Metallica: Enter Night (12 page)

It took almost four months for Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield to persuade Cliff Burton to at least jam with Metallica. Intrigued but far from convinced yet, Cliff began turning up whenever the band played in San Francisco, something that was now happening on a monthly basis. Cliff picked up on two things straight away: how different their approach was to the more staid, far more trad-metal ideals of the cheesy Trauma – and just how much the crowds appreciated that – and how lifeless the playing was of the incumbent bassist, the well-meaning but increasingly out-of-his-depth McGovney. The only thing that put him off was the thought of having to relocate to LA. Why would he want to slum it in a city he instinctively hated, when he still enjoyed all the comforts of home in a city more naturally suited to his sensibilities?

What finally made up his mind to make the jump was the fact that, as he told Harald O, ‘eventually Trauma started to…annoy me’. Specifically, the band was ‘starting to get a little commercial’. ‘Commercial’ was Cliff’s polite word for embarrassing. What the rest of Trauma saw as their inherent theatricality, Cliff saw as trying too hard to attract a wider audience. Metallica seemed to have found a way of attracting a fanatical following in the Bay Area by simply turning up as themselves. There was, however, one condition Cliff made to the band, and it was a deal-breaker: they would have to come to him. No way was he leaving home for LA – not even for the hottest new band in the Bay. He told them: ‘I like it up here. So they said, “Yeah, well, we were thinking about doing that anyway.” So that worked out just right. So, they came up and we got together in this room that we’re sitting in now, set up the gear and blasted it out for a couple of days. It was pretty obvious straight away that it was a good thing to do, so we did it!’

Lars, who had already seen it coming, reasoned that with Ron out of the picture now anyway, and the band left with nowhere to rehearse, it was time to say, ‘Okay, fuck it. LA is pretty shitty for us anyway.’ According to Jan, Cliff ‘was a very loyal person’ who ‘didn’t want to leave Trauma. But Trauma wanted him to go plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk. He wanted to play lead bass and they said, “No way.” He really became so frustrated at wanting to express himself musically. Metallica kept calling every week. They’d call him from LA and he’d say, “No, no.” When they finally got together he’d say, “I wanna play lead bass. I want some spot in here where I can go off.” And they said, “You can play anything you want, just come with us.”’

It was a bold move for both sides, but most especially for the three-man Metallica line-up who agreed to relocate from LA to San Francisco. As Brian Slagel says now, ‘It was a
very
big deal.’ Los Angeles and San Francisco are ‘polar-opposite cities’. Regarding Lars, however, Slagel states, ‘I don’t think it really mattered that much, ’cos he was used to kind of moving around anyway.’ For James, ‘a guy that grew up in LA, and for that matter Mustaine, that’s kind of a big move. But the timing of it was good, too. None of them had any really strong ties to LA. They felt much more at home in San Francisco. It really was day and night…And Cliff was clearly the right guy. I mean, he was just an unbelievable bass player. So they felt it would definitely be a big upgrade for them to get a guy like that, even to consider it.’ Unlike Ron, none of them had girlfriends at this stage either. Says Slagel: ‘They didn’t have those ties. I guess there was a certain family tie with Lars. But I know James didn’t have a great relationship with his family and the same was true of Dave. But Lars’ family was so supportive, it was like, hey, if that’s what you need to do to make you happy we’ll be completely supportive of that. So why not move to San Francisco?’

Certainly it was something the band felt they had to do. As Lars would tell me, in San Francisco, Metallica simply ‘connected to a whole different level of energy and vibe [than in LA] and there was much more passion…there was much more of a scene. People were passionate about music, people were curious, people were open. I think in LA we had always felt like outcasts, like we never belonged. It seemed like the music was secondary to the partying. Up in San Francisco there was just a different level of passion and people reacted differently to the music. So when we decided to not only pursue Cliff but to offer ourselves to Cliff, when I told him we would be glad to leave behind LA, and when I realised that it actually became conditional for him, that the only way he would even consider joining the band would be if we moved to San Francisco, it was a no-brainer. Of course we would relocate to the Bay Area because we felt from those shows in the fall of ’82 much more of a kinship, we felt like we belonged there.’

Leaving for San Francisco, they stopped off at Patrick Scott’s house. ‘They came over to tell me goodbye,’ he says. It was a poignant moment for the school friends. Patrick knew he ‘probably wasn’t going to see Lars again any time soon. They said goodbye and hung out for a while and then they left.’ He remembers how, ‘Lars once asked my dad for ten thousand dollars to invest in the band but who in their right mind would have done that? My dad said, “How would anybody rationalise ten thousand dollars in [an unknown] rock band? How many of them make it, you know?”’ When they drove off, Patrick realised that ‘James had left his high school letterman jacket at my house. I called James and told him he left his jacket there and he said, “Just throw it away; I don’t really want it any more.” But I kept it, I still have it actually. It says “J. Hetfield” on the neck and in embroidery on the front it says “James”. I told him about it maybe five years ago and told him he could have it back if he wanted it for like his kids or whatever and he was like, “No, but keep it. Don’t sell it, just keep it.” And I still have it.’

So it was in the week between Christmas and New Year 1982, that Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield and Dave Mustaine packed as much of their gear as they could onto another trailer – this time paid for with their own money and not Ron’s – and drove north up the California coast road to San Francisco, where they had arranged to stay temporarily at their friend Mark Whitaker’s house at 3132 Carlson Boulevard in El Cerrito, in the East Bay. Whitaker was a well-known face on the SF club scene. Having taken on the role of manager for local boys Exodus, he had also helped out recently at several Metallica gigs, now becoming their full-time live sound engineer and general dogsbody. When he agreed to let James, Lars and Dave stay for a few days over the Christmas holidays of 1982, he had no idea what he was letting himself in for. By February 1983 all three had moved in permanently and Whitaker’s El Cerrito house was quickly nicknamed the Metallimansion. It would become the band’s HQ for the next three years – the place where they would not only write the material that would comprise some of the greatest albums of their career, but where they began to live the rock ’n’ roll life they had only previously fantasised about. Or: ‘every cliché that you could muster up’, as Lars put it. ‘Me and James each had a bedroom. Dave Mustaine slept on the couch. Dogs running around. We had the old garage converted into a rehearsal room with egg cartons. It was the refuge, the sanctuary for everybody in the neighbourhood. People would come over and live there, hang there. It was a lot of fun – when you’re nineteen.’ It was also the place where they would forge the ‘gang mentality’ they would need to keep them strong through the testing times ahead – ‘this tiny little situation. Nobody can stray outside of…the thing you do.’

As Ron Quintana recalls, ‘The Carlson pad was a fairly normal first pad away from home for three young LA transplants, but quickly things got wilder! The three of them would have nothing to do in El Cerrito but drink vodka most days and practise those days Cliff made the hour drive north from his comfortable Castro Valley parents’ pad. Most nights they would hang out and drink or go to Exodus’ practice studio and party or an occasional Berkeley Keystone metal show or Metal Mondays at the Old Waldorf or shows at Mabuhay or Stone.’ Weekends would be spent cadging drinks at Ruthie’s Inn ‘or an occasional house party’ where the three would join well-known party animal and Exodus vocalist Paul Baloff and guitarist Gary Holt ‘and destroy someone’s living room’.

It was also at 3132 Carlson Boulevard that, on 28 December 1982, Metallica held their first all-night jam session with Cliff Burton. The impact was immediate. Cliff liked everything from Bach to Black Sabbath, from Pink Floyd to the Velvet Underground, from Lynyrd Skynyrd to R.E.M. As Lars told me in 2009, ‘Cliff turned me and James onto a lot of stuff at the time. From Peter Gabriel to ZZ Top to a lot of stuff that we really didn’t [know]. He flew the flag for bands like Yes. We’d never really experienced a lot of that type of stuff. Of course, at the same time, he had never heard that much Diamond Head or Saxon and Motörhead, or anything like that. So there was definitely a cool give and take there.’ Or as James told me, ‘Besides introducing us to more music theory, [Cliff] was the most schooled of any of us, he had gone to junior college to learn some things about music, and taught us quite a few things.’

Cliff, who ‘had a really bad back because he was always bent over thrashing his head’, was to become an influence in many other, entirely unexpected ways, too. James again: ‘He was the kind of guy, you know, him and I aligned a lot closer as friends, as far as our activities, music styles that we liked, bands that we liked, politically, views on the world, we were pretty parallel on that wavelength. But, yeah, he had such a character to himself, and it was a very strong personality, he did creep into all of us eventually.’ Says Lars: ‘Cliff was very, very different from James and Dave and Ron and anybody else. I mean, Cliff lived a whole different life up in the Bay Area. He was an interesting mix of the kind of hippy, trippy, non-conformist kind of vibe that was so well known about San Francisco and kind of…in his own headspace. And then also, a whole side that I’d never really experienced in America yet, was kind of what we call the redneck element. You know, he lived out in Castro Valley. It’s a good thirty- or forty-minute drive from San Francisco [and] there was a different kind of vibe out there, a little bit in the suburbs, a little bit sort of beer-drinking, hell-raising. Listening to ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd, type of thing. A little bit of that kind of vibe. So he was a very interesting mix of many different types of personalities and so on. When me and James met him I was just infatuated with his uniqueness. I was infatuated with his lack of conformity, and his sole insistence on doing his own thing, even to the point of ridicule. I mean, even at that time. Me and Hetfield were wearing as tight pants as possible and Cliff was wearing the famous bell-bottoms. There was a lot of contradictions about him.’ Within ‘the uniqueness’ there was also ‘a little bit of a rebellious attitude and energy, and obviously I could really relate to [that]. Being an only child from a very bohemian upbringing in Denmark and stuff, I could really relate to…really just doing your own trip and not kind of being caught up in what everybody else wanted from you. So we really hit it off on that level.’ Cliff Burton was simply ‘not your basic human being’, James later laughingly recalled. ‘He was really intellectual but very to the point. He taught me a lot about attitude.’ Cliff, said James, was ‘a wild, hippy-ish, acid-taking, bell-bottom-wearing guy. He meant business, and you couldn’t fuck around with him. I wanted to get that respect that he had. We gave him shit about his bell-bottoms every day. He didn’t care. “This is what I wear. Fuck you.”’

The four of them saw in 1983 by sitting round in the garage at Carlson Boulevard getting wasted on beer and pot and talking up their plans for the future. That was when Burton gave them his philosophy in typically Cliff-like shorthand. As he later told Harald O, ‘When I started [playing music], I decided to devote my life to it and not get sidetracked by all the other bullshit life has to offer.’ Wise words the rest of Metallica would do their utmost to try and live by – even after Cliff had left them.

Time was getting on and we were only halfway through the show. I looked up at the big studio clock.

‘Where are the guests?’ I asked the floor manager.

‘In the toilet,’ he grimaced.

‘Still?’

‘Yeah. I think they’re…you know…’

Because we recorded the show so early in the morning it didn’t happen often that one of the bands actually turned up drunk or stoned. But just occasionally, you got one or two, usually from one of the younger bands, who felt the need to vanish into the loos and lock the door behind them before sauntering onto the set ready for their close-up.

Then here they came, strutting, frowning, faking. The two Daves from…I checked my crib sheet…Megadeth. Right. I took a guess and held my hand out to the one in front with the long curly hair and the painted-on sneer.

‘Dave Mustaine,’ I said, acting pleased to see him. ‘Welcome to the Monsters of Rock show.’

He held out his paw and allowed me to grasp it. One of the production assistants showed him to his seat while I said hello to the other Dave – Ellefson. Dave Junior, as he was fast becoming known. Junior was the band’s bassist, and although he was just as fucked-up on drugs as his leader, he came without a sneer and minus the ton of attitude. They were the yin and yang of Megadeth, good cop, bad cop.

I settled myself down and watched as they sniffed loudly and leered at the production assistant’s cleavage. They wanted us to know they were bad boys and we dutifully played along.

Then the interview began. Cameras rolling, sound and…the floor manager made the funny hand signals for action.

I began by mentioning Mustaine’s past in Metallica but he cut me short. ‘That was then,’ he sneered. ‘This is now and I really don’t think I have much to say about it. I don’t speak ill of the dead…’

Oh, but he did. Every chance he got. As soon as we took a break for the first video he got into it. How he’d written all the songs on the first Metallica album but never received the credit. How the band had been nothing until he came along. How they were hypocrites for tossing him out when they were all drinking and getting fucked up just as much as he did. How Lars couldn’t play the drums and Kirk had just ripped him off. How James was scared of him.

Dave Junior, who’d obviously heard it all before and could look forward to many years more of hearing it over again, shifted in his seat and cleared his throat and tried to change the subject. But Mustaine just ignored him. This wasn’t about Dave Junior or even about Megadeth. It certainly wasn’t about trying to tell
me
anything, whoever I was, some asshole with a cable show and an Iron Maiden T-shirt.

This was all about Dave Mustaine. Always had been, always would be. God bless his broken black heart…

In many ways, relocating to San Francisco at the start of 1983 is the real start of the Metallica story. It certainly felt that way for Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield. Speaking to me in 2009, Lars put it like this: ‘What happened were two things. Number one, we started being more comfortable with ourselves, more confident. We started feeling that we were belonging to something that was happening, and that was bigger than ourselves, that we
belonged
instead of being on the outer fringes. And number two was…Cliff. At that time, me and James were basically self-taught. Most of what we knew we’d learned from [listening to] records and so on. But Cliff had been to college, had studied music at school; was educated in music, so there was a whole different level of expertise that came in there…a sense of melody and a whole other scope of understanding music.’ San Francisco also provided a more cultural mêlée that reminded the brash young drummer of his European roots. ‘I felt the kinship there right away…You took the train around, you took the tram…It was a bunch of kids from the city instead of a bunch of kids from the suburbs. It was big city living and obviously with the cultural scene in San Francisco, the political openness and that whole type of thing, it was…really the closest I’ve found to a European big city. That’s why I choose to live there still. If I was tarred and feathered and thrown out of San Francisco and told never to return I would probably go back to Europe. Because I don’t think there is any other place in the States that I would feel as comfortable in, or that I feel would be home in the way that San Francisco [does].’

As Lars suggests, things began to move much faster after Cliff Burton joined Metallica. Within days of his first show with them in San Francisco at the Stone, on 5 March 1983, there was already talk of making an album. So excited were they by the possibilities of the line-up now Burton was aboard, they arranged for his second gig with them, again at the Stone, on 19 March, to be videotaped, capturing on tape his classic windmill style of bass playing, swinging his beloved 1973 Rickenbacker like an axe, wringing angry distorted tones from it one moment, loud sensuous moans the next, all the while using all ten fingers to dig out the continually propulsive rhythm. Lars, whose drumming was still rudimentary at best, struggled to keep up. Cliff even had his own showpiece within the set, an extended bass solo that would later be immortalised on the first Metallica album, already even at this early stage a highlight of the new Metallica show. ‘We do what we want,’ Cliff was captured on video saying. ‘We don’t care what anyone else thinks.’ There had also been two new tracks demoed at the Metallimansion on 16 March, the first Metallica recordings to feature Cliff Burton: ‘Whiplash’ and ‘No Remorse’. Once again, the band was quick to ensure cassette copies were shared around the fanzine and foreign magazine guys as well as their network of regular tape-traders. They also pulled off a minor coup when they persuaded a DJ at radio station KUSF FM to play both tracks on air, on the basis that Metallica was now, technically speaking at least, a local San Francisco band.

Brian Slagel had been ready to put out a Metallica record of some description since the first time John Kornarens played him the
No Life ’til Leather
tape and asked him to guess who it was. Slagel assumed it must be some bright new European band: ‘It sounded awesome.’ When John told him it was Lars Ulrich’s group, he couldn’t believe it. ‘This is
Metallica
? This thing is incredible!’ The problem was Slagel’s fledgling Metal Blade label simply didn’t have the money for the kind of project Lars had in mind. The widespread circulation of
No Life ’til Leather
and, the latest cassette on the tape-trading scene, an audience recording – from a boom box placed in front of the speaker stacks – of Ron McGovney’s last show with them at the Old Waldorf at the end of November, dubbed the
Live Metal up Your Ass
demo, had done a certain job. What Metallica needed now, Lars felt strongly, was a more accomplished studio recording; something that demonstrated there was more to them than home-made demos and live tapes. As a stopgap, Slagel suggested simply releasing the seven-track
No Life
demo as an EP. ‘But good as they liked it they wanted something a little bit better, if they were actually going to put together a real recording.’

One studio in LA offered to let them come in and record an album for a flat fee of $10,000. They asked Brian for the ten grand but he told them: ‘I don’t have ten thousand dollars! Are you kidding me?’ He offered instead to try and find someone willing to invest the ten thousand. ‘But back then that was a lot of money and it just never really happened. By the time they got to San Francisco, I think they were more focused on getting Cliff into the band and integrating him in and playing some shows. We had some other loose discussions about stuff but again nobody had any money and there was just no way to make a quality recording.’ Nobody Brian Slagel or Metallica knew out on the West Coast, anyway. Three thousand miles away on America’s East Coast, however, somebody they didn’t know yet was having other ideas. His name was Jon Zazula – Jonny Z – and though he didn’t have any money either, he and his wife and business partner Marsha Zazula more than made up for that with what Jonny now calls ‘the passion’. He and Marsha ‘loved music so much’, he says, ‘that we were willing to sacrifice anything for music and for metal. “For the metal” – that’s what we used to say.’ It was a phrase that Jonny and Marsha would repeat like a mantra over the coming months as they struggled to keep pace with what was already one of the toughest times they would endure, even before the four beer-hungry kids in Metallica arrived on their doorstep to disrupt and forever change their lives.

At the time he heard his first Metallica recordings – a ten-track bootleg cassette of one of Ron McGovney’s last shows at the Mabuhay Gardens in November – Jonny was then running a record-and-tape stall named Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven in a flea market near to his and Marsha’s home in Old Bridge, New Jersey. Offered a copy of the cassette by a regular customer who insisted he play it immediately, the Mabuhay tape consisted of live versions of the seven-track
No Life
demo plus the newer ‘No Remorse’ and ‘Whiplash’ and the inevitable Diamond Head cover, ‘Am I Evil?’, which Jonny, another NWOBHM aficionado, instantly recognised. Jonny remembers how, ‘One of our customers came back from San Francisco like he saw Jesus Christ! We would be playing Angel Witch or Iron Maiden or whatever in the shop and never played a demo…but we sold them. And [this guy] came over with a [live] tape cassette of Metallica. It wasn’t even
No Life ’til Leather
and I was blown away. Actually the song that got me was “The Mechanix”. That was the one that initially just blew me out of my seat. I wanted to find out where I could find these guys. This all was happening as I’m listening to the tape the first time. Then someone hands me K.J. Doughton’s name and I think I called up somebody to get K.J.’s phone number and then I called him and he called Lars and then Lars called me.’

When Lars phoned during dinner one night, Jonny wasn’t even sure yet what he wanted to tell this unknown new band. ‘Damned if I know. I just got caught in this passion, like there’s this little Led Zeppelin hanging out in El Cerrito, you know? Just a little gem that blew my mind. They seemed like America’s antidote to the NWOBHM. America really didn’t have anything, especially in the east, to compete in that world.’ The only concrete proposal Jonny had for them at that point was the suggestion they might like to open up at some of the shows he and Marsha had recently begun promoting locally, featuring the sorts of artists his regular customers at Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven were interested in seeing. They had begun by ‘being in cahoots’ with the then-hot Anvil. After that came NWOBHM outfit Raven. At the same time as they first discovered Metallica, the Zazulas were also looking at bringing in Germany’s best new metal act, Accept, and taking a punt on local boys Manowar. Says Jonny, ‘We had Raven tearing up the place and Anvil tearing up the place before Metallica. And they were
big
successes, Raven and Anvil. That’s how we started.’

Jonny and Marsha’s next venture was twelve dates they were putting together: ‘The shows were to be with Venom, Twisted Sister…We [also] had Vandenberg and The Rods.’ Talking on the phone to Lars for the first time, Jonny impetuously ‘offered all twelve to Metallica, if they’d come over. Marsha thought I was crazy.’ Lars, who had already heard through the grapevine of something happening in the north-east, told Jonny: ‘Let’s go! Send me some money, I’ll get everybody together, we’ll come over!’ Jonny acted delighted, then got off the phone and immediately started worrying. Money was so tight he and Marsha still relied occasionally on handouts from her father just to buy groceries. He’d also omitted to tell Lars one other important detail: Jonny was actually halfway through serving a six-month jail sentence for conspiracy to commit wiretap fraud, while working for a company involved in trading precious metals. Or, as he puts it now, ‘For being too bright and a wise guy on Wall Street.’ A situation that was especially difficult as Jonny maintains to this day that he was innocent of the charges, but that his lawyer advised him to plead guilty because he couldn’t afford the cost of a long-drawn-out defence trial which he was likely to lose anyway. The result: a six-month jail sentence, which he was allowed to serve at a ‘halfway house’. Or ‘a jail without guards,’ as Jonny puts it. ‘I was left with a pity plea, a wife and a beautiful baby. I never did jail time, they wanted me to be able to work and feed my family. [But] we lost everything, Marsha and I, from our Wall Street mis-experience. I would spend the week [at the halfway house] and the weekends at home. The only phone that was available to do all this organisation of the shows was done on a payphone in a halfway house with quarters, with people who’d just got out of prison waiting for the phone to speak to their girlfriends. Waiting for me on the phone for twenty minutes, they were gonna kill me. You can imagine this? Nobody knows this story.’

The six-month sentence was eventually commuted to four and a half months. In the meantime, Marsha not only had to somehow keep Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven going, she had to look after their infant daughter Rikki. Friends rallied round – from ‘Old Bridge militia’ pals such as Rockin’ Ray and Metal Joe, to the kindly neighbours across the street who sent their son over to mow their front lawn when the grass got so high other neighbours began sticking letters in the mail, complaining. Meanwhile, Jonny’s father-in-law took over the weekday running of the market stall while Marsha kept Jonny’s spirits up by doing everything she could to keep the dream alive of moving from market stall owner to local gig promoter. Says Jonny: ‘I knew nothing about the business. Marsha went and got me out of the library all these books about how to be a manager, and understanding music law, and all that. I would read them at night, during the week, so that I understood all the various points of a contract – What should a band get? What’s fair? – all that stuff. I learned it out of books ’cos there was no years of experience.’