Enter Night, page 20
The Venom dates were to have been followed by Metallica’s first UK tour, second on the bill, sandwiched between The Rods, three albums into their career but living largely now on reputation alone, and Canada’s first self-styled thrash metal act, Exciter, whose debut album, Heavy Metal Maniac, released on Shrapnel some months before was then only available in Britain on import. Knowing none of the three would be able to headline a UK tour in their own right, Metallica’s new UK agent, Neil Warnock at The Agency, had gambled on the appeal of a package featuring all three, putting together a hugely ambitious list of dates that was to climax with a show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. Says Hooker, ‘It shows you where we were with this at the time because The Rods were gonna be the headliner.’ There had to be some last-minute quick-thinking, however, when the tour was scrapped due to an embarrassing lack of ticket sales. Thrash metal, as an established genre of music, may have begun to achieve recognition in Kerrang! but it was still very much a marginal concern everywhere else. For once, however, the fans in Europe were ahead of the curve. Instead, at Hooker’s instigation, the band drove straight from their final show with Venom in Belgium, to Copenhagen, where they routined their new material at Mercyful Fate’s rehearsal space. A week later they were in Copenhagen’s Sweet Silence Studios, recording their new album.
Ask Marsha Z now how Metallica came to record their second album in Lars Ulrich’s hometown and she chuckles and says, ‘Why do you think?’ But there were sound reasons, too, why Metallica should record in Copenhagen. First and foremost, cost: with the band using a disused upstairs room at the studio to sleep in, there would be no hotels to pay for. Secondly, they would have use of the skills of the studio’s twenty-six-year-old co-owner Flemming Rasmussen, whose production work on Rainbow’s 1981 Difficult to Cure album, also recorded there, had been a big favourite of Ulrich’s. Determined not to find themselves in the same situation as they had on Kill ’Em All, fighting every day to get their opinions across, they decided they would produce the album themselves – with the ‘technical assistance’ of Rasmussen.
Already a married man with a four-year-old son, Rasmussen offered Metallica the best of both worlds: young enough to get where they were coming from musically, expert enough in the studio to help them achieve the effects they desired. With a broad musical background in everything from rock to jazz, folk and pop, Rasmussen was also a fast worker who spoke the band’s language – literally, in the case of Lars. ‘We always [spoke] Danish when we were together,’ he says now. It enabled them to ‘talk without people knowing what we’re talking about’. But while working in Copenhagen suited Lars, says the producer, ‘I don’t think the other guys were too keen about it.’ The first time any of the others had left America, touring Europe had been an eye-opener; odd food, weird beer, different languages, but fun, travelling from strange new place to place every day. Now, holed up in a big wooden, converted factory, as far from home as they had ever been, sleeping all day, working all night, the fun factor was hugely diminished. This was hard work. Still winter, dark and cold out there, none of them could be bothered to stay awake long enough to explore Copenhagen, beyond the occasional foray to drink Elephant beer at a nearby bar.
Work in the studio would begin at seven o’clock every evening and would carry on until four or five in the morning, with a break for a meal around midnight. Flemming admits that at first the music seemed unusual to him. ‘I hadn’t heard a lot of that stuff in Denmark at that time. But I really liked it. I thought it was pretty brilliant, actually.’ The only immediate problem was that James was lost without his usual guitar amp, a modified Marshall that had been stolen when the band’s equipment van was broken into outside a gig at the Channel Club in Boston, in January. The thieves cleaned out the whole van, leaving behind just three guitars. Recalls Rasmussen, ‘Nobody knew what had been done to it. So we actually started out by getting every single Marshall amp that was in Denmark at that time and [placing it] in the studio, and James would start fucking around with it.’ The producer indulged his new clients. He had no intention of attempting to reproduce what he saw as the ‘pretty crappy’ guitar sound on Kill ’Em All. When, finally, James found an amp and cabinet he liked, Rasmussen says, ‘we fucked around from there’. The result was a much deeper, more powerful sound. ‘We actually more or less made that [new] guitar sound from scratch.’ For Flemming, this was an early source of pride, as, in his opinion, James was the best musician in the band. ‘James is, like, world-class. He’s probably the tightest rhythm guitar player I’ve ever met. I hadn’t heard anybody that played [downstrokes] with that kind of precision before ever in my life. So I was really impressed.’ In terms of pure musical vision, ‘from an artistic point of view it would probably be Cliff’, although it was always ‘Lars and James that were more or less in charge’.
The only real weak spots, technically, as with Kill ’Em All, were in James’ singing and Lars’ drumming. Rasmussen recalls, ‘James wasn’t so keen about singing at all. But we just took it bit by bit and double-tracked him and made him sound [good]. And he got more and more confident as we progressed with the work. I tried to do what I could to boost his confidence because I thought he had a good vibe to his voice and a good character and I thought it fitted the music pretty well. The fact that he was trying, you know, I really liked that.’ Lars’ difficulties on the drums were more problematic. ‘I thought he was absolutely useless,’ Flemming says now. ‘I remember the very first thing I asked when he started playing was: “Does everything start on an upbeat?” and he went, “What’s an upbeat?” Holy shit! The thing is that Lars is an innovative person, so his whole drumming had been based on drum fills. That was his thing. All the ones and twos in-between, he never took notice of that. He didn’t really think about what was going on between the drum fills. I still think he’s a great drummer in his own right ’cos I think he does some things that are absolutely amazing. But me and the guy who was his drum roadie, another guy called Flemming [Larsen] who at that time was [also] playing drums in a Danish metal band called Artillery, we started telling him about [beats]. That they have to be an equal length of time between that hit, that hit and that hit and you have to be able to count to four before you come in again…[Then he could play] a really good fill that nobody else had thought of doing at that time.’ He pauses then adds, ‘I can’t imagine what they must have been like live at that time. He was speeding up and down in tempos a lot [playing] more the way he felt the songs should be.’
Lars remained nonplussed. As he later told me, ‘It’s like, five minutes after I could play drums, Metallica were going, and the shit just roller-coastered. Suddenly we’re making demos, then we’re touring, making our first record after only being together a year and a half…all of a sudden it was like, well, we have a record out but we really can’t play. So I had to take drum lessons and Kirk’s doing his Joe Satriani trip.’ More to the point, ‘We spent a lot of years trying to prove to ourselves and to everyone out there that we can play our instruments – you know, listen to this big drum fill I’m doing, and Kirk’s playing all these wild things that are really difficult…When we were first starting out in 1981 the two big bands in America that year were the Rolling Stones and AC/DC. I clearly remember sitting at James’ house going: “The worst drummers in the world are Charlie Watts and Phil Rudd! Listen to them, they don’t do any drum fills, they’re not doing anything. Listen to that, it’s horrible! Give me Ian Paice and Neil Peart.” So for the next eight years I’m doing Ian Paice and Neil Peart things, proving to the world that I can play…’
After the extra time spent getting the guitar and drums right, it was a relief for Rasmussen to discover that most of the songs were already worked out. ‘They had really rehearsed and arranged the demos. So they were pretty set.’ The only song they hadn’t finished yet was one of the album’s centrepieces, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’. ‘We had one day where they kind of jammed it and finished.’ The bell, in question, was actually provided by the striking of an anvil. ‘We put it on a backstairs when we recorded it. That was ridiculous, it weighed a ton. But [Lars] hit it with like a metal bar and it sounded really good. That was before samplers so we had to make our own sounds.’ The backstairs was also where they eventually placed Lars’ drum kit, ‘right on the other side of the door. There’s actually an apartment there now so somebody’s sitting in the living room watching the telly in the spot where Lars played the drums.’ Rasmussen says he knew the album was going to be special long before they’d finished it: ‘I was pretty sure at that time that they were gonna be really big. The funny thing was that everybody else in the studio came from a jazz background – they kept telling me, “But they can’t play!” And I went, “Fuck that! Listen to it, it’s brilliant!” I was really proud. I still am, actually.’ When it was over, “I was like, fuck, yeah, I wanna do more of this shit!”’
Of the eight tracks on Ride the Lightning – as they had decided to call the album after another of its centrepiece tracks – almost all would survive to become cornerstones of the long-term Metallica mythology: the only exception being the one track that seemed to offer a shred of light amidst the unrelenting gloom, a Thin Lizzy-esque mini-anthem in the making called ‘Escape’, its comparatively upbeat message – ‘Life is for my own, to live my own way’ – being the exception to the rule in the otherwise unremittingly bleak landscape of Hetfield’s lyrics. The rest of the album was unified by one theme: death. By mutually assured destruction (‘Fight Fire with Fire’); capital punishment (the title track); war (‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’); suicide (‘Fade to Black’); living death through cryogenics (‘Trapped Under Ice’); biblical prophecy (‘Creeping Death’); even an H.P. Lovecraft-inspired monster (‘The Call of Ktulu’). It was the sort of adolescent death trip any angst-ridden, acne-bedevilled teenage boy locked in his bedroom, railing impotently against an unjust world, might be expected to come up with. What set the album apart was the music. A discernible leap forward from their inspired but occasionally awkward, cheaply produced debut nine months before, Ride the Lightning was the first clear indication that there was more to Metallica than teen-speed and short-fuse power. Received at the time as the epitome of the emerging new thrash metal genre, listening back to it now it’s clear how much it owes not to any received notions of genre-defining but to the much more traditional values of melody, rhythm and old-school musical talent. The vocals remain one-dimensional but are no longer fey, due to Rasmussen’s good practice of double-tracking, adding plenty of oomph. The drums rely too much still on rolls and needless fills but there’s no mistaking the depth-charged beat, thanks again to the producer’s extra coaching and more experienced close-miking technique. The rest, though, could be Iron Maiden at its most fiery, from the wail of duelling guitars on the title track to the battering rhythms of ‘Creeping Death’. Most clearly, if not always directly, can be felt the influence of Cliff Burton. Uninterested in thrash metal, per se, his own playing stoked by jazz and classical references – his tastes ranging from the southern rock of Lynyrd Skynyrd to the mystical balladry of Kate Bush – Cliff’s sheer presence makes the band comfortable enough suddenly to explore such previously considered musical heresies as an acoustic ballad; songs that travel at something less than the speed of light; even a towering, Ennio Morricone-style instrumental.
Freed from the obligation of reproducing Dave Mustaine’s original work, Kirk Hammett’s guitars also come into their own, a universe apart from any notions of what a ‘thrash guitarist’ might be and much closer in aspect to the lessons he had been absorbing from that great Jimi Hendrix disciple, Joe Satriani. These were Kirk’s first attempts to break free of what he later described as the ‘one-voice guitar thing’ of 1980s thrash, and he recalled how ‘when the other guys heard the solos on “Creeping Death” and “Ride the Lightning”, it was a different aspect of soloing than they were used to. Dave Mustaine played fast all the time. I play melodically. And I play parts, different sections that make the solo as hooky as possible.’ Although he admitted he had ‘always been very flashy’, the playing on Ride was full of restraint and controlled aggression. Where the excitement boils over, as on what he called ‘the whammy-bar craziness’ at the conclusion of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, it does so knowingly. This is not to say they had completely abandoned their commitment to being ‘the fastest and heaviest’: James’ clench-fisted rhythmic downstrokes are much in evidence throughout. But while there would be little room for levity on the album, from its doom-laden subject matter to the ominous front cover of an electric chair suspended amidst an electrical storm, as recording artists increasingly in control of their musical destiny Metallica were already starting to subvert that idea; to play against the grain and deliberately bend the rules. The typically windmilling opener ‘Fight Fire with Fire’ – one of the fastest numbers they would ever record – actually begins with a short acoustic ‘overture’, before fizzing like a stick of dynamite into explosive life. The album closer, ‘The Call of Ktulu’ (printed on some pressings, unforgivably, as ‘The Cat of Ktulu’), meanwhile, is an eight-minute-plus instrumental that takes its inspiration more from Morricone than it does Motörhead. A far more substantial showcase for Cliff Burton’s extravagant talents on the bass than its little brother ‘(Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth’ on Kill ’Em All, it’s entirely symbolic of the massive strides Metallica had made as musicians since their hurriedly wrought debut. It’s also an impressively bold way of concluding what it was still hoped would be the album to bring them to a wider audience than the loyal but still limited following they had so far attracted.
The real signifier of Metallica’s determination not to be boxed in by the limitations of others’ expectations, though, was the inclusion of a seven-minute acoustic-based ballad: ‘Fade to Black’. As James later put it, ‘If we’d been told when we were recording Kill ’Em All that we were gonna record a ballad on the next record, I’d have said: “Fuck off.”’ Built upon a sequence of minor guitar chords picked as an arpeggio that James came up with while idling on an acoustic, its sombre, reflective mood a million miles from the juvenilia of anything he’d attempted as a songwriter before, the lyrics – although presented as a suicide note – were initially inspired by the theft of the band’s equipment that resulted in him losing his cherished Marshall. With the addition of Kirk’s tastefully applied electric crunch filling in for the lack of a chorus and Lars’ drums, for once, mirroring a similar restraint, ‘Fade to Black’ became at once the most harrowing and beautifully subtle piece of music Metallica had yet come up with.
Mostly, however, this was Metallica laying down a mission statement. In ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and ‘Creeping Death’ they had, simply, created two enduring heavy metal classics that would have sounded apposite whatever era of rock history they had sprung from. The former (misprinted on early pressings as ‘For Whom the Bells Toll’) might just as easily have come from early-Seventies Black Sabbath, Cliff’s expertly distorted bass solo which signals its beginning a marvellous, musicianly touch; the latter – destined to become a huge crowd favourite, chanting ‘Die! Die! Die’ – the first touchstone Metallica classic.
Not everybody was bowled over by such ‘originality’. Kirk’s former Exodus bandmate Gary Holt, for one, was distressed to discover, as he says now, that not only did the riff from an early Exodus number, ‘Impaler’, ‘become like one of the best riffs on Ride the Lightning, on “Trapped Under Ice”’, but that the now famous line in ‘Creeping Death’ which begins ‘Die by my hand…’ was taken from Holt’s own composition ‘Dying By His Hand’. There was no question, he admits, ‘that the riffs were [Kirk’s]’. Nevertheless, it caused bad blood between the two for a while. ‘I remember calling Kirk up and giving him a great deal of grief,’ says Holt, ‘and he said, “Ah, I thought I asked you if it was okay.” I’m like, “No, you didn’t.” So I’ve had the pleasure – and I use the term loosely – of watching sixty-thousand people chant that shit [at subsequent Metallica shows over the years] yet I’ve never received a penny for it. I’ve had many people say, “Man, you should have sued.” But I’m like, yeah, whatever, you know? It is what it is. I laugh about it now. I had one conversation with Kirk about it then I let it go for ever.’
But then, as Holt also points out, while both Metallica and Exodus had become known for ‘playing like real furious shit’, Kirk’s taste was always ‘a little more leaning towards the Maiden route, you know?’ And if James lifted a lyrical phrase from Kirk’s Exodus-era songbook, he certainly added to it in ways nobody else would have done. Inspired by the band catching a TV showing of the movie The Ten Commandments, the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille epic starring Charlton Heston, the lyrics of ‘Creeping Death’ were based on the Bible story of the tenth plague bestowed upon the Ancient Egyptians – the Angel of Death sent by God to kill every first-born child. When Cliff, in a cloud of weed, exclaimed, ‘Whoa, it’s like creeping death’ the rest of them laughed so much they decided they had to write a song with that title. That James so cleverly wove the convoluted lyric together said much for his rapidly improving songwriting skills. Musically, it was also a revelation; a brutal rock monolith built on incredible finesse, from its juddering riff to the mesh of vocal and guitar harmonies in its chorus, Hammett’s concluding double-tapped solo a masterclass in itself. ‘Creeping Death’ remains an all-time rock anthem, the thrash generation’s very own ‘Paranoid’ or ‘Smoke on the Water’.
The writing credits were also more evenly shared this time. The two most important tracks (‘Fade…’ and ‘Creeping…’) were credited to all four members. Two to Hetfield, Ulrich and Burton (‘Fight…’ and ‘For Whom…’); two to Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton and Mustaine (‘Ride…’ and ‘…Ktulu’) and the least significant two to Hetfield, Ulrich and Hammett (‘Trapped…’ and ‘Escape’). Ride the Lighting also codified a format for Metallica in the 1980s: manic opener, monumental title track, at least one death march, one big ballad and a fistful of all-out thrash crowd-pleasers. If anything, it was progressive rock Metallica were now leaning towards, making virtues of musicianship, long solos, complicated time changes; above all, lengthy numbers, Lars sitting there, as he told me, timing the recordings, ready to ‘build more stuff in’ if they weren’t sufficiently long enough. The question remained: what would the die-hard thrash fans make of it? According to Flemming, the band ‘weren’t too concerned about fans not liking “Fade to Black”, they were more worried about “Trapped Under Ice”, which they thought was maybe a bit too poppy. That was the only concern during the recording. They joked about it almost being a single song.’
