Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (28 page)

LEMMY KILMISTER:
As far as the tempos go, well, we were all doing speed when we started, but then again, I was doing it in Hawkwind. I’ve just always been in a hurry for everything. I’m a very impatient man.

DIMEBAG DARRELL ABBOTT (1966–2004) (Damageplan, Pantera):
Motörhead—man! Songs like “Ace of Spades” and “Love You Like a Reptile” just tear your head off. The uniqueness of that band changed the way a lot of people looked at their sound. Lemmy’s bass—cramming it through a Marshall cabinet on twelve—was real unique. His voice was very raw, and so was their whole way of jamming. The music didn’t have to be all pretty and polished. It’s like they set up, jammed it one time, and said, “Okay mix it, we’re done. We’re going to drink. See you later.”

Metallica quickly became the most influential thrash band and one of the most inspirational metal bands, period. But they weren’t the
first
to play thrash metal. A year before Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich met guitarist and vocalist James Hetfield in Los Angeles, San Francisco quartet Exodus was playing an early form of thrash with a lineup that featured future Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett, drummer Tom Hunting, and a revolving door of players, before the band’s future architect, guitarist Gary Holt, entered the fray.

GARY HOLT (Exodus):
I met Kirk Hammett when Exodus played in my high school band room, and we became friends. He taught me a couple chords, and six months later I was in the band. The Kirk-era of Exodus was definitely thrash, but it had a more Iron Maiden-ish bent to it. Tom [Hunting] used to play drums
and
sing because we couldn’t find a singer at first. Then we met Paul Baloff at an outdoor party we were playing. He came down because Lääz Rockit played with us and he went to school with those guys. Paul couldn’t sing at all, but he was more metal than anybody I’d ever met. We believed in him, so he became our vocalist, and he became a guy many people still consider the voice of the band, even though he only sang on one studio record.

RAT SKATES:
In the heavy metal underground, even before Metallica, Exodus was definitely huge. We had recordings of all their live shows, which they didn’t know people were making. The tapes got copied and passed around. We all knew what they were like live way before we saw ’em.

GARY HOLT:
The live shows were a big thing for us from the start. But a lot of the real excitement always happened offstage. One time, Kirk, Tom, and our former manager got frustrated with their lack of quality equipment and robbed the band in the rehearsal storage shed next to them. I wasn’t even in Exodus when this happened, but sometime between the actual theft happening and me hooking up with them, I let them rehearse in my parents’ garage. The guitar player I replaced—my high school buddy Tim Agnello (ex-Blind Illusion)—ratted the band out because he was one of the founding members and he was so mad at them for firing him. They got caught, and I got called in for questioning. The police considered me an innocent patsy until I got caught hiding the remaining stolen gear, which cemented my guilt. So I spent one night in juvenile hall. That’s the only time I’ve actually spent in jail.

At first, thrash was deemed way too heavy for radio or MTV airplay, so bands played out as much as they could and sent demo cassettes to musicians, fans, and industry insiders in the hopes that their music would be embraced by fanzine editors, mom-and-pop record stores, and ambitious start-up labels. This was the early-to-mid-eighties era of tape trading, the primitive method of peer-to-peer music sharing that existed almost twenty years before the dawn of Napster and BitTorrents.

RON QUINTANA (San Francisco radio DJ, ex–fanzine editor):
In 1980, there was no metal in any real magazine in America.
Circus
would maybe show pseudo-metal bands like Scorpions or Ozzy, and an occasional Black Sabbath. They hardly ever showed Motörhead or Iron Maiden, or anything coming out of Europe. And the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was pretty big hype for England in 1979 and 1980, so we’d read about it if we could ever find any of the British papers—
Sounds, New Music Express
, or
Melody Maker
. That’s why a lot of fans started their own fanzines.

LARS ULRICH (Metallica):
The scenes were all centered around stores that imported a lot of records and driven by word-of-mouth, grassroots movements, and tape trading. By the time you got a copy of a demo, it was like the fourteenth generation of it. You could barely make it out, but man, you knew it was the thing: “Hey, guess what, I got a demo you don’t have, ha-ha. I’m super extra cool.” It was sort of like the early version of the Internet.

RON QUINTANA:
I met Lars on the streets of Berkeley on Telegraph [Avenue] going into a record store. Back then, anybody wearing jackets with buttons and patches of underground bands from Europe was pretty noticeable. My friend ran over and talked Lars into coming up to our party spot in the middle of Golden Gate Park. Since Lars was from Denmark and knew all about the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, we all accosted him and pointed at his patches for Silverwing or Demon Pact, because we had only read about these bands. He told us all about the groups, and we all listened intently. It’s funny, because Lars was a total metal guy, but he was also this tennis kid down in LA in Newport Beach. So he went back to LA after our party to play tennis, and then he’d come up every once in a while and we’d go on record trips to Tower Records and this store in Walnut Creek named the Record Exchange. Those were the only places you could buy metal imports. It was an hour east of San Francisco, so it was quite a trek. Lars would pick us up in his little green Pacer. It was kind of like the Wayne’s World car. Not very metal at all.

BRIAN SLAGEL (chairman/CEO, Metal Blade):
I hadn’t started Metal Blade Records yet when I went with my friend John Kornarens in December 1980 to see the Michael Schenker Group at the Country Club [in Reseda, California]. While we were there, he saw a kid wearing a European Saxon T-shirt, so John ran up to this kid and said, “Do you know who Saxon is?” The kid turned out to be Lars Ulrich. I’ll never forget hanging out at his family’s condo in Newport Beach. He had a drum set sitting in the corner. It wasn’t even put together. He said, “I’m going to start a band,” and we’re like “Yeah, sure you are.” He was a crazy little kid. When we went to the record store with him, he’d be out of the car and at the metal bin before we even shut the engine off. He had to get there first.

While Tower Records and the Record Exchange were selling vinyl and tapes to California metalheads, a less flashy but even more influential mom-and-pop retail outlet was taking root in Clark, New Jersey; it would indirectly help launch the careers of Metallica, Anthrax, Overkill, and others.

JONNY ZAZULA (Megaforce Records founder):
Before thrash metal started taking off, my wife Marsha and I had a flea market store in New Jersey, where we were selling predominantly picture discs from Europe by bands like the Kinks. But there was one picture disc I really loved, and it was Judas Priest’s
Sad Wings of Destiny
. Someone gave me $200 for it. I said, “Wow, this is amazing.” I realized there was a real market for metal, so I started bringing in other things like that. And then I met Maria Ferrero [longtime Megaforce Records publicist and the current owner of Adrenaline PR]. She came knocking on my door to buy Motörhead and I really didn’t know much about them, but I found the album and I got it for her. We got to the point where all we would buy was metal, nothing else.

MARIA FERRERO (Adrenaline PR founder, ex–Megaforce publicist):
Jonny and Marsha were the champions of metal. They brought us the goods and we ate it up.

BOBBY “BLITZ” ELLSWORTH (Overkill):
Jonny’s flea market was part of a big supermarket that sold everything from Indian tapestries to cleaning solutions. Overkill wasn’t a band at the time yet, but we would all go out there and be exposed to things like Raven and Anvil. Jonny slowly became this local guru because he held the
gold
.

While Zazula was selling Saxon and Motörhead albums, across the country in Los Angeles, Metallica front man James Hetfield was just getting started. And Ulrich was learning to keep a steady beat—initially with limited success.

RON McGOVNEY (ex-Metallica):
James and I went to junior high and high school together. In high school we had our lockers by each other. He was the rocker kid with the Aerosmith shirt, and I had an Elvis Presley sticker on my notebook, so he’d always make fun of Elvis and I’d make fun of Aerosmith, but we became friends. James had a band called Obsession and I was one of their roadies. We started going to clubs when we were seventeen and seeing Hollywood bands. That’s when I really got into Mötley Crüe, because they were so different. We just looked at their ad in
BAM
magazine, and I was like, “Hey man, this band looks cool—let’s go watch them.” So James and I went down and saw them, and he was like, “Yeah, whatever,” but I thought it was awesome.

RON QUINTANA:
On one of his trips to San Francisco, Lars said he was a drummer. My friends in Metal Church—at the time they were called Church of Metal—were looking for a drummer. They had made this amazing demo, and back then they were probably the heaviest band in America. So I set up an audition for Lars with them in early ’81. But he disappeared and he didn’t show up for months after that. We didn’t know what happened or if he could actually drum.

As it turned out, Ulrich was in the UK following some of his favorite bands. Having grown up in an art community in Copenhagen with ultra-liberal parents, he retained worldly perspective as a teenager and was allowed to travel back and forth to Europe on his own.

BRIAN TATLER (Diamond Head):
Back in 1981, Diamond Head still hadn’t gotten a record deal, so we decided to sell our first album ourselves via mail order for 3 pounds 50. We advertised for six weeks in
Sounds
magazine, which Lars regularly read, and he ordered his copy. Well, he loved it and he wrote back to the fan club address, which was at [vocalist] Sean Harris’s house, and said how much he loved the band. He even phoned Sean and Sean’s mum a few times. Next thing you know, he shows up at this gig in London at the Woolwich Odeon in 1981, and he introduced himself and said he flew over from California to see us. That was astounding to us—that a seventeen-year-old had flown over from America to see us in England. I asked him where he was staying, and he hadn’t arranged to stay anywhere yet. So I said, “Well, come stay with me.” He literally jumped in the car with the rest of the band and we drove back up to the Midlands, and he slept on my floor in my bedroom. I still lived with my parents, so he slept in my brother’s old sleeping bag on the floor for a week. Then he went and stayed with Sean for four weeks.

LARS ULRICH:
In the fall of 1981, after coming back from a trip in England, I wanted to put a band together. I put together an ad in
The Recycler
saying, “Heavy metal drummer looking for other musicians. Influences: Tygers of Pan Tang, Angel Witch, Saxon.” Most people would call up and be like, “I’m into heavy metal but I’ve never heard of any of those bands. But I like Journey and I like REO Speedwagon. Does that work?” One of the guys that called up was a guy named Hugh Tanner. He came down with his rhythm guitar player, this James Hetfield guy, who basically spent the whole afternoon not saying one fucking word. I mean, I’d never met anyone that shy in my life. We had a bit of a jam and nothing much materialized out of that. My ability on the drums at that time was basically zero. I think they were secretly laughing at me. But there was something about this guy Hetfield. The way he played, his aura, his vibe.

RON McGOVNEY:
James and I were in Leather Charm; I played bass. We only had “Hit the Lights,” which we played in Metallica. And there were riffs from three different Leather Charm songs that James put together later to make the Metallica song “No Remorse.”

LARS ULRICH:
I called up Hetfield and I said, “My friend’s putting this [heavy metal compilation] record together. Do you want to take another shot at it?” He came down and we started hanging out pretty much every day. I started subjecting him to every single New Wave of British Heavy Metal thing, from Praying Mantis to Black Axe to Silverwing. Then we basically wrote a song together—“Hit the Lights.”

RON QUINTANA:
Me and Lars prepared band names and magazine titles. I had
Metallica
on my list for magazine names, but I liked
Metal Mania
better, and, of course, he liked Metallica better. It came from the
Encyclopedia Metallica
, an English book that was hard to find in America that was all about English heavy metal bands.

BRIAN SLAGEL:
So Lars finds out I’m doing this record [
Metal Massacre I
] and he says, “If I started a band, would you put me on your compilation?” I said, “Sure.” Him and James had been jamming for a while but couldn’t find anyone else who liked what they liked. So they’d stopped jamming. Typical Lars. He was scattered. They recorded that song, “Hit the Lights,” the night before the very last day [of the deadline for the compilation]. I kept pressuring him, saying, “This record is going to press. I need your track.” So they recorded on [a Fostex four-track tape recorder] and he brought a cassette to the mastering session, and the engineer told him, “It has to be on quarter-inch reel,” which would cost $50 to transfer—but I didn’t have $50, Lars didn’t have $50. So my friend John Kornarens actually paid for it because if he didn’t, it wasn’t going to get on the record.