Enter Night, page 23
I nodded dutifully then waited for the plane tickets to arrive. I didn’t give a toss about who was breaking into the mainstream. I just liked Lars, who’d I’d met at Donington back in the summer. A right laugh. I’d watched his band struggling to drape their dark musical backdrop across the unfeasibly sunlit stage, while doing their best to avoid the bottles and catcalls, the usual drunken Donington crowd detritus. Then later that night, back at the hotel, wasted in the bar, Lars had pointed to the unconscious figure of Venom singer Cronos, slumped at a nearby table, face down in a sea of pint glasses, and suggested we get our pictures taken with him. We stood there sniggering while the magazine photographer aimed his lens, waggling our willies in Cronos’ slumbering ears.
Now this, waiting to go to the studio to hear what Metallica had been up to in the studio all these months later. It hadn’t really dawned on me yet that they might be a band to take very seriously. They were thrash metal; the musical equivalent of silly drunken boys sticking willies in your ear and I had been there many times before. Surely by now we must have seen it all, I thought…
Suddenly, in the autumn of 1984, everything changed for Metallica. Under their agreement with Elektra, Megaforce would hand over US rights to Ride the Lightning after 75,000 sales. The way the album was already flying out the door, Elektra prepared to rerelease it in November, by which time it would already have sold twice as many copies as Kill ’Em All. Although Jonny and Marsha were ‘heartbroken’ to say goodbye to the band, the Elektra deal did help Megaforce stay afloat at a time when they were still struggling with near-crippling debt. As Jonny says now, ‘Our prize for breaking Metallica was losing them. But by the end people were swarming to see them.’ The Elektra money he ‘put into Anthrax and Raven’.
In the UK, Martin Hooker of Music for Nations was also disappointed to see the band go, but in his case the new deal worked more heavily in his favour. ‘[Megaforce] sold the band to Elektra for America. So Elektra were getting the rights to that album [Ride the Lightning] that we’d paid for. In return they very kindly gave us [the next Metallica album] Master of Puppets for free. We still had to pay the band a very handsome advance but we didn’t have to pay any of the recording costs; which was fair because we’d paid for the previous album.’ It also meant ‘somebody else had the hassle of the studio side, overseeing it’. In the meantime, MFN could continue marketing Metallica records with impunity – something that they took spectacular advantage of during the latter months of 1984 when they released a twelve-inch EP of ‘Creeping Death’. The B-side comprised newly minted versions of two NWOBHM classics – Diamond Head’s ‘Am I Evil?’ and Blitzkrieg’s ‘Blitzkrieg’ – from their days in Ron McGovney’s garage. Hence the informal title they gave the single’s cover versions, ‘Garage Days Revisited’.
Gem Howard recalls that sales in the UK and Europe ‘were just phenomenal on that. I think in the end we sold something like a quarter of a million copies, all told.’ It wasn’t just the content that sold the single – Diamond Head singer Sean Harris later recalled being nonplussed when Peter Mensch called for copyright permission to use ‘Am I Evil?’: ‘I was like, “Well, I can’t see the point, but yes you’re welcome to!”’ – it was the ingenious way MFN marketed the record. Tapping into his previous experience at Secret of selling multi-format ‘limited edition’ singles and EPs to the hardcore collector punk audience, Hooker shrewdly released ‘Creeping Death’ in a special coloured-vinyl edition. In America, where Elektra had elected not to release a single, MFN sold more than 40,000 copies of the ‘Creeping Death’ twelve-inch just on import. When orders began to outstrip their ability to manufacture more, MFN simply improvised and released it in a different colour. Recalls Gem, ‘We pressed [“Creeping Death”] on every colour vinyl we could find. We’d get a phone call from an importer in New York saying could [they] have another three thousand coloured-vinyl after we’d decided to put it out in blue or something. I went, “Yeah, okay.” Then I’d phone up the pressing plant and they’d say, “We haven’t got any blue vinyl left.” And I’d go, “Well, what have you got?” and they’d go, “We’ve got some yellow…” So I’d phone back New York and say, “Can’t do blue, can do yellow and you can have them in seven days, any good?” They’d say, “Okay, done.” And it literally was like that. I know that we did blue, red, green, yellow, brown. “They’ve only got brown.” “Okay…” I don’t actually know how many colours we did in the end. I think we did it in clear as well. And gold, of course…’
Many Metallica fans would buy the record again and again just to collect the set. Sales began to rocket so high in Britain and Europe they began to sell more copies of the ‘Creeping Death’ twelve-inch than they did of Ride the Lightning. Boggle-eyed, the rest of the biz took note and within two years singles in multiple formats became the industry standard in the UK, with releases being staggered so that new formats appeared every week for up to eight weeks in the knowledge that many fans were simply buying repeats. (This practice was later restricted under new legislation.)
All of this was done with the blessing of the band – or certainly Lars. ‘Lars was always the spokesperson,’ points out Hooker. ‘Any business you had to do, everything went through Lars.’ But then Lars wasn’t like other drummers. He knew there was no music to be made without the business side being taken care of too, and vice versa. As Hooker says, ‘It’s always helpful if you’ve got one guy in the band who has his business head screwed on. So many bands haven’t a clue. Metallica always kind of knew where they wanted to go. They had one guy who was great doing the interviews and the business. It left the others time to take care of the music.’ He adds, ‘But that’s also something that American bands have that English bands never have. Like Twisted Sister were unbelievably professional; so together and business-minded, but without selling-out on the music front. Metallica were very much that way.’
Delighted though they were over this newfound excitement abroad, now they had a major deal Metallica were in a hurry to get back on the road in America. But Burnstein and Mensch brought their experience to bear and persuaded them that their best move now would actually be to return to Europe where their profile remained highest, and begin touring as headliners. With Elektra not prepared to put their full marketing machine behind Ride the Lightning until it was rereleased in the States in November, a US tour in the New Year was a more sensible option, allowing momentum to build. ‘Which is exactly what happened,’ says Hooker. With fellow MFN act Tank in to provide support, Metallica kicked off their twenty-five-date Bang the Head That Doesn’t Bang tour on 16 November with a show at the Exosept club, in Rouen, France, before moving on to Poperinge, Belgium, then heading south for shows in Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Montpellier and Nice. Concerts in Milan, Venice and Zurich followed before the tour arrived for seven shows in West Germany, interrupted only by a quick drive across the border for a smoke-ringed sell-out date at the notorious Paradiso club in Amsterdam. After that the highlight was a gut-busting hometown show for Lars at the Saga club in Copenhagen, which a ‘very proud’ Flemming Rasmussen attended, the tour concluding with more sold-out club shows in Sweden and Finland.
The final night of the tour was an ambitious one-off UK date at London’s Lyceum Ballroom on 20 December. Part of a larger strategy to push Metallica’s profile in Britain further towards the same level it now enjoyed in Europe, the band also appeared on the front cover of Kerrang! for the first time. Featured on the cover of the Christmas 1984 issue of the mag was a sole picture of a sunglasses-wearing Lars Ulrich, head thrown back in drunken exultation, and – bizarrely – spray-painted silvery pink, holding a similarly spray-painted, nuts-and-bolts-encrusted Christmas cake. It seemed an incongruous image for a band then building a stiff reputation for itself as a non-glam, walk-it-like-you-talk-it street metal outfit unprepared to bow to commercial pressures. But to the rest of the industry the subtext was clear: the pictures for the cover and inside story were taken by Ross Halfin, Kerrang!’s number one photographer, the story written by the magazine’s deputy editor, Dante Bonutto – both close personal contacts of Peter Mensch, flown to San Francisco to hang out with the band at El Cerrito. ‘I thought: how have they managed that? ’Cos Diamond Head never made the front cover of Kerrang!,’ says Brian Tatler, laughter tinged with envy. ‘The only reason he’s got that, I thought to meself, is ’cos he’s said, “Yeah, you can spray me, I’ll do whatever you like to get on that front cover.” Whereas Diamond Head would probably have been a little more, “We’re not doing that! I’m not gonna be made to look silly.”’
Far from being silly, as far as the band’s new set-up was concerned, it was another giant leap forward. ‘Getting your band on the cover of Kerrang! meant you immediately sold more records,’ shrugs Gem Howard. Everyone who had ever shown support for Metallica in Britain was invited along to the Lyceum – also billed as a special Christmas show – headed by Bonutto, Xavier Russell and the rest of the Kerrang! team. Writer Malcolm Dome recalls being invited to listen through a headset to what Cliff Burton was playing onstage. ‘It was surreal. I mean, he was doing what he needed to do to keep the beat and so forth, but the rest of his playing didn’t seem to fit what the others were doing at all, as though he was in a world of his own. It was absolutely extraordinary.’ Questioned later by Harald O about his more spontaneous approach to playing live, Cliff shrugged it off with a smile. ‘Yeah, well, you get so you know the song like the back of your hand and you can just flip off and do different stuff. It’s funner that way, it keeps me entertained. You know; something to do.’ Sure, Cliff.
After a break back home in San Francisco – Lars resisting the urge to spend the holidays at home with his family, as Cliff and Kirk would do, in order to keep James company at El Cerrito – the first three months of 1985 found Metallica on their first extended run of US dates for over a year. Second on a three-band bill headlined by W.A.S.P., and opened by old buddies – and now fellow Q Prime clients – Armored Saint, the tour officially got under way on 11 January with a packed show at the Skyway club in Scotia, New York. It was the start of the band’s longest tour yet: forty-eight shows in sixty-eight days that would establish them as the hottest new street-level band in the USA. Closest rivals Grim Reaper – the last of the NWOBHM-generation bands to get a foothold in America – had sold over 150,000 copies of their debut album, See You in Hell (released in the USA at the same time as RTL on the independent Ebony Records label, distributed by RCA). But that would be their peak. Slayer’s debut Show No Mercy had notched up 40,000 US sales in 1984, enough to become Brian Slagel and Metal Blade’s biggest hit yet but not enough to touch what Metallica was now achieving. (Anthrax and Megadeth would not release their first significant albums until much later in 1985). By the time Metallica’s US tour had climaxed with a headline show at the Palladium in Hollywood on 10 March, Elektra had added another 100,000 sales to the 75,000 Megaforce had already done in the USA, the album reaching Number 100 on the Billboard chart. In the UK, meanwhile, the album had gone silver for over 60,000 sales; double then treble that figure across Europe. They were also now making inroads into the lucrative Japanese market, where Q Prime had set up a deal with CBS (soon to become Sony). It had cost a great deal of money to get to this position – on tour support, on advertising and promotion, on recording costs and simply keeping them fed and out of trouble – and they certainly weren’t in the position yet where they could look forward to significant royalties. Indeed, when they were home Cliff was still living with his parents while James, Kirk and Lars clung to their garage couches at the Metallimansion in El Cerrito. But they were certainly on their way. You could feel it in the air at every show they did that year. When the tour finally came to a noisy, drunken halt with one last show, at the Starry Night club in Portland, Metallica dragged on the members of Armored Saint for the encores, concluding with a rowdy version of ‘The Money Will Roll Right In’ by San Franciscan punk rockers Fang. A self-referential bit of theatre among the beer-laden laughter, but deep down inside Metallica were no longer even half-joking.
The band was becoming road-hardened. Even James was starting to lighten up – onstage and off. He boasted to Xavier Russell, who joined the tour for a few days, about some of the adventures he was now having. Having spent ‘hours and hours in the bar’ they had decided to really ‘booze it up’ in Armored Saint bassist Joey Vera’s room. ‘We were all getting really ripped and started throwing bottles out the window. They were smashing and it sounded really neat. But that soon got boring, so I threw Joey’s black-and-red leather jacket out and it landed in the pool, which luckily had its cover on. We went down to get it and on the way back up to the tenth floor I decided to open the elevator doors between floors…we then got stuck for half an hour and everyone is like freaking out and I started shouting, “Get us the fuck out of here!” We finally get up to the tenth floor and by now I’m pretty [mad] so I see this fire extinguisher hanging on the wall. So I kinda took it down and started squirting people with it – all this CO2 or some kinda shit was comin’ out of it.’
Not coincidentally, it was around this time the band picked up the nickname, first gleefully reported in Kerrang!, of Alcoholica. James was going through his schnapps phase. That and beer and vodka, ‘embracing alcohol at a different level from the rest of us’, as Lars later put it. Lars had ‘more of the binge mentality. I’d go every night for three days. Then I wouldn’t touch a drop for the next four.’ For James it was different. Drinking was becoming another mask he could hide behind. ‘I think drinking made me forget a lot of stuff at home,’ he later reflected. ‘Then it became fun.’ It was a fan who’d come up with the name Alcoholica, designing a T-shirt based on the Kill ’Em All album cover, the title recast as Drank ’Em All and the Metallica logo supplanted by that of Alcoholica, the ghoulish hammer and blood pool replaced by an overturned vodka bottle, its contents spilling out. ‘We thought it was pretty cool,’ said James. ‘We had shirts like that made up for ourselves.’
The booze provided a lift in other, more tangible ways too. Most significantly, Hetfield was now finding his voice – real and imagined – as the frontman. Megadeth bassist David Ellefson recalls being ‘totally blown away’ when he caught the Metallica/Armored Saint show at the Hollywood Palladium in March. ‘I’d seen them play on Kill ’Em All at the Country Club [in Reseda, in August, 1983] and it was good [but] they hadn’t quite settled into the pocket yet, as all bands do once you’ve been on the road for a few years. But when I walked in [at the Palladium in ’85] I remember James coming out with his shirt off and it was just ferocious. Like, holy smokes, man! This band has arrived! There’s nobody like this doing this.’ Recalls Joey Vera, who watched Metallica from the side of the stage most nights of that tour: ‘It was a fire that was beginning to burn. That’s where I first saw it on a daily basis, in every small town. It’s one thing to see something in a magazine, or one show in a big city, but when we were on tour together we played every shithole across the US and that’s where you got to see, like, wow, this is having the same effect in front of two hundred people or in front of six hundred people.’
Hanging out on tour, they would take turns sharing buses between cities, recalls Vera: ‘They were just…very crazy. A lot of partying. They had already been to Europe. So we were always in awe of them because they had done that, begging for stories. How ugly the chicks were, how bad the food was, how many times they woke up in the gutter, so on and so forth.’ As the bassist, Joey was especially drawn to Cliff: ‘We had a kinship, Cliff and I, because we also listened to some jazz fusion. We’d have some conversations about Stanley Clarke and about all these other bass players that we liked when we were growing up. So he was someone who had another foot somewhere else in the music and was an excellent player and a pretty strong musical front in that band. I think that’s one of the reasons the band always looked to him for approval. He also had this really strong punk aesthetic…of doing it against the grain, going against the norm, someone who is basically an artist. That’s how I always perceived Cliff, as someone who was very strongly opinionated and very much not willing to do anything which would go against what he believed in. It was pretty evident back then that that mattered to the rest of the guys too.’
Mainstream rock was so conservative in the mid-Eighties, to see this guy with the flared trousers, the denim jacket, the long, straight hair and the weird, scruffy little moustache, it was an inspiration, says Vera. He talks about how Cliff, ‘almost had his own language. Just the way he would phrase things. He wasn’t one of these people that would come and say hello how are you today, the weather’s really nice. One time we played a show in El Paso, and we’re all waiting to go onstage. He opens our dressing room door and pops his head in and says: “Weakness is emanating from the crowd.” And he shuts the door. We’ve never forgot that. That’s like one of the classic Cliff quotes.’ He chuckles softly. ‘We took that as, okay, well, now we’ve got to go out and really fucking wake these people up. The Grand Master has come in and let us know where he stands…’
Machine Head vocalist Robb Flynn was a sixteen-year-old Metallica fan when he caught the tour at the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco. ‘That was crazy, a really intense show. The first time I’d seen a circle pit, first time I’d seen people headbanging. I went right down the front. I was like, “Holy shit, this is awesome!” I had never felt such a rush of energy. I was completely exhilarated. I didn’t even drink, I got dropped off by my dad so I was sober and I remember every moment of it. After that I was just like, we gotta start going to shows and drinking and buying drugs. That just seemed like what you were supposed to do.’ James Hetfield was now ‘the guy who everybody related to. I loved the other guys, too, but Hetfield was extremely…he was just so pissed [off] it was awesome. He was just so mad about everything it was like, fuck, yeah!’
