Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (23 page)

‘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 then 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.

This shot, along with the images which partnered the story, was taken by Ross Halfin, then, as now, one of the rock world’s best known and most prolific photographers. A complicated man possessed of a temper that made Dave Mustaine look like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Halfin had come of age in the pages of the rock fortnightly, most notably for his work with Iron Maiden. Despite the entreaties of Peter Mensch, however, as the days began to shorten in 1984 the photographer had yet to focus his camera in Metallica’s direction. Increasingly exasperated with this state of affairs, Mensch finally demanded of Halfin that he ‘stop being an asshole’ and come shoot his new band.

‘My original idea for the photo shoot was to reference the Rolling Stones’
Beggars Banquet
cover, as frankly I couldn’t think of anything else to do with them,’ remembers Halfin. ‘Sadly, there was no stuffed venison or wild boar in sunny Oakland, so I had to make do with a Chinese takeaway. Actually, we had to order two as the first lot that arrived, the band ate … Then I looked at Lars and thought, “I know, let’s spray him silver with a
metal cake” … I still have no idea where the cake came from or the nuts and bolts we put in it. To this day, I think it’s possibly one of the worst photos I have ever taken; but, look, it seemed like a really good idea in 1984. I cringe now thinking about it.’

Kerrang!
’s decision to place Ulrich on its front cover was a bold plunge into the unknown. Although the magazine’s sales figures averaged 40,000 copies per issue, this figure was a tally aggregated from sales of thirteen issues combined. Even now it is unknown whether the only issue of
Kerrang!
ever to feature a drummer alone on its front page sold well or otherwise. Despite this, Metallica would appear on the front page of the publication a further fifty-three times. For his part Geoff Barton recalls that Ulrich ‘was instrumental in getting a lot of the journalists on board, with his sheer enthusiasm, persistence and his general nuisance-ness, shall we say. At that point he was the most recognisable member of the band; he was the face of Metallica. It was Lars who was really banging on about them all the time, and promoting their cause. It was his single-handed persistence that got them on the cover.’

At the same time as his face could be seen grinning in newsagents from Edinburgh to Exeter, in December 1984 Lars Ulrich and Metallica landed once more at Heathrow Airport for the occasion of their third London concert. The group’s final live performance of 1984 took place at the Lyceum, at the time a Mecca-owned ballroom situated on Wellington Street in the heart of London’s theatre district. A Grade II listed building built in 1834 to the specifications of architect Samuel Beazley, despite laying a justifiable claim to being one of Westminster’s loveliest structures the Lyceum had in recent years staged concerts by bands as unruly as the Clash and Killing Joke. For Metallica to be appearing in a venue more than five times the capacity of the Marquee – this despite their music being played only on Radio 1’s late-night
Friday Rock Show
– provided hard evidence that their bandwagon was beginning to take on the form of a steamroller.

Fittingly for a band who are often defined by their flaws, Metallica responded to this upturn in fortunes by delivering a set that remains one of their worst performances on British soil. Writing in
Kerrang!
, reviewer Howard Johnson confessed that ‘a poor sound didn’t help me make much punch-drunk sense of [the band’s] assault’, adding, ‘There are those in the know that profess that this wasn’t anywhere near Metallica at their
hip-swingin
’ best.’

One of those not only ‘in the know’ but also in attendance at the Lyceum was Malcolm Dome, a man fast becoming the Forrest Gump on hand to witness the significant moments of Metallica’s early years. Dome concurs that while the group’s appearance in Theatreland did not amount to the ‘best performance the band has ever played … in fact, it was far from it’, nonetheless he is of the opinion that the concert was ‘a seminal gig because it came at the time when everything was clicking into a higher gear. The music they played, the size of the audience, the business side of the band, it was all going up a notch.’

So much was this the case that an underwhelming performance on a Thursday night in central London offered no impediment to the band’s first flush of success. As Big Ben chimed a dozen times and ushered in the winter solstice, at the Lyceum the members of Metallica were each presented with a silver disc of
Ride the Lightning
commemorating sales in excess of 60,000 in Europe. This they had achieved with no promotional video, no
seven-inch
single and without a single note of their music being played anywhere on any radio station during daylight hours.

In 1985 Metallica turned their attentions from the shores of Europe to the vast expanse of the United States. In the previous twelve months, the group had performed live on home soil on just three occasions, causing Ulrich to admit that ‘we have rather
overlooked America recently,’ adding that ‘our timing has been rather bad because heavy metal is taking off there in a big way.’ With his usual attention to detail, the drummer also confessed that it was possible that Metallica ‘may have lost a little ground to other bands’.

It is difficult to identify the ‘other bands’ to whom Ulrich is referring. At the start of 1985 Metallica’s forward momentum had propelled them beyond the horizon of thrash metal’s chasing pack. That this was so is no surprise, with the genre as a whole being not only nascent but also somewhat neutered. Slayer gnashed away merrily enough on
Show No Mercy
, the group’s debut album released in 1984, but did so with milk teeth. Meanwhile, Anthrax had to their credit the debut album
Fistful of Metal
, a set comprised of a skipful of clichés and not a single song worthy of the name. Elsewhere Exodus had yet to disentangle themselves from a legal quagmire that would delay the release of the band’s debut album,
Bonded by Blood
, by almost a year, while Dave Mustaine’s Megadeth were at the time seconded at Indigo Ranch Studios in Malibu recording their first LP,
Killing Is My Business … And Business Is Good!