Enter Night, page 19
The final show of the eleven-date winter tour was at the Agora Ballroom in Mount Vernon, New York State, on New Year’s Eve, 1983. By now, the fire sparked by the release of Kill ’Em All had spread across the Atlantic and 1984 would find Metallica doing their best to capitalise on that astonishing fact. What the devoted young thrash metal maniacs waiting for them there would not know was that for Metallica their music was already shifting. The soon-to-be-crowned godfathers of thrash had never been solely occupied with speed. Now, with technically much more proficient players such as Cliff Burton and Kirk Hammett onboard and someone to lead the band like Lars, whose own ambitions extended far beyond the safe cubbyhole such musical margins offered, Metallica was ready to push on with a far more ambitious agenda than any of their contemporaries. They were already performing some of the new songs they planned to record for their second album, including the title track, ‘Ride the Lightning’, and had, in fact, already written most of what was going to be on there. And although their hardcore, deliriously proud fans would have been aghast to be told so, very little of it had to do with thrash metal…
Six
Calling Aunt Jane
There was Peter – sharp, in your face, no shit or else. And there was Cliff – whiskery, monkish, a wise head. Not quite good cop, bad cop, but certainly happy to hover in that realm when it suited them. It wasn’t hard to figure. One was a natural balls-buster, liked to see the other guy flinch; could never be wrong. The other was the calm voice of reason that was never wrong either, but didn’t rub your face in it, just said the words; let you draw your own conclusion.
The one I knew best was Peter. I liked him – sometimes. He talked dollars and sense, kept both eyes open, yet always made a point of stopping and saying hello, checking it out, whatever it was I was into, which back then, as we almost always met at gigs by the various bands he and Cliff managed, usually meant too much to drink and smoke and everything else the moneyed-up Eighties rock scene had to offer a young dude who actually believed tomorrow never came. As Peter didn’t smoke or take drugs, rarely even sipped a beer, this meant that little by little, he grew contemptuous, began treating me like a groupie.
‘What do you think I am – a fucking groupie?’ I once asked him sulkily.
‘Yes,’ he said, then walked off, slowly.
That had been backstage at a Def Leppard show, the final date of their 1988 US tour. Leppard were then Peter and Cliff’s most successful act, which was saying something as they had several successful acts, including Metallica. I had been out on several legs of the Leppard tour, interviewing them for my Sky TV show, writing about them for the covers of various magazines in Britain, America, Japan…helping to spread the word, as I saw it. I certainly didn’t feel like a groupie. Indeed, I had flattered myself into believing I was some sort of…friend.
Then bumping into Peter on my way back to the dressing rooms at the end of the show, that final night, he had slapped me on the back so hard – in mock greeting – it nearly knocked me off my feet. I had gotten used to the snide remarks, the disdainful looks; the rotten all-round vibe. But so many people got treated like that by Peter, I tried to shrug it off as a sort of backhanded compliment. Like, whaddayagonnadohuh? That slap shook me up, though.
Cliff was different, as far as I could tell. The day before, we had sat beside each other on Leppard’s private plane as we flew from Portland to Tacoma and I had taken the opportunity to ask him about his background. He told me how he’d gotten his start working in A&R at Mercury Records, how he’d always loved what he called ‘the British rock sound’. How he’d been one of the few American music-biz people that really got Thin Lizzy, how he’d tried to help break them in America but that the band was its own worst enemy. He meant drugs. Cliff didn’t dig drugs. ‘I don’t like the feeling of being out of control,’ he said. I nodded my head sagely.
Just then the plane did something sudden and dramatic and I felt the blood rush to my head. The plane did it again and this time it felt like my head was trying to jump off of my shoulders. Things got rapidly worse. I yelled, ‘Fuck’s sake! What’s happening?’
The captain’s voice came over the tannoy. ‘I thought as this was our last flight we’d treat you folks to something special.’ He’d put the damn thing into a nosedive, he said, its tail spinning, the plane spiralling towards the ground. I gripped the armrests of the chair and held on, terrified. Around the luxury cabin several other faces were grinning, some whooping. I couldn’t believe it was happening. We were all going to die…
I managed to swivel my head round to look at Cliff. He looked as terrified as me, his face frozen, holding on to his composure – just – as terrified maybe of losing his cool as the plane crashing.
‘Make – it – stop,’ I pleaded, barely able to speak. ‘Please – make – it – stop—’
‘That’s enough,’ he said, though not loud enough for anyone else to hear. A little louder: ‘I said…that’s enough.’
I looked across at Peter. He was sitting, oblivious, frowning at a magazine. Then, as though picking up the signal, he tuned into Cliff’s voice, glanced up and saw the panic.
‘Hey – that’s enough!’ he barked. This in turn was picked up by the singer Joe, who repeated Peter’s order and – thank God – the plane suddenly righted itself. There were one or two disappointed voices grumbling. Like, what the fuck? ‘Hey, there are visitors on the plane today, okay?’ said Joe, one of the good guys.
I breathed out, tried to regain control of myself without seeming to make some big effort. I looked at Cliff, the only other one on the plane who seemed to feel it. He was breathing in, out, righting his wings, pulling out of the nosedive, the man who didn’t like to feel out of control. He ignored my look, kept his eyes focused on the straight and narrow…
Despite the fires Metallica were now starting all over the country, by the end of 1983 Kill ’Em All had sold barely 17,000 copies in America – a drop in the ocean in terms of US record sales; certainly not enough to cause more than a blip on the radar of the mainstream media. ‘We knew the next album would be the one,’ says Jonny Z. ‘It was just a case of finding the money to make it.’
Jonny and Marsha were broke. They had given all they had and more to get the first Metallica album made and then put the band out on the road. That, plus the running costs of setting up their own label and management company, on top of the day-to-day running of Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven, meant ‘the well was dry’ – a phrase the band got so used to hearing they would put it next to his name on the credits of their next album. Jonny and Marsha had been able to spring for a limited-edition twelve-inch EP version of ‘Whiplash’ (along with three other tracks from the album) to try and help promote their end-of-year shows but again sales barely covered costs. With Anthrax in tow as support on those final shows of 1983, the increasingly frantic crowd reactions they were now getting meant they felt sure it was only a matter of time before things picked up, but it all came back to the fact that they needed to get another album out.
Enter their knight in cockney accent, Martin Hooker, then head of his own UK-based independent record label, Music for Nations. Still in his twenties, Hooker had already enjoyed a successful career in the music business, working for EMI for six years, ‘handling promotion, label managing [and] lots of different jobs’, he says, for artists ‘from Queen to Kate Bush and all stops in between’. The one job he most coveted, however, in A&R, scouting and signing new talent, ‘was the one thing I didn’t do’. EMI kept denying him the opportunity, citing a lack of experience. Frustrated, Hooker decided to leave and start his own label – Secret Records, which he describes now as ‘predominantly a punk label’ but which really came into its own in the aftermath of the original generation of British punk rock bands.
Typical of Secret was one of Hooker’s first releases, the Punk’s Not Dead album by The Exploited – deliberately designed to distance itself from the less musically bilious ‘new wave’ that had followed directly on from punk and to re-establish what the band and its followers saw as original punk’s aggressive, uncompromising stance, musically and image-wise. Released in March 1981, Punk’s Not Dead went to Number One in the UK independent charts and would eventually become the biggest-selling independently released album of the year. It was not a fluke. Hooker recalls, ‘We then had nine chart albums out of nine releases – things like The Exploited, the 4-Skins, Chron Gen, Infa Riot…all sorts of things.’ Released at a time – the summer of 1981 – when the UK was undergoing an almost nightly series of anti-government inner-city riots, suddenly the ‘very hardcore punk’ that Secret specialised in ‘was big news. Literally, everything that we put out went straight in the charts.’ Looking back now, he attributes this instant success to a mixture of spotting a gap in the market and ‘just really liking that stuff. It was the era and it was exciting and fun.’ And in terms of running your own label, ‘an absolutely fantastic learning curve’.
As a result, several of the London-based major labels invited Hooker to come and run their A&R departments: ‘But by that time I had the money to not necessarily do that.’ Instead, his next move was to look beyond the confines of the UK punk scene towards a form of music he felt would have more international appeal. ‘I was quite keen to move into a more heavy metal area.’ Unlike, punk, however, Hooker was less interested in the domestic scene: ‘I was very much a rock fan but I wasn’t that keen on many of the NWOBHM-type bands. I was much more into the American side – Mötley Crüe and those sorts of bands.’
Towards the end of his time at Secret, Hooker signed Twisted Sister – a US metal band whose outré image lay firmly in the glam tradition but whose music veered more towards a UK punk-metal hybrid. Disentangling the band from its New York roots and replanting them in England, where he recorded their debut album, Under the Blade, released on Secret to great success in September 1982, had given Hooker the taste for more. ‘It was a great experience. That album went straight in the chart and Dee [Snider] was one of the best frontmen I’ve ever seen. We got them on the Reading Festival where they just completely stole the show. So after that, I thought, this is crazy, I’m gonna start a heavy metal label and I came up with the idea for Music for Nations. I thought it was a good name for it because [metal] was the one type of music that never came in or out of fashion.’ And unlike punk, ‘I could see it in every country in the world.’
Working out of a small office in Carnaby Street with initially just his girlfriend Linda there to help, Hooker got Music for Nations under way at the end of 1982 by inviting contacts in the USA to send over copies of any recent metal-orientated product he might potentially look to release in Britain and Europe. Within weeks his desk was overflowing with demos and one-off independent releases. Settling on ‘a handful to get the ball rolling’ the first release on MFN, on 4 February 1983 – Hooker’s 30th birthday – was the self-titled debut from New York outfit Virgin Steele. Attracted by the band’s unashamedly American rock stance, mingled with the musical theatricality of Rainbow, the Anglo-American vehicle of former Deep Purple guitarist Richie Blackmore, equally appealing was the fact that the album had only previously been available in the USA from the band’s own vanity label, VS Records. Virgin Steele’s only other minor claim to fame was the inclusion of a track, ‘Children of the Storm’, on the 1982 compilation, US Metal Vol. II – almost entirely unknown outside hardcore US metal circles but, coincidentally, much admired by a certain Lars Ulrich.
Closer to Hooker’s avowed intention to seek out ‘Mötley Crüe-type bands’, the second release on MFN was the seven-track mini-album from LA glam-metal roisterers Ratt, entitled simply The Ratt EP. Originally released on the little-known Time Coast Records and featuring the track, ‘Tell the World’, the original recording of which had been on the same Metal Massacre compilation that also featured Metallica, both this and the Virgin Steele album became unspectacular but steady sellers for Hooker and his fledgling enterprise. Next up would be Tank, a British trio fronted by former Damned bassist Algy Ward. Modelled on the punk-metal mien of Motörhead, Tank had already had two well-received albums released on the UK independent Kamaflage Records. By the time MFN put out their third, This Means War, the novelty was wearing off and the album did not do as well. By that time, though, Martin was already in the process of signing another new young American metal band he would have a far greater degree of success with even than his days at Secret.
‘The very first time I listened to the No Life demo, I thought, wow, this is just fantastic! You have to remember, in those days nobody had heard of speed or thrash metal. So it was totally, totally different to all the pompous nonsense that was going on with a lot of heavy metal bands at that time. And it was totally in keeping with my kind of punk thing. Certainly my friends at all the majors thought I was mad – completely. They just didn’t see it. But I just thought they were the most exciting band I’d [heard] for a very long time. We ended up doing a deal with Jonny Z to put the [Kill ’Em All] album out in the UK and Europe.’
Aware of the amazing job Hooker had done with his friends Twisted Sister, when Jonny and Marsha decided to go it alone with the first Metallica album, part of the plan to help allay costs and forge a presence for the band outside the USA had been to do some sort of licensing deal with either a foreign major, or, more likely, a fellow independent – hence the brief flirtation with Bronze. Says Hooker, ‘Jonny wanted somebody to come in and share the costs, I think. He’d already recorded the album and then we licensed it from him.’ In fact, the deal Hooker did was for three Metallica albums. But after Kill ’Em All, the relationship between Megaforce and MFN ‘became a lot more complex’. Initially, however, with the album already paid for and completed, ‘it was a straight deal to license that in’. He adds with a smile, ‘I dare say that what I paid for it more than covered the recording costs at the time.’
Hooker had never met the band, let alone seen them play live. Apart from the music, ‘all I had to go on were these pictures of these four spotty herberts’. Consequently, when MFN released Kill ’Em All in the UK ‘it was really, really hard work. The initial manufacturing quantity was fifteen-hundred and it took a long time to sell them. Then after that we were remanufacturing for quite a while in five hundred units at a time.’ He already had a network of distributors in every country in Europe through his days at Secret. ‘I used predominantly the same people, so they were already releasing the first batch of MFN titles. I was able to slot Metallica straight into that distribution network, which was great for them.’
The key to getting Metallica off the ground properly, Martin knew, would be to get them in front of a live audience. ‘In those days touring was one of the few ways you could successfully promote the acts. Unlike now, there were no metal TV shows, hardly any chance of radio airplay and no chance of [mainstream] press.’ Spending the significant amounts needed to bring an American band to Britain at a time when hardly anyone outside the hardcore metal scene was yet aware of them was a risk, though. His hand was all but forced, however, when Jonny Z made it apparent there might not be a second album – unless he could find a partner to come in and help finance the project. Says Hooker: ‘Jonny had run out of money. So he did a deal with us that we’d pay to record the album. We were still only getting the UK and Europe but we were kind of helping [Megaforce] out as well.’ There would be no kickback from Megaforce’s US sales, ‘But it kind of all worked itself out because we [eventually] sold shed-loads of records, so getting the money back wasn’t a problem.’
The new deal also led to Metallica spending most of 1984 actively promoting themselves in Britain and Europe. The plan, as hatched by Martin Hooker, with the encouragement of Lars Ulrich and Jonny Z, was that the band would record their second album in Europe, while also testing the waters with some exploratory UK and European dates. As with their earliest shows on the East Coast, they would begin with a handful of reasonably high-profile support shows, opening once again for Venom on their quaintly named Seven Dates of Hell tour, which began on 3 February at the Volshaus in Zurich, and continued through Germany, France, Belgium and culminated with Metallica’s first outdoor European shows at the Aardschok Festival in Holland on 11 February and the following afternoon at the Poperinge Festival in Belgium. The tour was a notable success, in terms of crowd response, with the band amazed to find their music was known to many of Venom’s ardent fans. Jeff ‘Mantas’ Dunn recalled their first gig in Zurich as ‘like National Lampoon’s Vacation. Metallica went fuckin’ nuts on the first night.’ When one of the band broke a window to talk to some of the fans, ‘the promoters had decided that they were gonna kill them for damaging the venue’. The band ended up hiding in Venom’s dressing room, ‘like little rabbits caught in the headlights’.
Certainly Venom felt they had given Metallica a significant helping hand in not only introducing them to such large crowds on their first trip to Europe, but also in legitimising them through their association at such a crucial early stage in their career – a fact that Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant now feels is unfairly overlooked in the Metallica story. ‘We always wanted to help other bands,’ he later told Malcolm Dome. ‘Had we left everything down to the suits there would never have been a Metallica support.’ As the years went by, however, Metallica ‘just totally forgot all about the fact that we gave them the support on the Staten Island shows in ’83 and that we also gave them a full European tour. We don’t want a medal for that, guys. We just want you to tell it the way it is.’ According to Venom drummer Tony ‘Abaddon’ Bray, it wasn’t just profile Metallica picked up from their association with Venom. ‘I would swear that [James Hetfield] suddenly started to walk like Cronos,’ he said in 1996, getting up and mimicking the trademark, loose-limbed Hetfield swagger. In the same interview, Lant claimed that Kirk Hammett had learned to play by getting Joe Satriani to teach him early Venom numbers such as ‘Die Hard’. He rolled his eyes as though that explained everything.
