Enter Night, page 30
The search for Cliff’s replacement would begin the very next day.
Nine
Blackened
It was hot, late. Too much to drink; too much to smoke…We’d been at it since they’d finished playing some time in the afternoon. Now here we were back in Lars’ hotel room, some outpost by the airport in Tampa. It was a Sunday night. That is, a Monday morning, and in a few hours he would be leaving to go back to the studio to carry on mixing the new album. We were both having trouble keeping it together. Nevertheless, he was insistent.
‘No, no,’ he said, every time I suggested we call it a night, ‘one more…’
He reached over and wound the tape forward, stopped, played a bit, stopped, then wound it back, stopped, played a bit, stopped, wound it forward…eventually he found what he was looking for.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘to this…’
It tiptoed out of the speakers of his ghetto-blaster, got all angry and busy, building quickly like a funeral pyre. Then it was off and running…
I had no idea what to tell him. I mean, on one level it sounded good – fast, heavy, the usual Metallica thing – but on another level it was unlike anything I had heard from them before. For a start, the drums were weird: flat-sounding, tinny, no bounce whatsoever. I rather liked the effect but wasn’t sure if I was getting it right. Had they intended the drums to sound so…off?
‘I like the drums,’ I said loudly over the top of it. ‘No echo…’
‘Reverb,’ he yelled. ‘No reverb. None of that shit…’
I took another gulp of beer and sat there trying to take it in. On and on it went.
‘What’s this one called?’ I shouted.
No reply. I looked around, he wasn’t there. I waited for him to come back. He didn’t come back. I got up to look for him and found him sitting on the crapper, his black jeans around his ankles, the door to the bathroom wide open.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘sorry.’
‘What’s up?’ he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, taking a shit with the door open, me standing there talking to him.
‘Um, this one,’ I said, retreating, ‘what’s it called?’
‘“And Justice for All”!’ he yelled as I found my way back into the noise of the other room.
‘“And” what?’ I yelled back.
‘“Justice…for All…”’
Hmmm. Sounded…black. As in deep-down-at-the-bottom-of-the-well black. They definitely seemed to be going for something, though. A kind of anti-rock, I thought, idly.
I kept waiting for it to end, for him to finish doing his business, close the door and come back in. But it just wouldn’t.
‘Is it deliberate?’ I yelled again.
‘What?’
‘Like…anti-rock!’
He nodded, coming through the door, doing up his belt, but I knew he hadn’t heard me.
It finally finished. ‘Kind of like sort of avant-garde…jazz…thrash…’
He looked at me. ‘You’re stoned.’
‘No. Yeah. But it does sound…sort of…doesn’t it?’
‘I guess,’ he said. But I had the feeling he knew what I was on about. ‘It’s deliberate,’ he said.
Deliberate? I knew it!
‘I like it,’ I said. ‘I really like it. You’ve really gone for something…different.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
He wound it forward-backward to another track. Click, click went the drums, drone, drone went the guitars. Bottom-of-the-well shit, you know? I liked it. I really, really liked it. I really did.
I just couldn’t keep my eyes open any more…
Although it would be years before they were able to acknowledge the fact, the hasty, seemingly perfunctory way in which Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield dealt with the death of Cliff Burton would have lasting ramifications that would go far beyond the story of Metallica. The decision to simply bring in a new bass player and continue on with their plans as quickly as possible may have looked like the right one on paper, but the role Burton played in Metallica was only partly to do with playing the bass. Even with that taken care of, Cliff’s violent wrenching from the group had fatally holed the ship below the waterline. The remaining three hadn’t just lost a member. They had lost their mentor, their older soul-brother; they had lost Metallica’s best friend. The one who would never lie to them; never let them down, the only one who could save them from themselves.
As Malcolm Dome says, ‘Cliff was a great character. Had he lived he may have taken Metallica into some very interesting directions because he was the one with the open mind and he was the one the others looked up to, because he was slightly older, and more mature and commanding. In his own way, he was the leader of the band. Even though it was James and Lars’ band, it was clear they looked up to Cliff as being someone they could go to for advice. He would be the guy saying, “I don’t think we should be doing this, we should do that.” He didn’t look like he belonged in a thrash band and that was the key – he didn’t feel he had to conform.’
Instead, Lars and James – so vocal always about doing things their own way, according to their own personal feelings – now found themselves scurrying to do the right thing professionally to save their careers. In this they had the always-reliable advice of Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein at Q Prime, who counselled a swift regrouping, a smoothing over of the cracks, a united public face and the resumption of Metallica’s medium-term plans as speedily as possible. This, after all, was an absolutely crucial juncture in the band’s career, for which James and Lars had worked so hard the previous five years to get to: the very moment when they were poised to become a big-time act in their own right. Not just ‘inventors’ of thrash, more than just potent second-stringers to bigger, more commercially adept rock outfits, but an actual mainstream headliner themselves. At any other point in Metallica’s career trajectory they might have been able to afford to take the time they needed to come to terms mentally, emotionally and spiritually with the huge loss they had just suffered. But not right now. Burnstein and Mensch had been here before enough times to know just how important – and fleeting – such moments in a rock band’s career can be; how one false move could destroy the work of a lifetime. Burnstein had been one of the leading lights at Mercury Records in the late 1970s, forced to stand by impotently and watch as Thin Lizzy’s career in America fizzled out in the wake of serial tour cancellations when various members left abruptly. No one had died – too many early-morning drugs and late-night fights had been Lizzy’s downfall – although it could be argued that the slow, painful demise of singer Phil Lynott, dead barely five years after Lizzy’s last, ill-starred US tour, could be traced back to his band’s inability to make the most of their luck while it was still riding high. Mensch, meanwhile, had been key in overseeing the impossibly swift resurrection of AC/DC when their singer Bon Scott had died in 1980. Like Metallica, AC/DC had just had their first breakthrough album in America, with Highway to Hell. Any delay in its follow-up could have been fatal to their chances of long-term success there. Under Mensch’s tutelage, however, they achieved the seemingly impossible and almost immediately found a replacement for Scott, their first album with new singer Brian Johnson, Back in Black, being released within months of his arrival and subsequently becoming the biggest, multi-million-selling success of AC/DC’s career.
Sitting with Peter the night before Cliff’s funeral, James and Lars had already made up their minds about wanting to continue with Metallica. They just needed their brilliant, all-seeing manager to spell out the reasons for them, to make it all better. Mensch put it to them succinctly. It wasn’t just a case of not throwing in the towel; it was absolutely essential they understood they had not a second to spare. The cancelled European tour could be rescheduled for the new year. Mensch had already looked into that, he told them. But the Japanese tour in November – their first visit to the country, the third largest record-buying territory in the world and another important milestone on the route map to success – should not be delayed. Could they meet that deadline? Lars and James decided they could.
Professionally, it was absolutely the right thing to do, they all agreed. The human cost of this hurriedly made decision, however, would be immense, not just for the three remaining members of Metallica, but also for the poor unfortunate whose job it would be to attempt the impossible and somehow replace Cliff Burton.
‘I don’t understand how anyone who knows what Metallica is about could honestly think that we’d give up,’ Lars would tell Sounds journalist Paul Elliot three months later. ‘The question was not, “Are we gonna pack it in or not?” It was, “How fast can we get the whole thing back on its feet again?”’ He added, ‘We have to do it for Cliff…If he knew we were sitting around in San Francisco feeling sorry for ourselves, he’d come round and kick us in the ass and tell us to get back out on the road and continue where we left off.’ This was to become the prevailing theme, repeated like a mantra, whenever the question of how they came to the decision to carry on without Cliff Burton came up. It was, as Kirk later told me, ‘Because that’s what Cliff would have wanted.’ Uh huh…
The Japanese tour, just five weeks away, would give them a deadline to work to. Rejecting the suggestion of getting in a veteran simply to help them through the tour, they decided to go for broke and find a full-time replacement. ‘We wanted someone young, hungry, someone new and a bit unknown,’ said Lars at the time. ‘Not someone that people would associate with another band.’ Bobby Schneider recalls, ‘Everybody got completely trashed at Cliff’s funeral. And I can remember Mensch looking at me and saying, “I told you guys not to get fucked up” because we had to have this meeting afterwards. Not me and the band but Mensch and me, and I think one other.’ The plan, as outlined by Peter, says Bobby, was, ‘“Okay, the guys want to keep going, you’re gonna move to San Francisco, you’re gonna set up this rehearsal, we’re gonna start auditioning bass players. You’re gonna run the whole thing, you’re gonna look after the guys here.” So I moved out.’ Rich enough to no longer have to put up with the garage at El Cerrito, Lars and James had planned to buy their own properties at the end of tour. Now, back in San Francisco suddenly, they didn’t have anywhere to live. ‘We all got apartments down by Fisherman’s Wharf and they started the process,’ says Bobby.
They didn’t have to search hard. Every young bass player in America seemed to be dreaming suddenly of replacing the irreplaceable. The same night they’d heard about Cliff’s death, Jonny and Marsha Z had wandered down to Testament’s rehearsal space. ‘It was like every band in the Bay Area was there,’ Jonny recalls. ‘Every rehearsal space in the building was filled with bass players trying to play “Pulling Teeth”. It was kinda nuts.’
Among the personal effects returned to his family after his body had been shipped back to the USA were the two skull rings that Cliff always wore, one of which the family now gave to James. Although they had only really become close in the last year of his life, of everybody in the band, James had looked up to Cliff the most. Says Schneider, ‘I think of everybody, James was [most affected]. Because if you’re in with James and you’re part of James’ family, you’re part of James’ family for the rest of your life. James is as true blue and loyal a person as they come and I think he was very freaked out.’ He and Cliff had ‘identified with each other’, said James – not just through their shared love of southern rock and bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, but also the whole outdoorsman lifestyle both were drawn to, ‘hiking, camping, shooting guns, drinking beers…’ More importantly, James looked upon Cliff as a big brother figure, very much the wise older head. Onstage, where James had always felt most insecure as frontman, yet been forced to grow into the role in the aftermath of the sacking of Dave Mustaine, Cliff’s almost supernaturally confident demeanour had been a huge inspiration to him. Look now at some of the early live footage of their first shows and you’ll see James habitually glancing to his right, to the space on the stage dominated by Cliff’s huge presence. Seeking approval; needing validation; and getting it. It may have been Lars and James who formed Metallica, may still have been James and Lars who wrote together, but by 1986 in James’ mind Metallica had become far more about how he and Cliff saw things. They had even reached a point where they had apparently begun discussing seriously the prospect of replacing Lars as drummer.
How serious this suggestion should be taken remains a hot topic for debate among Metallica aficionados. As the years have gone by there are few left who will talk openly about it – except, of course, for Dave Mustaine, who was still talking about it 2008 when he told viewers of Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro’s Spread TV show, ‘James and I had planned on firing Lars so many times. And [Lars] won’t ever cop to this but he was getting canned when the guys were coming back from the European tour, before Cliff died. They planned on getting rid of him.’ It was a claim he repeated during an interview with Rolling Stone the following year. ‘That’s what Scott [Ian of Anthrax] told me. He said that when Metallica got home, that James, Cliff and Kirk were going to fire Lars.’ A posting on Anthrax’s Twitter feed immediately issued a denial, saying, ‘Story’s not true. Little does anyone know but Lars actually owns the name, good luck ever kicking him out.’
It’s tempting then to dismiss this as a typically provocative Mustaine aside. However, Marsha Z remains tellingly reticent to comment on the subject when I ask now how much she knew of this. She certainly doesn’t deny the story is true. Malcolm Dome is less inhibited on the subject and claims he heard about it at the time from both Ian and drummer Charlie Benante. ‘I remember after the crash Scott and Charlie were in London and we went out for drink at the pub near the Kerrang! office and Scott actually said, in so many words, [Cliff’s death] may have actually saved Lars’ job ’cos they were ready to fire him. He said it, absolutely said it. I think he’d been told by James or Cliff that they’d had enough of Lars. He was holding them back. I don’t think now Metallica could actually work with a really good drummer because they’ve adapted to what he doesn’t do. But at that point, with the Master of Puppets era when they were really starting to move forward and change and look at different ways to present music, they could have replaced him.’
Dome goes on to suggest that Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo was being lined up. ‘Dave Lombardo was definitely mentioned at one point as the guy they wanted in,’ says Dome. ‘I don’t actually recall any other names but Dave was definitely on that list and with good reason.’ An astonishingly innovative drummer, technically light years ahead of a player of Ulrich’s limited scope, it’s easy to see how Burton and Hetfield – already masters of their own instruments – would have been excited at the prospect of working with someone like Lombardo. Indeed, his work on Reign in Blood, released that year, had thrilled both men. Intriguingly, Lombardo was also about to walk out of Slayer, citing financial reasons. ‘I wasn’t making any money,’ he said, ‘I figured if we were gonna be doing this professionally, on a major label, I wanted my rent and utilities paid.’ Within weeks, however, the broke drummer had been talked into returning by his wife, Teresa. Had Metallica approached him then it seems highly likely he would have jumped at the chance. Might his defection from Slayer even have been influenced by some whisper of what was allegedly going on behind the scenes in Metallica? Certainly there appears to be little doubt James and Cliff did discuss the notion of getting in a better drummer, just as James and Lars had once discussed getting in a better bass player. As the rhythm engine of the band, Burton and Hetfield would also have been the ones who most acutely felt the drag Ulrich’s lack of wide-ranging drum skills imposed upon them. How seriously they entertained the idea of actually replacing Lars, however, is something only James Hetfield knows. It might have just been one of those drunk and stoned late-night rambles lots of band members have, bitching about each other behind their backs. Or perhaps they really were serious. It seems unlikely that Lars would already have patented the name ‘Metallica’ at that stage, and even if he had it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that both James and Cliff were still young and idealistic enough to play around with the notion of starting again with a newly named outfit – maybe one that included Dave Lombardo and possibly even Kirk Hammett, Cliff’s other close friend in Metallica.
Any such notions died with Cliff, though. Getting over the loss of Cliff was going to be hard enough, starting again with a new drummer as well would be simply unthinkable. Indeed, now that he was gone the relationship between James and Lars began to reassert itself. ‘After Cliff died, James and Lars got really close again,’ says Schneider. It had always been their band, their songs, but now they really did take control seriously for the first time since the days when there was just the two of them rehearsing in Ron McGovney’s garage. Malcolm Dome recalls going out with Lars in London one night not long after when the drummer became very emotional over a few drinks and began earnestly extolling the talents of his singer. ‘Lars got very drunk and went into this huge defence of how brilliant James was,’ says Malcolm. ‘How he never gets the credit for how great a guitarist he is. It sounded like they really had bonded through the grief of losing Cliff. And I think that bond overturned any thoughts in James’ mind about, well, maybe we should actually replace Lars as well and get a new rhythm section altogether.’
That wasn’t all. Cliff’s death threw all the remaining members’ hopes for the future into sharp relief. It didn’t just draw Lars and James closer together, it focused their minds like never before on what it was they really wanted out of Metallica. Cliff’s very presence had always meant the lines between musical integrity and career ambition were fuzzily drawn, hazy and disguised in wreaths of weed smoke. It was easy to see how ambitious Lars was; it was always assumed Cliff had nobler aims, which he ostensibly did, in terms of not bowing to fashion or commercial pressure. Cliff was just as keen on making the band a significant success, though. Lars had always been the brains, James the brawn. But they were young and innocent enough still to incorporate Cliff’s longer-term views into the cause, or at least pay lip-service to them. They were all comfortable with the idea of selling millions of records, yes, but only on their terms. Certainly they never saw themselves as competing on the same terms as the likes of Bon Jovi and Whitesnake, groups that released four or five singles per album and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on state-of-the-art videos. Metallica’s blood was purer, truer; they belonged to a proud tradition that stretched back through Iron Maiden and Motörhead, to ZZ Top (before the cutesy videos) and Lynyrd Skynyrd; all the way back to Zeppelin and Sabbath; groups that didn’t kiss ass or kowtow to the Man.
