewer than four Diamond Head tracks – ‘Helpless’, ‘Sucking My Love’, ‘Am I Evil?’ and ‘The Prince’. After listening to their cassette, which also featured versions of ‘Blitzkrieg’ by Leicester quintet Blitzkrieg, ‘Let it Loose’ by Mansfield’s Savage and ‘Killing Time’ by Northern Irish metallers Sweet Savage, the satisfied quartet began breaking down their backline for the twenty-minute drive to Orange County.

  Practice, of course, can only take a band so far: the acid test of a group’s character comes when their songs are presented in front of a paying audience. In this regard Metallica did not get off to the strongest of starts.

  ‘I was really nervous and a little uncomfortable without a guitar,’ Hetfield recalls, ‘and then during the first song Dave broke a string. It seemed to take him an eternity to change it and I was standing there really embarrassed. We were really disappointed afterwards. But there were never as many people at the following shows as there were at that first one.’

  ‘The crowd didn’t get into them,’ is the considered verdict of Patrick Scott, who drove the band’s drummer to the show. ‘But it was still a cool thing to see, just to see somebody playing Sweet Savage songs and Blitzkrieg songs in LA, because there was none of that going on.’

  ‘I went there with Pat,’ says Bob Nalbandian, who at the time edited Headbanger fanzine from his parent’s Huntington Beach home. ‘It wasn’t a great show by any means, but it was something different in Orange County, because you never saw bands play like that before.’

  For his part Lars Ulrich considered that his band ‘went down pretty good’. Recording the details of the gig in his diary, as he would for every future Metallica show that year, the meticulous drummer estimated that the crowd numbered seventy-five people and noted that the quartet were paid $15 for the engagement. ‘Very nervous’ he admitted. ‘Played so-so.’

  Ironically, given Ulrich’s stated antipathy towards the group, he would have Mötley Crüe to thank for his band’s next significant live outings, a pair of performances which would see Metallica share a stage with one of their New Wave of British Heavy Metal heroes, Saxon.

  ‘We had heard that Saxon was gonna be playing the Whisky [a Go Go] in Hollywood,’ is Ron McGovney’s recollection. ‘So I went over to the club with our demo, and as I was walking up, I run into Tommy Lee and Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe (who I was taking pictures for at the time). They said, “Hey Ron, what’s up?” I told them that Saxon was doing a gig at the Whisky and I wanted to try to get my band to open up for them. They said, “Yeah, we were gonna open up for them but we’re getting too big to open. Come on in and I’ll introduce you to the chick that does the booking.” So I dropped off the tape and she called me back the very next day, I remember her telling me, “You guys are pretty good … you remind me of this local band called Black ’N Blue.” Anyway, she said, “Saxon is scheduled to play two nights; we’re gonna have Ratt open for them the first night and your band can open the second night.”’

  For Lars Ulrich this booking – which comprised two opening performances, as Saxon were to play two headline sets each night – amounted to a very big deal. The teenager had discovered the Barnsley quintet’s Wheels of Steel album in the summer of 1980, and he considered Biff Byford’s band to be one of the essential New Wave of British Heavy Metal collectives. The shows would prove to be a lesson in the ways of the music industry for the young drummer. Turning up at the Whisky in the middle of the afternoon on March 27, Metallica were immediately advised by Saxon’s road crew that they would not be afforded time to sound check for the evening’s first sold-out show. Nor would they be provided with dressing room access for the night as Saxon were to be receiving VIP guests, including Mötley Crüe and Ozzy Osbourne and his manager and fiancée Sharon Arden. When Ulrich asked if perhaps his band might be allowed to use an onstage fan to keep their gear from overheating, he was informed that the fan was solely for the use of Mr Byford. So far so “Fuck you”.

  Such intransigence was never likely to do more than scratch the surface of Ulrich’s Teflon-coated ebullience however. At 9 p.m. the drummer walked onstage in front of a 400-strong crowd and launched into the opening rolls of ‘Hit the Lights’. Allotted just twenty minutes for their six-song set, Metallica dispensed with stage banter or song introductions and simply attacked. The group did, however, find time to debut another new track, ‘Metal Militia’. Analysing his band’s earliest songwriting efforts, James Hetfield once observed that ‘the epic feel is definitely from Diamond Head, while the simplicity came from Motörhead’, and ‘Metal Militia’ was the clearest example yet of this fusion. Here Hetfield sings of his band in militaristic terms, ‘fighting for one cause’ in uniforms of ‘leather and metal’, and encourages those listening to fall in line behind the quartet in their crusade ‘to take on the world with our heavy metal.’ Offering a rallying call to arms reminiscent of Saxon’s own ‘Denim and Leather’, the
new song was met with roars of approval from the Yorkshire band’s Californian fans.

  Already installed as Metallica’s harshest critic, Ulrich was less impressed. The drummer would later write that his group were plagued by ‘awful’ sound on their first show of the night, adding, ‘The band as a whole sucked.’ (Amusingly, however, Ulrich noted that he himself ‘played great’.) Afforded one extra song for their second show of the night, the four-piece bolstered their set with a third Brian Tatler/Sean Harris composition, ‘Sucking My Love’. As was his habit, James Hetfield declined to introduce the song as a cover version, which led Saxon’s watching soundman Paul Owen to enquire sarcastically whether the young group were familiar with an English band called Diamond Head. Their faces duly flushed with embarrassment.

  ‘Had a good time,’ Ulrich concluded in his diary, ‘but never met Saxon.’

  Ulrich was not the only person in the room critiquing the band’s performance that night. The LA Times commissioned their arts correspondent Terry Atkinson to file his own review, which duly appeared in the March 29 edition of the newspaper.

  ‘Saxon could also use a fast, hot guitar player of the Eddie Van Halen ilk,’ Atkinson opined. ‘Opening quartet Metallica had one, but little else. The local group needs considerable development to overcome a pervasive awkwardness.’