Enter Night, page 24
As well as top-drawer management and a major US record deal, Metallica’s operation was expanding in other ways too. They now had major agency representation in both the USA – where they were now signed to ICM, personally handled by rising industry star Marsha Vlasic – and the UK, where Fair Warning co-founder John Jackson would become their booking agent. Their touring staff was also upgraded. Mark Whitaker, his time now taken up with full-time management of Exodus – making waves of their own with the Bonded by Blood album – was replaced by an English sound technician, ‘Big’ Mick Hughes, an apprentice electrician from West Bromwich who’d started out humping gear in his spare time for Judas Priest then graduated to live sound engineer with another upcoming Q Prime act, the Armoury Show. When the latter folded, Peter Mensch invited Hughes to work with Metallica, his immediate innovation to add a high-to-mid ‘click’ to Lars’ live bass drum sound, as a way of lifting the drums out of the bottom-heavy sound he’d previously been labouring under, adding more bounce and feel. Paul Owen, another English Midlander who had previously worked for Diamond Head, was also hired as monitor engineer.
Another significant new face backstage was that of soon-to-be-tour-manager Bobby Schneider, who had been working as the drum tech on David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour prior to receiving the invitation to join up with this, for Bobby, unknown new band. ‘I had never heard of Metallica,’ explains Schneider now, ‘nor had I ever worked for any metal bands at all. So this was a complete new world for me.’ He had been working locally in Boston when he got a call from the band’s temporary new tour manager, regular Rush man, Howard Ungerleider, who Bobby had previously worked for on a Rush tour as a lighting engineer. Recalls Bobby: ‘Lars’ drum tech had destroyed a hotel the day before so they’d fired him. So they were looking for someone right away and pretty much offered me the job [over the phone] and I flew out [to the W.A.S.P. tour]. I remember sitting in a room with Lars when he was trying to explain to me [what he needed]. He used to switch sticks in the middle of the set, a different stick in his right hand and a couple other things. In typical Lars fashion – and I don’t know the guy yet – he’s explained this same thing to me fifteen times. And I look at him and go, “I got it.” He goes, “Wow, you’re pretty confident, aren’t you?”’
When Ungerleider had to leave to return to Rush, he recommended that Schneider take over as tour manager. Bobby had already been tour-managing for smaller bands and handling production but this was something new: ‘Howard said to Mensch, “You know they love Bobby – you should just make him the tour manager.” So that’s where we started. I finished out that tour and they brought me back for a couple more. In the end, we had a six-year relationship. I definitely saw some changes in that time. I saw them grow up.’
Schneider characterises the W.A.S.P. tour now as ‘a breakthrough moment’ – for both himself and Metallica. ‘They were blowing everybody away. I wasn’t really into the metal world. I hadn’t lived in that world. The W.A.S.P. guys, all being six foot six tall, were very intimidating, and they were the ones who had most equipment. But the kids weren’t coming to see them. They were doing their best to be the headliner. But there was no question that Metallica [had] the vibe.’ Going from working for Bowie’s supremely accomplished drummer Tony Thompson to working for Lars Ulrich was also something of a leap of faith. ‘James used to spit on him all the time, when Lars would really get out of time, which was often. He’d be so off sometimes James would just turn around and glare at him.’ The spitting ‘was James’ way of telling him, “Dude, you’re really fucking bad tonight.”’ Searching for the positive, Bobby likens Lars’ drumming back then to being ‘almost like a guitarist. You know, he’s playing all kinds of triplets and fills…It never seemed that Lars fucked up the intricate parts. It was sort of the ongoing feel for it’ that so enraged James it caused him to spit. And while Lars may have been the business leader of the group, as far as Schneider could tell it was Cliff Burton the band relied on for the right words in their private moments, as human beings. ‘Cliff was the backbone. Cliff was the guy that everybody looked to. If there was a big decision to be made it was [done] in the inner workings. But it seemed to me, if there was something Cliff wasn’t gonna like, it wasn’t gonna happen. Cliff was the Keith Richards of the band. No one fucked with Cliff.’
The early weeks of the summer of 1985 found Metallica back in San Francisco, off the road but getting ready to go back into the studio and record their next album. The Metallica fire, as Joey Vera says, may have begun to burn more fiercely, but the biggest-selling album that year was the newly muscled and suddenly clean-cut Bruce Springsteen’s flag-waving Born in the U.S.A. (no matter the counter-intuitive message of the title track being largely misconstrued by a significant number of the fifteen million Americans who eventually bought the album). Looming on the horizon was the global feel-good event of the decade, Live Aid. What place then in this larger, strictly white-hat scheme of bigger and better things for the angry bombast of a bunch of heavy-metal-worshipping young heads from the tripped-out West Coast? Somewhere far off in the shadows, perhaps, certainly nowhere near the centre. But that was okay. Metallica needed the down-time to sit and write their future. Their next album – their first recorded directly for a major American label – would be their most important yet and they all felt the pressure of that even as they kidded around and acted like it was all just a game. It would also be the first Metallica album for which there were no hold-overs from the past to fall back on; no old Mustaine or Exodus riffs to repurpose and remould into their own, more interesting new image (although Dave would later claim, erroneously, that he’d had a hand in at least one of the new tracks). Just at that moment when they needed to demonstrate they had what it took to climb out of the musical ghetto thrash metal was already beginning to resemble, they would need to start again from scratch.
As would become their habit from here on in, Lars and James initially retreated to the garage at El Cerrito alone, roughing out early demos before inviting Cliff and Kirk down to jam along with some ideas of their own. As a result, while the Hetfield and Ulrich monikers would adorn all eight of the tracks that would make up the next album, already titled Master of Puppets after the best of the new numbers James and Lars had begun bashing into shape, only two would bear the names of all four members (the title track and album closer, ‘Damage, Inc.’); three with the addition of Hammett (‘The Thing That Should Not Be’, ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’ and ‘Disposable Heroes’), just one the additional Burton imprimatur (the by-now-obligatory Cliff instrumental, ‘Orion’), and two simply bearing the Hetfield-Ulrich stamp (‘Battery’ and ‘Leper Messiah’). Nevertheless, insists Hammett, ‘Ninety-nine per cent of it was conceived by the four of us. There wasn’t anything left over from the Ride the Lightning stuff, the Kill ’Em All stuff was already written [when I joined]. It was pretty much the definitive musical statement from that line-up, and it felt like it. We had really gotten to know each other’s musical capabilities and temperaments over that three-year period. And I could tell that it was really blossoming into something that was to be reckoned with. It was very consistent. Every song we came up with was just like the greatest thing. Every time we’d write another it was like, “Oh my god! It’s just another great conception,” you know?’
All but two of the new songs – ‘Orion’ and ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’ – were fully completed at El Cerrito that summer. Speaking with me more than twenty years later, Hammett laughed off Mustaine’s suggestion that he should have received a co-credit for ‘Leper Messiah’: ‘Even though Dave might claim that he wrote “Leper Messiah”, he didn’t. There’s maybe a chord progression that was in that song, like maybe ten seconds that came from him – that, ironically, is just before the guitar solo. But he did not write “Leper Messiah” at all. In fact, I remember being in the room when Lars came up with the main musical motif.’ Kirk still has tapes ‘recorded on a boom box in the middle of the room’ of the El Cerrito sessions, including works-in-progress such as ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’, ‘Disposable Heroes’, ‘Master of Puppets’, ‘Battery’ and the middle section of ‘Orion’: ‘Cliff wrote that whole middle part complete, with bass lines, two- and three-part harmonies, all completely arranged. It was pretty amazing. We were all really, really blown away.’
Although Burton only received co-writing credits on three of the eight tracks, Hammett felt strongly that ‘people don’t talk enough about Cliff’s contribution to that album’. Not just things like the evocative ‘volume swells’ on the bass intro to ‘Damage, Inc.’, which had evolved from the improvised bass solo he performed each night on tour, but to the overall sound and direction the band now took: ‘I remember him playing the intro to “Damage, Inc.” on the Ride the Lightning tour. It has all those bass swells and harmonies on it. What was really amazing, I remember him saying, “Yeah, it’s based on a Bach piece.” I asked him which one and I’m not sure if I’ve got the title right but I’m pretty sure he said it was “Come Sweetly Death”, or something like that.’ The piece Kirk’s referring to is ‘Come, Sweet Death’, from the 69 Sacred Songs and Arias that Johann Sebastian Bach contributed to Georg Christian Schemelli’s Musical Songbook, which contained nearly a thousand song texts for voice and accompaniment but written down as a figured bass – musical notation indicating intervals, chords and non-chord tones, in relation to a bass note, providing harmonic structure. A very Burton-like musical preoccupation.
Continued Kirk, ‘I remember when I first heard the riff to “Damage, Inc.”, I thought, wow, how simple but how effective. And I have to say, that one line – “Honesty is my only excuse” – that’s a great line, but it’s influenced by Thin Lizzy and a track from Shades of a Blue Orphanage.’ Again, however, Kirk has got it slightly wrong, the track he referred to, ‘Honesty is No Excuse’, is not from Orphanage but the eponymously titled debut album from Thin Lizzy, in which singer Phil Lynott ends verses with the line, ‘Honesty is my only excuse’. Kirk was absolutely spot-on, though, when he said that Master of Puppets was characterised by ‘all sorts of strange influences like that’, including a short guitar passage at the end of the verse on ‘Disposable Heroes’ that was the guitarist’s attempt at a military march. ‘Like bagpipes or something. I watched a lot of war movies, trying to find something that was like a call to arms. Like something a bagpipe player would play as they were going into battle. I didn’t really find anything but that’s what I came up with.’ He laughed. Some influences were more familiar, as with the acoustic intro to the track that would open the album, ‘Battery’ – another deliberate attempt at ‘an Ennio Morricone thing’, while still retaining some of the actual chords from the subsequent track.
With the songs all but complete, the band set about finding a studio to record them in. With Flemming Rasmussen back onboard as co-producer, Lars would have been happy to return to Sweet Silence in Copenhagen but none of the others wanted that. Enough of the cold and snow already, protested the Californian boys, let’s make the album somewhere warm and sunny, even if it meant doing it in much-loathed LA. So Flemming flew into LA and he and Lars spent two weeks in July being chauffeured around in a Lincoln town car, paid for by Elektra, checking out studios. ‘It’s what the record company rented,’ a red-faced Lars protested when one journalist bumped into him and asked jokingly if he was now a rock star. ‘We didn’t order it!’ But rock stars are what Lars Ulrich and Metallica were fast becoming – much to their drummer’s secret delight.
The problem, as Rasmussen recalls, was trying to find a studio in LA that provided a comparable set-up for the drums. ‘We had like a huge storage room in the back of [Sweet Silence] with a really big, wooden room with a lot of ambience in it. That’s where we ended up putting the drums [on RTL]. We needed a [similarly] huge live room to record the drums for [Master of Puppets] so we drove around checking out studios.’ Unable to find what they were looking for, Lars went back to the rest of the band and again put the case to them for returning to Sweet Silence. What ultimately swung it, recalled Kirk, was that the dollar rate was such that it made recording the album in Denmark much cheaper than it would have been in America, allowing them for the first time to really take their time in the studio. ‘We’d also had great results in the past with Ride the Lightning and knew the studio and all the people there. The familiarity of it all made sense to us. And we really wanted to be somewhere where there wasn’t a whole bunch of distractions. At least, for the three of us – Lars was out all the time!’
With sessions not due to begin in Copenhagen until September, Q Prime took the opportunity to squeeze the band onto the bills of three of the biggest rock festivals that summer: England’s increasingly famous annual Monsters of Rock show at Castle Donington on 17 August; the even more prestigious Day on the Green festival at Oakland Coliseum on 31 August; plus an appearance at the Loreley Metal Hammer festival in Rhein – the West German equivalent of Donington – on 14 September. Worldwide sales for Ride the Lightning were now approaching half a million but the band was still viewed very much as underdogs, curiosities at best, next to more established names like ZZ Top, Marillion and Bon Jovi (all of whom followed Metallica onto the stage at Donington) and Scorpions, Ratt and Y&T, all above Metallica at Bill Graham’s Day on the Green festival a fortnight later. Only the crowds seemed to really know who Metallica were, especially in Europe, where they had sold most records and were now increasingly seen as the next big thing. At the Rhein festival, at which ‘Disposable Heroes’ was given its first public performance, Venom was also on the bill, in the slot above Metallica. Standing backstage, listening to them pounding through ‘Seek and Destroy’, Jeff Dunn was astonished to hear ‘the whole audience singing it. Then James shouting, “What the fuck was that?” and then the whole place going mad. James had that rapport with the audience; they were his that night. It was at that point I can honestly say that Metallica were starting to overtake us – the European gig where they definitely made their mark.’
In the hotel bar the night before the Donington show, Lars had told me they were ‘in the mood to kill’. When later I asked if he thought Metallica had succeeded he nodded his head enthusiastically. Of course they had. ‘When we walked onstage at Donington, I thought we were showing both the other bands and the kids in the audience that we have a different way of presenting ourselves, way, way apart from people’s preconceived ideas of what a band like Metallica is all about. I think a lot of people are slowly starting to understand and appreciate that what we do, and the way we do it, is real. What you see is what you get, no faking. What you see of us like onstage is what we’re like all the time, we don’t start pretending or hamming it up.’
Certainly there was no faking the non-stop rain of objects that were hurled at the stage from the 70,000-strong Donington crowd that day, including plastic bottles full of urine. Not just for Metallica, but throughout the entire event, as if ritualistically. Marillion singer Fish, then at the height of his fame, was brave enough to tell the crowd: ‘Those of you who are throwing bottles, people down the front are getting hurt, so fuck off.’ This did bring a temporary halt to the disgusting deluge. But those bands lower on the bill not popular enough yet to get away with something like that were forced to grin and bear it. James Hetfield, though, had other concerns when Metallica took to the stage in the middle of a swelteringly hot afternoon. Squeezed between Ratt and Bon Jovi, the sort of poodle-haired pop-rockers Metallica professed to despise, James announced to the crowd, ‘If you came here to see spandex, eye make-up, and the words “Oh baby” in every fuckin’ song, this ain’t the fuckin’ band!’ Cue another hail of beer cans and bottles. As usual, Cliff Burton had his own way of dealing with things. Ducking beneath a flying pear, which ended up embedded in his bass bin, he coolly sauntered over to his stack, plucked out the pear, took a couple of ironic bites out of it then slung it back into the crowd, to general all-round cheers. As he later ruefully recalled, ‘Donington was a day of targets and projectiles. [Stuff] was piling high on the stage all throughout the day, and freaks were flipping.’ Then added with a straight face: ‘I think they liked us, though.’
At the Day on the Green festival two weeks later, this time Metallica were bigger creators of mayhem than any of the 90,000 in the crowd. The show itself had been a memorable occasion. Recalls Malcolm Dome, who was there covering the event for Kerrang!, ‘It was the first time I’d seen Metallica so high up the bill at such an important show. The headliners were the Scorpions, second on the bill were Ratt, and Metallica were just below them, with Y&T, Yngwie Malmsteen and Victory below them. I know it was a hometown show for them but this was a stadium and yet it was clear they belonged on the bigger stages. One thing about Metallica, they always grew into whatever new context they found themselves in. And yet they were still a people’s band, you could tell by the audience reaction. They knew how to relate to the fans, as in we’re still of the same mentality as you lot, we understand you. We are on this big stage here only because we have the music to carry it forward and entertain you but we haven’t changed at all.’
As if to prove it, after the show Hetfield ran amok in a Jägermeister fit and, egged on by one of his East Bay pals, smashed up the band’s dressing room. Wrecking rooms had become a regular sport on their own tours, but as James later confessed, the Day on the Green rampage was ‘the worst’. Having got it into his head that, as he put it, ‘the deli tray and the fruit had to go through a little vent’, when the vent proved too small he simply decided to ‘make a hole’. As a result, the backstage trailer the band was using to change in was all but destroyed. Promoter Bill Graham, whose long career had seen him work with prolific room-breakers such as Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, summoned the singer to his office like the headmaster summoning a recalcitrant pupil for a flogging. Graham told him sternly: ‘This attitude you have, I’ve had the same conversation with Sid Vicious and Keith Moon.’ Informed in no uncertain terms that no further destruction of property would be tolerated and that he would be sent the bill for the damage he’d already done, as James later ruefully observed, ‘I realised at that point there was more to being in a band than pissing people off and smashing shit up.’
