Enter Night, page 35
It wasn’t just the drinking they were up to now. ‘It was fucking great,’ Lars would later boast to Rolling Stone. ‘Girls knew we were part of the tour and wanted to fuck us, but at the same time we could blend in with the crowd…Like, “Who gives a shit? Let’s have another rum and Coke and go back in the audience and see what’s happening.”’ Which is exactly what they did in Tampa; photographer Ross Halfin and I walked to the very top tier of seats at the stadium with them, where they dropped their jeans and flashed the audience. The only one who wasn’t regularly drunk was Jason, still exulting in his outsider status, nervously smoking weed alone back in his hotel room, or in the company of groupies too young to grasp his lowly status; still counting his blessings for finding himself in such a privileged, financially settled position, still wondering if Metallica would ever really feel like his band too.
There was now a small group of what they called their ‘tough tarts’ at every show; girls waiting naked in the showers; girls in bikinis they’d given passes to the night before whose names they could no longer remember; girlfriends of boy fans offered to the band almost ritualistically. ‘I couldn’t figure out why all of a sudden I was handsome,’ said Kirk. ‘No one had ever treated me like that before in my life.’ Both Kirk and Lars were starting to use cocaine more regularly, too. Lars primarily, he said, because ‘it gave me another couple of hours’ drinking’; Kirk because it brought him out of his shell. And because he liked being out of his head; sitting there, stoned, gazing at horror movies, some on TV, some just playing out in front of him in real time in his hotel room.
The biggest drinker was still James, who would regularly polish off half a bottle of seventy-proof Jägermeister. He was also into the vodka, although his brand had improved: he now favoured Absolut. ‘That whole tour was a big fog for me,’ James later recalled. ‘It was bad coming back to some of those towns later, because there were a lot of dads and moms and husbands and boyfriends looking for me. Not good. People were hating me and I didn’t know why…’
It wasn’t just irate husbands and boyfriends that James was falling foul of. Alcohol brought out the dark, mouthy Mr Hyde to his more usual monosyllabic Dr Jekyll. On a flying visit to London that summer, he had revealed to Kerrang! designer Krusher Joule just how black his drinking could make him: ‘James and Lars had come to the office to discuss their next tour programme, which Geoff Barton was helping them with. Afterwards I took them for a friendly drink and we ended up at a pub round the corner from where I live in south London. By now of course we’re all pretty pissed but we were having a laugh. Then one of my next-door neighbours showed up, a lovely woman, a little bit older and very straight, Mrs Normal. I remember turning round to introduce her and there was Lars standing with his cock out, just looking at her. Anyway, I told him to put it away, she was a taken woman, and we went back to drinking. Later, after the pub closed, we were walking back to my flat across this park and James started going on about “people coming to our country and taking our jobs”. I said, “Hang on a minute, mate, you are descended from the people who came into that country and stole it…”’
This was not the kind of mission statement James was likely to take kindly to, especially not after an evening of hard drinking. ‘All I remember next,’ says Krusher, ‘is we were going at each other. We literally just kind of ran at each other and hit. And I got him down! Face first, and put him in a headlock. You know, once you’ve got a headlock on it’s a pretty fucking powerful wrestling hold. You just pull back and they’re like, “Whoa! Stop!” Lars was standing there, pissing himself laughing. Then I realised that okay, I’ve got him down but once I let him go he’s going to fucking kill me. So I was like, “Lars, help me here. We’ve got to negotiate. I’ll let go of James if he promises he won’t hit me and I promise I won’t talk any more about the racist shit.” So Lars talked to James, I let go of him, nothing else was said and we walked to the flat.’
‘Things were starting to happen right then and things became available,’ said James, looking back in 2009. ‘Women, parties, you name it. We got sucked into that…It was fun.’ He admitted that it wasn’t funny, though, when he got so drunk he became violent: ‘There’d be the happy stage. Then it would get ugly where the world is fucked and fuck you. I became…the clown, then the punk anarchist after that, wanting to smash everything and hurt people. I’d get into fights – sometimes with Lars. That’s how resentments would get released, pushing and shoving, throwing things at him. He wants to be the centre of attention all the time and that bothers me because I’m the same way. He’s out there charming people, and I’ll be intimidating so people will respect me that way.’
Meanwhile, the band’s reputation continued to grow with every appearance they made on the tour. When it became known that the Metallica T-shirt was selling more than any other bar the official event tee, even headliners Van Halen began to take notice, with singer Sammy Hagar making a big deal of coming over and spending ‘face time’ with them both nights I was there. Merchandising was increasingly where it was at for the rock business in the 1980s. Iron Maiden had become millionaires from profits on their merchandising long before their record sales; many American bands whose limited popularity outside the USA only allowed them to play a handful of shows in Europe or the UK could only afford to do so because of the phenomenal sales from their on-site merchandising operation. Gone were the days when the most money concert-goers could be expected to shell out for a show besides their ticket price was a tour programme. By 1988, the business of selling tour merchandise had become almost an exact science with the biggest artists selling over two hundred separate branded items at their shows. Giant merchandising companies such as Brockum in the USA and Bravado in the UK reckoned on selling between $25 and $50 per head, per show, organising their merchandising stands at concert venues so that the most expensive gear – tour jackets, programmes, posters and baseball caps – was situated by the doors, ready to grab the fans’ attention as they entered. Smaller, much less expensive items – the two-dollar badges and wristbands, stick-on tattoos and denim patches – would be positioned closer to the door of the actual concert hall. ‘The idea was you’d get the big ten- or twenty-dollar hit as they entered, all excited,’ says one former merchandising vendor, ‘then systematically take every last dollar they had so that by the time they were ready to find their seats, you got their last dollar or two. The idea was for them to leave without a penny in their pockets.’ In Japan, where fans were already used to handing over their credit cards for in-concert ‘merch’, you could make ten times your usual profits. There, the promoters would arrange for the fans to buy their ‘mementoes’ on their way out of the venue, erecting barriers that snaked towards the exits past a long line of stalls selling every conceivable type of officially branded tat. ‘In Japan, they figured on making $100 to $200 dollars per head, per concert-goer, sometimes more.’
Shrewd as ever, Lars and Mensch had taken note of how the most successful merchandising brands in rock built heavily on the element of collectability; how it was no longer enough to simply own a Tour ’88 shirt; that the smartest bands produced a new shirt for each new situation they found themselves in. Here the undoubted ‘kings of merch’ in the 1980s were Iron Maiden, who had their own in-house artist and designer, Derek Riggs, producing both their record sleeves and their most collectable T-shirts and related tour merchandise; his most famous creation that of Eddie, the phantasmagorical monster who adorned every Maiden single and album – and consequently every significant piece of official Maiden merch. ‘I liked the idea because it gave you great visual continuity,’ Maiden manager Rod Smallwood would tell me, ‘and it made the Maiden sleeves just stick out a bit more than the average sort of “could-be-anything” sort of sleeves most rock bands used then. And it became a very important part of Maiden’s image, in that way.’ Like Metallica, Iron Maiden did not do TV; could not be heard regularly on radio. ‘But because Eddie struck such a chord with the Maiden fans, we didn’t need to be. Wearing an Eddie T-shirt became like a statement: fuck radio, fuck TV, we’re not into that crap, we’re into Iron Maiden. And, of course, we’ve had a lot of fun with Eddie over the years, trying to find new and ever-more outrageous things for him to be and do. Sometimes the ideas come from Derek; usually, though, they either come from me or one of the band. But it can be anybody or anything that inspires us.’
A self-styled English eccentric and former art-school drop-out, Riggs produced thousands of images of Maiden’s monstrous mascot in whatever setting the band’s career took them: from the very Devil himself on 1983’s Number of the Beast album, to mummified Egyptian god on the 1985 Powerslave sleeve, to laser-packing time-cop on 1986’s Somewhere in Time. From there it was a short step to having Eddie become the defining image on all their merch; an idea that quickly developed into a goldmine for them. The possibilities were endless: Maiden plays Hawaii? Well, how about a picture of Eddie on a surfboard? Maiden does New York? How about Eddie as King Kong? The fact that Eddie had also transmogrified into part of Maiden’s travelling stage show in the 1980s was also not lost on Metallica and Q Prime. With Metallica now planning for their first arena-headlining tour, Lars decided they would need their very own Derek Riggs; even their own Eddie, perhaps. The others did not disagree.
Metallica found their own Derek Riggs in one of James’ skateboard pals: Pushead – real name: Brian Schroeder – who he had first met at a Venom concert in 1985. ‘He’d seen something I’d done for The Misfits,’ Pushead recalled for me, ‘and he asked if I could get him a T-shirt of it. I said, sure, no problem. Then he wore it on the back of the Master of Puppets album, and that’s when the whole Misfits cult thing took off.’ When Pushead moved from LA to San Francisco they met up again through the skateboarding scene. Working from his one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, surrounded by his collection of skulls (cow, monkey, alligator, human) the first thing Pushead did for the band was what became known as the ‘Damage, Inc.’ T-shirt: ‘James wanted something like an animal type thing – like a wild beast…[But] it didn’t work for me. So I went to a human skull and made the head a little bigger. James wanted fangs, so I drew them in, and he wanted the mallets, so I did that. Then they all came over and I showed it to them and they loved it.’
Next came the sleeve design for the Cliff ’Em All video: the four faces of the Burton-era line-up in suitably fearsome pose, arranged clockwise on a charcoal-grey background. As a fun piece it was just about acceptable. It was with his T-shirts, though, that Pushead’s designs really came into their own. Next came the now highly collectible ‘Crash Course in Brain Surgery’ T-shirt: a gruesomely amusing, typically skull-based example of classic Pushead splat. Now, with the 1988–89 world tour about to begin, they asked him to step up production, beginning with an illustration for the inside sleeve of the Justice album cover: a hand, with the word ‘f-e-a-r’ tattooed onto its fingers, holding a hammer onto which their four – just about identifiable – faces are drawn. It was also a Pushead illustration that adorned the cover of the official 1988–89 Damaged Justice world tour programme, a play on the album’s ‘blind justice’ sleeve: the Statue of Liberty as skeletal fiend, its scales wreathed in bandages, its sword lowered. They would also commission him to come up with sleeve designs for the two singles from the album: ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ and ‘One’. Mainly, Pushead was to concentrate on designs for the numerous merch items that would feature throughout every leg of the tour.
Drawing a great deal of his inspiration at that time from better-known 1980s comic book artists such as Kevin O’Neil, famous for his Torquemada series in the same groundbreaking British weekly, 2000AD, that gave the world Judge Dredd, Pushead was also indebted, he confessed, to psychedelic Sixties poster legend, Rick Griffin, although he bridled at any suggestion that his own lurid designs may have been similarly drug-induced. ‘I’ve never taken drugs and drawn,’ he frowningly told me. ‘I’ve been straight since I was in high school. I don’t even drink coffee.’ Human skulls were what ‘inspire me the most’, he said. The only commission still missing from his portfolio, he noted somewhat sulkily, was for a full-bore Metallica album cover. ‘I’d love to, obviously,’ he said, ‘But they haven’t asked me yet.’ It would be another fifteen years before they did, his outlandish pictures considered simply too cartoonish for the increasingly serious-minded way Metallica came to view their albums, until, finally, in 2003, they came up with an album – St. Anger – so clearly trauma-induced that a Pushead design was actually deemed a palatable corrective. In the meantime, so cool was Metallica’s new Pushead-designed merch considered, that he quickly became the designer of choice for other huge rock names of the era such as Aerosmith and Mötley Crüe (his skulls-in-straightjacket T-shirt became the second most popular item of merchandise on the Crüe’s wildly successful 1989 Dr Feelgood tour).
It was in New York at the end of June that Lars says he first realised how far the band had come since their previous American summer tour, with Ozzy, two years before. Hanging out after lunch with Cliff Burnstein, the manager had a treat in store for him. Suggesting they take a swing by the office of their booking agent, Marsha Vlasic at ICM, Lars was astounded when Marsha pulled out a tour schedule of dates provisionally booked for the band’s own arena-headlining tour later that year. ‘I look down at the first two weeks, and Indianapolis is there. Now, Indianapolis was always this joke between me and Cliff, about how in Indianapolis they just don’t get it. That was the barometer. Lo and be-fucking-hold, we go to Indianapolis, and there are nine thousand people there. I remember thinking, “Wow, maybe all those people in Middle America will get it.”’
There was a break in August, between the end of the Monsters of Rock tour and the start of Metallica’s own headline world tour. Lars flew with his wife Debbie to London where they stayed at Peter Mensch’s house, between brief visits to Debbie’s parents’ place in the Midlands. Lars also took the opportunity to do some hanging out backstage at that year’s British Monsters of Rock show at Donington, headlined by his old favourites Iron Maiden. Also on the bill were his new favourites Guns N’ Roses, who he would actually spend most of his time with, sharing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s with Slash – whose trademark top hat Lars was famously pictured wearing at various drunk intervals – and swapping war stories with their notoriously troubled singer Axl, whose white leather jacket with the Guns N’ Roses logo emblazoned across its back Lars was so taken with he later order a similar one for himself. (This was made to order by Brockum, the US merchandising company both bands shared, and the subject of much piss-taking from James and the others when it arrived.)
There was also one other band on the bill that Lars was more surreptitiously fascinated with: Megadeth. ‘I always got the impression that Lars was always wanting to see what Dave [Mustaine] was up to, and was kind of inquisitive and always intrigued by what Dave did,’ says ’Deth bassist David Ellefson now. ‘It seemed like Lars especially wanted to retain a friendship and maybe competitively kind of always know what Dave was up to.’ It was no surprise to either Ellefson or Mustaine then when Lars wandered over to their dressing room area backstage before they went on. High from his visit with Guns N’ Roses, Lars was already too out of it to pick up on the bad vibes emanating from the band. As Ellefson explains, ‘The whole group was just in dismay and disarray and dysfunction, because of [heroin] addiction.’
Both Ellefson and Mustaine had been junkies for over four years by then, during which time their ‘disease’, as Mustaine called it, had cost them a manager, girlfriends and several potentially great line-ups of Megadeth, whose career was, astonishingly, still then in its ascendency. ‘I started off using,’ Mustaine would tell me matter-of-factly, ‘then it turned into abuse and then into full-blown addiction. It got like I couldn’t see what was going on. I was powerless…When Dave [Ellefson] and I first hooked up together, the extent of our getting high was just beer and pot. But we were hanging out with these jazz players, and jazz is synonymous with drugs. And they’d be saying, “Dude, all the greats do heroin! Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, blah blah blah”. I was kind of fascinated by the thing of being a junkie too.’
At the time of the Donington ’88 show, Mustaine told me, ‘I was spending $500 a day…on that stuff.’ Having only just flown in for the show the day before, however, none of the band – with the possible exception of Mustaine – had been able to score. As a result, says Ellefson, they were all ‘really, really strung out’. He just about managed to ‘get through the show’. What made it worse, he says, is that they had reached that desperate stage as junkies where they were now lying to each other about who had smack and who didn’t. For all Ellefson knew, Mustaine had some but wasn’t telling him. Or maybe the whole band had somehow been able to get hold of something – and not told him, wanting to keep what little they had for themselves. Paranoia was rampant. ‘Yeah, absolutely, because at that point the heroin thing is very dark, is very deceptive, it’s very deep. It’s just evil. All the dishonesty…everything is complete dysfunction, everything is bad.’
