Enter Night, page 22
There was a further twist to the tale, though – one that Jonny had not seen coming but which would be the real reason he was furious: the arrival on the scene of a rapidly up-and-coming New York management company named Q Prime. Fronted by Peter Mensch – a thirty-one-year-old former tour accountant for Aerosmith who had graduated in the late 1970s to day-to-day management with Contemporary Communications Corporation (CCC), known in the biz simply as Leber-Krebs, after Steve Leber and David Krebs, who formed the company in 1972 – Q Prime was fast becoming in the Eighties what Leber-Krebs had been in the Seventies: the most successful company in American rock management. Leber-Krebs’ clients had included Aerosmith, AC/DC, Ted Nugent and the Scorpions; the perfect schooling for a player like Mensch who would go on to manage multi-platinum US stars such as Def Leppard, Dokken, Queensrÿche and, biggest of all eventually, Metallica. Along with his business partner Cliff Burnstein – a former Mercury Records A&R executive also schooled in the Leber-Krebs way – Q Prime was then riding the crest of a wave with the third Def Leppard album, Pyromania, the second-biggest-selling album in America in 1983 after Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Now they were in expansionist mood and Metallica, having recently appeared on their radar, looked like prime candidates to be assimilated into the rapidly evolving Q Prime universe. Indeed, Mensch – overseeing the ‘international’ side of the company’s business from his London home while Burnstein ran the New York office from his Hoboken apartment – already had a proven track record in pouncing on rising rock artists whose management support system was considerably weaker and less experienced than his own. Back in 1979, he had been instrumental in persuading AC/DC to leave Michael Browning, who had taken the band from the pubs and clubs of Australia to the brink of worldwide success, and sign with Leber-Krebs. Eighteen months later he managed to do something similar with Def Leppard, then one of the leading lights of the NWOBHM, on the verge of cementing a major deal in London with Phonogram. Neither act had cause to regret their decisions. In both instances, Mensch had overseen complete overhauls of their careers: the next two AC/DC albums would be both the best and, more importantly, biggest-selling of their careers to that point, Highway to Hell (1979) and Back in Black (1980); while Leppard were now on their way to becoming the biggest-selling British rock band in the world. When Mensch and Burnstein decided in 1982 to form their own management company, Def Leppard went with them.
Now, in 1984, Q Prime was on the hunt for new blood. Mensch had been a keen observer of the NWOBHM scene, had circled Diamond Head in their earliest, still exciting days, but had been shooed away suspiciously by Sean Harris’s well-meaning but desperately inexperienced manager-mother, Linda. ‘Mensch offered us the chance to open for AC/DC at two shows in Newcastle and Southampton early in 1980,’ Brian Tatler recalls. ‘Afterwards we had a little meeting with Mensch in the dressing room while he told us things about how the music business worked. We were very impressed, avidly listening, and it occurred to me, wouldn’t it be great if Peter managed us. But Sean’s mum and [her partner] Reg probably tried to keep us away, ’cos if [Mensch] had got involved he’d steal us away from them.’ Mensch had also been in discussion with a young Marillion, then on the verge of major success with EMI, but again was rejected not because of any perceived lack of knowledge or experience, but rather the opposite. ‘Peter Mensch was very urbane, very American, very obviously big time,’ recalls former Marillion singer Fish, ‘and I think, still being so sort of parochial in our tastes in those days we were offended by all that.’ As with Diamond Head, Mensch’s can-do demeanour proved too much for the more homespun British five-piece who signed with a manager less high-powered but more on their level personally. In both cases, it might be suggested, the bands would live to regret their decisions as their careers never quite reached the heights achieved by so many others who did have the courage to sign with Mensch and Q Prime.
One American metal band that went through a very similar experience with Q Prime in the mid-1980s and never regretted it is Queensrÿche. Like Metallica, Queensrÿche’s first, eponymously titled EP had been released on their own independent 206 label in 1983, while the band was managed by record store owners from their hometown of Seattle. The band was picked up for a major deal by EMI America but two albums into its career, despite rave reviews in America and the UK, career-wise felt it was essentially treading water. Enter Q Prime, who Queensrÿche singer Geoff Tate now describes as ‘extremely valuable’ in getting the band to the next level. Says Tate, ‘They had such clout and muscle as far as being able to demand what they felt was best for the artist. In regard to the record companies, the production, going on the road and doing deals with promoters, you know, clout with MTV. They were very well respected and they had success under their belts and so people listened to them. They didn’t have a lot of opposition to their plans, and so, yeah, it was a big plus to have that kind of muscle.’
Of the four albums Queensrÿche would release over the ten years they were managed by Q Prime, the first three went platinum in America – not through putting the pressure on the band to make any commercial adjustments to their sound, Tate hastens to point out. Quite the opposite, he says: ‘Q Prime had a very simple philosophy, and that is: follow your muse. Follow what it is that you want to do artistically and that will always be your calling card. At the end of the day whether you sell records or not you still have the fact that you followed your artistic calling.’ The key lesson Mensch and Burnstein preached, he says, was ‘“Never ever listen to anybody. You didn’t listen to anybody in the beginning and look where you are. So follow what it is that you want to do.” And I liked that immediately. Upon meeting them that was the thing that really struck me, that they weren’t gonna sit there and tell us what kind of clothes to wear or what kind of notes to play. They didn’t have any interest in that at all. They just wanted to manage bands that had something to say. Bands that had a destiny, I guess, you’d say.’ As for the individuals, ‘Peter and Cliff are true gentlemen. I have the utmost respect for both of them. They both have strengths in different areas and they were wise enough to recognise what each of them did well and allow each other to pursue those interests. Peter was always much more in control of the touring aspect and road life. Cliff was more into diplomacy and talking. Any issues within the band, he would be the one that would come and talk to everybody and kind of reason things out. Peter was kind of like the big stick; he would come in and bash people over the head.’
Be that as it may, Michael Alago insists now that he was already speaking to Jonny Z about signing Metallica ‘long before Q Prime’s involvement’, denying that Mensch and Burnstein had any direct influence on his decision. ‘At the time they were being handled by the Zazulas and not Q Prime. For me it was all about the band and their dedication to the music.’ It just so happened that ‘Q Prime were scouting them out the same time I signed them’. But as Jonny Z points out, it was Q Prime who ‘closed the deal’. Consequently, Jonny now believes that while he was involved in preliminary discussions with Alago, Mensch and Burnstein had probably been talking to Alago’s superior, Tom Zutaut. ‘The deal was, basically, in conversation. Then [Q Prime] came in and closed it. They may have closed it from the top while we were working from the bottom up.’ However it worked, the fact remains that by the time Metallica were ready to put pen to paper on an eight-album deal with Elektra in New York, they were no longer being managed by CraZed Management. Jonny says Marsha already had an inkling something was up, suspicious over the number of phone calls Lars would suddenly have to take from ‘Aunt Jane’. Jonny chuckles ruefully, ‘Marsha was telling me they kept calling Aunt Jane. Aunt Jane I think was Peter or Cliff. “I have to call Aunt Jane.” We think that. But who knows?’
For Lars Ulrich, though, it wasn’t about ditching Jonny and Marsha. They had ‘always been good people’. But ‘if we were to go next-level’ they would have to take drastic steps, as they had previously with Ron and with Dave, and as they would again in the future when it came to others in their rapidly expanding organisation. For Lars, meeting Peter Mensch was like finding the final piece of the jigsaw, or being introduced to the bigger, smarter, older brother he never knew he had. Despite their outward differences – Lars the garrulous young hell-raiser to Mensch’s scowling party-pooper – beneath their seemingly uncomplementary façades lay two strikingly similar egos.
Both men were hugely driven, insanely ambitious overachievers, always on the clock, never able to switch off, never wanting to. Almost immediately after they started working together, Lars looked up to Peter, trusted his instincts completely, knew he was the right man for the job. By the same token, Mensch was savvy enough to see past the beers and the laughs, to grasp instantly that here was someone as determined as he to get to the top, and that it would be a good fit: Lars the smiling frontman, charming the pants off everyone he met; Mensch the enforcer standing at his side, making sure everyone paid attention and took this shit seriously.
‘Interesting’ is the tactful way Martin Hooker now describes his dealings with Mensch, subsequent to his takeover of Metallica: ‘He was hard work, I have to say.’ Gem Howard is less guarded. Working with Metallica’s new American managers ‘was weird. Peter Mensch seems to have not really much respect for anybody and the only time I met Cliff Burnstein, when we had a meeting with him…they actually treated us with contempt, really. The only thing Burnstein was interested in was trying to find a Metallica sweatshirt that fitted him. That’s all I remember of him.’ Others share similar feelings. ‘It was always difficult with Mensch really,’ recalls then Kerrang! editor Geoff Barton, who describes his relationship with the manager as ‘abrasive’. He goes on, ‘Being an American, he didn’t really understand the power of the British music press. The press in the States didn’t have that same kind of influence.’ So while Mensch regarded journalists like Barton as ‘an ant willing to be crushed under his feet’, the reality was that he exerted far less control over the then-all-powerful British music press than he would have wished.
That said, there are many who worked closely with Q Prime – former employees and record company executives – who have nothing but good to say about them. When one of the record company people who worked with Def Leppard in the 1980s became seriously ill, she awoke one morning to find her hospital room filled with flowers – courtesy of Peter Mensch. Another former employee at Q Prime’s New York office from that time who left under difficult personal circumstances in the 1990s still insists they would go back to work there ‘in a second’, and that, despite the unhappy way they left, it was still ‘the best job I ever had’, pointing out the enormous pressure Mensch and Burnstein were always under. ‘Faxes and phone calls at three in the morning, I don’t know how someone deals with that kind of pressure.’ Certainly there was no mistaking Mensch and Burnstein’s abilities as managers. They didn’t win every time – Armored Saint might arguably have had a bigger career had they ignored Q Prime’s advice and gotten themselves over to Britain and Europe to capitalise on their early popularity there, just as Metallica had in the days before they had come under Q Prime’s raven-like wing; Warrior Soul and Dan Reed Network were other Q Prime acts that arrived with a bang, media-wise, in the Eighties and left with a whimper, comparatively speaking, sales-wise. But those that did flourish under their tutelage did so spectacularly and by the end of the decade Q Prime would boast multi-platinum acts such as Def Leppard, Metallica, Queensrÿche, Dokken, Tesla and Cameo. In 1989 they were hired to oversee the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels comeback world tour.
It had actually been Xavier Russell who effected introductions between Q Prime and Metallica. ‘Mensch phoned asking me for their number,’ he recalls now. ‘This was pre-mobile phone days and they were pretty hard to track down. I remember I had to phone Kirk’s mother in San Francisco. I said, “I need to track down Lars urgently.” She said, “Well, we can get him to a pay phone,” because they weren’t on the phone at the El Cerrito house. This is how archaic it was. I then remember Lars phoning me up from a phone box in America, reversing the charges. I said, “Look, Mensch needs to talk to you. He’s serious about wanting to sign you.”’ The next thing Xavier heard, the deal was done. He points out that Mensch and Burnstein could hardly have been the only ones sniffing around Metallica at that time. He believes Iron Maiden manager Rod Smallwood may also have been interested: ‘Lars always worshipped the way Maiden was managed – their artwork, the sleeves, the tours. He always wanted to be represented by somebody like Smallwood. But I don’t think Smallwood was really into that sort of music. Mensch knew something was gonna happen.’
Says Jonny, ‘I got to tell you something; it shattered me to lose them, for years. Because I thought we would have proved to everybody that we could have taken it all the way. It would have happened with us as well. It was on fire when we gave up the band! Absolutely blazing! It was in the middle of everything going on.’ The deal eventually struck with Elektra allowed Megaforce to continue with the US release of Ride the Lightning up to the first 75,000 sales. But then, says Jonny, ‘The first seventy-five for any band that’s brand new is [the main part of the job]. After that it’s just taking orders.’ He claims Howard Thompson, then a main player at Elektra, later ‘came up to me and said that Marsha and I did a million-dollar job to really break this band. It would have cost Elektra millions to get the band to the level that they were handed Metallica. That’s one of the best compliments I took.’
Ultimately, though, the separation was ‘not very fun’. Indeed, three years later, as a guest at Jonny and Marsha’s home, I would sit and listen to him semi-jokingly describe Q Prime as ‘Thieves! Fuckin’ thieves!’ When I remind him of it now, he sighs and says: ‘Can I tell you something, they probably are. What they did was probably thieve-ish. But the band probably came to them complaining and moaning and asking for a saviour, to get to the next level. Lars, you remember, always, always wanted to be in the same league as Def Leppard. He felt that if he had Def Leppard’s manager, it’s possible. And again, I was not proven in the arena level, in those days. Marsha and I had not done any giant venues – and they wanted to be where that knowledge was guaranteed to exist.’ He is not allowed to ‘discuss the terms’ because of the confidentiality clause in his eventual written agreement with Metallica. ‘But I’ll see if I can put it to you in a mild way. We were asked, legally…to negotiate a separation.’ Another deep sigh. ‘You know, if it ain’t right, you can’t manage a band. You don’t want to be hated. I want to be loved! So it would have been punishment for us also to have gone on. It was a surprise but I can’t say anything [except] I felt the history would have been the same or maybe even better with me and Marsha.’
We would never know.
Seven
Masterpiece
I sat on the corner of the bed in my hotel room, watching Gem go at it.
He’d taken a picture from the wall, laid it flat on the coffee table and was chopping out lines of coke on it.
‘There are two things I’d rather you didn’t bring up to the band,’ he said.
‘Yeah, what’s that?’
‘One is this whole thrash thing. They’re really sensitive suddenly about being called thrash. They feel like they’ve gone beyond all that now and that this new album is something different.’
‘Okay,’ I said. No biggie. It had been the same during the punk thing. I’d lost count of the amount of bands I’d interviewed in my early days on Sounds that no longer wished to be labelled simply as ‘punk’. ‘New wave’ was the desirable new sobriquet for the would-be pop intelligentsia and so that’s what you wrote – if you wanted to stay in with them. It was the same with all the old NWOBHM bands. By the time I’d started writing about Iron Maiden and Def Leppard for Kerrang! it would never have occurred to me to describe them as NWOBHM. That stuff was good for getting known in the early days but turned into a pain in the arse once it came to second or third album time. The novelty had worn off and everybody was desperate to distance themselves from it. No one still described Pink Floyd as psychedelic, did they? Or The Beatles as Merseybeat or mop-tops, God forbid.
‘What’s the second thing?’ I asked, eyeing the coke impatiently.
‘Er, this,’ he said, handing me a rolled-up pound note.
I snaffled up a couple of fat ones then sat back, fighting the welling nausea as the stuff trickled down my throat.
‘Why…They don’t like coke?’
‘Oh, they like it all right. A bit too fucking much! No, if they find out I’ve got this they’ll do it all and there’ll be none left for us.’
‘Fuck that,’ I said.
‘Too right…’
We sat there a couple more hours, doing our thing, getting ready to go to the studio and see the band. I liked Gem. He was old-school, knew how to get the party started. The band was lucky to have him. And now they would have me, too. Not a thrash writer but a proper mainstream music critic here to bestow his blessings – or something. That was certainly the spiel I’d been on the receiving end of when I’d been invited to fly to Copenhagen to check out their new album, Master of Puppets. ‘It’s different this time,’ I kept being told. ‘This is the one that’s going to break them into the mainstream.’
