Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (12 page)

Audience members gathered to see Exodus at The Stone or at Ruthie’s Inn in Berkeley – a club located next door to the Covenant Worship Center, a church on the steps of which, according to Ron Quintana, concert-goers would do ‘many, many bad things’ – wearing flowers in their hair could be certain of being the recipients of much unwelcome attention. The notion that the Bay Area, with San Francisco acting as shorthand for its varied and numerous streets and avenues, is a location that lacks teeth or knuckles is itself one that is short on attention to detail. Shipping, freight, railroad and canning industries provided work for thousands of employees on both sides of the bay, with working people represented by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, the International Brotherhood of
Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union, to name just three. Oakland was also the birthplace of the militant African-American Black Panther party, formed in the city in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Less political but attracting scarcely less infamy were the Oakland Raiders American football team, and their legion of often unruly fans. Owned by Al Davis, a man capable of filing a lawsuit in an empty courtroom, and who often played to Oaklanders’ sense of underdog grievance, the Raiders are the team beloved of James Hetfield, this despite the organisation moving from Oakland to Los Angeles just three months before Hetfield headed in the opposite direction (unlike Metallica, the franchise was to return from whence it came in 1994). But perhaps the most symbolic example of the Bay Area being a place other than a haven for the Free Love generation came on December 6, 1969, at the Rolling Stones’ notorious free concert at Altamont Speedway in Alameda County. ‘Just be cool down there, don’t push around,’ Mick Jagger implored of the crowd moments before eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by Hell’s Angels

Fourteen years later, the notion of not pushing people around at Bay Area thrash metal shows was as ridiculous as arriving wearing flowers in one’s hair.

On the part of Metallica, or at least on the parts of James Hetfield and Dave Mustaine, such physical aggression was not confined to the dance floors of spit ’n’ sawdust clubs filled with angry adolescents, but often spilled out on to the streets of the Bay Area itself.

‘When Metallica first came to San Francisco I thought Lars’s guitarists were either going to get him killed or else land him in jail,’ is the recollection of Ron Quintana. ‘Hetfield and Mustaine were just out of control. For a time it seemed like Dave would get in a fight every single night on Broadway. He wasn’t always the instigator; he didn’t always start the fights, but he usually finished
them. He was a tough guy and was always drunk. I didn’t expect him to last the Eighties. James was kind of quiet back then, and he’d only come out of his shell when drunk. But Dave was always out of his shell – and always out of his head!

‘He was,’ concludes Quintana, grasping for a suitable euphemism, ‘a real character.’

As well as its obvious obnoxiousness, the picture painted by Quintana is not without its attendant humour. The image of the irrepressible and voluble Ulrich charging through the streets of San Francisco, in tow of two band mates, boiling with energy but of a kind different from Hetfield and Mustaine is, at the very least, striking. Lars, the born conciliator and natural diplomat, in company with a lead guitarist capable of starting a fight with a Salvation Army Santa Claus and a front man so shy that his hidden character only reveals itself under cover of darkness, and under influence of alcohol; and a drummer with an appetite for construction being undone by the opposing instincts of his band mates. Quintana is right when he says that Hetfield and Mustaine could well have succeeded in getting a drummer five inches shorter than themselves killed; what he also might have added is that it was surprising that none of the party ended up in rehab even sooner than they eventually did. This intemperance was not confined merely to nights out. On the rare occasions that the new kids on the block were not running wild through the streets of San Francisco, back in El Cerrito the ‘Metallica Mansion’ drew faces from the scene into which its tenants had recently parachuted, like filings to a magnet.

‘We all hung out because they had their house,’ recalls Steve Souza, ‘… and everybody would go there. I remember there was one night where we were drinking and we didn’t have any chaser, so James pulls out fucking log-cabin syrup. We were drinking vodka and log-cabin syrup! But it was just like that, everyone was close knit and everyone went to each other’s shows and hung out.
It was a great scene. It was strong. It wasn’t anyone saying, “Oh, that band sucks!”, not like in the glam scene in LA. We were together. We had the unity … But that house was a free-for-all. It was 24/7. Shit was going on constantly there, till three or four in the morning. It was infamous.’

Three thousand miles east of 3132 Carlson Boulevard, in New Jersey, Johnny Zazula (a man known to his friends as Johnny Z) and his wife Marsha were at work staffing Rock’n Roll Heaven, the rock record and tape stall the couple ran in a flea-market at the Route 18 International Indoor Market in East Brunswick, a small town in the centre of the Garden State. Despite its suburban location, the epicurean selection of rock and metal – particularly releases imported from Europe – available at the couple’s stall qualified Rock’n Roll Heaven as a popular spot for informed metalheads from as far afield as the furthest boroughs of New York City, a two-hour commute. On a spring afternoon in 1983, a customer from San Francisco approached Johnny Z and handed him a cassette tape.

Ironically, given what was about to happen, Rock’n Roll Heaven had at the time a policy that it did not play demo tapes. The unnamed customer, however, was adamant that the stall’s proprietor would love the music contained within. Zazula looked down at the object in his hand, and read the name on the inlay card – ‘Metallica’. By deciding to lift the needle on the record that was playing on the stereo – an album by Angel Witch – and to begin playing a cassette tape by a band he had never before heard, Johnny Z made a decision that would change his life.

Occasionally music strikes with such a force that it seems as if a bolt of lightning has served to split the sky in two. When the Sex Pistols unveiled ‘Anarchy in the UK’ on an astonished United Kingdom in 1976, music writer Greil Marcus observed
that Johnny Rotten’s assertion that he was ‘an antichrist’ ‘for a few minutes made it seem as if the rage issuing from his mouth could level London’. Fifteen years later, Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ took mainstream rock’s play book and cast its pages to the hurricane they themselves had created. In terms of widespread amplification, in the first half of 1983 Metallica had nothing like this kind of impact. But as has been seen, many of those who heard the group on the tape-trading vines became not so much fans of the group as adherents to, even participants in, the cause. The trouble was, of this number few were in any position to do anything to further the group’s cause other than nod, or bang, their head in appreciation.

That the proprietor of a stall in a flea-market in a small town in America’s most widely derided state quickly became the most pivotal figure in their story so far shows the paucity of options open to Metallica as the days began to lengthen in 1983. Aside from running Rock’n Roll Heaven, Johnny and Marsha also operated the company Crazed Management, the live promotion arm of which saw UK proto-thrashers Venom and Canadian journeymen Anvil perform in the United States for the first time. But this operation was a labour of love rather than a business run for profit; its aim was to bring underground metal to an underground audience solely for its own sake. Such noble intentions go some way to explaining the course of action pursued by Zazula immediately after he first heard Metallica. Remarkably, the tape that so impressed the impresario was not
No Life ’Til Leather,
but rather its successor, the
Live Metal Up Your Ass
concert tape (a recording of the band’s set at the Old Waldorf on November 29, 1982), a collection notable for its execrable sound quality. Asking his wife to mind the store, Zazula made his excuses and made his way to the nearest public pay phone. Inserting a fistful of metal into the coin slot, he placed a call to K. J. Doughton, the man who was soon to become
administrator of Metallica’s fan club, and whose number and address – actually, the number and address of his parents’ home in the state of Oregon – featured as the contact detail on the demo’s inlay card. The fact that Zazula recalled reading an article Doughton had written about Metallica fortified his decision to attempt to contact the band. It was to be the beginning of a fortuitous and fast-moving chain of events.

Zazula revealed to Doughton his desire to speak with a member of Metallica, and was told by the voice on the other end of the line that Lars Ulrich (inevitably) would be in touch. The following day, the proprietor received a phone call from a young man with a thick European accent. With this, first contact was made.

Zazula enthused to the drummer about his love for the music captured on a tape that was not even the best thing to which Metallica had put their name. In return, the drummer – ever the student of the underground metal scene – spoke of his familiarity with the activities of the husband and wife team on the East Coast. In a stroke resplendent in its chutzpah, Zazula then presented a proposition so startling that it might even have silenced Lars Ulrich. It was suggested to the Dane that his group transport themselves and their equipment across the United States from California to New Jersey. A practice facility in the New York borough of Queens was promised, as was accommodation at the Zazula family home in the Garden State, and a place on the bill for concerts headlined by Venom and The Rods

At this point in their career, Metallica can be thought of as being like a shark: if they ceased moving, they would die. While other bands existed only in the present, Ulrich for one had trained his eye to search for future possibilities, and no risk was deemed too large. The drummer relayed Zazula’s suggestions to his band mates, all of whom agreed that it was a capital idea. There was, however, one significant obstacle to be overcome: Metallica lacked the means with which to embark on such an epic journey.
Ever resourceful, Johnny Z had a solution.

‘We sent them fifteen hundred dollars to come across America,’ he recalls. ‘They got a one-way rental: a U-Haul van and a truck. Literally they had two drivers and they slept in the back with all their gear and they delivered themselves to my front door. It was basically, “Well we’re here – what do we do next?”’

The journey to New Jersey in the U-Haul trailer took place at the end of March 1983. Accompanied by Mark Whitaker, the party decided that rather than waste time and money sleeping in motels en route, they would instead sleep in shifts on mattresses placed in their ride, and for the driving to be undertaken in shifts. Aside from food and bathroom breaks, it would be a caravan of uninterrupted motion.

If the prospect of traversing a country the size of a continent had not previously struck Metallica as being a trepidatious, even ill-advised, endeavour, there can be little doubt that such thoughts did enter their minds once the journey was under way. To this day there is a culture in parts of the United States that finds it socially acceptable to drive while under the influence of alcohol; in the case of Dave Mustaine this tendency was indulged to a hazardous degree. Already a considerable drinker – in fact, the lead guitarist would subsequently claim that even at this point in his young life he was already an alcoholic – during the long journey from West Coast to East Mustaine failed to make the distinction between there being a time and place for getting drunk and its exact opposite. In the town of Laramie, in the border state of Wyoming, the group’s caravan jack-knifed after their truck – or truck driver – mishandled in the snow, forcing the party off the highway. While the travelling party dusted themselves off on the side of the road, and as each man laughed with relief at their scrape with danger, the group were almost decapitated by a passing
eighteen-wheel
lorry passing close enough by that the human face felt the blast of cold air from its slipstream. In the wake of the truck came a Jeep Wrangler, only this time the ride was headed straight for the now bewildered and discombobulated evacuees. Each man dived for cover, with Mustaine pulling Mark Whitaker from the path of the oncoming vehicle at the last possible second.