Metallica: Enter Night (15 page)

An ex-New Yorker who was so shocked by news of Hendrix’s death he took up the guitar himself – ‘the day I heard he died, I was playing football and I went to the coach and told him I was leaving to play guitar to be like my hero,’ he says now – by 1981 Joe Satriani was working out of a guitar shop in Berkeley, giving lessons, while trying to get his own club band, The Squares, off the ground. Kirk had heard of him ‘from just being in the San Francisco underground metal scene and seeing a few guitar players in the scene who had a massive amount of technique, and me coming up to them and introducing myself to them and asking, “How did you learn to play like this?” And they all said the same thing, “Oh, I’m taking lessons from this guy named Joe, in this music store in Berkeley.”’ Kirk, who ‘had to just find this guy’ got on his bike and rode it to Satriani’s store. ‘I walked in, like “Hi, I’m here for guitar lessons. Is there a guy named Joe in the house?”, and some guy in the back said, “Yeah, I’m over here.”’

‘The first few times Kirk came to me for lessons I remember his mother brought him,’ says Satriani now. ‘It was the beginning of thrash metal in San Francisco. But Kirk was really quite different, really wanting to know the secrets behind Uli Jon Roth and Michael Schenker as well as Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. He was a connoisseur, a really good head on his shoulders. He knew what he liked and had really good taste. One day he comes in and says, “Hey man, I got this audition for this band Metallica.” Then I didn’t see him for a bit, then he comes back and he’s like, “I’m in this band and it’s great! We’re recording an album!” Things were just taking off for them and it was really great to see it. Then later on as they were working on other records, sometimes he would bring in songs that they were working on and he’d say, “What do you play over this?” Because James [Hetfield] would be writing some chord progressions that people hadn’t written before. Whether he knew what he was doing or not, it didn’t matter; he was writing some very intense music. But Kirk, who was the soloist in the band, it put him in a new stop. If he went back and looked at Schenker’s solos or Hendrix solos he’d say, well, those guys didn’t get into this territory either so where’s my guide, you know? And so I started to introduce him to some unusual scales. And the way I did it was quite organic. I would show him a scale, explain to him that the scale comes from the notes of the chord progression and then I’d say, “But there are no rules and you have to decide what scale you’re going to play and which notes from the scale you’re going to emphasise. And whatever you decide, that becomes your style.” Kirk was a great example of somebody who could look at what I was doing and say, “I understand where Joe is coming from but I know he wants me to take it in my own direction.” And that’s what he did and that’s the sound that we know and love, the sound of Metallica with Kirk riding on top.’

At the time he left to join Metallica in New Jersey, Kirk had recorded one three-track demo with Exodus and held high hopes for their future. ‘I started Exodus in high school. It was me and [drummer] Tom Hunting. We basically got together to just play. One day I said, “Hey, let’s find a name for ourselves,” so we went to the county library [in Richmond]. I went down one aisle and I saw a book and on the spine it said:
Exodus
by Leon Uris. I pointed to that and said, “That’s our name right there – Exodus!” and it stuck. From the get-go we were playing original material. Although it wasn’t very good, we were still playing original material, and we played a bunch of cover songs. We did the whole house-band circuit, playing for our friends’ parties and at their houses. Occasionally we would rent out town halls or city halls, and put up a stage and charge tickets for a show. In the last, like, six or eight months of me being in the band it was starting to happen – starting to play places like the Old Waldorf and the Keystone, in Berkeley. And we landed this opening slot for this unknown band called Metallica that we had only just heard of and heard the demo like maybe two weeks prior.’ The first time he saw Metallica, he said, ‘I’ll never forget it. I thought to myself, “These guys are great but they could be so much better with me in the band.” I honestly thought that.’ Five months later he was flying to New York to join them. ‘Mark Whitaker passed an Exodus demo on to Lars and James and they listened to it and heard it and thought, okay, let’s get this guy out. And, you know, we never really looked back.’

Gary Holt now insists that the rest of Exodus took the news well. But that was only after they realised there was nothing they could do about it – and after Gary realised it would mean the band was now his, virtually. ‘We had a big party for Kirk. Had a food fight at his house, we went around the Old Waldorf drinking, and cut about fifty pictures of Kirk out of the band photos and put them all over the place, little Kirkies, as Paul [Baloff] called it. I mean, obviously it worked out great for Kirk, and I was already like starting to sew my own oats as a songwriter. I had already written a number of songs that ended up on [first Exodus album]
Bonded by Blood
.’ Kirk leaving, ‘kind of put me in the driver’s seat and so I relished the opportunity. There was no hard feelings. I thought it was my chance to mould the band into the image I wanted to. Tom and I gathered, just the two of us, and really started banging songs out from all of these riffs I had already.’ The bottom line, Holt admits, was ‘Metallica was in New York and on the verge of making an album – something that was still a way off for us. That was the golden carrot that [Kirk] chased.’

Taking the red-eye shuttle overnight from Frisco to New York, Kirk Hammett arrived at Jonny and Marsha’s house just a few hours after they’d driven Dave Mustaine to the Greyhound bus depot. Hammett now recalls his entry into Metallica as ‘pretty level at that point…we were all still in the beginnings of our careers as musicians. And when I joined the band we all got along famously…I literally just walked in and sat down and they said, “Okay, you’re in the band, let’s take it from here.”’ Determined, however, not to become bogged down in the same battle for leadership as the one they had just disentangled themselves from with Mustaine, Lars and James laid it out for him plain and simple – an attitude Lars later shared with the readers of
Rolling Stone
as, ‘Let’s not bullshit ourselves, me and James ran the show. Me and James made the records. Me and James wrote the songs.’ Kirk simply smiled his stoner smile and nodded his head. ‘I didn’t have any problem with that. It was evident that it was Lars’ and James’ band.’ Nevertheless, it was an autocratic rigidity that would make itself evident in the music more than was perhaps good for the band as the years rolled by and Lars’ and James’ grip on Metallica’s musical path tightened ever more. ‘We still made major decisions together,’ Kirk would insist. ‘But whenever I had to push for an idea, I had to assume the role of diplomat. I had to sell them the idea.’ Cliff, meanwhile, knew better than to argue. It may have been Lars’ and James’ band but they had come to him, not the other way around. As a musician, Cliff knew he was streets ahead of his new young bandmates, but he also understood band politics better than any of them. Let them do the talking in public, let them have the lion’s share of the writing credits; he was secure enough in his own talents, in his knowledge of who he really was, not to wish to compete on that level. The real tests would arrive once the first album had been completed and the band could move on, to tour, to write, to become a real band – with Cliff Burton as its very epicentre.

Jonny Z, who admits he was ‘scared shitless’ at the prospect of the band finding a good enough replacement for Mustaine, recalls going down to the band’s first rehearsal with Kirk ‘and he was just blistering. He had learned the songs, like, overnight. He just came and it was like, let’s go do some more gigs.’ Following a nervous debut at the Showplace in Dover, New Jersey, the new Ulrich-Hetfield-Burton-Hammett line-up of Metallica was thrown into the deep end with two back-to-back shows at the much larger Paramount Theater on Staten Island, opening for Venom. Says Jonny, ‘At the Showplace, I noticed Kirk would be blazing away but he’d be looking at his guitar all the time and he would stop and then he would go on. So I said to him, “Listen, Kirk, play the first part and let it rip, but look at the audience, and when you finish the first part just put your arms up in the air.” He was reluctant but he did it. At the very next show [with Venom] he put his arms up in the air and the audience goes, “Argh!” It was great!’ As well as ‘that little shtick’, it was Jonny Z who gave them the idea for some music to walk onstage to every night: Ennio Morricone’s evocative theme tune to the Clint Eastwood spaghetti western,
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
. As Jonny says, it worked so well, ‘It still introduces the band today. Marsha and I are big Morricone fans and I’d always thought that would be a great piece of music for some awesome metal band to walk onstage to. And it is!’

Through his connections with the underground metal scene, Jonny had persuaded the independent label, Neat, in the UK, to front enough money to send Venom to the USA for some shows under Jonny’s stewardship, on 22 and 24 of April. Venom guitarist Mantas (real name: Jeff Dunn) recalls staying at Jonny and Marsha’s house at the same time as Metallica. ‘We were upstairs and they were downstairs, and it was so fuckin’ hot it was difficult to get to sleep anyway.’ Like Metallica, Venom proved a handful for the Zazulas. ‘I remember we wrecked his kitchen one night when we were trying to cook something, and set fire to the fuckin’ place!’ The two bands got on well. James Hetfield collapsed drunk after the first show while clutching a vodka bottle, badly cutting his hand and necessitating a trip to the nearest Emergency Room, where he needed six stitches. Dunn recalls Venom bassist/vocalist Cronos – real name: Conrad Lant – passing out drunk after that first show in the same bed as Lars. ‘Absolutely pissed out of their fuckin’ heads and they just fell asleep, then woke up together in the morning and said, “What the fuck is this!” Everybody just crashed out…I could hear Lars going nuts downstairs, and I heard my roadie saying, “I’m gonna go down and knock that cunt out in a minute, I just really want to go to sleep.” Then it was quiet all of a sudden, I guess he just passed out or something.’ The following day, Venom visited Jonny and Marsha’s Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven stall to sign autographs. Dunn recalled: ‘I’ve still got the original poster which says, “Meet in person: Venom at Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven” and then in tiny writing at the bottom: “Metallica”.’

Venom’s famously over-the-top show was nearly the cause of a serious accident. Dunn recalled how at the first Paramount show, ‘we had these cast-iron bomb pots, right, about the diameter of a mug and eight inches high, and there were twenty-four of these along the front of the stage. One guy went along and filled the pots with blasting powder and put the fuses in, right? Then – because communication was so crap – another guy goes, “Fuck! The bomb pots!” half an hour before the show, gets up and fills them up again, not knowing the first guy had already done it!’ Dunn claimed the explosion when the pots went off ‘was louder than the band. One of the bomb pots – and this is no word of a lie – was found in the balcony embedded in the wall. That fucker could have killed somebody. There was a four-foot hole blown in the wood of the stage, as well. How somebody wasn’t injured…’ Hetfield shrugged, ‘There were a lot of unsafe things but we loved that surprise fear factor; it just added another dimension to the show.’

The only area Metallica still felt weak in was the issue of the lead vocals. The closer Jonny took them to actually recording their first album, the more of an issue it became for them. They decided, once again, to see if they might be able to persuade someone to come in and take over the frontman role, leaving James free to concentrate on the music. Marsha offered to line up some auditions, while Lars, as ever, had ideas of his own. Bill Hale claims Lars suggested they try and track down Jess Cox, original vocalist of NWOBHM archetypes Tygers of Pan Tang, who had left the band after their debut album,
Wild Cat
, in 1980. But while Cox had the sort of gravelly voice that might have fitted, what Lars didn’t know was that the singer was already embarked on a solo career that would see him moving more squarely towards the Eighties mainstream, padded shoulders, hair-sprayed mullet and all. But while Cox may have been ‘number one on their list’, according to Hale, it was to someone much closer to home that they next turned: the nineteen-year-old singer of another local LA outfit, Armored Saint, called John Bush.

Lars Ulrich openly admired called Armored Saint. The two bands’ paths would cross more than once in the future as Lars, briefly, became something of a champion for them. In 1983, however, he and James would happily have poached their singer – if only he would agree to throw in his lot with them. In fact, Bush turned Metallica down flat. ‘They got Jonny to call him,’ recalls Marsha. ‘But he wasn’t interested.’ For good reason, or so it seemed at the time. As Bush now points out, this was at a time when Metallica had yet to release an album, and while there was already ‘a giant buzz’ about them, ‘it wasn’t like they were that far past where Armored Saint was at, at that point. It was like, I don’t wanna join that band, I’m already in this band and these are all my friends.’ He admits that ‘whenever I tell that story now kids look at me like, you’re fuckin’ crazy’, but that, ‘Nobody anticipated what was to come – the whole face of it could have changed,
literally
. ’Cos who knows…I could have
ruined
it,’ he laughs. ‘I could have ruined metal!’ In fact, Bush adds, more seriously, ‘The enormous key to Metallica’s success, in my opinion, was the emergence of James as the frontman. His voice [in the early Metallica] is the way it is. But he turned into an awesome rock singer. You know, the riffs were great and all the fiery music and the energy and the attitude but the key to it all was the emergence of James as a singer and frontman. That’s what took it to a hundred levels higher. I remember saying, “You guys don’t need anybody. James is awesome!” It wasn’t like I said, “I’m not right but maybe somebody else is.” James was just coming into his own.’ Says Marsha Z: ‘James never wanted to take that frontman position. He wanted to step back and be a guitarist. He really never had a desire, I don’t think, to step into that front space. But…he did. And as he did, James became James. I think his real person came out when he took that position permanently. It was almost like it gave him, oddly enough, another voice.’