Enter Night, page 16
Early on, Jonny Z had identified ‘The Mechanix’ as the stand-out No Life track. Sure enough, it’s also the most impressive overall moment on the album, albeit re-presented in altered, much-improved form as a track now called ‘The Four Horsemen’. Ron McGovney had always considered Mustaine’s original lyrics ‘ridiculous’. The others had been less outspoken – until Mustaine was finally out of the picture, at which point Hetfield completely rewrote them. Gone were Dave’s cringe-inducing double-entendres – ‘Made my drive shaft crank…made my pistons bulge…made my ball bearings melt from the heat…’ – and in came some typically doom-laden Hetfield musings, mixing the metal-by-numbers imagery of lines such as ‘dying since the day you were born’ with yet more self-referential stuff about ‘horsemen…drawing nearer, on the leather steeds they ride…’ Musically, while its chugging main riff still owed a lot to Kiss’s ‘Detroit Rock City’, it was also the lengthiest, most complex piece on the album, full of surprising one-off motifs and thus the compositional progenitor of the increasingly complex, determinedly progressive material that Metallica would become famous for throughout the 1980s. Pitched at a considerably slower pace than Mustaine had always driven it along at, it also allowed the band to show themselves off in their best light, Burton’s swooning bass underpinning the juddering riffs with a classically framed, ascending progression that eventually gives way to a much more understated guitar solo from Hammett than the frenzied strafing Mustaine had always favoured. It’s a hugely ambitious number from a band still finding its feet in the studio, as if they had bolted together, Frankenstein-like, the still living parts of several other, now dead songs; one showing off their speed metal credentials, another showcasing Burton and Hammett’s abilities to introduce a much more textured approach. Similarly, the tracks ‘Phantom Lord’ (another of the four tracks Mustaine is given a songwriter co-credit for) and ‘No Remorse’ (one of the four credited just to Hetfield and Ulrich, with riff partially lifted from ‘Hocus Pocus’ by Focus) both demonstrated that there was even more to Metallica than Jonny Z’s ‘thunder’. There was crooked lightning to be had too, highs and lows, moon and stars – a whole new musical horizon coming quite suddenly into view.
The other major highlight, though, was one of the album’s shortest tracks, ‘Whiplash’. Inspired by the wild antics of one Ray Burch, a major Metallica fan from San Francisco, who had already distinguished himself at several of their Bay Area shows by almost knocking himself out (hence also the oblique Burch-inspired dedication on the back of the album sleeve: ‘bang that head that doesn’t bang’), as its title suggests, ‘Whiplash’ cracked along at a furious pace, sounding like a cross between prime-time ‘Ace of Spades’-era Motörhead and something even faster from the first, dementedly speedy Damned album. Every track on Metal up Your Ass teemed with energy but ‘Whiplash’ really does sound like the start of something new; as snotty as the rawest British punk and as rhythmically fleet-footed as early, shotgun-tempo Van Halen. There are other blisteringly paced moments on the album, such as ‘Motorbreath’ – a simple, four-chord verse and stop-start chorus, credited solely to Hetfield, that would be a guaranteed crowd pleaser for years to come – but if one wishes to identify the very moment thrash metal arrived spitting and snarling into the world, ‘Whiplash’ is indisputably it. This not least because of its prophetic chorus: ‘Adrenalin stars to flow / Thrashing all around / Acting like a maniac / Whiplash…’
The album’s only weak track was, almost inevitably, its most obviously commercial: a nauseous bit of old-fashioned heavy metal nonsense – co-credited to Hetfield, Ulrich and Mustaine but actually based on one of the first songs Mustaine had ever written as a teenager – called ‘Jump in the Fire’. Replete with shout-out chorus and a tediously telegraphed attempt at a catchy riff, ‘Jump in the Fire’ was so wince-inducingly rote it could have come from any of the chart-fixated LA glam-metal bands Metallica professed to loathe so much. To give them credit, they later recognised it as such – Lars jokingly suggesting it was, in fact, based on Metallica’s half-witted attempt to emulate Iron Maiden’s 1982 UK hit ‘Run to the Hills’ – but not before it was released as their own first UK single, though not, tellingly, their first hit. Equally straightforward but far more successful was ‘Seek and Destroy’, another song which would became a cornerstone of the live Metallica show for years to come, its audience sing-along on the simple, one-line chorus of ‘Searching…seek and destroy!’ providing the crowd with the opportunity to roar along, encouraged by James.
The only other places where the album would remain less than convincing came somewhat embarrassingly from the band’s principal members. Burton and Hammett shine throughout – the latter, despite being asked to reproduce guitar riffs, breaks and solos entirely conceived by someone else, a fact Mustaine would crow about for many years; the former in more subtle ways, and most directly in the shape of his own instrumental track, ‘(Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth’, an attention-grabbing, avant-rock fusion of classical triads, wah-wah pedal washes and pure distortion tethered to the ground by some fairly pedestrian drumming from Lars, and based on Cliff’s live show solo, introduced perfunctorily by studio engineer Chris Bubacz. Hetfield’s lead vocals, however, are still woefully undeveloped, caught somewhere between the screeching, chest-beating of a Judas Priest or Iron Maiden and the richer, more intimidating vocal burr he would grow into over subsequent releases. Lars’ drums – recorded in a large ballroom on the building’s second floor – are scattered comically over everything, endlessly rolling crescendos that sound like what they are: the work of an overenthusiastic amateur who doesn’t know when to stop.
‘The first album,’ Hetfield would later tell Rolling Stone, was simply ‘what we knew – bang your head, seek and destroy, get drunk, smash shit up.’ For all its instant underground cred, while many of the earlier demos of the songs had sounded like Motörhead meets Diamond Head, the finished album seemed aimed more towards the classic finesse of an early Iron Maiden or Black Sabbath. At this stage of their story, though, the first Metallica album was never going to just be about music. Its real achievement was to simultaneously define a new sensibility – the previously thought incompatible yet strangely thrilling, now it was here, melding of punk and heavy metal into something surprisingly far-reaching called thrash – and to reclaim credibility for a genre of music, heavy rock, which had become the provenance of those cultural illiterates left behind by the ground-zero arrival of punk.
First, though, Jonny and Marsha Z had to find a way to get the album released. No longer hopeful of landing a record deal once the album was recorded, with the band still sleeping on the floor at Metal Joe’s and the finished recordings in a box of tapes in the corner of their living room, Jonny and Marsha took their boldest decision yet: to effectively put out the record themselves. Says Jonny, ‘I figured, if we can buy [records] from a distributor, as we did as a record store, we could certainly sell them a record to sell to all the other record stores. We didn’t know that nobody from the distributors wanted to talk to you. The whole thing was we just did it.’ He laughs then adds, ‘Maybe I could have gone to someone like Metal Blade or Shrapnel on the West Coast, but this stuff was so new-sounding I didn’t know if anyone else would get it, you know? I was like the guy who didn’t know if he had a great idea or a stupid one, and I knew there was only one way to find out.’
Jonny and Marsha had decided to call the label Vigilante, then changed their minds after Cliff Burton came up with a better suggestion: Megaforce, the title of a low-rent sci-fi action adventure flick released in the USA the previous summer. Tagline: ‘When the force was with them, NO ONE stood a chance!’ As a mission statement, it was certainly apt. In reality, it meant taking out a second mortgage on the Zazula family home. ‘Some of those days were the worst days of my life,’ Jonny later recalled. ‘My neck was in a noose.’ But with Anthrax, Raven and now even Manowar, who’d been dropped by the EMI-backed Liberty label, all knocking on their door, promising to sign to their new notional label, Jonny and Marsha pressed on. They were encouraged by Lars, who suggested taking a leaf from Motörhead’s book: Motörhead’s records were ostensibly released on a small UK independent label – Bronze Records – but distributed through the auspices of Polydor Records, part of the Polygram conglomerate.
Formed in London in 1971, Bronze was started by Gerry Bron, then best known for his production work on albums for heavy rock groups of the era such as Uriah Heep, Juicy Lucy and Colosseum. When Heep’s deal with Vertigo ended, Bron persuaded them to let him set up their own independent, with all manufacturing and distribution of their records going through Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, then the UK’s most successful independent. Later releases went through EMI and by the mid-1980s they were putting their roster – which now featured NWOBHM stalwarts (Motörhead, Girlschool), punk (The Damned) and early 1970s rock goliaths (Hawkwind, Heep) – through Polydor. Jonny took Lars’ suggestion seriously enough to invite Gerry Bron over to the USA, with the idea of having Bronze put out the Metallica album in the UK and Europe, while Jonny formed his own label to work with US distributors. It might have happened, too. Says Jonny, ‘[They were] offering money for me to get the fuck out of the way…After that went down, Marsha and I spoke to Lars and said, why can’t we just do it?’
In the USA, Megaforce found an ally in Relativity, who agreed to distribute the Metallica album, while over in the UK the newly founded independent label Music for Nations was similarly contracted to put out the album. From that point on, says Jonny, he and Marsha ‘did everything; recording, producer, plus the artwork, also designed by us’. Still intending to call the album Metal up Your Ass, the band had originally come up with their own idea for the album sleeve: an arm coming up through a toilet bowl, brandishing a machete. Jonny, who was up for it until the appalled sales force at Relativity intervened, then had the job of trying to explain that while he was fine with it, the distributors had told him they would consider it ‘commercial suicide’ to put out an album called Metal up Your Ass, let alone one with such an obviously offensive front cover. Recalls Jonny: ‘It was very stringent then. It was before [parent advisory] labelling but they still had this moral issue. Wal-Mart or any of what they call rack-jobbers, they wouldn’t touch the record.’ Outraged, nevertheless, at the thought of having to compromise, to keep the record stores happy, Cliff bellowed at Jonny: ‘Kill ’em all! Kill ’em all!’ Jonny laughs as he recounts the incident. ‘Cliff got real mad, but Lars goes, “Kill ’em all…That’s a good name.” I go, “That’s a great name!” The next thing you know the album was called Kill ’Em All.’ The eventual sleeve, based on another idea from Jonny, which he says the band ‘were very pleased with’, was as simple and brutal as the new album title: a sledgehammer resting in a pool of blood with the shadow of a hand reaching out. A hardly less subtle image than the original sword from the toilet bowl, perhaps, this cover design – which still surfaces on T-shirts today – was one that US retailers nevertheless felt more comfortable with. The rear sleeve picture was a simple landscape portrait of the band, all doing their best to look suitably solemn, all looking impossibly young, despite Lars’ attempt at facial hair.
Officially released in America on 25 July 1983, Kill ’Em All was not a hit but nor was it expected to be. The fact that it got as high as Number 120 in the Billboard Top 200 album chart was considered cause for celebration by everyone at Megaforce. Had anyone dared suggest to Jonny Z back then that the album would eventually sell over three million copies in the USA, ‘I’d have thought you were even crazier than me.’ What Megaforce lacked in clout was more than made up for in the freedom it allowed Metallica to forge their own identity – musically and image-wise. As Lars would later tell me, ‘Early on we had a very distant attitude to the business side of things. We firmly stood our own ground on things like what we played, how we looked, how we presented ourselves. Or how we didn’t present ourselves…Just doing what we were doing. The thing is there weren’t really any decent independent labels going in America when we were starting out. You really had to be the right package to get a record deal in 1983. But we said, “Fuck that!” and just plodded away, doing our own stuff and feeling great about it. Then suddenly there is an independent label and we do have a record out and a lot of people start buying it because there was never quite anything like this [musically] in America before.’ The fact they were initially shunned by the major labels worked in their favour. In 1983, he said, ‘the [major] record company philosophy in America has always been, well, give the public a choice of A, B or C but the menu stops there, and we’ll decide that a band like Metallica will not be on the menu because they are not saleable. So all the people got to listen to hard rock through Styx or REO Speedway or whatever. And then this band Metallica came out and they thought, “Wow, where has all this shit come from? How come we haven’t heard this before?” Because the record companies never believed that anything like that could actually sell. So we start selling a shit-load of records and at the same time James’ lyrics are different from all the clichéd crap that all the older metal bands spew out, and people started to take notice of that.’
Initial press reception, however, was hugely mixed. With the exception of Kerrang!, the mainstream music press in both America and Britain largely ignored the album. The metal fanzines that had supported the band from day one, though, went ballistic. Reviewing it in Kerrang!, Malcolm Dome wrote: ‘Kill ’Em All sets a new standard…Metallica know only two speeds: fast and total blur.’ The UK’s leading metal fanzine, Metal Forces, meanwhile, voted it the album of the year, and Metallica band of the year. In America, Bob Nalbandian, first off the block as ever, summed up his review of the album in The Headbanger with the words: ‘Metallica might just be America’s answer to Motörhead’ – the highest accolade Lars Ulrich or James Hetfield could have wished for in 1983.
There was only one major dissenting voice and that belonged, with a certain sad inevitability, to Dave Mustaine. Interviewed within a few months of the album’s release by Bob Nalbandian, ostensibly about his new band Megadeth, Mustaine couldn’t resist using the opportunity to sound off about what he saw as the dreadful shortcomings of Kill ’Em All. ‘I’m just wondering what Metallica are gonna do when they run out of my riffs,’ he sneered, adding, ‘I already smashed James in the mouth one time, and Lars is scared of his own shadow.’ As for his replacement, ‘Kirk is a “yes” man…“Yes, Lars, I’ll do Dave’s leads.” “Yes, James, I’ll play this.”’ Adding insult to injury, he claimed that ‘I wrote the most songs on that whole fuckin’ album! I wrote four of them, James wrote three, and Hugh Tanner wrote two!’ He insisted that ‘James played all the rhythm on that album and Cliff wrote all Kirk’s leads, so it shows you they’re having a lot of trouble with this “new guitar god”.’
It was the start of a mostly one-sided verbal war between Mustaine and Metallica that would persist, in various forms, to the present day. From his endless jibes in the press about how ‘Kirk Hammett ripped off every lead break I’d played on that No Life ’Til Leather tape’, to his snide comments to Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro in 2008: ‘I don’t really like him because he got my job, but I nailed his girlfriend before I left – how do I taste, Kirk?’ If there was any envy between Mustaine and Hammett, though, it wasn’t the new Metallica guitarist who was feeling it. As Mustaine’s collaborator and closest confidant, David Ellefson, points out, any ‘copying’ by Kirk Hammett of Mustaine’s original guitar lines on Kill ’Em All would have been deliberate: ‘To some degree Kirk put his own stamp on [Kill ’Em All] but that kind of music isn’t just random solo over three-chord blues riff. The solo is a part of the composition, every bit as crucial to the song as the lyric and the choruses. That’s what we like about the music. It’s the difference between when I went to see Van Halen and they were like a sloppy party band, and when I went to see Iron Maiden and they played every single solo note for note. As a fan, I hung on every note…I wanted to hear it exactly the friggin’ way it is on the record.’ Kirk sticking to the No Life template was exactly what was required. ‘I always saw it like they tried to honour all of the good that Dave did bring to the band. They used his songs, they gave him credit. They paid him for it. When we would drive down the street in LA and some guy would yell out, “Metallica!” to me, that wasn’t “Fuck you!” to Dave. That was, “Dude, you were in fucking Metallica!”’
Despite being largely ignored by the mainstream music press, by the end of 1983 the first Metallica album was already starting to be recognised as a watershed moment in the history of rock. It showed that, far from being dead – as the post-punk British music press had been trumpeting since the day Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten claimed to have fallen asleep while watching Led Zeppelin, calling them ‘dinosaurs’ – punk and metal had a lot more in common than previously acknowledged. You could hear the musical antecedents of the juncture where Metallica come into the conversation in the ironclad riffs and spat-out vocals of the first Stooges and Pistols albums, and there again in the warp-speed rhythms and clattering drums of the earliest Motörhead and Ted Nugent recordings. Not that Metallica seemed particularly conscious of the radical moves they would soon be congratulated for making: ‘We thought that whatever we did, there’d be people who would approach [the album] with a lot of hesitation, because it was so different back then,’ said Kirk Hammett. If to the uninitiated the tracks seemed to fly by in a blur, that was just the way it was, insisted James Hetfield: ‘We’d just keep practising and the songs would get faster and faster, and the energy kept building up.’ Playing the songs live was ‘always faster’ because of all the ‘booze and freaks dinking around, just the excitement’.
