Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (21 page)

‘He didn’t quite make it,’ remembers Dome. ‘At the end of the night I had to pour him into a cab. At the time the band were staying in west London and I remember him getting into the cab and the driver asking him, “Where to, mate?” He didn’t reply at first, so I asked him, “Lars, where are you going?”, to which he announced, “Denmark! Take me to Denmark!” So there’s me asking, “Lars, seriously, where are you going?”, and him answering “Denmark!” And, of course, there’s Lemmy, completely sober, totally fine.’

On another occasion Cliff Burton decided to occupy a free day
with a shopping trip to Oxford Street. He was joined by Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian, who was in London to discuss plans for his band’s second album with Music For Nations. Ian accompanied Burton into the centre of town in order that the bass player could purchase a new Walkman. Waiting for an underground train at Tottenham Court Road station, the pair were approached by two policeman, one of whom asked, ‘If we were to search you right now, would we find any drugs?’

The pair’s answer, ‘No’, was not taken at face value by the two representatives of the thin blue line. Instead Burton and Ian were arrested on suspected possession of a controlled substance and were taken to the nearby Albany Street police station for questioning. Locked inside a windowless cell for hours on end, Burton found himself growing increasingly frustrated that the one free day afforded by Metallica’s schedule found him imprisoned in a Metropolitan Police nick. When the door to the cell finally did open, it was only to permit the entrance of two policeman, who instructed the suspects to strip to their underwear in preparation for a thorough body search. This search revealed a number of pills, belonging to Burton, which the officers suspected to be drugs of an illegal kind. Despite the bass player’s protestations that these tablets were nothing other than medicine for the treatment of allergies and a cold, he was told that neither he or his friend would be re-acquainted with their liberty before the items had been subject to testing in a police laboratory. While this took place, Burton was driven in a police van back to the flat he and his band mates were sharing in order that police could search the property for more ‘contraband’. Answering the door, Kirk Hammett was startled to see his band mate accompanied by six uniformed officers, and even more surprised when (without a warrant) the officers began to search the flat. When this exercise unearthed nothing, and the forensic lab report duly identified Burton’s seized property as being a phlegm expectorant, both
young Americans were told they were free to go, sent on their way with a back-handed apology from the station’s commanding officer. Saying that he was sorry for their inconvenience, the policeman added that had this event occurred in the United States the suspects perhaps could have expected worse treatment. Not one to suffer such foolishness, Burton retorted that that in United States most officers had the wherewithal to differentiate between cold medicine and Quaaludes and would instead quickly have shifted their attentions to the business of catching real criminals.

If Cliff Burton could hardly have been said to be viewing the sights of London (at least not while locked inside a police cell), the same held true for James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich. With the band’s first date at the Marquee fast approaching, on March 23 the pair travelled to the not at all picturesque neighbourhood of Walthamstow, a north-eastern suburb of the city known locally for its art deco dog-racing stadium and very little else, in order to drum up interest in their debut UK performance set to take place four nights later. To do this, the pair handed out flyers to fans gathered at the Royal Standard pub where that night Exciter were playing a headline show.

‘Lars and James were just giving out flyers inside of the venue,’ says Malcolm Dome, who was with the pair that evening. ‘They were just walking around asking people if they’d come down to the Marquee to watch them play. I don’t think it was a case that they necessarily thought that no one would come, but more a case of the fact that they just didn’t know what was going to happen. No one knew what was going to happen. There
was
a bit of a buzz about Metallica but this had taken a knock from the fact that the tour with The Rods had been cancelled. Suddenly from [a proposed date at] the Hammersmith Odeon, Exciter are playing the Royal Standard, which is a tiny place. And while Exciter got a good crowd that night, it wasn’t a huge one. So you can see why no one quite knew what to expect.’

Hetfield and Ulrich’s willingness to hustle on behalf of their own band in this way – an enterprise one imagines came more naturally to the drummer than it did the front man – lends credence to Martin Hooker’s observation that American bands were willing to work harder than their British counterparts in an effort to engineer some kind of forward momentum.

The significance of Metallica’s appearances at the Marquee would also have been something that was not missed by the band. Originally opened in 1958 on London’s Oxford Street, since moving the short distance to Soho’s Wardour Street in 1964 the 400-capacity room had established itself as the most iconic live music club in the world, eclipsing the profiles of even New York’s CBGB and the Fillmore in San Francisco. By 1984 the Marquee’s small stage had supported the weight of such acts as The Who, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, The Police, The Jam and Iron Maiden, to name but a few. For any group equipped with any degree of knowledge of musical history, an appearance at the Marquee was an occasion that amounted to more than just another date on a tour schedule. As if this weren’t enough, the headline act on March 27, 1984, might also have been feeling an added degree of pressure. For Metallica to have failed to honour their undercard appearance at the Hammersmith Odeon with The Rods was one thing; to then have managed only a timid splash over two nights at the Marquee would be quite another. A failure of this kind would have done nothing to encourage the charge of electricity that was beginning to crackle around their name.

They needn’t have worried. As tour manager Gem Howard remembers, ‘pretty much everyone from
Kerrang!
’ attended the first of the two performances, ‘everyone from the receptionist to the editor’. The band had also managed to attract paying customers in numbers sufficient to fill the room in which they were playing, a feat they would also accomplish less than a fortnight later. As the English winter ceded territory to a more
agreeable spring, Metallica placed their first marker in the heart of one of the world’s greatest and most musically significant cities.

‘It was quite a typical mayhemic Marquee experience with sweat pouring down the walls,’ remembers Geoff Barton. ‘But I don’t know if I necessarily saw the potential of Metallica at that point, because to me it was just a barrage of noise. It would be great for me to say, “Yes, I could see they were megastars in an instant,” but I don’t think that was really the case.’

‘They blew the place apart,’ is the rather more effusive recollection of Malcolm Dome, who bore witness to both of the group’s performances on Wardour Street. ‘The thing I remember most about them was just how commanding a presence James Hetfield was onstage. His personality was still developing at that point, but even then he had a great deal of stage presence. Live, he drove that band. And I remember Cliff looking odd and not seeming to fit in with the group that he was playing with, but in a good way. He just seemed to be a bit different, like a Southern rocker in a thrash band. But you just looked at what was happening on that stage and got the sense that you were watching something monumental.

‘At that time there were a number of American bands who were coming over to England and playing club shows,’ he continues. ‘Y&T had been over, as had The Rods and Twisted Sister. All of those bands had been really very impressive. But this was something different. The music Metallica were playing seemed to offer a whole new direction. And onstage, they sounded even heavier than they did on record.’

But if Metallica’s visceral live performances were of a power capable of thrilling audiences from San Francisco to London, when it came to the recording studio the group were ready to unveil a more nuanced and textured interpretation of their
sound.
Ride the Lightning
met its waiting public on July 27, 1984, a mere one year and two days after the release of
Kill ’Em All
. The eight-song set was more than the sound of a band growing into their own skin; it was also the work of a group whose musical inquisitiveness had taken them far from the point at which they stood just twelve months previously. Odd, then, that one of its creators spoke of the band’s effort with some hesitation. Informed by an ear trained on what he believed the album lacked rather than what it was outside parties would hear – itself always the sign of a restless creative force – when asked his opinion on
Ride the Lightning
Lars Ulrich explained with a perspective that suggested he viewed the bottle of vodka as being half-empty rather than two-quarters full.

‘We’re as happy [with the album] as we [can] be,’ he said, adding that ‘a few of the songs were only written just before we had to do the album, so I think we might have arranged them a little differently if we had had the opportunity to put them down on tape first, and then gone away and listened to them before doing the album.’

The very fact that Ulrich is making reference to musical arrangements offers a clue as to the distance traversed by the group over the course of the previous months. While the musicianship on
Kill ’Em All
is often accomplished in an individual sense, in 1983 Metallica’s technique for summoning volume and force was to emphasise their power by layering instruments atop each other in a manner that produced heat rather than light. As Ulrich himself rather astutely observed, in effect the band’s debut album was like ‘one complete track’, whereas its successor proved that ‘You don’t have to depend on speed to be powerful and heavy.’

With
Ride the Lightning
Metallica showed that they could transcend the boundaries of
Kill ’Em All
with some ease, a point that is made before the album’s opening track, ‘Fight Fire with Fire’, has even really begun. While the main body of this song
sees Metallica rallying to a riff that is both precise and relentless, the tracks opens not with power chords or a bass drum beat but rather with the swell of beautifully textured acoustic guitars. The contrast between what is heard in the first seconds and what soon follows is not only deliberately startling, but also serves to set the parameters within which the album itself operates. In 1984 the acoustic-then-electric technique displayed on ‘Fight Fire with Fire’ was sufficiently revolutionary and effective as to be quickly seized upon by thrash metal’s chasing pack and copied to such an extent that within two years it would be rendered a cliché.

Not that Metallica themselves were above resorting to cliché. Despite displaying a level of musical progression that is rarely less than striking,
Ride the Lightning
is not an album free from the banalities particular to heavy metal at the time. Twenty-nine years after the fact, ‘Creeping Death’ remains a classic of the genre, and it is a testament to the song’s remarkable musical power that it manages to obscure a lyric – the Biblical tale of the curse of the death of the first-born from the book of Exodus – that while poetically competent is in essence not a good deal smarter than a rock. The same might be said of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, a tale of medieval men fighting to the death over a patch of land, a sentiment accompanied by music of such quality that to this day it remains a particular favourite of Metallica’s audience and a staple of the group’s live set. It is, though, somehow more than magisterial music that rescues a lyric that might have been both brittle and daft; here, the notion that James Hetfield has established an emotional connection between himself and the characters in the song is a difficult one to shake.

Throughout
Ride the Lightning
the presence of Cliff Burton permeates, his authoritative but never insistent technique adding texture and depth to songs such as the instrumental composition ‘The Call of Ktulu’, a piece that owes as much to
nineteenth-century
European classical music as it does 1980s European heavy
metal. A glance at the songwriting credits reveals that along with Hetfield and Ulrich (credited as co-authors of all eight tracks) the bassist co-wrote three-quarters of
Ride the Lightning
– Kirk Hammett is also listed as co-author of four songs – suggesting that Burton’s contribution to Metallica’s ever-developing sound was more fundamental than merely stepping on a Crybaby
wah-wah
pedal and making a noise that sounded like a lead guitar.

In fact the two songs on which Cliff Burton’s name does not warrant a writing credit are the album’s weakest selections. As a power-metal anthem that declines to engage thrash metal’s top gear, ‘Trapped under Ice’ – a track that had its roots in the riff Kirk Hammett wrote for the early Exodus number ‘Impaler’ – is a song that manages to be effective without ever quite becoming
affecting
. That said, compared to ‘Escape’, ‘Trapped under Ice’ suddenly assumes a mantle of unparalleled artistic genius. With its ponderous tempo, uncharacteristically timid chorus and insipid lyric – where the narrator aspires to ‘break away from … common fashion’ desiring instead to be ‘out on [his] own, out to be free’ ‘Escape’ holds the ignominious honour of being Metallica’s first artistically dishonest song.