Metallica: Enter Night (13 page)

What the Zazulas lacked in music-biz expertise, however, they more than made up for with sheer strength of will and a determination to succeed at any cost. Indeed, Jonny and Marsha were on their way to becoming one of the most formidable partnerships in the business – both personal and professional. As Jonny recalls, ‘Marsha used to go out with my best friend and she was really a bitch to me. We started out really hating each other. Marsha was a deadly girl. When she don’t like you, forget it. [But] it just changed over time. We started laughing, never knew why we were mad at each other, and it just grew into this great relationship. She and I never left each other’s side since.’

Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven, which he and Marsha had started in 1982 with $180 cash, was doing well enough that ‘by the time Metallica came along we had about $60,000 worth of inventory just from reinvesting, reinvesting, reinvesting’. From that they were able to scrape together $1,500 to send to the band so they could hire a U-Haul truck and make the cross-country road trip from San Francisco to New Jersey. ‘They bought a one-way ticket. I believe Dave and Cliff were living inside the truck all the way from San Francisco, ’cos there was no car with the U-Haul. They showed up a week later without a fuckin’ dime.’ Living in ‘a small residential, blue collar area’ what Jonny and Marsha hadn’t bargained for was the ‘culture shock’ of a bunch of drunken teenagers suddenly arriving on their doorstep. ‘They come and land right on my front lawn. Basically, me penniless, them penniless, and we’re going “What the fuck, man? How we gonna do this?”’ The answer was for them to stay in Jonny’s basement. But the band soon outstayed their welcome and the Zazulas had to move them out. ‘I had a little bar in the hallway and they poured themselves a drink. Just took the bottle and started guzzling. That was the first thing.’ The first time Jonny and Marsha took them down to Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven, says Jonny, ‘I wondered if I’d made a mistake.’ Dave Mustaine was so drunk ‘he spent the entire time throwing up outside. As people were leaving, he’s there with long hair and vomit all over the place; just puking up a storm. To the normal people of the flea market who are selling linens and children’s clothes it was like, “Oh my god, what did he bring to this market!”’ Jonny, who was getting complaints ‘all the time’ for playing his records so loud, ‘didn’t need this’.

With Jonny still finishing his time in the halfway house, though, the brunt of the band’s bad behaviour was born by Marsha. ‘I had an infant, a husband in a halfway house and a band that was screwing everybody in the neighbourhood in my basement.’ She says she wondered if she was doing the right thing ‘every day. This was very far afield from anything I had ever done before. We put our entire lives on the line for them because we lived in a little suburban community, which wasn’t all that impressed with the guys. And because we poured every ounce, every penny we had into them, we had to not pay our mortgage. We had [situations] where we couldn’t pay electric bills and lost our electricity.’ Her father, who would buy them groceries, ‘to keep us fed, and in turn was then feeding the band’. Marsha adds, ‘They were young teens who had all kinds of things going on in their own lives. They drank too much. They partied a little too hearty. You kind of looked at it and said, “Oh my god! Is this what I’m investing my life in? How is this all gonna play out?” But at the core of it [was] their talent, their incredible talent made you just say I’ve gotta keep doing this. These guys are great, these guys are different. They have that – whatever that is – that can propel them, and so you just kept going, even when some days you weren’t quite sure why.’

The only member of the band who possessed any decorum, says Marsha, was Cliff Burton. ‘If I have to say who was I closest to in those days, who did I bond with the most, it was Cliff. He was a
treasure
to have in my home. He was great, he was respectful. He was warm. He would help me out with Rikki, because she was so little and I would be busy doing something. It would be time for her to go to bed and so he’d read her a story or sing her a song. He was quite the human. James and Lars were just, like, diabolically different,’ she chuckles. ‘’Cos at night James [and Dave] would want to get drunk, party and Lars of course would be out [chasing] the women.’ Lars, she adds, ‘really was quite the man, in his own mind…he was a small man in white spandex pants, so you had to kind of give him a break’. Cliff, though, ‘was really a hippy in a heavy metal band, with his bell-bottoms and his whole persona, just a beautiful, beautiful human being’. She adds, ‘Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough of a voice in the band. In terms of the decisions that were made, Lars was the ringleader and he said it and that was it, they moved in that motion. Cliff wasn’t involved in that aspect of the band. He was a musician, pure.’

Blasting out the
No Life
demo from the market stall every day, says Jonny, ‘
Everybody
was coming round from everywhere going “What the fuck is that?” Before you know it, the siege of Metallica started.’ For the rest of the band’s stay, ‘we only played
No Life ’til Leather
in our store’. Jonny would sit in his living room with Mark Whitaker, who had come up with the band from San Francisco as their live sound engineer and all round ‘guy Friday’, making more cassette copies of
No Life
to sell at the store at a knock-down price of $4.99. ‘As many as we can every day, one at a time, so they had some money to eat and live while they were here. And we sold
tons
of them. It still wasn’t enough, you know, but we sold a lot compared to any other band.’

Lars would hang out at the stall every day, watching, taking it all in. Lars, says Marsha, was ‘always the one. He was the master, orchestrator of his destiny. And whether that came from the fact that his dad was a tennis star and he always wanted to be looked at by his dad with high regard, or what, I don’t know. But he just was always, “I’m gonna get there. I’m gonna do this and we’re gonna do that.” He really did, for a very young man, have a very succinct plan in his mind as to how he envisioned Metallica and how he heard the music. It was really quite interesting.’ At the stall where they had ‘umpteen albums’, Lars would commandeer the turntable. ‘“Oh, listen to this, listen to that. See how they do this, see how they do that.” He was always involved. It wasn’t like he said, okay, well, this is my music and I’m gonna do it this way. He was very aware of his predecessors in the music business, musician-wise, and always watching what was happening.’ It was that fiercely competitive aspect of Ulrich’s character, says Marsha, that drove Metallica. ‘He just always wanted to be at the top of the heap. They were creative, as far as how they presented themselves. They came to us with their logo and it was brilliant. Then it was, “How do we work off our logo?” [Lars] was a forerunner, he really was. I don’t think they would have succeeded without that competitive side of him, and being aware of everything that was going on around him…’

Jonny didn’t really have what he calls his ‘Brian Epstein moment’, though, until he saw the band play live for the first time: two shows over the weekend of 8 and 9 April; the first, opening for Swedish rock darlings Vandenberg at the Paramount Theater in Staten Island; the second, supporting US metal up-and-comers The Rods at L’Amours in Brooklyn. ‘It was intense, whoosh.’ However, ‘Every show they played had an edge. You didn’t know where the fuck-up was gonna come. They were making mistakes in those days.’ For Metallica this was a baptism of fire. ‘These were big shows in big venues,’ says Jonny. ‘Marsha and I had kind of taken over the Staten Island, New York area rock shows…venues that held up to two thousand. They didn’t come in and start in little clubs, like The Beatles. We put them in front of a lot of people.’ Dee Snider, frontman for Twisted Sister – a New York band then making waves in the UK – came up to Jonny during one of the shows Metallica played and asked: ‘What is
that
, Jonny?’

The only real problem that Jonny and Marsha could see was Dave Mustaine. ‘You didn’t know with his drinking what you were gonna get,’ says Jonny. ‘You were either gonna get the friendly Dave, or you were gonna get the monster Dave. He was so drunk you just didn’t know how he could play those notes. Everybody [in the band] was heavy into the booze but Dave was over the top.’ Privately, Lars and James had already told Jonny they, too, were sick of Mustaine’s loutish behaviour, his drunken antics and his confrontational attitude, that they were, as Lars put it, ‘just gonna hang on until someone [else] came along’. Jonny’s concern was that without Mustaine the band wouldn’t be nearly as good. ‘I was worried because even though Mustaine was so out of control, he was a real big part of the band. Some of the best songs were written with Dave Mustaine. [To replace him] it was gonna be really weird.’ According to Lars, the band had already decided to replace Mustaine before their U-Haul had even reached the East Coast. ‘It all kind of spilled over [then],’ he said. ‘There were a few things happening that became too much.’ Not least the time a drunken Mustaine insisted on taking his turn driving the truck and allegedly nearly crashed it into a jeep during a snowstorm near Wyoming. ‘We could have all been killed,’ said James. ‘We knew it couldn’t go on like that, so we started looking at other stuff.’

Mark Whitaker, who also managed fellow San Franciscan metallists Exodus, suggested poaching their lead guitarist, a curly-haired whiz-kid named Kirk Hammett. Unlike Dave Mustaine, who was big and brash and utterly unpredictable, twenty-year-old Kirk Hammett was short, like Lars, and nerdy. Unlike Lars, he was quiet; a cool number, though already well schooled in the Metallica way, having opened for them with Exodus at the Stone and hung out at the Metallimansion. Like Cliff, he was another easygoing San Franciscan, born into a time and place famous for the flowers it wore in its extremely long hair. The kind of stoner dude you’d see walking round the Haight with buds in his beard – once he’d started to shave, which he still looked like he hadn’t at the time he met Metallica. Best of all, Hammett was technically one of the best guitar players on the scene. Behind the amiable façade was an extremely determined young gun who still took lessons and practised for hours each day, no matter how wasted on weed. Not an innovator like Mustaine, certainly not such a monster personality, but with a much broader musical palette and a much steadier emotional hand – the kind of talented kid who would do what he was told. They told Mark to keep it dark but to call Kirk, check it out.

It was 1 April and Kirk was ‘sitting on the can’ when Whitaker made the phone call. Hammett assumed it was an April Fool’s gag, said, ‘Yeah, sure’, and hung up, barely giving it another thought. He only knew it was for real when Whitaker called him back the following morning and told him he was Fed-Exing a tape of Metallica songs for him to learn. ‘Then I started to get more calls from Whitaker: “The band wants you to come to New York to audition with them.” I thought about it for like two seconds and said, “Sure, I’ll check it out.”’ The tape arrived just four days before Metallica’s first gig – with Mustaine still in place – for Jonny Z. By the time the band was onstage at the Paramount and ready to launch into ‘The Mechanix’ – the song Dave Mustaine wrote for them and the number Jonny still loved best – Kirk was already saying goodbye to his bandmates in Exodus and getting ready to board a plane for New York, to start his new life in Metallica, first thing Monday morning.

Nervous about how Dave would react to the news, the others decided to tell him while he was in bed, still half asleep, having been woken first thing Monday morning by Lars, who drew the short straw and was the one who actually broke the news. Lars would later joke that Dave had asked what time his flight left, to which the band replied that they’d booked him on the first Greyhound bus out of town. ‘Not only was he out of the band but he had to sit on a bus for four days and think about it!’ Lars laughed. Mustaine would remember it a little differently. ‘Basically, when they told me to leave I packed in about twenty seconds and I was gone. I wasn’t upset at all as I wanted to start a solo project during the middle of Metallica anyway.’ In fact, Mustaine was devastated, becoming more furious as each hour passed on the four-day bus ride back to San Francisco, at what he would increasingly come to see as the band’s betrayal of him. Specifically, what he saw as Lars’ role in his sacking. ‘I like James more than Lars, I think everybody does,’ Mustaine was still telling people in 2008. Interviewed by Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro for his internet-based
Spread TV
talk show, he added, bitchily, ‘I don’t really like Kirk ’cos he got my job but I nailed his girlfriend before I left.’ Mustaine also claimed he and Hetfield ‘had planned to fire Lars so many times’. All of this may contain different degrees of truth, yet to find Mustaine still talking about it a quarter of a century later arguably says more about his own unresolved issues.

Giving his first interview since being fired from Metallica, to Bob Nalbandian, in January 1984, Mustaine gave a slightly more balanced view. ‘The truth of the matter was that things just didn’t click,’ he said. ‘I was a different person back then. I was a brash person that was always drunk and having fun and James and Lars were withdrawn little boys. James hardly ever talked to people. [James] was singing but it was I who talked in between songs. The whole thing was that I had too much to drink. But I fuck up one time and it costs me the band and they fuck up a hundred times…’ He paused. ‘There’s been times when I had to carry both James and Lars because they were so drunk.’ It was true. As Brian Slagel says now, ‘Everybody back then was partying. None of us were sober when things were going on.’ Nor was Dave Mustaine the only one who became angry and unpleasant when drunk. Harald Oimoen recalls a late-night visit to his apartment during which a drunken James badly lost his cool, showing his mean streak after Oimoen showed him a picture he’d taken recently of Hetfield and Ulrich in bed together, goofing around, that was then used on the cover of Ron Quintana’s
Metal Mania
, along with a joke picture of Eldon Hoke, a.k.a. El Duce, the notoriously overweight drummer-vocalist of Seattle’s self-styled ‘rape rock’ band The Mentors. ‘James hadn’t seen it before and I hadn’t realised at the time that they wanted to keep those pictures to themselves; it was like a private fun kind of thing,’ Oimoen recalled. ‘So I showed the magazine to James and he had a big smile on his face, he thought it was great. And then all of a sudden he realised what the picture was of and he kicked me in the stomach, and we almost got into a brawl and he said I was never taking photos of them again after that. But once the alcohol wore off and we started talking about it, it was all cool.’