Enter Night, page 8
Three
Leather on Your Lips
One of those nights, 1986, I’m home and I’m high, me and my girlie, when the phone rings – again. Jaded, I pick it up. Pips. Someone calling from a phone box.
‘Hey, Mick! It’s Lars!’
A pause while I mentally shuffle through the deck for a face to go with the name.
‘…from Metallica!’
Oh…yeah, Lars. How did he get my number?
‘Hey, Lars. How ya doing?’
‘Yeah, great…’
There follows the usual lengthy exposition in which I get to hear just how great he and his band are doing. There are shows that have been ‘awesome’. There are people that have been ‘fucking assholes’ or, more often, ‘great fucking guys’. There are beers that have been drunk and furniture that’s fallen over and been flung out the window, laughs everywhere, the party never-ending, inescapable. In the background as he rants in his mangled Danish-American accent, the unmistakable sound of a pub in full swing.
And then he gets to the point. ‘Listen, I was thinking, I don’t have anywhere to stay tonight…’
This, I know, is a lie, or an untruth. Everybody knows that whenever Lars is in London these days he stays at his new manager’s posh house. But he wants something and I can already guess what it is.
‘Listen, I was thinking, maybe I could come over to your place, maybe crash on the couch?’
Shit, no. Not tonight. I’ve only just pulled up the drawbridge. But it’s hard to get a word in edgeways…
‘…we could get some beers, maybe, hang out…whaddayasay?’
I look over at the girlie but she mouths the word ‘no’. She has made the mistake of shrugging and saying ‘yes’ too many times before.
‘…or maybe we could catch a gig. What’s on tonight, do you know? I could meet you in Wardour Street, at The Ship. As a matter of fact, I’m there now…’
Finally – finally – I spot an opening and dive in with some half-hearted bit of spiel about needing to get a story finished and maybe next week or some other time perhaps, ’cos let’s face it there will always be another time for someone like Lars.
‘What?’ he says, not buying any of it. ‘You don’t want me to come over?’
‘No,’ I say, ‘of course I want you to come over. That would be great. It’s just…’
‘Oh, man! But I don’t have anywhere to stay.’
‘I thought you were staying at Peter’s,’ I say.
‘Well, yeah,’ he says, ‘but it’s so fucking boring. I need to get out, have some beers, tear it up. Come on, whaddayasay?’
The pips start to go again and so he goes to throw some more money in. But I get there first. ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I really can’t tonight. Good hearing from you though, man. Next time…’
‘Okay,’ he says, utterly unconvinced. And then the line goes dead. Phew. That was close. I mean, nice kid, means well, never shuts the fuck up though. I flop back down on the couch, roll one and try to forget about it…
Released in June 1982, the arrival of the first limited-edition copies of Brian Slagel’s epochal Metal Massacre album changed everything for Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield. Before it, they were two teenagers with the bare bones of an idea for a rock group. After it, they were this entity, something to be reckoned with, something called Metallica – or, rather, ‘Mettallica’, as they appeared on the original album sleeve and label. Lars and James didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. A dream come true, yet somehow just a little bit spoiled. Lars bit his lip and accepted Brian’s apologies. James said nothing, just fumed. ‘They understood,’ Slagel insists now. ‘They were not happy about it, for sure. [But] everything they delivered was late and the typesetter made the mistake. There was no way to check it before it went to press. I was furious! We changed it of course on all other versions [and] I apologised over and over to the band. As I said they were pretty cool about it, all things considered. I think it all worked out in the end for them,’ he adds dryly.
At least the existence of Metal Massacre gave the nascent Metallica line-up impetus. Moreover, it demonstrated something to Lars and James they had not known before: that they were actually good. It was as if the fact that they didn’t yet exist outside the fevered imaginations of Ulrich and Hetfield had enabled them somehow to be more than the meagre sum of their parts. Yet to be discouraged by poorly attended gigs or a string of rejection slips from disinterested music-biz figures, they just blast it out, as sure-footed as two guys virtually miming in front of their bedroom mirrors can be. Three weeks after the release of Metal Massacre, the band thought they had really cracked it when they went in to an eight-track studio in Tustin called Chateau East, where they recorded what they were convinced would actually become their first stand-alone release, following another typically brusque Lars Ulrich challenge to a more established local independent label owner. Unlike Brian Slagel, though, the owner was a punk aficionado – a genre still then diametrically opposed to heavy metal – and this time Lars’ bluff appeared to backfire.
‘[The guy] was a real snake in the grass,’ Ron McGovney would later recall. ‘He had this punk label, which was a division of an Orange County record company. He said he would put up the money to have us do an EP.’ But after hearing the seven tracks they came up with – comprised, essentially, of every original tune the four-man line-up had so far bolted together – he claimed to be appalled that the band had duped him into thinking they were a punk outfit and refused to release any of it. Ever resourceful, Lars suggested the band simply take the tracks and distribute them as a ‘limited edition’ cassette tape entitled No Life ’til Leather (taken from the opening line of ‘Hit the Lights’, and inspired by Motörhead’s live album No Sleep ’til Hammersmith, which had been Number One in the UK charts the summer Lars was there). Along with its own makeshift sleeve with liner notes written by Lars, plus tracklisting and band logo, you wouldn’t be able to buy it in the stores, in the way you could buy Metal Massacre, but it would burn a hole in the tape-trading scene, Lars rightly reasoned, which is exactly what it did. In fact, the seven tracks on No Life ’til Leather – ‘The Mechanix’, ‘Phantom Lord’, ‘Jump in the Fire’ and ‘Metal Militia’, all of which would be credited to Hetfield, Ulrich and Mustaine, but which Mustaine would later claim he had essentially written the bulk of alone, plus ‘Motorbreath’, another arrangement left over from Hetfield’s days working with Hugh Tanner but which would now be credited solely to James, ‘Seek and Destroy’, by James and Lars, and in no small measure ‘inspired’ by Diamond Head’s ‘Dead Reckoning’ (a track released earlier that year), plus a new version of ‘Hit the Lights’, this time featuring both Mustaine and McGovney (although they cannily over-dubbed onto it the original Lloyd Grant solo, too) – did everything for the band an official EP might have done, except garner reviews in the mainstream rock press. But it made up for that by the sheer force of its word-of-mouth following, something Lars understood only too well through his own avidness for obscure, hard-to-find NWOBHM releases.
Patrick Scott was enlisted to help send out copies of No Life. ‘I was actually really the only person mailing them out,’ he says now. ‘It was a little bit selfish [of Lars] but it was helping a friend, too. I had these pen-pals like Metal Mike from Aardshok, and Bernard Doe [at Metal Forces], and some other pen-pals…I would just send them demos and T-shirts then they’d send me stuff back…But they were just going nuts over Metallica, even in countries where we thought the cool bands were, they thought Metallica was the coolest band. Not in LA but everywhere else, from other states in the US, to Japan and Sweden and England…it was a fun time, running to the mailbox every day. Lars just kept giving me stuff to send out. He knew what he was doing.’ Lars would never claim to have masterminded any particular strategy, at least not at this stage, but he understood how getting their music out this way fitted Metallica’s developing profile in all sorts of useful ways. Although they would grow with the years into a much more inclusive club, the original music and mien of Metallica was quintessentially the sound of outsiders, positioned so far beyond the borders of the mainstream that they wouldn’t even bother trying to force their way in; an approach so utterly at odds with the prevailing crowd-pleasing LA attitude that it appeared to make no sense at all to most of the people they performed to at the various Hollywood clubs they were now beginning to play on a semi-frequent basis.
Soon, cassettes of No Life ’til Leather were circulating all over Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, London, Birmingham and Copenhagen. Band operations still centred on Ron’s parents’ bungalow – with Ron more often than not personally funding those activities, as he was the only one with an active credit card – but it was the start of Lars taking over the business side of the operation in terms of band profile and promotion. As he boasted to Rolling Stone years later, conveniently omitting the role played by Scott and others, ‘I was the one who went out and bought all the tapes. I was the one who sat down and copied them. I was the one who sent them out to people. That’s where it started. Somebody had to do it.’ Although they did also send tapes to various record companies, that side of it ‘was never that serious’, insisted Lars. ‘All we wanted to do was send it out to the traders, get mentioned in some fanzines.’ Typical of the reaction among the tape-trading fraternity was that of future Metallica fan club chief K.J. Doughton, who also received a tape from Scott. ‘After hearing the demo, I freaked out. Metallica had a distinctly European slant to their music, at a time when most US bands were light alloy at best. There were heavy Yank bands like Y&T, Riot, and The Rods, but Metallica took on the big, biblical, slash-and-burn, good-versus-evil issues. No party music. No girl-magnet ballads. Just brutal, attack-oriented audio death.’ Says Scott, ‘They were what we were all looking for.’ He recalls playing the tape down the phone for Ron Quintana. ‘I called him one day and played him “Hit the Lights” and he was like, “Oh my god!” He was just going crazy over it.’ When Quintana realised it was Lars Ulrich’s new band he was listening to, he ‘couldn’t believe it’. Says Ron now, ‘None of our friends were in popular bands so I never expected a little metal mad rocker like Lars would ever be in a big band! He talked a good game, but I never heard him play till mid-’82 on tape and LP and live till later.’ When Quintana then asked Scott to write an article on Metallica for Metal Mania, Patrick told Lars and they sat down and wrote it together. ‘This was like top secret back then,’ Patrick says. ‘We sat in [Lars’] bedroom and he was like, “You can’t tell anybody!” We were just laughing, saying these things which seemed ridiculous, like the famous line: “potential to become US metal gods”.’ As a reward, Lars gave Patrick a rare copy of 1980, the one and only album by Danish punk-metal progenitors Brats, the band guitarist Hank Shermann had before he joined Mercyful Fate. ‘I didn’t ask for that but [Lars] had two copies. I still have that. But I sent the article to Ron and it got into Metal Mania.’
Musically, Metallica’s influences were obvious to anyone then acquainted with the NWOBHM scene – which most American fans weren’t. Mixed in with obvious touchstones such as Diamond Head and Motörhead, though, were more obscure traces, including hardcore British and American punk. Hanging out after rehearsals, they would mix their Motörhead and Angel Witch records with new releases from the Ramones, Discharge and the Anti-Nowhere League, ‘and no one flinched’, said James. ‘It all belonged together. It was aggressive, it had guitars. It felt good. Discharge’s guitarist Bones was pulling off some serious metal riffs.’ Patrick Scott recalls introducing James and Lars to Accept’s Restless and Wild album, in particular the track ‘Fast as a Shark’. ‘They were a little bummed, like, “Somebody beat us to it!” They wanted to take all this stuff they loved and bring it to another level. Mainly Lars. He knew what he liked and what he didn’t like. He wanted to be like them but he wanted to take it a step further and combine Motörhead with the NWOBHM bands. Heavier, faster.’ It was also Patrick who first played them Mercyful Fate. James would play ‘Curse of the Pharaohs’ to get his guitar tone down. They loved Mercyful Fate…they were a big influence on Metallica, as far as an approach to be progressive with time-changes and putting just riffs in. They didn’t want chord progressions, they wanted riffs. That was the big thing. Ten riffs in one song you could make ten songs out of.’
The common thread running through all their listening habits back then – certainly the ones that were influencing their own writing – were speed, power and aggression. The first time Lars brought in a copy of Venom’s Welcome to Hell album – the original self-styled ‘black metal’ release – it had a huge impact, says Ron McGovney, although not necessarily in the same way for him. ‘The other guys loved Venom. I thought they sucked.’ He concedes, though, ‘I guess the speed of the songs may have been an influence.’ Not just the speed but their fiercely uncompromising, entirely antisocial tenor, exemplified in songs such as ‘Sons of Satan’, ‘One Thousand Days of Sodom’ and ‘Angel Dust’. A trio from Newcastle formed in the late 1970s and similar to Metallica in that they had a burning desire to take the influence of Motörhead, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath and essentially speed it up, by 1982 and the release of their second album, Black Metal, Venom’s frenzied shows were attracting a frightening mix of headbangers, bikers, punks and skinheads. Combining ‘the big pyro show’ of Kiss with ‘the satanic lyrics’ of Black Sabbath, as their bassist, vocalist and lead songwriter Conrad Lant, a.k.a. Cronos, explained in 2009, Venom’s credo was bite-size simple yet shockingly effective: ‘Metal is the devil’s music, let’s make it as aggressive as we possibly can.’ The extra twist: where Sabbath-era Ozzy Osbourne was always being ‘a tormented soul chased by demons…Venom wanted to be the demon’. The impact of Venom was such that it would help a whole new genre of rock to evolve in the USA; one which Metallica would be credited for inventing, though, as Lars says now, the real credit lies with the melting pot he and his bandmates were beginning to stir up together. ‘A band like Venom had a lot to answer for. Because there were a lot of the songs on their first record that were very fast. Then you say Venom, then okay maybe throw a little Discharge in there, then you throw a little GBH in there. All of a sudden you got a little bit of punk, a little bit of metal, a little bit of Motörhead, who sort of had one foot in each world, then you add the American X-factor – and there you have thrash!’
While the formula may have been as straightforward as Lars suggests, the long-term effect was something not even he could have predicted. As such, the arrival of Metallica, and with them this new phenomenon called ‘thrash metal’, was a watershed moment in rock history: the end of heavy metal as it had become, post-punk – either lugubrious rhythms dredged from a river setting the scene for jiggery-pokery lyrics about Satan and his followers, or self-conscious anthems full of whinnying guitars and blow-dried vocals – and the beginning of a whole new thing that began by offering an alternative to the staid old ways and ended up replacing them. Thrash discarded those clichéd images of heavy metal as readily as punk, but kept the muscle and musicianship. Punk was about singles; thrash about albums. After that the two had more in common than not; dressed down in street clothes, determinedly proletariat, its appeal lying far beyond the remit of the pop or rock mainstream. Compared to anyone who had gone before, Metallica were closest to Motörhead in terms of stripping back rock to its most vital components. But there was a comic aspect to Lemmy and his man-boys, a knowing wink, a glint of the gold tooth that Metallica did not share. Lars and his guys were far more earnest in their musical endeavours, dressed head to foot in black, building their songs into musical movements before they could barely play their instruments. Metallica was a more purist experience and to be a thrash fan meant taking the music to a far more serious level: closer to the deep emotional abyss of Dark Side-era Pink Floyd or the self-absorbed self-righteousness of the early Clash. Not quite as bleak as Joy Division, but then Joy Division didn’t come from sunny southern California where the light is so bright it bleaches the shadows. So while Metallica, and with them the template for thrash, would include some of the old-school rock trappings – show-stopping drum displays, cartwheeling solos on a Flying V, even the occasional power ballad – regular rock fans instantly recognised them and it for what they were: something new, something different, something less instantly likeable but perhaps more ultimately meaningful. In time, thrash would become successfully commodified and labelled – it was something to do with skateboarders, something to do with classic Marvel comic books, something to do with smoking pot, with taking speed, with hellacious beer drinking, something to do with tattoos and piercings and dirty white sneakers – but originally it had nothing to do with any of those things. It was simply about the obsession of a failed teenage tennis protégé with the early 1980s new wave of British metal, and the fact that Metallica was quintessentially American. Ten years earlier Lars would have been just as happy drumming in a Deep Purple-style band. Ten years later he’d have been in his element in a Soundgarden or an Alice In Chains. It just so happened that in 1982, when he formed his first – and last – band, the music they set out to play was still so unheard of, so unlikely, he ended up inventing a whole new genre on his own. As he later told me, ‘We didn’t call it thrash; we’d never even heard the term till we started reading about it in British magazines like Kerrang!. It was like, we’re thrash metal? Okay, it sounded cool…’
