Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (9 page)

Such intransigence was never likely to do more than scratch the surface of Ulrich’s Teflon-coated ebullience however. At 9 p.m. the drummer walked onstage in front of a 400-strong crowd and launched into the opening rolls of ‘Hit the Lights’. Allotted just twenty minutes for their six-song set, Metallica dispensed with stage banter or song introductions and simply attacked. The group did, however, find time to debut another new track, ‘Metal Militia’. Analysing his band’s earliest songwriting efforts, James Hetfield once observed that ‘the epic feel is definitely from Diamond Head, while the simplicity came from Motörhead’, and ‘Metal Militia’ was the clearest example yet of this fusion. Here Hetfield sings of his band in militaristic terms, ‘fighting for one cause’ in uniforms of ‘leather and metal’, and encourages those listening to fall in line behind the quartet in their crusade ‘to take on the world with our heavy metal.’ Offering a rallying
call to arms reminiscent of Saxon’s own ‘Denim and Leather’, the new song was met with roars of approval from the Yorkshire band’s Californian fans.

Already installed as Metallica’s harshest critic, Ulrich was less impressed. The drummer would later write that his group were plagued by ‘awful’ sound on their first show of the night, adding, ‘The band as a whole sucked.’ (Amusingly, however, Ulrich noted that he himself ‘played great’.) Afforded one extra song for their second show of the night, the four-piece bolstered their set with a third Brian Tatler/Sean Harris composition, ‘Sucking My Love’. As was his habit, James Hetfield declined to introduce the song as a cover version, which led Saxon’s watching soundman Paul Owen to enquire sarcastically whether the young group were familiar with an English band called Diamond Head. Their faces duly flushed with embarrassment.

‘Had a good time,’ Ulrich concluded in his diary, ‘but never met Saxon.’

Ulrich was not the only person in the room critiquing the band’s performance that night. The
LA Times
commissioned their arts correspondent Terry Atkinson to file his own review, which duly appeared in the March 29 edition of the newspaper.

‘Saxon could also use a fast, hot guitar player of the Eddie Van Halen ilk,’ Atkinson opined. ‘Opening quartet Metallica had one, but little else. The local group needs considerable development to overcome a pervasive awkwardness.’

Ulrich’s frank assessments of his colleagues’ performances on March 27 were an early indication both of his own exacting standards and of the tensions that were already starting to surface in his new band. By his own admission, Dave Mustaine was ‘rarely sober and always stoned’ during his first six months in Metallica, and the guitarist’s constant desire to be the centre of attention grated with Ron McGovney who concluded that his new band mate was less interested in Metallica’s music than in
‘the kicks, the parties, the fame’. For his part, Mustaine was (justifiably) concerned that as musicians his colleagues simply were not capable enough to share a stage with him: ‘There were times when James and I wanted to kick Lars out,’ he admitted, ‘and times Lars and I talked about letting James go.’ Hetfield, meanwhile, was having his own crises of faith. Painfully
self-conscious
and cripplingly insecure, the singer was concerned that he possessed neither the voice, the looks or the charisma to front the group.

‘I was open for
anybody
doing it,’ he later confessed. ‘I thought that the band wouldn’t make it without a front man. I thought that singing and playing guitar didn’t look right, and the singer couldn’t be focused enough.’ Entreaties were made to several of the area’s star front men – John Bush from Armored Saint and Sammy Dijon from Ruthless among them – but no firm connections were established.

A decision was reached instead to recruit a second lead guitar player, so that Hetfield might be freed up to focus solely on singing once again. On April 23, the band made their debut as a five-piece at the Concert Factory in Costa Mesa, with one Brad Parker, aka Damian C. Phillips, in their line-up. It would prove to be a
short-lived
union. No sooner had the words ‘And coming up next … Metallica’ fallen from the MC’s lips than Parker appeared onstage on his own, treating the crowd to his finest Eddie Van Halen impressions, as his bemused colleagues looked on aghast from the dressing room. When the band convened in Ron McGovney’s garage later that same week for the purpose of recording their first ‘proper’ demo tape, Parker was not invited to attend.

Untitled, but often erroneously referred to as the ‘Power Metal’ demo, the four-track demo tape was split between two Mustaine compositions – ‘Jump in the Fire’ and ‘The Mechanix’ – and two re-worked Leather Charm originals – ‘Hit the Lights’ and ‘Motorbreath’. Crudely recorded, while the four songs
manage to capture the young band’s raw energy, the collection is more notable for featuring some of the worst singing and most excruciating lyrics ever committed to tape. In fairness to Hetfield, he had already voiced his own concerns about his singing ability months prior to the recording. But from the moment he delivers the opening line of ‘Hit the Lights’ here, with his keening vocals lathered in reverb, the singer’s discomfiture is as palpable as it is painful to hear. That said, this awkwardness is easy to understand when one considers the nature of the lyrics submitted for him to sing by Mustaine. Already hamstrung by one of the most lumpen riffs in Metallica’s catalogue, the earliest recorded version of ‘Jump in the Fire’ is further besmirched by Mustaine’s priapic adolescent poetry that sees the narrator talk of ‘Movin’ [his] hips in a circular way’ and confessing his desire to ‘Pull your body to my waist, feel how good it fits’. This, though, was poetry comparable to the finest works of Sylvia Plath when placed alongside the overripe masturbatory fantasy that is ‘The Mechanix’.

‘You say you wanna get your order filled,’ sings Hetfield, ‘Made me shiver when I put it in, Pumping just won’t do ya know … luckily for you.’ There then follows a chorus which, with its references to bulging pistons and cranked drive shafts, reads like J. G. Ballard might were the author to turn his hand to writing the letters page for a top-shelf magazine.

Despite this emphatic lack of grace, the band’s momentum continued to gather pace. A pair of gigs were booked for May, a further two in June and four in July, while August saw no fewer than seven shows pencilled into Ulrich’s diary. It was at the first of these, an August 2 headline appearance at the Troubadour that James Hetfield punched his drummer for the first time.

Ironically, that evening’s concert was one of Metallica’s best performances to date. At the conclusion of their nine-song set, the audience inside Doug Weston’s storied venue called the quartet back to the stage for an encore. The problem, however, lay in the
fact that the band had not rehearsed for such an eventuality, and consequently had nothing prepared. During a hastily convened backstage discussion, Hetfield suggested that the band might
re-emerge
to play ‘Blitzkrieg’ while Ulrich put forward Diamond Head’s ‘Helpless’ as his preferred choice. After a show of hands ‘Blitzkrieg’ was nominated and the band trooped back onstage to warm applause. But as Hetfield approached his mic stand, Ulrich, in clear defiance of the principles of democracy, began beating out the intro to ‘Helpless’ instead. Thrown completely off-guard, the world’s most acutely self-conscious front man stuttered and stumbled through the lyrics, his face ablaze with embarrassment. When the song ground painfully to its conclusion, Hetfield walked to the back of the stage, hurled his guitar straight at Ulrich and slugged the shell-shocked drummer hard in the stomach.

‘You fucker!’ he raged. ‘Don’t you
ever
do that again.’

Elsewhere, though, matters were progressing in a rather more pleasing manner for the occasionally fractious quartet. Three weeks on from the release of Brian Slagel’s
Metal Massacre
compilation, a collection which served to highlight in the starkest terms the gaping chasm in attitude and tone between Metallica and contemporaries such as Ratt, Bitch and Malice, the quartet found themselves in a recording studio once more, this time at the behest of local punk rock impresario Kenny Kane. Kane told Ulrich that he’d been given his own label imprint by the fast-rising Anaheim record label Rocshire Records and that he wanted to make Metallica his first signing. The drummer duly booked the band into a small Orange County recording studio called Chateau East on July 6, where they cut versions of the seven original tracks they had written to date: ‘Hit the Lights’, ‘The Mechanix’, ‘Motorbreath’, ‘Seek & Destroy’, ‘Metal Militia’, ‘Jump in the Fire’ and ‘Phantom Lord’. A significant improvement on the uneven ‘Power Metal’ demo, the recordings were crisp, sharp and aggressive, the work of a band beginning to
find their own voice and range. Ulrich duly amended his band’s upcoming gig posters with the information that the
Metallica
EP would be released on September 1. When Kenny Kane took possession of the master tapes however, he phoned Ulrich in a rage, claiming that Metallica had duped him. The songs, he claimed were ‘too heavy metal’. Why, he demanded to know, had Metallica not recorded the punkish songs he had heard them play live? Ulrich had to calmly explain that those songs were, in fact, cover versions. Kane said he could take the tapes back and do with them as he wished.

In the weeks that followed, Lars Ulrich and his friend Patrick Scott dubbed literally hundreds of cassettes from this master tape, now titled
No Life ’Til Leather,
in tribute to both the opening line of the tape’s opening track and the title of Motörhead’s 1981 live album, and posted them to every fanzine writer, every tape trader, every record store owner and every gig promoter in their address books. In a matter of weeks, the tape was
everywhere
.

‘Kornarens had got a copy of the demo at the record store and he said “Hey, I wanna play you something, but I’m not going to tell you who it is,”’ recalls Brian Slagel. ‘So he played the tape and I thought it was really good. I thought it was some new English metal band, because he didn’t tell me who it was. I said, “This is pretty good, what is this?” and he said, “You don’t want to guess?” I said, “No, I have no idea.” He said, “This is Metallica.” I said, “Wow, this is Metallica? Wow, they’ve really gone so far!” Because it was
incredible
.’

In the weeks that followed, Lars Ulrich was inundated with requests for interviews from fanzines located all over America. Among these were Ron Quintana’s
Metal Mania
, Bob Muldowney’s
Kick Ass Monthly
, K. J. Doughton’s
Northwest Metal
and John Strednansky’s
Metal Rendezvous
. From his booth in a Chevron filling station at which he was now employed, the young Dane spoke passionately about his band’s desire to initiate a new
age for metal. When Quintana asked Patrick Scott to conduct an interview with Ulrich for
Metal Mania
, the two friends sat giggling in Ulrich’s Park Newport bedroom as they composed the notice, which concluded that Metallica had ‘the potential to become US metal gods’.

‘We were just laughing at the stuff we were talking about,’ says Scott now. ‘It just seemed so far-fetched at that point.’

But as Metallica’s fortunes were falling into place, the band’s members were falling out with one another. This discord began with an argument over a dog which descended into a fist fight the aftermath of which saw Hetfield tell Mustaine that he was sacked from the band.

‘At the time I was dealing drugs to survive,’ explains Mustaine, ‘and, whenever Metallica were playing concerts, people knew I was gone so they’d break into my apartment to steal my dope. So I figured I’d get a couple of pit bulls to guard the place. I took one of them to rehearsal one day and it put its paws on the bass player’s car. I guess James thought she was going to scratch it, so he pushed her off with his foot. We started arguing. And then I hit him.’

As Hetfield wiped blood and phlegm from his face, Ron McGovney tried to intervene to protect his friend. Mustaine deflected the bassist’s attack and flipped him over his hip, sending McGovney crashing down on to an entertainment centre in the corner of the room. As a stunned Ulrich looked on in disbelief, Hetfield screamed at Mustaine to get out of his friend’s house.

‘You’re out of the band!’ Hetfield roared. ‘Get the fuck out of here!’

‘Fuck you!’ Mustaine retorted. ‘I quit.’

The break-up lasted all of twenty-four hours. The following day, the guitarist sheepishly tendered his apologies to Hetfield and McGovney, and was reinstated in the group. But the events of that afternoon would not quickly be forgotten.

‘That,’ the guitarist reflected some twenty years on, ‘was definitely the beginning of the end for me.’

At the start of October 1982 James Hetfield was moved to write Metallica’s first love song. The words he penned in his notebook, however, were not inspired by a girlfriend, but rather by a city situated almost 400 miles north of his home town. An unabashed love letter to San Francisco and its fanatical heavy metal community, the members of which gathered nightly ‘to maim and kill’, ‘Whiplash’ contained the singer’s most direct and affecting lyrics to date.