Enter Night, page 7
Where Ron’s motivations lay was his business; as far as Lars and James were concerned, as long as he turned up for rehearsals it didn’t matter. With an actual track about to be released on an actual album, this was no longer a time for seeking out the perfect musical partner and far more a case of ‘getting the show on the fuckin’ road’, as Lars put it. Indeed, even James had yet to settle on what he felt would be his long-term role in the band, vacillating between wanting to be a straightforward frontman in the Steven Tyler and Sean Harris mould, and deciding his best bet was actually off to one side, head down, playing rhythm guitar.
Meanwhile, after yet another ad was placed in the Recycler, they finally found someone who they decided just might be the answer to their prayers. His name was Dave Mustaine and he was about to help Metallica become a legend, although not entirely in ways any of them could have foretold. ‘I answered the phone one day,’ McGovney remembered, ‘and this guy Dave was on the other end, and he was just spieling this baloney like I could not believe.’ Lars: ‘I got a call from this guy and he was just so OTT: “I got all this equipment; my own photographer, my own this, my own that.” He didn’t have a clue what we were talking about musically, but he had enthusiasm. He was pretty quickly turned on, which was cool because everybody else in LA had this career thing – Quiet Riot, Ratt and Mötley Crüe were big bands, and everyone else in Hollywood was doing imitations.’ Dave Mustaine had no desire to imitate anybody. He was already his own biggest hero.
Born, as he would tell me, ‘at the witching hour’ – meaning midnight or ‘two minutes after’, as he put it – on 13 September 1961, in La Mesa, California, David Scott Mustaine was the classic product of a broken home. The disgruntled son of an alcoholic father, John, and mistreated mother, Emily, Mustaine had grown up messed-up and furious across several different locations in Southern California, with Emily forced to keep moving to escape the abusive attentions of her only son’s estranged father. By the time Dave answered the ad in The Recycler he lived alone in his own dishevelled apartment in Huntington Beach, from which he routinely sold weed, pot – nothing too heavy but enough of it to keep both himself and his regular customers high. A tall, good-looking guy with a lot of reddish-blonde hair and a lot more attitude, some said he was an asshole. Actually, a lot of people said he was an asshole – and often they were right. But the hard, confrontational exterior masked a highly intelligent young man with an exceptional gift as a guitarist and songwriter. Indeed it might be argued that it was Mustaine’s belligerence that supplied his artistic edge: compelling, outspoken, and in his own way, supremely honest. And consequently more than a little bit scary…If the contrived profanities and vulgar machismo were doomed to overshadow much of the brilliant music he would make throughout his rarely dull career, Mustaine was also responsible for making some of the most innovative heavy metal recordings of his time. And what a time he was destined to have.
James Hetfield, whose own shattered background meant he could relate to any embittered boy from a broken home, felt an immediate connection with his brash new acquaintance. Dave Mustaine felt it, too: ‘I think that James and I are very much the same man,’ he later reflected. ‘I think that we grabbed an angel, split him in half, and both of us are possessing that power.’ As time would go on, however, James began to see Dave less as a brother and more as an evil twin. As well as being more adept on guitar than James, he wasn’t averse to usurping him onstage, too, sensing James’ insecurity and seizing on it to become the frontman, announcing the names of songs, rapping with the audience, even on occasion seemingly trying to outdo James’ singing. Until he joined Metallica, Dave had been in a group of unknowns named Panic, with whom he had assembled an impressive array of guitars and amps, something which the eagle-eyed Lars was quick to note, more or less deciding to offer the new guy the gig before they’d heard him play. Equally opportunistic, Mustaine picked up on the vibe immediately and made himself right at home. ‘I was [still] tuning up when all the other guys in the band went into another room. They weren’t talking to me, so I went in and said, “What the fuck? Am I in the band or not?” and they said, “You’ve got the gig.” I couldn’t believe how easy it had been and suggested that we get some beer to celebrate.’
Beer, it transpired, was a must at a Dave Mustaine rehearsal. ‘As a kid,’ he would later tell me, ‘everyone always said that I was going to end up an alcoholic like my father. You see, alcoholism is hereditary, it’s in the genes. I just could not drink.’ Unfortunately for his career in Metallica, he was some ten years away from discovering that fact. ‘In my childhood,’ he went on, ‘I did martial arts, and then I started getting into dope and thought no one could fuck with me. In reality, if anyone had tried it I would have been destroyed.’ Maybe. But that wasn’t the impression James and Lars had back in 1982. On top of the drug-dealing and alcoholism, as well as the karate-kicking, confrontational nature of this apparently unstoppable force of ill-intentioned nature, there was also an undisguised suggestion of occult knowledge. It’s true, he told me, ‘I believe in the supernatural. My elder sister is a white witch. I dicked around with her stuff when I was a kid.’ To do what, though? Occult rituals? Invocations? ‘I found a “sex hex”,’ he said nonchalantly, ‘and I used it on this girl I had the hots for. She was this cute little babe, looked like Tinkerbell. She didn’t want to have anything to do with me. So I did my little hex and the next night she was in my bed.’
Anything else?
‘One time I did one on this guy who picked on me when I was going to school. He was enormous. But without going into it too much, I did a chant, basically asking the Prince of Darkness to devastate this fella and stop him messing with me. Later, the guy broke his leg and he can’t walk straight now. I stopped messing with witchcraft after that, but it made me feel good at the time. Retribution,’ he cackled.
Whatever else he brought to the mix, the arrival into the nascent Metallica line-up of a guitarist of Mustaine’s ability brought an immediate leg-up, in terms of the band’s own musical self-image. ‘Pretty quickly [after Dave joined] things began to happen,’ said Lars, ‘because of those three words that have worked throughout our career – word of mouth. These outcasts started turning up, people who liked music a little more extreme than that served up by the American music industry. We took the riff structures of AC/DC and Judas Priest and played them at Motörhead tempos. And then we threw in our X-factor – and we don’t know what it was. We had this European sound and attitude but we were an American band, and there was no one else in America doing it.’
Interviewed in Rolling Stone fifteen years later, Lars would claim he could ‘never remember ever thinking about the future much’ when Metallica started. That he was ‘always so caught up in the present. Where I come from in Denmark, this whole American thing about goals is not a big thing. You’re taught very early on in America that you have to have goals. I never bought into that. We were always real comfortable in the present, in our little world, continuing with blinders on.’ Back in 1982, though, the Lars Ulrich everyone knew then that they remember best now was someone who clearly had found his one true path – and wasn’t about to dawdle along the way. Diamond Head’s Brian Tatler recalls Lars writing to tell him about the new band. ‘I’ve got this classic letter that says: “My band’s called Metallica and we rehearse six nights a week and it’s going pretty good.” I think he says, “The guitarist is pretty fast, you’d like him.” He doesn’t mention his name but I presume it’s Dave Mustaine. This would have been in early ’82. And I think he sent a cassette of “It’s Electric” to Sean [Harris] because they must have done a demo of that as well [which] we were flattered by – that somebody had bothered to work one of our songs out.’ Mustaine, he adds, had ‘worked the solo out note-perfect and that was impressive’.
Certainly there was a new focus to the band. Ron recalls him and James coming home from work each day and meeting up with Lars, who still lived at his parents’ house but had recently taken a job working behind the till at a gas station to help pay his way in the band, and Dave who had his own apartment and ‘was self-employed in “sales”, if you know what I mean’. With the four-man line-up now seemingly set in stone, the band ventured forth to play their first gigs, beginning with a shaky set at Radio City, in nearby Anaheim, on 14 March 1982, where the set comprised largely of their three-track demo, plus one other original and a handful of Diamond Head covers posing as originals: ‘Helpless’, ‘Sucking My Love’, ‘Am I Evil?’ and ‘The Prince’, interspersed with ‘Hit the Lights’ and their only other original tune ‘Jump in the Fire’, a new number that Mustaine had brought with him, plus the NWOBHM nuggets: ‘Blitzkrieg’ by Blitzkrieg, ‘Let it Loose’ by NWOBHM hopefuls Savage and ‘Killing Time’ by Irish band Sweet Savage. As Lars later confessed, ‘Our trick back then was not to tell people that these songs were covers; we simply let them assume they were ours. We just didn’t introduce them, so we never actually laid claim to them, but…well, you get the idea.’
At this stage James was still trying to make it work as a guitarless frontman. With Ron sticking mostly to the shadows as he studiously plucked away at the bass lines James had taught him, and Lars gurning furiously at the back, any early showmanship, including song introductions and audience interaction, was conducted by the comfortably voluble Mustaine. ‘There were a lot of people there,’ James later recalled. ‘We had all my school friends and all Lars’ and Ron’s and Dave’s buddies. I was really nervous and a little uncomfortable without a guitar and then during the first song Dave broke a string. It seemed to take him an eternity to change it and I was standing there really embarrassed.’ With the exception of the prematurely ‘seasoned’ Mustaine, none of them had ever played a regular club show before. ‘Dave was the only one who really looked comfortable,’ says Bob Nalbandian, who was also there. ‘You could tell he was used to being up on a stage, he had no fear. The others didn’t look like they really knew what they were doing.’ Lars’ later diary entry for that first gig read: ‘Crowd: 75. Pay: $15. Remarks: 1st gig ever. Very nervous. Only band. Dave broke a string on the first song. Played so-so! Went down pretty good.’
More memorable, and impressive, were their second and third ever performances, playing two opening sets for authentic NWOBHM royalty Saxon, at the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Strip. The band had recorded a three-track home-made demo, featuring a newly recorded ‘Hit the Lights’ with the new four-man line-up, Sweet Savage’s ‘Killing Time’ and Savage’s ‘Let it Loose’. When they found out that Saxon was booked to play the Whisky, Ron took a cassette of the demo over to the club, where he happened to bump into Tommy Lee and Vince Neil, drummer and singer, respectively, of then up-and-coming LA glam-metal outfit, Mötley Crüe, who he’d recently taken pictures of.
McGovney recalls: ‘They said: “Hey Ron, what’s up?” I told them that Saxon was doing a gig at the Whisky and I wanted to try to get my band to open up for them. They said, “Yeah, we were gonna open up for them but we’re getting too big to open.” They offered to take Ron in and introduce him personally ‘to the chick that does the booking’. She must have been impressed, either by the tape or the quality of the band’s contacts, because she phoned Ron the very next day and told him, ‘You guys are pretty good…you remind me of this local band called Black ’N Blue’ – another band, coincidentally, on the forthcoming Metal Massacre compilation. Says Ron, ‘Anyway, she said, “Saxon is scheduled to play two nights; we’re gonna have Ratt open for them the first night and your band can open the second night.” So we actually have Mötley Crüe to thank for getting us that gig, which was a major break for us back then.’
Brian Slagel, who was at the Saxon show, remembers it well. James, still without a guitar to hide behind and wearing tight leopard-print pants was ‘interesting’, he notes kindly. ‘I mean, they played decently, which was surprising enough. But [James] was so shy and didn’t have a whole lot of stage presence. He was playing guitar before that obviously but they wanted him to be like the frontman. There definitely wasn’t an amazing amount of confidence. You could tell he was a little intimidated. But they pulled it off pretty well. It easily could have been a train wreck and it was not. But [James] felt so uncomfortable up there that I think that’s why he immediately started to play guitar [onstage] afterwards because he felt more comfortable having something else to do, other than just trying to sing.’
In keeping with the astonishingly rapid rise the band was about to experience, they also got their first mainstream review for the Saxon shows, in no lesser an organ than the LA Times, where music critic Terry Atkinson nailed them when he wrote: ‘Saxon could also use a fast, hot guitar player of the Eddie Van Halen ilk. Opening quartet Metallica had one [in Dave Mustaine], but little else. The local group needs considerable development to overcome a pervasive awkwardness.’ In his gig diary, Lars smugly noted that the band got paid a dollar more than their first gig, adding immodestly: ‘Great sound this time. Dave and me played great. Ron and James so-so. Went down pretty good. Had a good time but never met Saxon.’
‘Of course,’ says Brian Slagel, ‘John [Kornarens] and I were probably the only two people there that knew what [songs] they were playing. Everybody else just thought they were playing originals.’ Everybody, that is, with the exception of Saxon singer Biff Byford, who watched them from the side of the stage with his mouth open. ‘Apparently, Biff was like, “What? What? Why are they doing Diamond Head songs?”,’ recalls Brian Tatler. It wouldn’t be for long. By the time Metallica were ready for a return appearance at Radio City in early June, they had added two more original numbers to their set and recorded the first in a short series of what even then were considered groundbreaking demos, beginning in April with the four-track Power Metal collection: a round-up of their first four original numbers, with ‘Hit the Lights’ and ‘Jump in the Fire’ now joined by another new Mustaine-driven epic, ‘The Mechanix’ and Hetfield’s ‘Motorbreath’. Later rerecorded for the now legendary No Life ’til Leather demo, what’s interesting now about the earlier Power Metal demo is the way it captures the band before it had settled into its essential musical shape. James, in particular, sounds very different from the growling bad-ass he would soon portray himself as, holding the notes on the chorus of ‘Jump in the Fire’, for example, very much in the style of Diamond Head’s Sean Harris, though with considerably less finesse.
‘He later figured that he didn’t sound like Sean Harris so he decided to sing gruffer,’ recalled Ron McGovney, who had inadvertently given the demo its title when he took it upon himself to have some Metallica business cards made up to send to possible gig promoters. ‘The card was supposed to just have the Metallica logo and a contact number. But I thought it looked too plain and decided it should say something under the logo. I didn’t want to put “hard rock” or “heavy metal”, so I coined the term “power metal”; I thought it had a nice ring to it. No band had used that term before as far as I knew.’ When he proudly displayed the new cards for Lars, though, the drummer was aghast. ‘He said, “What did you do? What the hell is power metal? I can’t believe you did such a stupid thing! We can’t use these cards with the words power metal on them!”’ James and Dave saw the funny side, however, and sarcastically dubbed their first recording together ‘the power metal demo’. Everything, though, was still in such a touch-and-go state that no one member could afford to laugh long at any other. Hetfield, in particular, was still suffering a massive crisis of confidence over his role in the band. When they landed a gig at the Convert Factory in Costa Mesa, on 23 April, they actually appeared as a five-piece: James was still out front as singer, but now there was a second rhythm guitarist, Brad Parker (stage name: Damian C. Phillips) to help beef up the sound. But as Ron recalled: ‘While [the rest of the band] are getting dressed to go on stage, we hear this guitar solo so we look over the railing of the dressing room and we see Brad on stage just blazing away on his guitar. So that was Metallica’s first and last gig with Damian C. Phillips. Later I think he went on to join Odin.’
It was enough to convince both Mustaine and Hetfield that no one else should be allowed to play guitar in the band. But if James was going to concentrate on rhythm guitar, he argued, they should get a ‘real’ singer in. It wasn’t just his voice he was insecure about. Plagued by severe acne throughout his teens and early twenties, James had grown so painfully self-conscious of his looks that he avoided mirrors, felt uncomfortable around pretty girls and, most lastingly, erected a huge barrier behind which he hid, disguising his minutely sensitive feelings in a cloak of monosyllables and withering glances. Being asked to stand in front of a group as musically confrontational as Metallica, he admitted he didn’t know if he could do that. After a show at Lars’ old high school on 25 May with James trying to sing and play guitar – a disastrous showing which saw them performing to a virtually empty hall – the others acquiesced. Enter yet another short-lived hopeful: Jeff Warner. Again, just for one gig: back at the Convert Factory.
There was an even more brief dalliance with a singer named Sammy Dijon, from another local outfit called Ruthless. ‘Sammy was a good singer,’ said Ron, ‘just not Metallica-style.’
They were still deep in discussion about the best way forward for James and the group when Metal Massacre was finally released on 14 June 1982. Although the conversation would continue, off and on, right up to the band’s second album, the idea of bringing in some new guy to front the band increasingly seemed off-point. They were now a band with a track on an actual album – and James was the singer of that song. Still unconvinced, James agreed at least to continue in the role for the time being. Dave and Ron, meanwhile, were determined to ensure they too would make their presences felt the next time the band got anywhere within earshot of a recording situation. They had the Metal Massacre album to swan around with and show off to people, along with their name, right there on the back cover: misspelled as ‘Mettallica’. Lars was on the phone to Brian Slagel about that within thirty seconds of spotting the mistake…
