Enter Night, page 13
Lars would hang out at the stall every day, watching, taking it all in. Lars, says Marsha, was ‘always the one. He was the master, orchestrator of his destiny. And whether that came from the fact that his dad was a tennis star and he always wanted to be looked at by his dad with high regard, or what, I don’t know. But he just was always, “I’m gonna get there. I’m gonna do this and we’re gonna do that.” He really did, for a very young man, have a very succinct plan in his mind as to how he envisioned Metallica and how he heard the music. It was really quite interesting.’ At the stall where they had ‘umpteen albums’, Lars would commandeer the turntable. ‘“Oh, listen to this, listen to that. See how they do this, see how they do that.” He was always involved. It wasn’t like he said, okay, well, this is my music and I’m gonna do it this way. He was very aware of his predecessors in the music business, musician-wise, and always watching what was happening.’ It was that fiercely competitive aspect of Ulrich’s character, says Marsha, that drove Metallica. ‘He just always wanted to be at the top of the heap. They were creative, as far as how they presented themselves. They came to us with their logo and it was brilliant. Then it was, “How do we work off our logo?” [Lars] was a forerunner, he really was. I don’t think they would have succeeded without that competitive side of him, and being aware of everything that was going on around him…’
Jonny didn’t really have what he calls his ‘Brian Epstein moment’, though, until he saw the band play live for the first time: two shows over the weekend of 8 and 9 April; the first, opening for Swedish rock darlings Vandenberg at the Paramount Theater in Staten Island; the second, supporting US metal up-and-comers The Rods at L’Amours in Brooklyn. ‘It was intense, whoosh.’ However, ‘Every show they played had an edge. You didn’t know where the fuck-up was gonna come. They were making mistakes in those days.’ For Metallica this was a baptism of fire. ‘These were big shows in big venues,’ says Jonny. ‘Marsha and I had kind of taken over the Staten Island, New York area rock shows…venues that held up to two thousand. They didn’t come in and start in little clubs, like The Beatles. We put them in front of a lot of people.’ Dee Snider, frontman for Twisted Sister – a New York band then making waves in the UK – came up to Jonny during one of the shows Metallica played and asked: ‘What is that, Jonny?’
The only real problem that Jonny and Marsha could see was Dave Mustaine. ‘You didn’t know with his drinking what you were gonna get,’ says Jonny. ‘You were either gonna get the friendly Dave, or you were gonna get the monster Dave. He was so drunk you just didn’t know how he could play those notes. Everybody [in the band] was heavy into the booze but Dave was over the top.’ Privately, Lars and James had already told Jonny they, too, were sick of Mustaine’s loutish behaviour, his drunken antics and his confrontational attitude, that they were, as Lars put it, ‘just gonna hang on until someone [else] came along’. Jonny’s concern was that without Mustaine the band wouldn’t be nearly as good. ‘I was worried because even though Mustaine was so out of control, he was a real big part of the band. Some of the best songs were written with Dave Mustaine. [To replace him] it was gonna be really weird.’ According to Lars, the band had already decided to replace Mustaine before their U-Haul had even reached the East Coast. ‘It all kind of spilled over [then],’ he said. ‘There were a few things happening that became too much.’ Not least the time a drunken Mustaine insisted on taking his turn driving the truck and allegedly nearly crashed it into a jeep during a snowstorm near Wyoming. ‘We could have all been killed,’ said James. ‘We knew it couldn’t go on like that, so we started looking at other stuff.’
Mark Whitaker, who also managed fellow San Franciscan metallists Exodus, suggested poaching their lead guitarist, a curly-haired whiz-kid named Kirk Hammett. Unlike Dave Mustaine, who was big and brash and utterly unpredictable, twenty-year-old Kirk Hammett was short, like Lars, and nerdy. Unlike Lars, he was quiet; a cool number, though already well schooled in the Metallica way, having opened for them with Exodus at the Stone and hung out at the Metallimansion. Like Cliff, he was another easygoing San Franciscan, born into a time and place famous for the flowers it wore in its extremely long hair. The kind of stoner dude you’d see walking round the Haight with buds in his beard – once he’d started to shave, which he still looked like he hadn’t at the time he met Metallica. Best of all, Hammett was technically one of the best guitar players on the scene. Behind the amiable façade was an extremely determined young gun who still took lessons and practised for hours each day, no matter how wasted on weed. Not an innovator like Mustaine, certainly not such a monster personality, but with a much broader musical palette and a much steadier emotional hand – the kind of talented kid who would do what he was told. They told Mark to keep it dark but to call Kirk, check it out.
It was 1 April and Kirk was ‘sitting on the can’ when Whitaker made the phone call. Hammett assumed it was an April Fool’s gag, said, ‘Yeah, sure’, and hung up, barely giving it another thought. He only knew it was for real when Whitaker called him back the following morning and told him he was Fed-Exing a tape of Metallica songs for him to learn. ‘Then I started to get more calls from Whitaker: “The band wants you to come to New York to audition with them.” I thought about it for like two seconds and said, “Sure, I’ll check it out.”’ The tape arrived just four days before Metallica’s first gig – with Mustaine still in place – for Jonny Z. By the time the band was onstage at the Paramount and ready to launch into ‘The Mechanix’ – the song Dave Mustaine wrote for them and the number Jonny still loved best – Kirk was already saying goodbye to his bandmates in Exodus and getting ready to board a plane for New York, to start his new life in Metallica, first thing Monday morning.
Nervous about how Dave would react to the news, the others decided to tell him while he was in bed, still half asleep, having been woken first thing Monday morning by Lars, who drew the short straw and was the one who actually broke the news. Lars would later joke that Dave had asked what time his flight left, to which the band replied that they’d booked him on the first Greyhound bus out of town. ‘Not only was he out of the band but he had to sit on a bus for four days and think about it!’ Lars laughed. Mustaine would remember it a little differently. ‘Basically, when they told me to leave I packed in about twenty seconds and I was gone. I wasn’t upset at all as I wanted to start a solo project during the middle of Metallica anyway.’ In fact, Mustaine was devastated, becoming more furious as each hour passed on the four-day bus ride back to San Francisco, at what he would increasingly come to see as the band’s betrayal of him. Specifically, what he saw as Lars’ role in his sacking. ‘I like James more than Lars, I think everybody does,’ Mustaine was still telling people in 2008. Interviewed by Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro for his internet-based Spread TV talk show, he added, bitchily, ‘I don’t really like Kirk ’cos he got my job but I nailed his girlfriend before I left.’ Mustaine also claimed he and Hetfield ‘had planned to fire Lars so many times’. All of this may contain different degrees of truth, yet to find Mustaine still talking about it a quarter of a century later arguably says more about his own unresolved issues.
Giving his first interview since being fired from Metallica, to Bob Nalbandian, in January 1984, Mustaine gave a slightly more balanced view. ‘The truth of the matter was that things just didn’t click,’ he said. ‘I was a different person back then. I was a brash person that was always drunk and having fun and James and Lars were withdrawn little boys. James hardly ever talked to people. [James] was singing but it was I who talked in between songs. The whole thing was that I had too much to drink. But I fuck up one time and it costs me the band and they fuck up a hundred times…’ He paused. ‘There’s been times when I had to carry both James and Lars because they were so drunk.’ It was true. As Brian Slagel says now, ‘Everybody back then was partying. None of us were sober when things were going on.’ Nor was Dave Mustaine the only one who became angry and unpleasant when drunk. Harald Oimoen recalls a late-night visit to his apartment during which a drunken James badly lost his cool, showing his mean streak after Oimoen showed him a picture he’d taken recently of Hetfield and Ulrich in bed together, goofing around, that was then used on the cover of Ron Quintana’s Metal Mania, along with a joke picture of Eldon Hoke, a.k.a. El Duce, the notoriously overweight drummer-vocalist of Seattle’s self-styled ‘rape rock’ band The Mentors. ‘James hadn’t seen it before and I hadn’t realised at the time that they wanted to keep those pictures to themselves; it was like a private fun kind of thing,’ Oimoen recalled. ‘So I showed the magazine to James and he had a big smile on his face, he thought it was great. And then all of a sudden he realised what the picture was of and he kicked me in the stomach, and we almost got into a brawl and he said I was never taking photos of them again after that. But once the alcohol wore off and we started talking about it, it was all cool.’
Even Hetfield’s later assertion that Mustaine’s drug-dealing was a factor – ‘the money he had coming in was not legal’, James told writer Mat Snow in 1991, ‘and his buddies would come in to rehearsal and things would go missing’ – sidesteps the real reasons behind his dismissal. More to the point, said Hetfield, ‘He was obnoxious. That was kind of what we were into back then, but when it turned in towards us, it was inevitable he’d be out.’ Says Brian Slagel, ‘That was James’ and Lars’ band from the beginning and, you know, Dave had a pretty full personality as well. It was unfortunate and a bummer because he’s a phenomenally talented guy and musician. But when I heard about it I couldn’t say that I was shocked.’ Looking back now, Ron Quintana characterises Mustaine as ‘hardcore hard rock, but he was hard to read. As well as I got along with Lars, Dave had a totally endearing personality and was the face of 1983 Metallica. Dave had charisma galore and I honestly thought they wouldn’t be as good without him. But he was kind of like 1977 Ozzy: alcoholic and occasionally dangerous to himself and others.’ He adds, ‘Dave drank more and faster than anyone at every party and was often dead drunk by the time the party started. He often was passed out [and] if he was awake somebody might get punched! Sober, he was the life of the scene, but he never stayed sober. I don’t think he ever got in a fight until he’d had a drink.’ Often it would be because ‘some girl gravitated towards him then her aggravated boyfriend would always show up and get bloodied’. Other times it most definitely was Dave’s fault: ‘He would almost always be a centre of attention and consequently a target. James was usually an ally in some shenanigan, but always in the background and usually overshadowed.’ Quintana refutes any suggestion that Mustaine was still dealing drugs in San Francisco: ‘Dave drank and smoked everything but didn’t know enough locals to be dealing back then.’ Ultimately, Quintana says, Mustaine ‘could be a train wreck’ but when they set off for Jonny Z’s ‘it looked like a strong foursome that would stick together’.
According to Bill Hale, another friendly face from those days then taking his first tentative steps as a photographer for the Metal Rendezvous Int. fanzine: ‘Lars always had a plan.’ Hale thinks Lars probably knew he was going to replace Dave Mustaine with Kirk Hammett as early as the first show Metallica and Exodus played together at the Old Waldorf in November 1982, although, ‘I don’t think Kirk knew it yet.’ He adds, ‘Dave was funny [and] he wasn’t as violent as he’s [now] claimed to be – none more than anyone else in San Francisco.’ He cites Paul Baloff of Exodus as ‘the king of excess’, compared to whom, ‘Dave wasn’t that bad.’ He also suggests that Metallica may have misfired in their decision to dump Mustaine – musically, at least: ‘With Cliff and Dave, that band was monstrous! I would have put that line-up against Black Sabbath of ’72 or Deep Purple [in the same era]. They were a monster band, and everybody knew, whatever it was, Metallica had it.’ It was deeply unfair, he says, that after Mustaine got kicked out ‘everybody ganged up on Dave – Dave’s an alcoholic or whatever. But we all have to remember, Dave wrote most of the first [Metallica] album plus the second album, Dave [had] the ideas.’ Compared to his successor, ‘Dave is a much more of an aggressive player, a cutting-edge player.’ That he subsequently formed his own multi-platinum-selling band, Megadeth, speaks volumes, while Hammett remains just ‘a lead guitar player in a band. So you know…’ Hale concedes, however, that career-wise, replacing the combustible Mustaine with the rock-steady Hammett was ‘why Metallica went far. All of a sudden there’s just two leaders in the band.’ Had Mustaine stayed, ‘I can only imagine how tumultuous the whole process would have been.’
If there was a positive aspect to Mustaine’s sense of betrayal, it was that it fired him up to prove the others wrong. Within months he had moved back to LA and formed his own innovative new metal band, Megadeth, in which he would not only play lead guitar but also sing. Second-in-command in the new outfit would be bassist David Ellefson, an eighteen-year-old from Minnesota who had moved out to LA with three buddies a week after graduating high school in 1983. One morning Ellefson was in his apartment chugging away on the bass intro from Van Halen’s ‘Running with the Devil’ when he heard a voice from the apartment above scream, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ followed by the crash of a flowerpot hitting his window-side air-conditioner. ‘I was like, jeez, these people in California aren’t friendly like they are in Minnesota.’ The same day one of his roommates reported seeing ‘some cool-looking guy with long blond hair’ walking around outside the building, barefoot. Deciding they needed ‘to meet some people’, one night they went upstairs to Mustaine’s apartment and knocked on his door and asked where to buy some cigarettes. ‘He slammed the door in our faces.’ So they knocked again and asked if he knew where to buy any beer and this time ‘he opens the door and lets us in’. Ellefson goes on: ‘This was early June ’83. He’s talking about this band Metallica that he was in and which I hadn’t heard of. I knew about the New Wave of British Heavy Metal but he seemed to know all about it.’ Mustaine played Ellefson the No Life demo. ‘I thought it was awesome. It had this very haunting heaviness to it that intrigued me, almost kind of scary. It had kind of a darkness to it.’ Mustaine gave Ellefson the full story. ‘San Francisco, New York…playing gigs at Staten Island, Jonny Z, and then the inevitable resentment about it because he wasn’t in the band any more.’ Explaining why he’d been fired, ‘The main thing was: “It [was about] attitude, not ability.” That was his kind of tagline.’
Mustaine’s new band Megadeth, he told Ellefson, would be his revenge on Metallica. ‘Sure, without a doubt. It was a vengeful, spiteful return from Dave,’ says Ellefson. Mustaine’s ousting from Metallica ‘totally explains the pressure, the angst [and] frustration’ he continues to exhibit about Metallica to this very day. ‘Maybe even to some degree the broken heart that Dave had about being fired. Because, you know, Dave is kind of a gentle spirit underneath all of the ferociousness and the anger. Underneath of that is a real genuine, actually real sweet guy at times. I think for him a lot of it was, yeah, obviously their success. But I never got the feeling Dave ever played guitar for money anyway. That never fuelled him.’ For Dave Mustaine, ‘it was more just the broken heart of losing his friendship and his buddies’. As James Hetfield later conceded, ‘It’s obvious [Mustaine] had the same drive as us – he went on to do great things in Megadeth.’ Had he been allowed to stay, ‘There would have been myself, Lars and him all trying to drive and it would have been this triangulated mess.’ For that reason, not for the drinking or drug-dealing or in-fighting, but because he represented a genuine threat to the hegemony of the band, ‘Dave had to go’.
Brian Slagel had seen Kirk Hammett play in Exodus and knew he was ‘a great player’. Equally important, ‘he seemed like a really nice guy’. When he heard about Kirk replacing Dave in Metallica, ‘I knew people in Frisco who knew Kirk and I would ask around and everybody said the same thing: the guy’s an incredible guitar player, he’s a super-nice guy and he’s probably the perfect fit for that band.’ From the East Bay town of El Sobrante, Kirk Lee Hammett was born 18 November 1962, to a Filipino mother (Chefela) and an Irish merchant marine father. The middle child, Kirk grew up alongside an older half-brother Richard Likong (from his mother’s first marriage), and a younger sister Jennifer. ‘I was a typical urban child,’ Kirk would tell me. ‘I grew up in the city. I went to Catholic school, a couple blocks down from my house. From the time I was six years old to the time I was about twelve I would just walk to the school alone. You can’t do that these days in San Francisco. You pretty much can’t do that anywhere these days. But, you know, I was a very poor Catholic schoolboy.’ He ‘wasn’t very good at being Catholic’ though, he says, his main memories of his schooldays now revolving around ‘reading monster magazines and horror comic books. Occasionally I’d get caught [and] the teacher would take it away.’ Although he was non-confrontational, he developed a passive-aggressive stance that would later serve him well in Metallica. When the nuns threatened to call in his parents for a serious talk about his comic-reading habits, ‘I remember looking at them straight in the eye and saying, “That’s fine because they know all about it.”’ Even as an adult, Kirk was always the guy firing up a joint and reading a comic book, or watching a horror movie. His favourite: ‘a tie between the original 1931 Frankenstein movie and Bride of Frankenstein’.
When, in fifth grade, he flunked his religious education class, ‘I came to a conclusion that Catholicism was just hypocritical, hypercritical…it wasn’t congruent with my reality.’ More interested these days in Buddhist philosophy, reality for Kirk Hammett as a child was a stepbrother eleven years older plugged into a percolating music scene on his doorstep that was about to change the world: ‘[Richard] was full-on into the whole hippy thing. He was going to the Fillmore and seeing bands like Cream, Hendrix, Santana, the Grateful Dead, Zeppelin…all these monumental bands and gigs.’ There were also the conversations ‘about LSD and acid’ he overheard between Richard and his father. ‘Being a merchant marine, [my father] was exposed to all sorts of things. He was very broad-minded, very open to the whole hippy lifestyle at first.’ Kirk’s long hair was ‘another thing that the nuns really did not like. I would regularly get reminders to cut my hair because it was touching my collar.’ Punishment beatings from the nuns became a regular thing: ‘Generally rulers were the weapon of choice. I got some of it, you know.’
