Enter Night, page 32
There was no time for looking back in 1986, though; the Japanese dates were immediately followed by a short US and Canadian tour at the end of November, before finally returning to Europe – the scene of the crime – at the start of 1987 to finish up the dates they’d been forced to cancel when their tour bus skidded off the road and took at least one glorious possible future with it. ‘I did another tour before we went back there,’ says Schneider. ‘Me and Flemming Larsen, actually, went out on tour with Slayer and neither one of us could sleep on the bus. I mean, I had to pass out to go to sleep. For years and years and years I had to sleep on a certain bunk or on the front couch.’ To help Metallica over any residual feelings of insecurity, in fact, Q Prime hired an American bus driver to travel with them. ‘He came with us and watched the other driver drive; that’s what his job was…to keep an eye on things.’
When, in April 1987, they released their first long-form video, a tribute to their man down, titled Cliff ’Em All, it seemed from the outside like an act of closure. Basking in a renewed round of rave reviews, within weeks of its release, Cliff ’Em All was certified both gold and platinum in the US music video charts. All surely was now well again in Metallica’s world. In fact, the deep and unsightly wounds inflicted by Burton’s death would remain open, continuing to fester for at least another twenty years, by which time a despairing Newsted would finally have had enough and thrown in the towel, leaving the band to try and do what they should have done in 1986. Not tour, not record, not paper over the ever-widening cracks, hoping it would be all right when they came to again in the morning. That day was coming whether they liked it or not. Meanwhile, things would just get worse – the pain, the bitterness, the recriminations and resentments, the awful guilt – stalking their rapidly growing success like an ever-lengthening shadow, night waiting to fall.
Compiled from bootleg footage recorded by fans, personal film clips belonging to the band and photos sourced from various locations, both official and unofficial, Cliff ’Em All was a groundbreaking release. More than a decade before such concepts as ‘reality TV’, the unscripted, unplanned, apparently random nature of the material came as a delightful surprise, whether one was a dyed-in-the-wool Metallica fan or merely a random viewer. By turns amusing, sad and surprisingly insightful, it’s the kind of thing we take for granted in these YouTube-inflected times but which seemed utterly revelatory back then: Cliff chilling out smoking ‘the greatest pot to hit these shores’; the band walking en masse into a liquor store and stealing enough beer and bites to see them through the evening; all this amidst a flood of Beavis and Butthead-style sniggering. Most of all, some glorious footage of the band in its earliest days, from Cliff’s second gig at the Stone in April 1983, via the Day on the Green in ’85 and several fan-shot bootleg clips from the summer ’86 Ozzy tour, where it became clear just how powerful a presence Burton was onstage and off – and how young and unconfident James in particular often was, not least when Dave Mustaine was still ruling the roost from the opposite side of the stage. Imagine that: caught in the spotlight between Cliff Burton on one side and Dave Mustaine on the other, behind you that little lunatic Lars. No wonder James felt he had a fight on his hands just keeping up.
After the tour the plan had been to begin writing for the next album, a process broken up with a smattering of lucrative festival dates scheduled for the summer. However, things changed when Hetfield broke his arm again in yet another skateboarding accident, this time in an empty swimming pool in Oakland Hills with Kirk and their pals Fred Cotton and Pushead. James had been wearing all the protective gear this time, he had been ‘just a little too vertical,’ recalled Cotton. ‘As soon as he came down into the bottom of the pool you could hear the snap.’ Forced to cancel what should have been a career-boosting appearance on NBC-TV’s highly influential Saturday Night Live, Cotton claims Q Prime subsequently ‘made James sign something that promised he wasn’t go to skateboard any more’. Instead, the focus now switched to something even more important: recording their first release under their new deal with a major British record company: Phonogram.
Master of Puppets had marked the end of Metallica’s licensing deal with Music for Nations. Unlike Jonny Z in his struggle to retain control against the encroaching interests of the much larger and more powerful Q Prime, Martin Hooker was not only keen to renew the band’s contract but he also had the financial means to do so. Peter Mensch, however, had bigger fish to fry. He wanted Metallica on a British and European label commensurate in size to Elektra in the USA and CBS in Japan. Specifically, he wanted them on Phonogram, where he already had Def Leppard. ‘We did offer them a considerably bigger deal than Phonogram,’ says Martin Hooker, ‘worth well over £1 million, which at that time was the biggest deal we’d ever offered anyone.’ He adds, ‘Unfortunately, Q Prime weren’t even prepared to discuss it as it suited their purposes to have the band at Phonogram.’ In fact, says Hooker, Q Prime, who were ‘amazed at our offer’, had already agreed the deal with Phonogram without even speaking to MFN. ‘When we found out, we then offered them a very generous new deal just to hold onto the catalogue that we already had. I explained that this would be very beneficial to the band as an extra income source that wouldn’t be recouped against tour support or recording costs et cetera on the new album [as it would at Phonogram]. I thought this made a lot of financial sense for the band. Needless to say I was incredulous to find out that Q Prime had already agreed to throw the existing catalogue into the Phonogram deal.’
Says Hooker: ‘My back catalogue was still selling truck-loads. So they [must have] really, really wanted those three records, to help them recoup their balance…they obviously pressured him and eventually, I think like a year later, when the second term expired, they took the back catalogue off me, which was totally within their rights to do so, of course.’ Hooker would have one last laugh, though. When Metallica left for Phonogram, MFN rereleased MOP as a ‘limited edition’ double album, claiming that the extra-wide grooves on the vinyl gave the music a more crystal-clear sound. ‘I wouldn’t say that it was any better,’ concedes Gem Howard now, ‘but it was louder. Because you can cut it much louder when you’re doing it at forty-five rpm on a twelve-inch, because there’s more room in the grooves, which makes it sound better…’ He goes on: ‘It seems laughable now but in those days we were getting kids writing to us saying how wonderful the sound quality was and we sold tens of thousands of it – incredible.’ Gem says the final figure for combined British and European sales of all three Metallica albums on MFN is now in excess of 1.5 million, or ‘about 500,000 each’. MOP remains the single biggest-selling album Music for Nations ever released.
Dave Thorne, then senior product manager in the International Department at Phonogram in London, wouldn’t normally have been involved in the Metallica campaign. Having recently worked with Bon Jovi, Rush, Cinderella, and several other rock-related Phonogram artists, however, he found himself in a central role in the Metallica deal, he says now, ‘because of my connections and understanding of heavy metal’. Thorne explains how the ‘key link’ in the deal had been Peter Mensch’s existing relationship with the label’s director of business affairs, John Watson: then Phonogram’s senior lawyer. The first time Thorne got wind of the deal was when he was called into the office of managing director David Simone, who was there with Watson. They told Dave they had the chance to sign Metallica and asked what he thought their long-term commercial prospects were.
‘I kind of got excited and said they are the band at the moment in the extreme metal scene’, characterising them as ‘the Rush of extreme metal’. When he added that Metallica had already sold 100,000 albums in the UK alone, Simone asked, ‘Yes, but is it gonna get bigger?’ To which Thorne replied, ‘With us as a company behind them, why wouldn’t it?’ Actually there were several reasons why Phonogram might not have been the right label for a band such as Metallica. As Thorne admits, all he got from the A&R department initially was ‘blank faces’. He adds, ‘They couldn’t have told you which way you held a guitar, never mind what sort of band Metallica was. They were signing bands like Soft Cell and Swing Out Sister – all these pop-driven, indie-type things.’
He recalls Mensch coming to London for a summit meeting with Simone, Watson, Thorne, and all the various heads of department, including marketing director John Waller and his boss Tony Powell. The thrust of Mensch’s presentation was: ‘This is not an A&R opportunity, the A&R on this band takes care of itself. This is a marketing opportunity…’ Says Thorne, ‘Mensch said, “Guys, don’t get yourselves excited. We’re not looking for you to be creatively involved in this. None of you except maybe that bloke” – pointing at me – “knows anything about this band. We want your sales, distribution and marketing.”’
Mensch won them over but, as he’d already conceded, very little of this had to do with the music. Says Thorne, ‘I suspect some of the powers that be thought, hey, this could be the new Def Leppard. I don’t think there was any real analysis of whether that was feasible. What we were talking about was building a stronger bridge with a big management company who we already had a relationship with.’ MFN had ‘great ears, great attitude; great tenacity in delivering what they’d done [but] were literally at the limit of their capability’. To get Metallica where they needed to go next, career-wise, it would take ‘serious old-fashioned marketing clout, delivering big campaigns, big discount deals, et cetera. Polygram, who were the distribution arm of the company, at the time, was pretty much the biggest distribution operation in Europe. So that’s what [Q Prime] were looking for.’
The first Metallica release on Phonogram would be a four-track twelve-inch: The $5.98 EP: Garage Days Re-Revisited – the title a reference to the subtitle of the B-side of the ‘Creeping Death’ single of three years before; an indicator that this was a collection of covers. It’s long been assumed that this was conceived as a handy way of breaking Newsted into Metallica before embarking on a full-blown album. In fact, the record was made at the suggestion of Dave Thorne, who saw their forthcoming return appearance at that year’s Donington Monsters of Rock festival as a perfect marketing opportunity for a new British release: ‘I said, “Look, this is an amazing sales opportunity. I know you’re not gonna have an album but we’ve got to put something out.” They said okay, we’ll go away and think about it.’ Thorne’s initial idea had been a straightforward single but Mensch told him, ‘We don’t do singles.’ Thorne responded, ‘Well, record something that will qualify for the singles chart but isn’t a single. They came back and said, “We’re gonna do The $5.98 EP: Garage Days Re-Revisited.” Even now, Lars still credits me with this idea, which is very nice of him. But I hadn’t conceptualised it.’
In fact, the idea – blasting out as-live versions of covers of underground metal and punk gems such as ‘Helpless’ by Diamond Head, ‘The Small Hours’ by fellow NWOBHM outfit Holocaust, ‘Crash Course in Brain Surgery’ by old-wave British metallists Budgie, and back-to-back versions of two songs by Cliff’s beloved Misfits, ‘Last Caress’ and ‘Green Hell’ – was simple but brilliant. Rehearsed, as the title suggests, in the garage – although not at their former El Cerrito bolthole but across the street in Lars’ newly soundproofed two-car garage at his very own house, bought with the extra money now coming in – then recorded in just six days at Conway studios in LA, ‘about the same time it took to load in the gear on the last album’, as James noted on the sleeve, the Garage Days EP was a riot from start to finish.
Opening with the sound of James humming while other voices in the background titter, before Lars’ monstrous-sounding drums kick in and the whole thing takes off like a runaway train, just as the Cliff ’Em All video anticipated aspects of reality TV, so Garage Days massively predated the taste for lo-fi recordings of a decade later, emphasised by rule-breaking moments such as the fade-out of ‘Helpless’ fading back in again to the sound of guitar chords being wrenched from amps and Lars barking instructions from behind his kit. The speed and ferocity continue through the next track, Jason’s bass erupting over the improvised intro and turning the ostensibly vintage rock anthem ‘Crash Course in Brain Surgery’ into a wild punk-metal powerhouse. The opening track on side two – ‘The Small Hours’ – is given an even more brutal treatment, lumbering towards you over the horizon like some mutant one-eyed alien monster from Kirk’s growing collection of vintage sci-fi comics, smothered in nuclear dust clouds and the blood of puny humans. The real kiss-off, though, is the climax, two long-dead Misfits songs – ‘Last Caress’ and ‘Green Hell’ – bolted, Frankenstein-like, into one. Despite its defiantly wrongheaded lyrics (‘I got something to say, I raped your mother today…’), ‘Last Caress’ was one of Metallica’s catchiest tracks, its counter-intuitive sweetness wonderfully superseded by ‘Green Hell’, one of their fastest tracks since ‘Whiplash’, the whole medley lasting barely over three minutes; the joke compounded when the EP ends with an amusingly tuneless few seconds of the intro to Iron Maiden’s ‘Run to the Hills’. Ironically, the most Metallica-like track recorded at these sessions was actually left off the UK version of the EP, in order to qualify it for the singles chart – their commanding version of Killing Joke’s ‘The Wait’, any traces of humour once more suspended as the band do the seemingly impossible and all but make the song their own.
For a band that would increasingly make superior production the foundation upon which their albums would stand or fall, the hastily recorded, ‘not very produced’ – as they wittily credited it on the sleeve – Garage Days EP arguably did more for Metallica’s reputation at that precise juncture in their career than the most momentous album release might have. It made Metallica seem fun and accessible, qualities that had eluded them since their first album. And, yes, it was a good way of introducing Jason Newkid, as he’s listed on the artfully ‘makeshift’ sleeve, to those fans waiting with folded arms to compare him to Cliff. It also gave Jason one of his first really good Metallica experiences, using his background as a carpenter and odd-job man to help Lars soundproof his new garage after the band decided they didn’t feel comfortable working out of a plush Marin County rehearsal studio shared by Night Ranger and Starship. Jason brought in strips of carpeting to soundproof the walls, with the help of Lars’ old pal from LA, John Kornarens (who still hadn’t got his fifty bucks back). As Jason recalled, ‘That was a fucking blast, man. You walked into the room, set up your amp the way you would live, put a microphone in front of it and you play the song. James was standing next to me…just doing his stuff. We recorded it there and then, mistakes and all. To me that’s one of the best-sounding Metallica records because of its rawness.’
The plan, explains Thorne, was for Phonogram to use its clout to ‘blast it straight into the charts. To make a massive statement about the band, and that’s of course exactly what it did.’ In fact, the EP went in at Number Twenty-Seven – good, not great, by contemporary chart singles’ standards but regarded as a significant success at Phonogram as the record had been released in only one format: a twelve-inch vinyl record. No CD, no cassette, no seven-inch formats. When Thorne had played a snippet of ‘Helpless’ at the weekly strategy meeting, ‘I kid you not, within thirty seconds, the press girls and virtually everybody else in the bloody room was going, “Oh, for god’s sake turn that off!”’ When the record actually became a commercial success, ‘That opened up the floodgates at Phonogram for Metallica.’ The EP also went gold in America, but for half a million album sales, because it wasn’t accepted as a single configuration. Marketed there as a mini-album, with the extra track, the cover of ‘The Wait’, now added, as it was for Japan, the package was retitled The $9.98 EP: Garage Days Re-Revisited. ‘They had to do that,’ explains Thorne, ‘or it simply would have sold that amount on import and Elektra [and CBS] would have missed out.’
Equally impressive, from their new record company’s standpoint, was the band’s willingness to help promote the record. They may not have been the usual type of singles-orientated artists Phonogram was used to dealing with but they more than made up for that by being down-to-earth and ready to roll up their sleeves. For most major artists, ‘coming into the country doing promo meant a handful of major interviews’, says Thorne. ‘Possibly a bit of TV and radio if it was available. Then you might get other members of the band to do some secondary interview type stuff. But Lars didn’t just want to talk to [the major music press], he wanted to talk to every bloody fanzine you’ve ever heard of and a load that you haven’t. Lars would come in and spend four or five days in our office. He’d do literally sixty, seventy, eighty fanzines. You couldn’t get him off the phone.’
Thorne cites this readiness to always meet the media halfway as one of the major contributing factors in Metallica’s later popularity with such temperamentally metal-hostile magazines as the NME, Time Out, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and so on, up to the present day and their current elevated status among the broadsheet newspapers. ‘It was a combination of Lars’ willingness to always go the extra mile for the media,’ says Thorn, ‘and also something else. It all comes down to the “c”-word: credibility. Every conversation I had with Peter Mensch, every meeting we had, every major decision we made, that was the word that was at the forefront: credibility. They would not do anything that would upset that applecart. They weren’t gonna sell out because they were a band of the people. They came up through the tape-trading scene and that’s where they wanted to stay. They didn’t want to upset those people.’
Maybe so but Lars, they discovered, was also Dave and the rest of Phonogram’s ‘go-to guy’ for both promotional issues and all relevant business decisions. ‘I would talk to Mensch and he would then say to me, “Okay, now you’ve got to talk to Lars and persuade him.”’ Peter, he says, ‘was obviously a guy who had a natural aversion to saying yes, especially to record labels. [So in the beginning] he got me to talk to Lars all the time. Lars was totally, totally immersed in the business side of things…he was the guy who had to be persuaded. He would then go to the guy who was the real decision-maker in the band, and that was Hetfield – on the big things.’
