Enter Night, page 21
They wouldn’t have to wait long to find out. Within a week of completing recording, the band was in London rehearsing for their first UK performance, headlining what would be the first of two shows in two weeks at the Marquee club in Wardour Street. Presented as an apologia for those fans who had bought tickets for the aborted Rods tour, Music for Nations made sure the venue was packed with media and industry faces. Hopes were high, the band nervous. Things could go either way; triumph or disaster. Fortunately, recalls Martin Hooker, ‘They were just fantastic.’ By the time of the second show on 8 April, ‘It was really starting to get a buzz going.’ Recalls Malcolm Dome: ‘They were very, very good. You still didn’t think, good grief, this band is gonna be huge. But it was clear they could really pull it off live. The line-up just looked right, felt right and sounded right.’ Described in the subsequent Kerrang! review as ‘the Ramones of heavy metal’, their down-at-heel image and speeded-up sound was distinctly at odds with the prevailing mid-Eighties hair-metal trend, as exemplified by the sorts of LA bands now regularly featuring on the cover of Kerrang! like Ratt and Mötley Crüe. They were doing the very opposite of what was happening sales-wise, recalls Xavier Russell: ‘There was a lot of hype but fortunately they were good. A lot of people were impressed that maybe hadn’t totally liked the Kill ’Em All album. For the first time, people could see there was really something there.’
One of the highlights for Lars was meeting another of his NWOBHM heroes, former Tygers of Pan Tang vocalist Jess Cox, who supported the band at the first Marquee date. Cox recalls, ‘I was touring with Heavy Pettin’ who pulled out [of the Marquee] at the last moment so I was going to headline and then [my agents] ITB said “Oh, there’s a new band coming over and you’ve got to support them.” I was like, “What band’s this?” and they said, “They’re called Metallica.” I said, “I’ve never heard of them.” They said “Well, you will, so don’t worry about it.”’ He was amazed to discover the drummer making such a fuss over meeting him – ‘I remember signing Lars’ drumsticks’ – blissfully unaware that Metallica had, in fact, once entertained the idea of recruiting him as their singer: ‘The guys have never said this to me personally. I only found out later.’
Music for Nations had rented a flat in Cadogan Gardens in Kensington for the band to stay in; another home from home to follow Jonny and Marsha’s house in Old Bridge and Mark Whitaker’s garage in El Cerrito. Recalls MFN label manager Gem Howard, who became Metallica tour manager throughout their UK and European dates that year, ‘It was just a shit-hole. Getting them a flat was much cheaper than a hotel and they could invite people back and be much freer with it. But of course they had no sort of ability to clean up. I remember walking into this flat and there was a table lying on its side with food over it, someone had left a half a pound of butter on the floor and trodden on it. Loads of empty bottles and cigarette ends and God knows what…Made Tracey Emin’s bed look neat and tidy.’
Xavier Russell became a regular drinking pal during their time in London. Lars and James came back to his Notting Hill Gate flat one night where ‘we played Blue Öyster Cult till about three in the morning’. Xavier recalls handing out squash rackets and the three of them miming guitar on them to Molly Hatchet’s ‘Boogie No More’: ‘The neighbours would be banging on the ceiling. Then they would put Thin Lizzy on – anything you could play along to on the squash racket. I remember we had a [Kentucky Fried Chicken] and we chucked up in the bucket!’ Another time, he went to see them rehearse in Shepherd’s Bush: ‘Afterwards we went out drinking and I remember James was so pissed he was standing on top of the roof of this cinema in the Tottenham Court Road going mad; it was brilliant!’ he laughs. James later recalled the occasion, too: ‘I got arrested for destruction of property…kicking the lights down on people. It was just one of those things we had to do when we were drunk.’
Xavier also spent time with Cliff and Kirk, but ‘that was different. Cliff was really into his own little world. He had a totally different mindset, really, and that shows in his playing. And he’d always have a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt on. He liked a lot of the bands I liked so we had a lot in common. While Kirk was quite funny, he’d always talk about comics. Lars was just Lars. He was the leader, in a way. And Hetfield back then just liked boozing and having fun, really. So they were all quite different characters but they all got on quite well. You could have a chat with each of them on totally different subjects. I remember [a couple of years later] going to see Blue Velvet with Lars when it came out, at the Gate cinema in Notting Hill Gate. We saw it twice. He was like, “Hey, we’re gonna write a song about it.”’
With the UK and Europe-wide MFN release of Ride the Lightning scheduled for 27 June, the band were back on the road that same month: four shows opening for Twisted Sister in Holland and Germany, followed by an appearance low on the bill at the Heavy Sound Festival on 10 June, then a return performance at the Poperinge Sports fields in Belgium, opening for Motörhead. Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider, who still recalled the bunch of kids he saw playing for Jonny in Old Bridge a year before, was fond of telling people that Metallica were a nice bunch of kids but there was no way they were ever going to make it. Most non-thrash fans agreed. The most optimistic forecast among the non-believers was that maybe, if they played their cards right, Metallica might become as big as Motörhead one day. Oblivious, the band was back at El Cerrito by the time the album was released a fortnight later. Reaction was immediate. In Britain, Sounds became the first heavyweight music weekly to give a Metallica album a rave review, in a glowing piece written by a seventeen-year-old Motörhead fan named Steffan Chirazi – these days better known as the editor of the official Metallica fanzine, So What. Reviewing it for Kerrang!, Xavier Russell called for readers to ‘soundproof the walls, get in a six-pack of beer, sit back and listen to one of the greatest heavy metal albums of all time!’
Ride the Lightning may not have been quite that but it would certainly become one of the most influential. Not all their old fans were so in thrall to its confection of illicit charms. Ron Quintana maintains now that in San Francisco, where Metallica had hardly shown their faces since temporarily relocating first to New Jersey and then to Copenhagen and London, Exodus’s debut album Bonded by Blood – although not released until early 1985, completed in the summer of 1984 and already receiving exposure on the underground tape-trading scene – ‘was liked better than Ride the Lightning by most of the underground kids here, and paved the way for the metal-punk crossover that spurred thrash to its heights’. In the UK, Dave Constable, then a key figure both in the pages of Bernard Doe’s Metal Forces fanzine and, even more influentially, serving behind the counter at London’s most high-profile metal-specialist record shop, Shades, in Soho, when asked to sum up the new, emerging thrash scene in a piece for Kerrang!, described Ride the Lightning as ‘a much watered-down follow-up’ to Kill ’Em All, designed specifically for ‘cracking the conservative home market’.
Both victims of the same fanzine mentality that always feels threatened when one of its own begins to attract much broader appeal, Quintana and Constable were right about one thing: RTL was far less about perpetuating Metallica’s image as godfathers of thrash, far more about establishing their credentials as serious rock contenders, musically and commercially. Malcolm Dome, who interviewed James and Lars for the first time after Ride was released, recalls how ‘Lars immediately struck me as being completely different. Unlike most drummers he was articulate and it was clear he and James had a long-term vision for the band. They weren’t going to be here today then serving pizza tomorrow. Lars had a vision of the band being big. James was more the musical vision. In terms of business, I think he went along with what Lars said, but James was the one already talking of their music moving on.’ As Lars insists now, at root Ride the Lightning was about ‘when we started writing with Cliff’, which for Lars and Metallica represented ‘a giant leap forward in terms of variety and musical ability…it was a much bigger palate’. Kirk recalled Cliff walking around during recording, proclaiming, ‘Bach is God.’ He had thought he was joking. ‘Then realised he wasn’t.’ Cliff was ‘a major enthusiast, understood harmonies and melody, he knew the theory, how it all worked, the only person who was able to figure out a time signature and write it on a piece of paper’. James talked of how Cliff wrote on guitar, not bass, carrying around an acoustic tuned to C. ‘We don’t know how the fuck he got it or why the hell he had it, but he used to play these weird melodies on it that kinda got us into the “Ktulu” vibe. He wrote a lot of our stuff on that guitar.’
Certainly more mainstream fans were now starting to queue up for Metallica. Martin Hooker recalls how it took ‘weeks and months of really pushing and slogging, and advertising and getting gigs’ to start the commercial avalanche that was about to begin tumbling in Europe. ‘It was the old school of hard work. I spent over a hundred thousand dollars in tour support, which in those days was a gargantuan amount of money. My [business] partner Steve Mason thought I was mental. But then it started to pay off and by that time we were starting to re-press in five thousands at a time and it’s all starting to look much more sensible.’ He adds, ‘The main thing that took it to the next level was the kids themselves, the word of mouth. Apart from the occasional play on the [Radio 1] Friday Rock Show they were getting no radio or TV whatsoever, a bit of press from the specialists but nothing from the mainstream. But the word of mouth was just unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable.’
Hooker’s right-hand man, Gem Howard recalls: ‘They were four kids who were out having a great time. Things were changing in their career. They weren’t that big at home [in America] at that time. Then we started touring them across Europe, which is when you started to notice it.’ Spirits were high, despite their meagre surroundings. ‘The gear was either in a truck or we were sharing it with Venom or Twisted Sister or whoever we were out with.’ Gem, who had previously toured with The Exploited and Madness, was struck by their in-van listening habits: ‘Every other band I’d worked with tended to listen to the kind of music they played. But with Metallica, they’d be playing The Misfits and smashing the van to bits while driving along. Then they’d play Simon & Garfunkel; then it was Ennio Morricone. Cliff was always the one that put on the most bizarre stuff. Lars was like the frontman. If you wanted to know anything about the band – anything at all – he would talk about it. That’s really helpful ’cos it meant that everybody that wanted an interview got an interview with substance.’ James ‘was less sure of himself in those days. He had very bad acne early on – an embarrassment, particularly if you’re trying to put yourself across as a frontman.’ He recalls Hetfield still taking about getting a full-time singer in as late as the summer of 1984: ‘He was always saying that they should get in a singer. He wasn’t happy…As he got older and more successful and the skin’s healed up and his skinny lanky frame took on muscle, and he got the girls, he realised that, yeah, I am a frontman. Which is quite different to the reasons that most people are frontmen; most people do it because of their ego, despite having a lack of talent.’
James also stood apart from the other three when it came to some of the more usual on-the-road pursuits. ‘He didn’t indulge in anything other than a drink,’ says Gem, ‘which set him apart a bit. I remember getting [some cocaine] in at some point and [James] was like, “Oh, we shouldn’t be spending the money on this.” I just said, “Look under your pillow.” I’d stuck a couple of bottles of vodka there and he was happy as a pig in shit. That’s early days, though, when you didn’t have enough money to go out and buy bottles of spirit out of your own pocket, and he just felt that he’d been catered for, which I think is a very important part of looking after any band anyway.’ Or as Cliff sagely put it, ‘You don’t burn out from going too fast. You burn out from going too slow and getting bored.’
They also developed some good habits on tour, says Gem: ‘The other thing that made them stand out from virtually everyone else that I’ve ever worked with is that they always had signing sessions after a show.’ Even at shows they weren’t headlining, they would set up tables in the corridors backstage specifically to meet and greet the fans. ‘They would finish playing, go backstage, sit down, have a drink, maybe just have a quick splash of water, and then they’d come and sit there with towels round their necks and just sign until everybody had gone. They were there for probably an hour or so, talking to the kids. They’d go, “How did you like the show?” and they’d go, “Oh, it was great. I really liked that guitar solo,” or, “I think you fucked up such and such tonight.” They got this immediate feedback on their performance. Any constructive criticism, they were open to it and that’s another sign of a band that isn’t in it for the money. They’re in it for the art.’ Bill Hale says this is a tradition started by Cliff: ‘He was the first one who went out and shook hands with the fans, ’cos Cliff was a fan. I would always see him do that the most.’ Lars and James, though, drew on their own experiences of being fans – both pro and con. As someone who had himself always pestered his favourite bands for autographs, Lars knew the value fans placed on personal contact, however small, and the loyalty it engendered, while James recalled his own bitter experiences writing to Aerosmith as a fan, addressing letters personally to Steven Tyler and Joe Perry: ‘I expected something back…because they were so personal to me. I could feel their music, they were my buddies. And I didn’t get anything back. I got an order form for a Draw the Line T-shirt. Wow, thanks a lot.’ That was when he learned ‘about how I would like not to treat our fans’.
The release in the USA on the Megaforce label of Ride the Lightning did not generate as much excitement at national level as it had in the UK, but Jonny and Marsha Z still had high hopes for its long-term success. ‘Martin had done a great job at Music for Nations,’ says Jonny. ‘They had invested a lot of money in marketing and ads.’ Unable to make that same level of investment, Jonny planned to launch the album with a big show at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, with Metallica second on the bill between headliners Raven, who he was also now looking after full-time, and openers Anthrax, his other main clients.
Jonny and Marsha had also continued exploring the possibility of getting Metallica signed to a major US label, targeting Michael Alago at Elektra, who Raven were also then doing demos for with a view to sealing a deal. Describing himself as, ‘a real New Yorker and a real music fan’, Alago was a native of Brooklyn whose life was changed, he says now, by seeing an Alice Cooper concert in 1973: ‘From the age of fifteen I ran around to all the rock clubs [and] bars like CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City and the Mudd club and Danceteria.’ Working at a pharmacy in the East Village to help pay his way through college, in 1980 he got his first job in the music business working at the Ritz nightclub, where he began tipping off some of the record company talent scouts who regularly came down about the best of the new bands that had played there. When Jonny first met Michael in 1983 he’d just begun working at Elektra in the A&R department as a talent scout in his own right. At the time, Mötley Crüe were Elektra’s flavour of the month, their first album for the label, Shout at the Devil, penetrating the Top Twenty and on its way to selling four million copies. Ratt had also made a chart breakthrough that summer, their first major label release on Elektra’s sister label, Atlantic, the Out of the Cellar album, going Top Ten; while Van Halen, on the other Elektra affiliate in the WEA triumvirate, had just had their biggest album yet, the ten-million-selling 1984, including their first Number One single, ‘Jump’. Hard rock was getting bigger than big again in the US market. Nevertheless, Metallica was still viewed as an entirely different proposition, even for Elektra. For any major label to sign Metallica would still have seemed a remarkably left-field thing to do. But, says Alago, ‘I was never interested in the hair bands. I liked my music fuckin’ dirty and snotty.’
Having seen Metallica at the Stone in San Francisco at the end of 1983, he’d been ‘blown away by the energy and charisma radiating from the stage’. When he heard Kill ’Em All, ‘I lost my mind.’ He had ‘never heard a record that alive-sounding and I loved the songs and the energy’. He admits, however, he ‘didn’t know what to tell the company about them. I gave Lars a call or two to express my interest but at the time they had a deal with Megaforce Records.’ They returned to his thoughts in the summer of 1984 with news that they were coming back to New York for a show with Anthrax and Raven. ‘I was doing demos with Raven at the time because the Zazulas managed them and wanted a US deal’, so he was already going to the show. The fact that Metallica would also be on the bill simply meant he would be coming early, he decided.
Jonny, who had put the whole show together as a showcase for CraZed Management talent, was delighted, inviting Alago and a slew of industry people, including record company execs, agents and – most importantly, from the Megaforce label’s point of view – key distributors. Following a stonking warm-up at the Mabuhay Gardens on 20 July – their first hometown show for over nine months, supposedly secret, and billed as a performance by the Four Horsemen – Metallica was buzzing and ready to go. Alago brought Elektra chairman Bob Krasnow with him to the Roseland show, along with ‘some promotion folks’ – not to see Raven, but to check out Metallica. Says Alago, ‘That night there was so much excitement and energy in the air I just knew it was gonna be a special evening. Metallica blew the roof off the stage. I ran backstage after the gig and basically hogged the entire evening and had them up at my office the next morning. We had a great meeting, got some beer and Chinese food and now had to figure out how to sign them away from Megaforce. Jonny was furious at me but in the end money talks and Megaforce got a financial override and the rest, my friend, is fuckin’ history!’
