Metallica: Enter Night (18 page)

Russell wasn’t a great writer but he was a major metal enthusiast and obsessive collector, in much the same way Lars and his nerdy teenage chums in California had been. When, in 1982, he was in San Francisco on holiday and noticed that Mötley Crüe – a new LA band he’d heard about but never seen perform – were playing at the Concorde Pavilion, he went along out of curiosity. Introduced at the gig to Ron Quintana, who handed him a copy of the
No Life ’Til Leather
cassette, he thought nothing of it (‘People were always sticking tapes of bands you’d never heard of in your hands at gigs’) until the following morning, still hungover, he popped the cassette into his Walkman, ‘expecting nothing special really’. He got a shock. ‘The speakers just went whoosh!’ He got as far as the second track, ‘The Mechanix’, before pausing the tape to phone Ron. ‘I said, “Where are this fucking band playing?” He said, “They’re playing Monday,”’ at one of the then-regular Metal Monday night gigs at the Old Waldorf. ‘I went and it was Metallica, Lääz Rockit and another band, and I was just totally blown away.’ At this point, Mustaine and McGovney were still in the band but they were already ‘just unbelievable. At the same time, you could see this battle between Hetfield and Mustaine. It was like they were both hogging the limelight. They looked like brothers that don’t get on. Mustaine was the more powerhouse one. At the same time you could tell he was on something.’

Introduced by Ron to Lars after the show, ‘Straight away we got on quite well so we stayed in touch.’ Nabbing a
Metal up Your Ass
T-shirt on the way out, Xavier had come back to Britain ‘and immediately started telling everyone at
Kerrang!
all about them. I wrote a “metal up your arse” feature and told Geoff Barton, “By 1991, this band will be the biggest band in the world.”’ Even though Burton and Hammett had yet to join the band, it wasn’t all just about speed, even then, says Russell: ‘What I noticed when I first saw them was that although they were playing fast you could still feel a tune in there. It definitely sounded European but it had an American slant to it.’ With the exception of Venom, it was ‘the most extreme form of metal I think I’d heard up till then – only better. Nothing against Venom, I quite liked them. But they were like listening to a cement mixer by comparison. Metallica always had a bit more of a tune to them, actual songs.’

While many would doubtless agree with that view, it would be wrong to dismiss the enormous part Venom played in laying the groundwork for what quickly became thrash. By the time Metallica released
Kill ’Em All
, the Newcastle-based band had already recorded three absolutely groundbreaking albums for the independent Neat label:
Welcome to Hell
(1981),
Black Metal
(1982) and
At War with Satan
(1983). Not only did they provide some of the musical footprints for Metallica to follow, they would also inspire their own self-ascribed genre, black metal, from which would come several notable acts over the next three decades. Beginning in the 1980s with, from Scandinavia, Mercyful Fate and Bathory – and in the 1990s those like Britain’s Cradle of Filth, who claimed to be actual occultists, and the ghastly Burzum, from Norway, who took the whole black metal shtick to a frighteningly literal new level with church-burning, the drinking of human blood and even murder in the case of Burzum frontman, Count Grishnackh (real name: Kristian Vikernes), who received a twenty-one-year sentence in 1993 for the murder of Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth of rival Norwegian black metallists Mayhem. Metallica never saw themselves as being as fixated on the rock-as-devil’s-music thing as Venom, but it was Venom’s utter determination to take metal music to a new, much more extreme level that allowed Metallica to see what could be done, given enough bloody-minded ambition. When Venom began, said frontman Cronos in 2009, they thought of themselves as ‘long-haired punks, ’cos that’s all we could associate [the music] with. But when we decided to start looking at terms like “power metal”, that’s when we started to call what we did the thrash metal, the speed metal, the death metal, the black metal. It was really just the black metal that stuck.’ Venom, said Cronos, was about, ‘going places where other bands hadn’t been’. Like books and movies, ‘Music should be so varied in subject too.’ There were, he said, to be ‘no rules to what we were writing’ – words that would be echoed more than once over the coming years by Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield…

Although ‘Whiplash’ contained the lines in its chorus: ‘Adrenalin starts to flow / You’re thrashing all around’, not even Lars Ulrich claims to know who first used the term ‘thrash metal’ to describe Metallica’s music. ‘Ask Xavier,’ he laughed. So I did but even he remains unclear on this point, saying only, ‘I think I did.’ But if he didn’t invent it, it was certainly Xavier Russell who did more than anyone else to popularise the term ‘thrash metal’. ‘I said [to myself], “How do you define this music?” I thought, “Well, it sounds thrashy to me.” Even if I didn’t say it to them, I wrote it down. Some people called it speed metal but then because they weren’t always fast that wasn’t quite right for what Metallica did.’

Speed metal would certainly have worked as an accurate description, however, of the band that would rival closest Metallica’s place at the forefront of thrash – Slayer, formed in Huntington Beach, the same surf city suburb Metallica had found Dave Mustaine in, in the same year, 1982. Led by vocalist/bassist Tom Araya and lead guitarist Kerry King, augmented by a second lead guitarist, Jeff Hanneman, and a frighteningly talented, jazz-trained drummer named Dave Lombardo, Slayer – originally known as Dragonslayer, after the 1981 fantasy film – had started out as an Iron Maiden-style sword-and-sorcery metal band. Like Metallica, they had an abiding interest in the NWOBHM, but it wasn’t until seeing Metallica opening for Saxon at the Whisky in the summer of 1982, that they shortened their name to Slayer and refocused their music towards a more original, much faster and more powerful sound, built around the screamingly atonal twin lead guitars of King and Hanneman, Lombardo’s monumental drums and Araya’s – unlike Hetfield’s at the same stage – already fully formed grizzly bear vocals. In common more with Venom, they would cultivate a ‘satanic’ image, which featured pentagrams, make-up, spikes and inverted crosses. While Hammett was perfecting his Joe Satriani-tutored technique, Hanneman likened his own guitar sound to that of a ‘slaughtered pig’. Slayer’s lyrical themes also took on a much darker hue than Metallica’s, early hair-twirling stage favourites including titles such as ‘Evil Has No Boundaries’, ‘The Anti-Christ’ and ‘Black Magic’. In 1983, at the same time as Metallica was working on
Kill ’Em All
, Slayer were invited by Brian Slagel – who had been impressed by their performance opening for Bitch at the Woodstock Club – to contribute to the
Metal Massacre III
compilation. The track, ‘Aggressive Perfector’, led to a fully fledged deal with Slagel’s Metal Blade label.

Similarly, Anthrax, who had buddied up with them during their time with Jonny and Marsha in New Jersey, would also have Metallica to thank for the radical change in direction that positioned them right at the forefront of the coming thrash phenomenon. ‘Anthrax always just wanted to be Metallica,’ says Marsha Z, who went on to co-manage them with Jonny. The band had been formed in 1981 by guitarist Scott Ian (nicknamed Scott ‘Not’ Ian at school) and another extremely talented drummer named Charlie Benante, along with bassist Dan Lilker, lead guitarist Greg Walls and vocalist Neil Turbin. Their debut album,
Fistful of Metal
, was recorded within weeks of
Kill ’Em All
hitting the street and would even be released on the same label, Jonny and Marsha’s fledgling Megaforce, in January 1984. But it was a staid affair by comparison, although it did contain one proto-thrash classic in its hilariously apoplectic cover of Alice Cooper’s ‘I’m Eighteen’. It wasn’t until Turbin, Walls and Lilker departed (Lilker to another new group of thrash wannabes, Nuclear Assault) and were replaced by singer Joey Belladonna, former bass roadie Frank Bello and guitarist Dan Spitz, recording the impressive
Armed and Dangerous
EP, that they began to be considered in the same musical ballpark as Metallica and Slayer, developing their own quirky style, less involved with mock-horror and more indebted to the comic book and skateboard culture which also sprung up around the genre. By this point, ‘We really felt that we were part of something,’ said Ian. ‘The energy was palpable.’

Last out of the traps but viewed with as much reverence, often more, than their peers, by dint of the fact that their creator had also been one of the originators of Metallica, came Dave Mustaine’s band Megadeth. ‘Truthfully, I just wanted to out-metal Metallica,’ Mustaine would tell Bob Nalbandian in a 2004 interview for Bob’s Shockwaves website (the twenty-first-century version of his fanzine
The Headbanger
). It was a typically flippant Mustaine remark, which nonetheless held more than a grain of truth. But if Megadeth had begun as Mustaine’s revenge trip on the people who had, as he saw it, betrayed him, it soon evolved, to his credit, into something more significant. Megadeth would be Mustaine’s irrefutable proof that there had always been more to him than helping furbish Metallica with a sound and musical direction; his inarguably great demonstration of his own, unique talents, not just as guitarist, of which he still saw himself as one of the best, but also as songwriter, singer, band leader, visionary, star. Or, as Dave put it to me some years later: ‘Fuck democracy. Democracy doesn’t work in a band. I had to have my own band and make music exactly the way I wanted to hear it, with no compromises to anybody else’s ego whatsoever.’

His new songs reflected his new band’s name: post-apocalyptic, wise after the fact, cynicism tinged with bitter joy. David Ellefson now describes sitting on the couch in Mustaine’s apartment when they first met, watching him ‘playing these amazingly solid rhythm parts. I mean, they were like slabs of rock. Dave was obviously not your average long-haired virtuoso guitar player.’ Two songs Mustaine sketched out for him early on – ‘Devil’s Island’ and ‘Set the World Afire’ – would later become stalwarts of the earliest Megadeth shows, although the latter would not be recorded until their third album. ‘They were monsters,’ says Ellefson. ‘They just jumped out at you. I thought, whoa, this guy’s got a whole different thing going on. This had nothing to do with what all the other “hair” bands were doing in 1983.’

The first Megadeth album,
Killing is My Business…and Business is Good
was not released until 1985, long after Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and several others had already made their mark. But it made up for lost time by combining the speed and fury of thrash, as gold-stamped by Metallica and Slayer, with a technical proficiency that was like nothing those other bands – the one rooted more deeply in traditional forms of telegraphed, well-played heavy metal, the other still in thrall to the Black Sabbath/Venom idea of what (black) metal should be – had yet attempted. Some detected jazz influences in the Megadeth maelstrom; others coined the term ‘technical thrash’ to describe the difference. But whatever one told Dave Mustaine his band sounded like, that’s what they were not, as far as he was concerned. Megadeth did not exist in a vacuum, though, and was built specifically to usurp not just Metallica but every other thrash band that had come along in the intervening years between Mustaine’s dismissal, although the perceived rivalry with Metallica was always at the forefront of his warp-speed vision.

‘The initial stuff we were writing was slower,’ recalled Ellefson. ‘Songs like “The Skull Beneath the Skin” and “Devil’s Island”, those were all more mid-tempo songs [but] I remember all the fans up in the Bay Area writing letters to Dave saying, “Man, I hope your stuff is faster than Metallica!”’ Says Bob Nalbandian, ‘That was the big thing at the time, who could play the fastest. All the thrash bands were competing for that title.’ When Nalbandian’s review of
Kill ’Em All
in
The Headbanger
proclaimed them as ‘one of the fastest and heaviest bands in the US’, he recalls how Slayer immediately started taking ads in the mag claiming to be the ‘Fastest and Heaviest of All US Metal Bands!’ As a result, said Ellefson, ‘I remember the next day we went to rehearsal and all the [new Megadeth] songs became speed metal songs. For us it happened overnight. It’s amazing how these fans writing letters to the band fuelled that whole thing and to a large degree it probably changed the course of our destiny. If the music just had stayed slow and mid-tempo, it would not have had the ferociousness and the furious nature that it eventually developed into.’

Even though thrash in its original incarnation – like punk and the NWOBHM before it – would be a relatively short-lived phenomenon, its influence would continue to be felt in the Bay Area and beyond for decades. A typically next-generation example are Machine Head, also from northern California, who didn’t record their first album,
Burn My Eyes
, until 1994. Vocalist Robb Flynn was fifteen when
Kill ’Em All
was first released, living in Fremont, about fifty miles outside of San Francisco, and discovering bands such as Metallica on an obscure college station called Rampage Radio. For the teenage Flynn, thrash meant bands like ‘Exodus, Metallica, Slayer. None of them were very popular at the time…a friend used to bring tapes of it into school. Also, Discharge, Poison Idea: all this punk rock and hardcore metal. We were like, fuck, this is super-cool, man! I remember one of the first times I ever got really drunk, we had picked up
Kill ’Em All
and we were walking around with this eight-inch cassette player with one speaker and we blasted “Whiplash” from this thing…just wasted out of our minds.’

For Robb Flynn and his pals there seemed to be no discernible link between the new thrash bands and metal bands of the past: ‘It didn’t have any history.’ No one else outside his circle of high school buddies had even heard of it. ‘When we started a band and were doing backyard parties we’d cover “A Lesson in Violence” [by Exodus] or “Fight Fire with Fire” [Metallica], and all these twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds were just fuckin’ not into it at all! Like, “You guys suck, man. Play some fuckin’ Zeppelin!” When Death Angel came along,’ an even younger band of Bay Area thrashers than Metallica, whose early demos were produced by Kirk Hammett, ‘for us that was, like, amazing. Wow, here’s kids our age playing this fuckin’ thrash shit and playing it killer. They were fuckin’ awesome!’ Everybody that came along after could be traced directly back to the Big Four, though: ‘When Exodus started to get heavy we were like, wow, Exodus are starting to get like Metallica, that’s cool. With Possessed, we were like, oh, they’re trying to sound like Slayer, they’re cool.’