Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (18 page)

Twenty-four hours later circumstances veered yet further towards the surreal, as the tour reached the Pine Bluff Convention Center in the town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Upon disembarking from their Winnebago, the touring musicians were met by a
local promoter who had recently dined on the misinformation – perhaps supplied from a telephone caller in Old Bridge, New Jersey – that earlier in the tour the bands had performed a show at the 17,000 capacity Madison Square Garden in Midtown Manhattan. In 2013 it is tempting to forgive the acceptance of such a bald-faced lie by a gullible promoter with the defence that in the days prior to the advent of the Internet greater latitude was afforded to unscrupulous opportunists happy to discard any facts that lay in the way of a good story. The reason for this is that anyone raised in the age where all information is within the reach of a fingertip tends to believe that prior to the computerised age people were incapable of finding out anything for themselves. The truth is, though, that the notion that Metallica and Raven were in possession of profiles of sufficient size for them to perform at ‘the Garden’ was a lie of such arena-sized proportions that it could easily have been dispelled either with a phone call to the venue itself, or even a glance at the
Billboard
album chart, on which neither group could be found. Upon hearing the news of the tour’s popularity on the American East Coast, John Gallagher thought to himself, ‘Hmm, someone has been bullshitting.’

Owing to a claim even more odoriferous than that emanating from the inside of their Winnebago, Metallica and Raven found themselves booked in an arena built to accommodate 10,000 people. Come the evening of the concert, barely 300 people had gathered for the performance, not all of whom were impressed with the entertainment on offer. As it must, the show went on, with both groups performing beneath two meagre lighting rigs held aloft by trusses anchored by fork lift trucks. Whatever this hot summer night resembled, it was not an evening at Madison Square Garden.

The nearer the Kill ’Em All for One tour juddered towards its denouement, the more the problems faced by its personnel increased. Following an appearance at the Country Club in the
Los Angeles suburb of Reseda, a booking for which Lars Ulrich had been saving a consignment of brand-new cymbals (presumably believing LA to be the kind of ‘special occasion’ city for which his new equipment was suited) the travelling party headed north on Interstate 5 for the five-hour drive to San Francisco. There, the Kill ’Em All for One tour would draw to a climax with a triumvirate of performances at the Keystone Clubs in Palo Alto and Berkeley, and, finally, The Stone in San Francisco – three clubs that have since become notable simply for the fact that bands such as Metallica used to play there. En route to the Californian group’s adopted home city, the wheels on their long-suffering and fully ill-equipped Winnebago completed their final revolution. The van’s engine died not with a cough or a whimper, but instead exploded with a force sufficient to cause smoke to billow from the vehicle’s every orifice. The sight of this was enough to propel Ulrich himself out of the ride and thirty yards up the freeway before anyone else had even exited the vehicle.

Temporarily stranded, the group convened in what John Gallagher recalls as being ‘a weird little town straight out of the Twilight Zone’ until alternative transport was sourced. Deciding to complete their journey not on Interstate 5 but rather on back roads leading south to north, at one point the party travelled along a road on which one side was abutted by a cliff edge and a sheer drop of several hundred feet. It was the kind of scene at which one which one might expect to see Wile E. Coyote in fruitless pursuit of the Road Runner. While some of the passengers reacted to this sight with gallows humour, others were less cocksure. From a seat in the rear, the voice of a young man with a Danish accent could be heard to say, ‘Kirk, I’m really scared. Can I hold your hand?’

For musicians coarsened by the experience of a two-month tour that had seen them endure gruelling conditions, bear witness to backwater cities, and amass enough experience to gain a crash-course understanding that it was indeed a long way to
the top for anyone desiring to rock ’n’ roll, such a request did not fall on sympathetic ears. For the final hours of the journey to San Francisco, it was Ulrich who found himself in the barrel as everyone in the vehicle laughed themselves silly at the drummer’s expense.

Following an adventure that, if not quite a trial by fire was at least an ordeal in heat, the sight of the seven square miles that comprise the city of San Francisco came as a welcome relief to the members of Metallica. The three shows the band performed upon their arrival re-affirmed to the group that their five-month absence from Northern California had only served to make the hearts of the local underground metal community grow fonder. As with each of the quartet’s previous Bay Area performances, the three appearances – on a bill strengthened yet further by the addition of Exodus as the opening group – were attended by audiences in possession of energy levels which surpassed anything seen in the preceding two months. For while the Kill ’Em All for One tour had been met with approval in cities such as New York, Chicago and Bridgeport in Connecticut, the sight of
slam-dancers
clambering on to the stage, only to immediately propel themselves on to the heads of those gathered in the front rows, proved that the Bay Area still contained the greatest number of hotheads of all the hotbeds that made up the emerging US thrash metal scene.

The travelling musicians marked the end of their great and surely never-to-be-forgotten adventure with a party at the Metallica Mansion on Carlson Boulevard. After a summer spent either asleep in a vehicle or else in motels of a kind where rooms were available for rent at hourly rates, this modest suburban bungalow may well have resembled the kind of luxury on offer at Claridge’s. But if this was the case, the scene didn’t bear this
resemblance for very long. As drinks flowed fast, the party-goers listened to bands such as English punk thugs the Anti Nowhere League and responded to this music by slam-dancing through the living quarters and breaking just about everything in sight. At one point an unidentified guest decided it would be a good idea to start a fight with Raven drummer Rob Hunter, an undertaking the assailant was ill-equipped to finish. Instead the aggressor found himself knocked out cold by a punch of such force that it broke a number of bones in Hunter’s hand.

With Metallica at last ensconced on home soil, the group turned their attentions to the business of composing new material. Even at this point in what could hardly yet be called their ‘career’, the group displayed character traits that could almost be described as being schizophrenic. This was a union that appeared not to be equipped with an ‘off’ button, but while Metallica’s capacity for waking up in the morning having little recollection of what occurred at the end of the night before is without doubt, to portray the group as being one whose sole concern was the pursuit of a good time all of the time is a construct without foundation.

Indeed, before anyone had even heard his name, Lars Ulrich understood that in order to realise his dream – actually, his aim – of guiding Metallica to the position of being the biggest band in the world would require talent married to discipline and graft. In this he was aided by Cliff Burton, a man whose commitment to making music had been noted not just by his supportive parents but also by everyone he encountered. In Kirk Hammett Metallica had finally found a lead guitarist committed to mastering his instrument not as a means of securing fame but as an end in itself (and unlike his predecessor, these talents were not kept in time by the metronomic beat of a ticking time-bomb). Most impressive of all was the development of James Hetfield, who assumed the role of front man with an authority that belied his own uncertainties. With Dave Mustaine dismissed, Hetfield
began to emerge from the monosyllabic shyness in which he had previously been cocooned. Coupled with this was his growing skill as a rhythm guitarist capable of composing first-class riffs with just a flick of the wrist. Together, the four musicians were starting to coalesce into a formidable unit.

As the nights began to draw in during September 1983, inside the cramped confines of their El Cerrito garage Metallica punched in shifts that would soon enough yield results that were both startling and surprisingly progressive. For once, the group could be said to have time on their side when it came to determining the direction their next musical steps would take. Although the quartet would once more play the Keystone Club in Palo Alto, this date was scheduled for Hallowe’en, some seven weeks after the completion of the Kill ’Em All for One tour. Following this, on the docket were a further four bookings at various Bay Area clubs, plus a return to the Country Club in Reseda, at which the group debuted the songs ‘Fight Fire with Fire’ and ‘Creeping Death’. During the same set Metallica also performed a new composition, the final details of which they had yet to wrestle into position, a lengthy instrumental presented under the working title ‘When Hell Freezes Over’. In time this track would metamorphose into the classic ‘The Call of Ktulu’. Three days later at The Stone the band premièred another new composition, titled ‘Ride the Lightning’. Unbeknownst to the people gathered to see the band play at either club, these audiences had between them heard what would become 50 per cent of the headliners’ second studio album.

Armed with a cache of fresh material, as autumn hardened into winter, Metallica once again left San Francisco, this time for a short tour of the Midwest and eastern United States. After playing shows in Illinois, Wisconsin and Ohio, the group headed back to the Eastern Seaboard for dates in New Jersey and New York state. On January 14, 1984, the quartet were scheduled to perform their
now expanded live set at the Channel Club in Boston. On the night prior to this appearance, Metallica’s three-man road crew – a body of men that comprised the ubiquitous Mark Whitaker as well Dave Marrs and guitar tech John Marshall – drove a truck into which was loaded the group’s backline of amplifiers, drum kit and guitars four hours north from New York City to Massachusetts. Arriving in a city gripped by frigid weather and what Marshall recalls as being ‘four feet of snow’, the crew parked the truck outside the hotel in which they were booked to sleep. Given the frigid temperature of the outside air, rather than leaving Metallica’s guitars to potentially warp in the cruel night air, instead the party carried the instruments up to their rooms for safe-keeping. With New Jersey as their starting point, Metallica themselves were scheduled to travel up to Boston the following day.

On the morning of the performance, however, Kirk Hammett was awoken by the sound of a trilling telephone. Picking up the receiver, he was confronted by a confusion of voices, one of which was saying ‘Oh no, oh no, I can’t. No, I can’t. No, no, I can’t … I can’t do it.’ Despite being just seconds into his waking day, Hammett inferred that this panicked voice was not the bringer of good news. ‘No, I can’t tell ’em, I can’t tell ’em,’ the speaker continued. ‘Tell us what?’ wondered Hammett? Eventually the speaker was replaced by someone capable of placing sentences together in something approaching a cogent order. Hammett listened as the voice at the other end of the line delivered a message the gravitas of which brought Hammett’s day into the sharpest of focus.

‘Guys,’ he was told, ‘[all of your] equipment has been stolen.’

In the exchange that followed Hammett learned that at some point during the night thieves had broken into the band’s equipment truck and not only relieved the ride of its entire cargo, but also nicked the truck itself. This raid, under cover of darkness, saw Ulrich dispossessed of his drum kit, Hammett relieved of
his Marshall head cabinet, and Hetfield bereft of his much-loved modified Marshall head cabinet and speaker. Also stolen was a suitcase containing books dedicated to music theory, as well as technical matters relating to the production of live music. Suffice to say, Metallica’s appearance at Boston’s Channel Club was promptly cancelled.

Receiving this news from a prone position in New Jersey, Hammett took possession of the facts and replied with a single word.

‘Fuck.’

5 – FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE

With snow on the ground, and a truck filled with drums and amplifiers God knows where, for Metallica the new year blues of 1984 bit hard. Following their cancelled appearance in Boston, they were scheduled to fly to Europe for their first tour of the continent. But as a consequence of the actions of light-fingered New Englanders, these plans were placed on ice.

‘We were very depressed,’ admitted James Hetfield. ‘We were stuck in New Jersey, bumming.’

So dispiriting were their circumstances that Hetfield was inspired to write a lyric which eclipsed anything he had penned before. ‘Fade to Black’ tells the story of a life so hopeless that suicide is presented as a valid means of escape. The perspective from which this tale unfolds takes the form of a first-person narrative. ‘I have lost the will to live, simply nothing more to give,’ wrote Hetfield. As the lyric expands into metaphor, it showcases an early example of the author’s underrated poetic ear, with the assertion that ‘growing darkness [is] taking dawn’ and that ‘I was me, but now he’s gone’.

For Hetfield a lyric that came from a sense of self-imposed powerlessness broke new ground. Other words written for Metallica’s as yet untitled and unrecorded second album also shifted position from the tough-guy bravura that splattered the lyric sheet of
Kill ’Em All
to scenarios where the narrator finds himself trapped in circumstances beyond his control. The recently premièred ‘Ride the Lightning’ takes as its subject matter a condemned individual whose last moments on earth see him constrained beneath the leather straps of an electric chair. Terrified
that the state is acting to switch off his lights in this manner, he asks, ‘[Can] someone help me? Oh, please God, help me, they are trying to take it all away.’ As when Johnny Rotten asked of the citizens on the east side of the Berlin wall to ‘please’ not to be waiting for him (in the Sex Pistols’ 1977 song ‘Holidays in the Sun’), the appearance of the word ‘please’ gives ‘Ride the Lightning’ a quality different not only from the material its author had written before, but also from the music with which Metallica’s own stood comparison. Notions of vulnerability and helplessness were, and are, prospects about which Hetfield held genuine fears. Even when couched in the metal-friendly narrative confines of state execution (and in another instance, of being trapped under ice), songs sung from this point of view lent the material a level of authenticity that had been absent from the group’s earliest work.

But with ‘Fade to Black’ Hetfield had taken an extra step towards revealing feelings of failure and futility. Here was a narrator left powerless not by outside forces, but rather by the ghosts that haunted the corridors of his own mind. One should not confuse the circumstances faced by the narrator of ‘Fade to Black’ with those of Hetfield himself – ‘I’m sure I wasn’t really thinking of killing myself,’ the front man conceded – but what can be said is that in translating and transposing personal misfortune into a convincing scenario of a much darker hue, the lyricist did successfully complete the alchemical process of turning real life into art.

‘It was my favourite Marshall amp, man!’ he said, by way of explaining the giant leap that saw a stolen speaker and
amplifier-head
provide the catalyst for a song about suicide.

Armed with an album’s worth of new material in various stages of development – from songs that had been rehearsed at length and committed to demo tape, to others still under construction – Metallica set about the business of finding both a studio and a producer who might translate their music to a twelve-inch
oil-based canvas with greater care and skill than that shown by Paul Curcio on
Kill ’Em All
. In this pursuit, the band – or, in all likelihood, the band’s drummer – had aced their homework.

In the winter of 1984 Copenhagen-born Flemming Rasmussen was co-owner and in-house producer of Sweet Silence Studios, a recording facility then located on the outskirts of the centre of his home town, the Danish capital. Born on New Year’s Day, 1958, Rasmussen joined the staff at Sweet Silence and was only eighteen when in 1976 the facility was bought by fellow Dane Freddie Hansson. Just four years later he was invited by Hansson to buy into the business, and in 1980 the engineer became joint owner of the premises. Despite having attracted the business of artists such as Ringo Starr, Van Morrison and Cat Stevens, not to mention being established as a favourite location of Danish jazz ensembles, it was Ritchie Blackmore’s decision to record his band Rainbow’s fifth studio album
Difficult to Cure
, at Sweet Silence in 1981 that brought the establishment to the attention of Lars Ulrich. Featuring a hit single in the form of the Russ Ballard-penned ‘I Surrender’, the nine-song set was produced by Rainbow bassist Roger Glover, but inspection of the album’s small print reveals that the credit for recording
Difficult to Cure
belonged to one Flemming Rasmussen, a fact that did not go unnoticed by a group in San Francisco who were quickly learning not to miss a trick.

‘In those days there was no email or anything, so a call came into the studio, which was taken by [Freddie Hansson],’ recalls Rasmussen. ‘I was told that there was this band coming over called “Metallisomething”, and I went, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do it.”’

Not for the first time in their short life, Metallica found the stars aligning in their favour. Despite its underwhelming if not entirely disastrous commercial performance in the United States,
Kill ’Em All
had found a receptive audience in Europe, and in the United Kingdom in particular. The album had been released in Britain on the fledgling independent rock and metal label Music
For Nations, which licensed the record without signing the band directly to the label. When it came to the matter of a second album, however, Music For Nations were sufficiently impressed by
Kill ’Em All
’s commercial performance to place its creators under contract. With these rights came responsibilities. When Johnny Zazula inevitably ran out of money needed to pay for the studio costs incurred in recording
Ride the Lightning
, it would fall to his band’s new record label to settle the account.

Music For Nations was launched in 1983 by music industry insider Martin Hooker. Hooker had earned his wings in the trade at the blue-chip corporation EMI, where he worked with such artists as Paul McCartney, Elton John and Kate Bush. To his delight, in 1976 the label – at the time, the very embodiment of the British establishment – signed the Sex Pistols, only to hurriedly discard them following the storm of notoriety surrounding the song ‘God Save the Queen’. Hooker realised that as long as he was in EMI’s employ he would have little control over the artists with whom it was decided he would work, and so determined to take action. While still working at the company’s offices in South Kensington, he secretly established his own independent imprint, fittingly titled Secret. Within six months, he had sufficient confidence in his new venture that he decided to devote himself to it in full, and handed in his notice at EMI.

The roster amassed by Secret could hardly have been more different from that of Hooker’s last place of work. While his previous employers had hurriedly hit the eject button on the Sex Pistols, Secret signed the Exploited, a Glasgow-based punk quartet so unreconstructed as to make the Pistols look like the Charlie Daniels Band. Despite not being in possession of a single artistic bone in their bodies, in 1981 the Exploited scored a Top 40 hit with the song ‘Dead Cities’, an occasion marked with a startling appearance on the BBC’s flagship early evening music programme
Top of the Pops
(a booking which suggested that, in
an age where the musical mainstream was becoming increasingly timid, ‘Auntie Beeb’ was still capable of stirring shards of glass into a bowl of vanilla cream).

‘I just loved [that period],’ recalls Hooker today. With not a little sarcasm, he adds that ‘just for a change’ the financial straits through which Britain was sailing were ‘crap’, a state of affairs that meant that the music offered by his label spoke more to the kids on the dole rather than to a nation hypnotised by the sinister fairy tale of the 1981 wedding of Charles Windsor and Diana Spencer.

‘Bands like the Exploited, who were our big act at the time, were having hits with the likes of “Dead Cities”,’ remembers Hooker. ‘And when you went on tour to places like Sheffield and Liverpool, you really did see horrific poverty. Everywhere places were closed down, there were kids sitting in gutters sniffing glue. It was quite the eye-opener. So [the kind of music made by the Exploited and others like them] had a valid place at the time. We put out nine albums and all of them went Top 40.’

At the same time as the Exploited were thrilling football hooligans and those for whom Johnny Rotten’s proclamation that there was ‘no future’ had become a deadening reality, listeners who preferred to grow their hair long rather than spike it to the rafters with sugar and water were rallying to the sound made by groups lumped together under the awkward acronym that was NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal). But while Hooker admits that the sound made by Iron Maiden was that of a ‘great band’, for the most part the collective whole as represented by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal left him cold. That this was so might have made Hooker’s decision to take
Kill ’Em All
under licence on his new label, Music For Nations, an odd choice, what with so many of that album’s component parts bearing such close resemblance to the sounds that had emerged from the United Kingdom just a year or two earlier. But while Hooker recognises this irony, he is also quick, and correct,
to point out that Metallica brought to their sound ‘an excitement and energy’ that gave their music a sense of uncharted vitality, if not quite originality. For while even the most frenetic of New Wave of British Heavy Metal turns did carry with them a whiff of something hoary, Metallica roared from the speakers with the pure amphetamined energy of the kind of punk that had never been near an art school.

So smitten was Hooker with Metallica that in his pursuit of the group the label owner broke a number of his own rules. ‘Unusually I went against my own instincts,’ he admits. ‘Usually I’d have long talks with the band and go and see them play live, but time-wise I wasn’t in a position to do that. I just wanted to get them signed up before anybody else was interested. So, yeah, I went about it a bit arse-about-face, and it was a bit of a gamble. But obviously it was one that paid off for me.’

But as with his decision to leave EMI in order to build Secret, and then Music For Nations, Hooker understood that in order to accumulate first he must speculate, and that Metallica were a prospect upon which it was worth placing a bet. The Englishman liked the fact that the group themselves were not English, observing that US bands were so much more to his personal taste.

‘American musicians were so much easier to work with than English guys,’ he maintains. ‘They were so much more
hard-working
, Lars Ulrich being a perfect case in point – you just wound him up and let him go. Whereas a lot of English bands that I worked with would be, like, “Right, I’ve signed a record deal, now make me a star.” They would just sit back and let it all happen around them. But the American bands were more inclined to put in a twelve-hour day to make things happen.’

Metallica’s decision to record their second album not in America but at Sweet Silence was aided by the fact that February 1984
saw the band perform their first live shows in Europe. Ticket holders who attended the Volkshaus club in Zurich, Switzerland, on February 3, 1984, can lay claim to being members of the first audience to see the quartet perform outside the United States. The group had travelled to the mainland as special guests on Venom’s Seven Dates of Hell tour, a tour which confusingly comprised of just six dates. As well as visiting Zurich, the caravan also made noise in the cities of Milan, Nuremberg, Paris, Zwolle and Poperinge.

The quartet were guided through this short European trek by tour manager Gem Howard. A friend of Martin Hooker’s and a colleague since the days of the Secret label, in 1984 Howard held the position of general manager of Music For Nations. The aspect of the job that Howard most enjoyed, however, was being out in the field, travelling with and taking care of bands touring Britain and mainland Europe. This he had been doing since 1976, when as an employee at Secret he would shepherd around the continent the kind of groups parents dread their daughters might one day bring home. Eight years on, Howard was still traversing the motorways and autobahns of his home continent in the service of Music For Nations’ growing roster of bands, many of whom were not just young and American but also in Europe for the first time.