Enter Night, page 12
He held out his paw and allowed me to grasp it. One of the production assistants showed him to his seat while I said hello to the other Dave – Ellefson. Dave Junior, as he was fast becoming known. Junior was the band’s bassist, and although he was just as fucked-up on drugs as his leader, he came without a sneer and minus the ton of attitude. They were the yin and yang of Megadeth, good cop, bad cop.
I settled myself down and watched as they sniffed loudly and leered at the production assistant’s cleavage. They wanted us to know they were bad boys and we dutifully played along.
Then the interview began. Cameras rolling, sound and…the floor manager made the funny hand signals for action.
I began by mentioning Mustaine’s past in Metallica but he cut me short. ‘That was then,’ he sneered. ‘This is now and I really don’t think I have much to say about it. I don’t speak ill of the dead…’
Oh, but he did. Every chance he got. As soon as we took a break for the first video he got into it. How he’d written all the songs on the first Metallica album but never received the credit. How the band had been nothing until he came along. How they were hypocrites for tossing him out when they were all drinking and getting fucked up just as much as he did. How Lars couldn’t play the drums and Kirk had just ripped him off. How James was scared of him.
Dave Junior, who’d obviously heard it all before and could look forward to many years more of hearing it over again, shifted in his seat and cleared his throat and tried to change the subject. But Mustaine just ignored him. This wasn’t about Dave Junior or even about Megadeth. It certainly wasn’t about trying to tell me anything, whoever I was, some asshole with a cable show and an Iron Maiden T-shirt.
This was all about Dave Mustaine. Always had been, always would be. God bless his broken black heart…
In many ways, relocating to San Francisco at the start of 1983 is the real start of the Metallica story. It certainly felt that way for Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield. Speaking to me in 2009, Lars put it like this: ‘What happened were two things. Number one, we started being more comfortable with ourselves, more confident. We started feeling that we were belonging to something that was happening, and that was bigger than ourselves, that we belonged instead of being on the outer fringes. And number two was…Cliff. At that time, me and James were basically self-taught. Most of what we knew we’d learned from [listening to] records and so on. But Cliff had been to college, had studied music at school; was educated in music, so there was a whole different level of expertise that came in there…a sense of melody and a whole other scope of understanding music.’ San Francisco also provided a more cultural mêlée that reminded the brash young drummer of his European roots. ‘I felt the kinship there right away…You took the train around, you took the tram…It was a bunch of kids from the city instead of a bunch of kids from the suburbs. It was big city living and obviously with the cultural scene in San Francisco, the political openness and that whole type of thing, it was…really the closest I’ve found to a European big city. That’s why I choose to live there still. If I was tarred and feathered and thrown out of San Francisco and told never to return I would probably go back to Europe. Because I don’t think there is any other place in the States that I would feel as comfortable in, or that I feel would be home in the way that San Francisco [does].’
As Lars suggests, things began to move much faster after Cliff Burton joined Metallica. Within days of his first show with them in San Francisco at the Stone, on 5 March 1983, there was already talk of making an album. So excited were they by the possibilities of the line-up now Burton was aboard, they arranged for his second gig with them, again at the Stone, on 19 March, to be videotaped, capturing on tape his classic windmill style of bass playing, swinging his beloved 1973 Rickenbacker like an axe, wringing angry distorted tones from it one moment, loud sensuous moans the next, all the while using all ten fingers to dig out the continually propulsive rhythm. Lars, whose drumming was still rudimentary at best, struggled to keep up. Cliff even had his own showpiece within the set, an extended bass solo that would later be immortalised on the first Metallica album, already even at this early stage a highlight of the new Metallica show. ‘We do what we want,’ Cliff was captured on video saying. ‘We don’t care what anyone else thinks.’ There had also been two new tracks demoed at the Metallimansion on 16 March, the first Metallica recordings to feature Cliff Burton: ‘Whiplash’ and ‘No Remorse’. Once again, the band was quick to ensure cassette copies were shared around the fanzine and foreign magazine guys as well as their network of regular tape-traders. They also pulled off a minor coup when they persuaded a DJ at radio station KUSF FM to play both tracks on air, on the basis that Metallica was now, technically speaking at least, a local San Francisco band.
Brian Slagel had been ready to put out a Metallica record of some description since the first time John Kornarens played him the No Life ’til Leather tape and asked him to guess who it was. Slagel assumed it must be some bright new European band: ‘It sounded awesome.’ When John told him it was Lars Ulrich’s group, he couldn’t believe it. ‘This is Metallica? This thing is incredible!’ The problem was Slagel’s fledgling Metal Blade label simply didn’t have the money for the kind of project Lars had in mind. The widespread circulation of No Life ’til Leather and, the latest cassette on the tape-trading scene, an audience recording – from a boom box placed in front of the speaker stacks – of Ron McGovney’s last show with them at the Old Waldorf at the end of November, dubbed the Live Metal up Your Ass demo, had done a certain job. What Metallica needed now, Lars felt strongly, was a more accomplished studio recording; something that demonstrated there was more to them than home-made demos and live tapes. As a stopgap, Slagel suggested simply releasing the seven-track No Life demo as an EP. ‘But good as they liked it they wanted something a little bit better, if they were actually going to put together a real recording.’
One studio in LA offered to let them come in and record an album for a flat fee of $10,000. They asked Brian for the ten grand but he told them: ‘I don’t have ten thousand dollars! Are you kidding me?’ He offered instead to try and find someone willing to invest the ten thousand. ‘But back then that was a lot of money and it just never really happened. By the time they got to San Francisco, I think they were more focused on getting Cliff into the band and integrating him in and playing some shows. We had some other loose discussions about stuff but again nobody had any money and there was just no way to make a quality recording.’ Nobody Brian Slagel or Metallica knew out on the West Coast, anyway. Three thousand miles away on America’s East Coast, however, somebody they didn’t know yet was having other ideas. His name was Jon Zazula – Jonny Z – and though he didn’t have any money either, he and his wife and business partner Marsha Zazula more than made up for that with what Jonny now calls ‘the passion’. He and Marsha ‘loved music so much’, he says, ‘that we were willing to sacrifice anything for music and for metal. “For the metal” – that’s what we used to say.’ It was a phrase that Jonny and Marsha would repeat like a mantra over the coming months as they struggled to keep pace with what was already one of the toughest times they would endure, even before the four beer-hungry kids in Metallica arrived on their doorstep to disrupt and forever change their lives.
At the time he heard his first Metallica recordings – a ten-track bootleg cassette of one of Ron McGovney’s last shows at the Mabuhay Gardens in November – Jonny was then running a record-and-tape stall named Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven in a flea market near to his and Marsha’s home in Old Bridge, New Jersey. Offered a copy of the cassette by a regular customer who insisted he play it immediately, the Mabuhay tape consisted of live versions of the seven-track No Life demo plus the newer ‘No Remorse’ and ‘Whiplash’ and the inevitable Diamond Head cover, ‘Am I Evil?’, which Jonny, another NWOBHM aficionado, instantly recognised. Jonny remembers how, ‘One of our customers came back from San Francisco like he saw Jesus Christ! We would be playing Angel Witch or Iron Maiden or whatever in the shop and never played a demo…but we sold them. And [this guy] came over with a [live] tape cassette of Metallica. It wasn’t even No Life ’til Leather and I was blown away. Actually the song that got me was “The Mechanix”. That was the one that initially just blew me out of my seat. I wanted to find out where I could find these guys. This all was happening as I’m listening to the tape the first time. Then someone hands me K.J. Doughton’s name and I think I called up somebody to get K.J.’s phone number and then I called him and he called Lars and then Lars called me.’
When Lars phoned during dinner one night, Jonny wasn’t even sure yet what he wanted to tell this unknown new band. ‘Damned if I know. I just got caught in this passion, like there’s this little Led Zeppelin hanging out in El Cerrito, you know? Just a little gem that blew my mind. They seemed like America’s antidote to the NWOBHM. America really didn’t have anything, especially in the east, to compete in that world.’ The only concrete proposal Jonny had for them at that point was the suggestion they might like to open up at some of the shows he and Marsha had recently begun promoting locally, featuring the sorts of artists his regular customers at Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven were interested in seeing. They had begun by ‘being in cahoots’ with the then-hot Anvil. After that came NWOBHM outfit Raven. At the same time as they first discovered Metallica, the Zazulas were also looking at bringing in Germany’s best new metal act, Accept, and taking a punt on local boys Manowar. Says Jonny, ‘We had Raven tearing up the place and Anvil tearing up the place before Metallica. And they were big successes, Raven and Anvil. That’s how we started.’
Jonny and Marsha’s next venture was twelve dates they were putting together: ‘The shows were to be with Venom, Twisted Sister…We [also] had Vandenberg and The Rods.’ Talking on the phone to Lars for the first time, Jonny impetuously ‘offered all twelve to Metallica, if they’d come over. Marsha thought I was crazy.’ Lars, who had already heard through the grapevine of something happening in the north-east, told Jonny: ‘Let’s go! Send me some money, I’ll get everybody together, we’ll come over!’ Jonny acted delighted, then got off the phone and immediately started worrying. Money was so tight he and Marsha still relied occasionally on handouts from her father just to buy groceries. He’d also omitted to tell Lars one other important detail: Jonny was actually halfway through serving a six-month jail sentence for conspiracy to commit wiretap fraud, while working for a company involved in trading precious metals. Or, as he puts it now, ‘For being too bright and a wise guy on Wall Street.’ A situation that was especially difficult as Jonny maintains to this day that he was innocent of the charges, but that his lawyer advised him to plead guilty because he couldn’t afford the cost of a long-drawn-out defence trial which he was likely to lose anyway. The result: a six-month jail sentence, which he was allowed to serve at a ‘halfway house’. Or ‘a jail without guards,’ as Jonny puts it. ‘I was left with a pity plea, a wife and a beautiful baby. I never did jail time, they wanted me to be able to work and feed my family. [But] we lost everything, Marsha and I, from our Wall Street mis-experience. I would spend the week [at the halfway house] and the weekends at home. The only phone that was available to do all this organisation of the shows was done on a payphone in a halfway house with quarters, with people who’d just got out of prison waiting for the phone to speak to their girlfriends. Waiting for me on the phone for twenty minutes, they were gonna kill me. You can imagine this? Nobody knows this story.’
The six-month sentence was eventually commuted to four and a half months. In the meantime, Marsha not only had to somehow keep Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven going, she had to look after their infant daughter Rikki. Friends rallied round – from ‘Old Bridge militia’ pals such as Rockin’ Ray and Metal Joe, to the kindly neighbours across the street who sent their son over to mow their front lawn when the grass got so high other neighbours began sticking letters in the mail, complaining. Meanwhile, Jonny’s father-in-law took over the weekday running of the market stall while Marsha kept Jonny’s spirits up by doing everything she could to keep the dream alive of moving from market stall owner to local gig promoter. Says Jonny: ‘I knew nothing about the business. Marsha went and got me out of the library all these books about how to be a manager, and understanding music law, and all that. I would read them at night, during the week, so that I understood all the various points of a contract – What should a band get? What’s fair? – all that stuff. I learned it out of books ’cos there was no years of experience.’
What the Zazulas lacked in music-biz expertise, however, they more than made up for with sheer strength of will and a determination to succeed at any cost. Indeed, Jonny and Marsha were on their way to becoming one of the most formidable partnerships in the business – both personal and professional. As Jonny recalls, ‘Marsha used to go out with my best friend and she was really a bitch to me. We started out really hating each other. Marsha was a deadly girl. When she don’t like you, forget it. [But] it just changed over time. We started laughing, never knew why we were mad at each other, and it just grew into this great relationship. She and I never left each other’s side since.’
Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven, which he and Marsha had started in 1982 with $180 cash, was doing well enough that ‘by the time Metallica came along we had about $60,000 worth of inventory just from reinvesting, reinvesting, reinvesting’. From that they were able to scrape together $1,500 to send to the band so they could hire a U-Haul truck and make the cross-country road trip from San Francisco to New Jersey. ‘They bought a one-way ticket. I believe Dave and Cliff were living inside the truck all the way from San Francisco, ’cos there was no car with the U-Haul. They showed up a week later without a fuckin’ dime.’ Living in ‘a small residential, blue collar area’ what Jonny and Marsha hadn’t bargained for was the ‘culture shock’ of a bunch of drunken teenagers suddenly arriving on their doorstep. ‘They come and land right on my front lawn. Basically, me penniless, them penniless, and we’re going “What the fuck, man? How we gonna do this?”’ The answer was for them to stay in Jonny’s basement. But the band soon outstayed their welcome and the Zazulas had to move them out. ‘I had a little bar in the hallway and they poured themselves a drink. Just took the bottle and started guzzling. That was the first thing.’ The first time Jonny and Marsha took them down to Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven, says Jonny, ‘I wondered if I’d made a mistake.’ Dave Mustaine was so drunk ‘he spent the entire time throwing up outside. As people were leaving, he’s there with long hair and vomit all over the place; just puking up a storm. To the normal people of the flea market who are selling linens and children’s clothes it was like, “Oh my god, what did he bring to this market!”’ Jonny, who was getting complaints ‘all the time’ for playing his records so loud, ‘didn’t need this’.
With Jonny still finishing his time in the halfway house, though, the brunt of the band’s bad behaviour was born by Marsha. ‘I had an infant, a husband in a halfway house and a band that was screwing everybody in the neighbourhood in my basement.’ She says she wondered if she was doing the right thing ‘every day. This was very far afield from anything I had ever done before. We put our entire lives on the line for them because we lived in a little suburban community, which wasn’t all that impressed with the guys. And because we poured every ounce, every penny we had into them, we had to not pay our mortgage. We had [situations] where we couldn’t pay electric bills and lost our electricity.’ Her father, who would buy them groceries, ‘to keep us fed, and in turn was then feeding the band’. Marsha adds, ‘They were young teens who had all kinds of things going on in their own lives. They drank too much. They partied a little too hearty. You kind of looked at it and said, “Oh my god! Is this what I’m investing my life in? How is this all gonna play out?” But at the core of it [was] their talent, their incredible talent made you just say I’ve gotta keep doing this. These guys are great, these guys are different. They have that – whatever that is – that can propel them, and so you just kept going, even when some days you weren’t quite sure why.’
The only member of the band who possessed any decorum, says Marsha, was Cliff Burton. ‘If I have to say who was I closest to in those days, who did I bond with the most, it was Cliff. He was a treasure to have in my home. He was great, he was respectful. He was warm. He would help me out with Rikki, because she was so little and I would be busy doing something. It would be time for her to go to bed and so he’d read her a story or sing her a song. He was quite the human. James and Lars were just, like, diabolically different,’ she chuckles. ‘’Cos at night James [and Dave] would want to get drunk, party and Lars of course would be out [chasing] the women.’ Lars, she adds, ‘really was quite the man, in his own mind…he was a small man in white spandex pants, so you had to kind of give him a break’. Cliff, though, ‘was really a hippy in a heavy metal band, with his bell-bottoms and his whole persona, just a beautiful, beautiful human being’. She adds, ‘Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough of a voice in the band. In terms of the decisions that were made, Lars was the ringleader and he said it and that was it, they moved in that motion. Cliff wasn’t involved in that aspect of the band. He was a musician, pure.’
Blasting out the No Life demo from the market stall every day, says Jonny, ‘Everybody was coming round from everywhere going “What the fuck is that?” Before you know it, the siege of Metallica started.’ For the rest of the band’s stay, ‘we only played No Life ’til Leather in our store’. Jonny would sit in his living room with Mark Whitaker, who had come up with the band from San Francisco as their live sound engineer and all round ‘guy Friday’, making more cassette copies of No Life to sell at the store at a knock-down price of $4.99. ‘As many as we can every day, one at a time, so they had some money to eat and live while they were here. And we sold tons of them. It still wasn’t enough, you know, but we sold a lot compared to any other band.’
