Enter Night, page 5
It was tough but, he suggests, it also ‘helped mould who I was, you know?’ Not that James saw it that way at the time. ‘When you’re young you want to be like everyone else, you don’t want to be unique. But I see the uniqueness in it now and it’s helped me to, uh, you know, accept and embrace the uniqueness of me.’ It was those difficult early experiences of always being the odd man out at school, James now believes, that nurtured his ability to not run with the pack, to always stand just a little bit apart from the rest of the gang. ‘It helped me carve my own path, and even the spiritual part of it; when you’re a kid you can’t really grasp the concept of spirituality. It was a very adult type of concept and for me not going to the doctor was strange. All I saw was the people in the church that had broken bones and they were healing wrong – it didn’t make any sense to me. So when I was saying these things to the [sports] coaches or teachers I was just speaking for my parents, I wasn’t really speaking for myself, so it was a kind of a sell-out thing, which I really never wanted to do again. But also it helped me embrace the spiritual concept later on, and actually see the power in that, along with the knowledge of doctors these days, so it did help me with my concept of spirituality.’
It would be many years, however, precipitated by lengthy and still ongoing counselling sessions, before James Hetfield was ready to give any ground on these particular points. After his father left in 1977, ‘I just said to my mom: “I’m not going to Sunday school any more. Make me.” That was it.’ Instead, music – one of the few forms of expression open to him as a kid that could be enjoyed alone – would become first a solace, then a guard and, eventually, an inspiration. Long before he became interested in rock, though, there was the classical piano, which Cynthia – whose hobbies included amateur operatics, painting and some graphic design – first encouraged him to study when he was nine. James told me: ‘What it was, my mom had seen me over at a friend’s house just kind of start bashing on the piano. I was more or less playing drums on the piano and she thought, “Oh, he’s gonna be a musician, okay, we’ll sign him up for piano.” I did that for a couple of years and it was really a bit of a turn-off because it was learning classical pieces, stuff that I wasn’t listening to on the radio, you know? I remember it was an older woman’s house and the cookies at the end was the big deal, so something was cool about it. But I remember she had some music that she put out that we were gonna learn, and it was called “Joy to the World” [the Christmas carol adapted from an old English hymn]. I thought it was [starts singing] “Joy to the world!”, you know [the 1971 pop hit by Three Dog Night], but it was not. I got a little excited, like, “I heard my brother play that song before!” But it was theory.’ Discouraged at the time, he is now ‘so glad it was somewhat forced upon me because the act of left and right hand doing different things, and also singing at the same time, it gave me some inkling of what I do now. It gave me an idea of that, that’s natural to do. So singing and playing are somewhat easier than it probably could have been if I hadn’t [studied] piano.’
He discovered rock via his older brothers’ record collection. ‘I was always looking for something different, something other people didn’t always dig. When I was into Black Sabbath, all my friends would go, “Oh, my mom won’t let me have that album. It’s scary and I’ll have nightmares.” I thought that was funny, so I had to go out and get it.’ Groups like The Beatles ‘and shit like that’, he said, ‘I never dug so much’. It was around now that he also tried his hand at playing his brother David’s drums, but couldn’t get it going. He was fourteen, he told me, before he remembers ‘picking up a guitar for the first time and going, “How do they make all these noises?”’ He couldn’t ‘remember learning’ to actually play one. ‘I started off with an acoustic then started fiddling around, and then learning the chords, and it just kind of went on from there, I guess. But it seemed to go pretty quickly and I was playing in a band pretty soon, like within a year or two: playing cover songs, which is certainly the way to learn guitar.’ He would also ‘slow down LPs, trying to learn stuff’. Listening; copying; repeating; always alone. ‘I liked being alone,’ he later told writer Ben Mitchell. ‘I liked being able to close off the world. And music helped with that a lot.’ He would put the headphones on and just drift away, digging Kiss and Aerosmith, Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper: all-American hard rock; irony-free, kick-ass music for straight-shooting dudes that didn’t dance but liked to party. ‘I didn’t get into other stuff until being introduced to Lars.’ The first concert he went to was in July 1978, just before his sixteenth birthday: Aerosmith supported by AC/DC at the Long Beach Arena. Aerosmith’s 1976 album Rocks ‘was one of the albums I could play over and over; it was filled with good stuff’. The same summer he also bought a ticket for the two-day California World Music Festival, also featuring Aerosmith, alongside Ted Nugent and Van Halen. ‘I remember following around my buddy, who was selling drugs. He tore up a part of his ticket – it had a kind of rainbow edge – and he cut it into bits and sold it as acid. I was like, “What are you doing, man?” He used the money to buy beer.’ Working his way through the crowd to the front, James recalled being ‘blown away’ by the fact that Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler addressed the crowd ‘as “motherfuckers”. I was like, “Whoa – are you supposed to do that?”’
Already a well-established loner at high school, like Lars Ulrich it was music that would finally bring James Hetfield into contact with other similarly obsessed classroom loners such as Ron McGovney, who later become the first bass player in Metallica. A fellow pupil at East Middle School, McGovney recalls meeting Hetfield in music class, drawn to him as ‘the only guy in the class who could play guitar’. Like James, Ron didn’t belong to any of the established school cliques. ‘There was the cheerleaders, the jocks, the marching band people.’ James and Ron ended up with other ‘laggers’ like their buddies Dave Marrs and Jim Keshil, ‘hanging around without any real social group’. Ron wasn’t solely into rock like James. He was ‘an Elvis freak’ who was ‘devastated’ when Presley died. Instead, he and James found common ground in the music of Led Zeppelin and ZZ Top, Foreigner and Boston. Dave and Jim were more like James; they were heavily into Kiss and Aerosmith. The odd man out, Ron eventually came round to the others’ way of thinking, bonding with them over British proto-metal acts such as UFO. As a result, Ron started having lessons on the acoustic guitar. ‘I knew nothing about bass,’ he recalls. He just wanted to learn how to play ‘Stairway to Heaven’. When, later that high school year, Hetfield started hanging out with two brothers named Ron and Rich Valoz, who played bass and drums respectively, and who then teamed up with another guitar-playing pupil named Jim Arnold, McGovney offered to roadie for them. The band called itself Obsession and like all high school bands they concentrated on cover versions of songs by their favourite artists. In this instance, that meant the easiest-to-play material by Black Sabbath (‘Never Say Die’), Led Zeppelin (‘Rock and Roll’), UFO (‘Lights Out’) and Deep Purple (‘Highway Star’). All three frontline members would take turns singing, Jim Arnold on the Zeppelin stuff, Ron Valoz on ‘Purple Haze’. James would be the UFO guy, tackling hard-line anthems like ‘Doctor, Doctor’ and ‘Lights Out’.
After a prolonged period rehearsing at the Valoz brothers’ parents’ house in nearby Downey, the new outfit eventually did the occasional gig: backyard ‘keg parties’, playing for free beer and the chance to show off. Mainly, though, they played every Friday and Saturday night at the Valoz brothers’ place. McGovney remembers the brothers as ‘electrical geniuses’ who had ‘wired up lights’ in the loft they built in their parents’ garage: ‘Dave Marrs and I would sit up there and work the control panel doing the lights, strobes and stuff.’ It was ‘this whole show in a tiny garage’. ‘We’d do Thin Lizzy,’ James told me. ‘We’d do like some Robin Trower…bands of the time that were somewhat heavy.’ James finally bailed out on Obsession, he said, when ‘I had brought an original song to play and none of them liked it so that’s when I basically kind of said goodbye to them. Because I wanted to start writing some songs and they weren’t interested in that.’ With James went Jim Arnold, joined by his brother Chris, to form another short-lived outfit called Syrinx. ‘All they played was Rush covers,’ McGovney recalled. ‘That didn’t last long.’
All the music came to an abrupt end, though, when James’ mother died agonisingly slowly of cancer, in 1980, after refusing treatment and even painkillers until right at the very end, when it was already too late. With James and Deanna forced to move in with their stepbrother, David – ten years older than James and now married and living in his own house twenty miles away in Brea, where he worked as an accountant – to begin with James would still make the twenty-mile trek back to Downey for rehearsals with Syrinx. That soon petered out as the implications of his mother’s death started to sink in and a different sort of gloom descended. James also broke up with his first semi-serious girlfriend. Nothing, it seemed, would ever go right again. Unruly as ever, Deanna was soon ejected from Dave’s – preferring to track down her father and join him. James, who ‘wanted nothing to do with’ his father, stayed put, seeing his parents’ divorce as the final spur to his mother’s illness. As he told Playboy in 2001: ‘My mom worried a lot, and that made her sick. She hid it from us. All of a sudden, she’s in the hospital. Then all of a sudden, she’s gone.’ Typically, tight-lipped James kept the devastating news of his mother’s death all to himself. ‘We had no idea,’ McGovney later recalled. ‘He was gone for like ten days and we had thought he went on vacation. When he told us that his mom had just died, we were stunned.’ According to her Christian Science beliefs, there had been no funeral for Cynthia, nor any designated grieving period. No time, as James later put it, ‘where you’re able to cry and get support. It was just: “Okay, the shell is dead, the spirit’s gone, and move on in life.”’
In Brea, James enrolled at Olinda High School, where he hooked up for a time with an aspiring drummer named Jim Mulligan and yet another guitarist, named Hugh Tanner, who he approached after seeing him carrying a Flying V into school one day. They called the nascent band Phantom Lord, although it never quite got out of the rehearsal stage, mainly due to the fact that they didn’t have a bass player. In desperation, James turned to Ron McGovney. Ron had never seen himself as a bass player, didn’t even own a bass. But James insisted it would be easy enough and that he’d show him the basic chords. McGovney reluctantly acquiesced, renting a bass from Downey Music Center, and the four-piece began practising together at a garage at Ron’s parents’ place. This was a shift in scene that also precipitated James suddenly feeling brave enough to move out of his stepbrother’s house in Brea and into Ron’s place back in Downey, taking a job as a janitor to pay his way – the first of a succession of menial jobs that would occupy him over the next couple of years. ‘My parents had a main house with three rental houses in the back,’ McGovney says now. ‘The property was going to be bulldozed to build a freeway. My parents let James and me live in the middle house rent-free. We converted the garage into our rehearsal studio.’ Having left high school, they both had a little money coming in now too. ‘I worked at my parents’ truck repair shop during the day,’ recalls Ron. James, meanwhile, had now gotten a job in ‘a sticker factory’ called Santa Fe Springs. They used their first month’s salaries to insulate the garage against noise, putting up drywall, while James painted the rafters black and the ceiling silver. Along with white walls and red carpet, Phantom Lord suddenly had a space to call their own and build from.
In the final entry in his high school yearbook, under ‘plans’, Hetfield wrote: ‘Play music. Get rich.’ As with most young bands, however, Phantom Lord splintered before it had even played a gig, signalled by the departure of Hugh Tanner, a decent guitar player but one who now had his eye on a career in music management. Undeterred, the others simply stuck an ad for a guitarist in the local music free-sheet The Recycler. Enter, albeit briefly, Troy James, along with a change in musical direction towards what McGovney describes now as ‘a glam thing’. It was still an all-American rock sound, but now leaning more towards the kind of flashy, chorus-heavy mien soon to be popularised by Sunset Strip archetypes like Mötley Crüe and Quiet Riot, both then making names for themselves on the Hollywood club scene, and like-minded, fully made-up British outfits such as Girl (fronted by future Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen and L.A. Guns frontman Phil Lewis), whose song ‘Hollywood Tease’ the new band would cover. They even had a new name to go with the new sound: Leather Charm. Hard though it is now to imagine gruff James Hetfield trying to pass himself off as a pouting glam-rock singer, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the new direction, even dropping guitar to concentrate on becoming a full-on frontman. It was also in Leather Charm that Hetfield came up with his first attempts at performing original songs, three of which, in reconfigured form, would eventually be recorded two years later for the first Metallica album: a prototype of ‘Hit the Lights’, which Ron McGovney later claimed Hugh Tanner came up with most of; and two Charm numbers James had more of a hand in, ‘Handsome Ransom’ and ‘Let’s Go Rock ’n’ Roll’, an improved and much speeded-up amalgam of which later became the Metallica epic, ‘No Remorse’.
Once again, however, the new band had only managed a couple of appearances at friends’ backyard parties when it fell apart. This time it was Mulligan who jumped first, preferring to take up the offer of a more challenging spot in another local outfit that specialised in Rush covers. At this point Troy James also quit, leaving James and Ron alone again in their silver and black garage. To try and help out, Hugh Tanner told them about an ad he’d seen in The Recycler: ‘Drummer looking for other metal musicians to jam with. Tygers of Pan Tang, Diamond Head and Iron Maiden’. It was the mention of Iron Maiden that had gotten his attention. None of the Leather Charm guys knew as much about the NWOBHM as Lars Ulrich – who did? But, lately, they had taken to including a version of Maiden’s ‘Remember Tomorrow’ in their set. James and Ron, however, were apathetic about the ad. Nothing had gone right lately, why should this? Hating to see them so down, Hugh offered to reply to the ad himself and set up a meet for them with the guy who’d placed the ad – some kid with a funny accent from Newport Beach called Lars – at a local rehearsal studio he’d booked under the pretext of recording a demo, and which James later claimed they ‘stiffed’ Lars on the bill for. Ron, never completely convinced about trying to make it as a bass player, was now concentrating more on a possible career as a rock photographer, so didn’t even bother to turn up to that first meeting with Lars. Not that it mattered. Neither James nor Hugh had anything good to say about the encounter afterwards. The kid was ‘weird’ and ‘smelled funny’. He couldn’t even really play drums. The whole thing was really a waste of time. ‘We ate McDonald’s, he ate herring’, was how James would summarise that first meeting twenty years later. Lars was simply ‘from a different world. His father was famous. He was very well off. A rich, only child. Spoiled – that’s why he’s got his mouth. He knows what he wants, he goes for it and he’s gotten it his whole life.’
The ill feeling, however, wasn’t entirely mutual. One of the first things Lars did, in fact, after returning home from his summer jaunt to Europe was call up James and invite him round to his house. James acted aloof, like he didn’t even remember who Lars was, giving him the ‘stay-the-fuck-away-from-me’ face. Shrewdly, though, Lars felt James might be less hostile to the notion of forming a ‘jam band’ with him, overlooking for the time being Lars’ obvious drawbacks as a drummer, if he had a better idea of who it was exactly he was dealing with. At the very least they could kick back and play some records together. Sure enough, the first time James visited Lars’ parents’ house his attitude instantly changed. ‘I would spend days just going through Lars’ record collection. He introduced me to a lot of different music.’ James, who ‘could afford maybe one record a week’, would be flabbergasted as Lars ‘would come back from the store with twenty!’ As Lars would later tell me, ‘When I came back to America in October of ’81 I was kind of energised from hanging out in Europe and then I called up James Hetfield because I thought there was something interesting about him and he seemed like he was pretty into the same stuff I was into.’ After such a stale first meeting, though, I wondered what had prompted him to persist with trying to get to know the taciturn would-be frontman. They were obviously quite different as people. ‘No shit!’ he snorted. ‘Absolutely.’ What was it then that intrigued Lars enough to try again? Initially, he said, it was because James was the only other person he’d found who might be interested in forming a band that played NWOBHM-type music ‘rather than copy Van Halen’. On a deeper level, he sensed something else, too. ‘Even though I didn’t spend a lot of time rebelling against a lot of things because my parents were too cool to rebel against, I spent a lot of time by myself immersed in the music world. And James spent a lot of time by himself and so on, so the one thing we share, even though we come from two different worlds, and two different cultures, is we are both loners. And in each other we found something that just connected with something deeper.’ He went on: ‘It was very difficult for me to find anything that I could relate to in Southern California. That’s why me and James became such good friends because we both sort of had social issues,’ he chuckled self-consciously. ‘Of a different kind but…’ He shrugged and looked away.
