Metallica: Enter Night (23 page)

Both victims of the same fanzine mentality that always feels threatened when one of its own begins to attract much broader appeal, Quintana and Constable were right about one thing:
RTL
was far less about perpetuating Metallica’s image as godfathers of thrash, far more about establishing their credentials as serious rock contenders, musically and commercially. Malcolm Dome, who interviewed James and Lars for the first time after
Ride
was released, recalls how ‘Lars immediately struck me as being completely different. Unlike most drummers he was articulate and it was clear he and James had a long-term vision for the band. They weren’t going to be here today then serving pizza tomorrow. Lars had a vision of the band being big. James was more the musical vision. In terms of business, I think he went along with what Lars said, but James was the one already talking of their music moving on.’ As Lars insists now, at root
Ride the Lightning
was about ‘when we started writing with Cliff’, which for Lars and Metallica represented ‘a giant leap forward in terms of variety and musical ability…it was a much bigger palate’. Kirk recalled Cliff walking around during recording, proclaiming, ‘Bach is God.’ He had thought he was joking. ‘Then realised he wasn’t.’ Cliff was ‘a major enthusiast, understood harmonies and melody, he knew the theory, how it all worked, the only person who was able to figure out a time signature and write it on a piece of paper’. James talked of how Cliff wrote on guitar, not bass, carrying around an acoustic tuned to C. ‘We don’t know how the fuck he got it or why the hell he had it, but he used to play these weird melodies on it that kinda got us into the “Ktulu” vibe. He wrote a lot of our stuff on that guitar.’

Certainly more mainstream fans were now starting to queue up for Metallica. Martin Hooker recalls how it took ‘weeks and months of really pushing and slogging, and advertising and getting gigs’ to start the commercial avalanche that was about to begin tumbling in Europe. ‘It was the old school of hard work. I spent over a hundred thousand dollars in tour support, which in those days was a
gargantuan
amount of money. My [business] partner Steve Mason thought I was mental. But then it started to pay off and by that time we were starting to re-press in five thousands at a time and it’s all starting to look much more sensible.’ He adds, ‘The main thing that took it to the next level was the kids themselves, the word of mouth. Apart from the occasional play on the [Radio 1]
Friday Rock Show
they were getting no radio or TV whatsoever, a bit of press from the specialists but nothing from the mainstream. But the word of mouth was just unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable.’

Hooker’s right-hand man, Gem Howard recalls: ‘They were four kids who were out having a great time. Things were changing in their career. They weren’t that big at home [in America] at that time. Then we started touring them across Europe, which is when you started to notice it.’ Spirits were high, despite their meagre surroundings. ‘The gear was either in a truck or we were sharing it with Venom or Twisted Sister or whoever we were out with.’ Gem, who had previously toured with The Exploited and Madness, was struck by their in-van listening habits: ‘Every other band I’d worked with tended to listen to the kind of music they played. But with Metallica, they’d be playing The Misfits and smashing the van to bits while driving along. Then they’d play Simon & Garfunkel; then it was Ennio Morricone. Cliff was always the one that put on the most bizarre stuff. Lars was like the frontman. If you wanted to know anything about the band – anything at all – he would talk about it. That’s really helpful ’cos it meant that everybody that wanted an interview got an interview with substance.’ James ‘was less sure of himself in those days. He had very bad acne early on – an embarrassment, particularly if you’re trying to put yourself across as a frontman.’ He recalls Hetfield still taking about getting a full-time singer in as late as the summer of 1984: ‘He was always saying that they should get in a singer. He wasn’t happy…As he got older and more successful and the skin’s healed up and his skinny lanky frame took on muscle, and he got the girls, he realised that, yeah, I am a frontman. Which is quite different to the reasons that most people are frontmen; most people do it because of their ego, despite having a lack of talent.’

James also stood apart from the other three when it came to some of the more usual on-the-road pursuits. ‘He didn’t indulge in anything other than a drink,’ says Gem, ‘which set him apart a bit. I remember getting [some cocaine] in at some point and [James] was like, “Oh, we shouldn’t be spending the money on this.” I just said, “Look under your pillow.” I’d stuck a couple of bottles of vodka there and he was happy as a pig in shit. That’s early days, though, when you didn’t have enough money to go out and buy bottles of spirit out of your own pocket, and he just felt that he’d been catered for, which I think is a very important part of looking after any band anyway.’ Or as Cliff sagely put it, ‘You don’t burn out from going too fast. You burn out from going too slow and getting bored.’

They also developed some good habits on tour, says Gem: ‘The other thing that made them stand out from virtually everyone else that I’ve ever worked with is that they always had signing sessions after a show.’ Even at shows they weren’t headlining, they would set up tables in the corridors backstage specifically to meet and greet the fans. ‘They would finish playing, go backstage, sit down, have a drink, maybe just have a quick splash of water, and then they’d come and sit there with towels round their necks and just sign until everybody had gone. They were there for probably an hour or so, talking to the kids. They’d go, “How did you like the show?” and they’d go, “Oh, it was great. I really liked that guitar solo,” or, “I think you fucked up such and such tonight.” They got this
immediate
feedback on their performance. Any constructive criticism, they were open to it and that’s another sign of a band that isn’t in it for the money. They’re in it for the art.’ Bill Hale says this is a tradition started by Cliff: ‘He was the first one who went out and shook hands with the fans, ’cos Cliff was a fan. I would always see him do that the most.’ Lars and James, though, drew on their own experiences of being fans – both pro and con. As someone who had himself always pestered his favourite bands for autographs, Lars knew the value fans placed on personal contact, however small, and the loyalty it engendered, while James recalled his own bitter experiences writing to Aerosmith as a fan, addressing letters personally to Steven Tyler and Joe Perry: ‘I expected something back…because they were so personal to me. I could feel their music, they were my buddies. And I didn’t get anything back. I got an order form for a
Draw the Line
T-shirt. Wow, thanks a lot.’ That was when he learned ‘about how I would like
not
to treat our fans’.

The release in the USA on the Megaforce label of
Ride the Lightning
did not generate as much excitement at national level as it had in the UK, but Jonny and Marsha Z still had high hopes for its long-term success. ‘Martin had done a great job at Music for Nations,’ says Jonny. ‘They had invested a lot of money in marketing and ads.’ Unable to make that same level of investment, Jonny planned to launch the album with a big show at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, with Metallica second on the bill between headliners Raven, who he was also now looking after full-time, and openers Anthrax, his other main clients.

Jonny and Marsha had also continued exploring the possibility of getting Metallica signed to a major US label, targeting Michael Alago at Elektra, who Raven were also then doing demos for with a view to sealing a deal. Describing himself as, ‘a real New Yorker and a real music fan’, Alago was a native of Brooklyn whose life was changed, he says now, by seeing an Alice Cooper concert in 1973: ‘From the age of fifteen I ran around to all the rock clubs [and] bars like CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City and the Mudd club and Danceteria.’ Working at a pharmacy in the East Village to help pay his way through college, in 1980 he got his first job in the music business working at the Ritz nightclub, where he began tipping off some of the record company talent scouts who regularly came down about the best of the new bands that had played there. When Jonny first met Michael in 1983 he’d just begun working at Elektra in the A&R department as a talent scout in his own right. At the time, Mötley Crüe were Elektra’s flavour of the month, their first album for the label,
Shout at the Devil
, penetrating the Top Twenty and on its way to selling four million copies. Ratt had also made a chart breakthrough that summer, their first major label release on Elektra’s sister label, Atlantic, the
Out of the Cellar
album, going Top Ten; while Van Halen, on the other Elektra affiliate in the WEA triumvirate, had just had their biggest album yet, the ten-million-selling
1984
, including their first Number One single, ‘Jump’. Hard rock was getting bigger than big again in the US market. Nevertheless, Metallica was still viewed as an entirely different proposition, even for Elektra. For any major label to sign Metallica would still have seemed a remarkably left-field thing to do. But, says Alago, ‘I was never interested in the hair bands. I liked my music fuckin’ dirty and snotty.’

Having seen Metallica at the Stone in San Francisco at the end of 1983, he’d been ‘blown away by the energy and charisma radiating from the stage’. When he heard
Kill ’Em All
, ‘I lost my mind.’ He had ‘never heard a record that alive-sounding and I loved the songs and the energy’. He admits, however, he ‘didn’t know what to tell the company about them. I gave Lars a call or two to express my interest but at the time they had a deal with Megaforce Records.’ They returned to his thoughts in the summer of 1984 with news that they were coming back to New York for a show with Anthrax and Raven. ‘I was doing demos with Raven at the time because the Zazulas managed them and wanted a US deal’, so he was already going to the show. The fact that Metallica would also be on the bill simply meant he would be coming early, he decided.

Jonny, who had put the whole show together as a showcase for CraZed Management talent, was delighted, inviting Alago and a slew of industry people, including record company execs, agents and – most importantly, from the Megaforce label’s point of view – key distributors. Following a stonking warm-up at the Mabuhay Gardens on 20 July – their first hometown show for over nine months, supposedly secret, and billed as a performance by the Four Horsemen – Metallica was buzzing and ready to go. Alago brought Elektra chairman Bob Krasnow with him to the Roseland show, along with ‘some promotion folks’ – not to see Raven, but to check out Metallica. Says Alago, ‘That night there was so much excitement and energy in the air I just knew it was gonna be a special evening. Metallica blew the roof off the stage. I ran backstage after the gig and basically hogged the entire evening and had them up at my office the next morning. We had a great meeting, got some beer and Chinese food and now had to figure out how to sign them away from Megaforce. Jonny was furious at me but in the end money talks and Megaforce got a financial override and the rest, my friend, is fuckin’ history!’

There was a further twist to the tale, though – one that Jonny had not seen coming but which would be the real reason he was furious: the arrival on the scene of a rapidly up-and-coming New York management company named Q Prime. Fronted by Peter Mensch – a thirty-one-year-old former tour accountant for Aerosmith who had graduated in the late 1970s to day-to-day management with Contemporary Communications Corporation (CCC), known in the biz simply as Leber-Krebs, after Steve Leber and David Krebs, who formed the company in 1972 – Q Prime was fast becoming in the Eighties what Leber-Krebs had been in the Seventies: the most successful company in American rock management. Leber-Krebs’ clients had included Aerosmith, AC/DC, Ted Nugent and the Scorpions; the perfect schooling for a player like Mensch who would go on to manage multi-platinum US stars such as Def Leppard, Dokken, Queensrÿche and, biggest of all eventually, Metallica. Along with his business partner Cliff Burnstein – a former Mercury Records A&R executive also schooled in the Leber-Krebs way – Q Prime was then riding the crest of a wave with the third Def Leppard album,
Pyromania
, the second-biggest-selling album in America in 1983 after Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
. Now they were in expansionist mood and Metallica, having recently appeared on their radar, looked like prime candidates to be assimilated into the rapidly evolving Q Prime universe. Indeed, Mensch – overseeing the ‘international’ side of the company’s business from his London home while Burnstein ran the New York office from his Hoboken apartment – already had a proven track record in pouncing on rising rock artists whose management support system was considerably weaker and less experienced than his own. Back in 1979, he had been instrumental in persuading AC/DC to leave Michael Browning, who had taken the band from the pubs and clubs of Australia to the brink of worldwide success, and sign with Leber-Krebs. Eighteen months later he managed to do something similar with Def Leppard, then one of the leading lights of the NWOBHM, on the verge of cementing a major deal in London with Phonogram. Neither act had cause to regret their decisions. In both instances, Mensch had overseen complete overhauls of their careers: the next two AC/DC albums would be both the best and, more importantly, biggest-selling of their careers to that point,
Highway to Hell
(1979) and
Back in Black
(1980); while Leppard were now on their way to becoming the biggest-selling British rock band in the world. When Mensch and Burnstein decided in 1982 to form their own management company, Def Leppard went with them.

Now, in 1984, Q Prime was on the hunt for new blood. Mensch had been a keen observer of the NWOBHM scene, had circled Diamond Head in their earliest, still exciting days, but had been shooed away suspiciously by Sean Harris’s well-meaning but desperately inexperienced manager-mother, Linda. ‘Mensch offered us the chance to open for AC/DC at two shows in Newcastle and Southampton early in 1980,’ Brian Tatler recalls. ‘Afterwards we had a little meeting with Mensch in the dressing room while he told us things about how the music business worked. We were very impressed, avidly listening, and it occurred to me, wouldn’t it be great if Peter managed us. But Sean’s mum and [her partner] Reg probably tried to keep us away, ’cos if [Mensch] had got involved he’d steal us away from them.’ Mensch had also been in discussion with a young Marillion, then on the verge of major success with EMI, but again was rejected not because of any perceived lack of knowledge or experience, but rather the opposite. ‘Peter Mensch was very urbane, very American, very obviously big time,’ recalls former Marillion singer Fish, ‘and I think, still being so sort of parochial in our tastes in those days we were offended by all that.’ As with Diamond Head, Mensch’s can-do demeanour proved too much for the more homespun British five-piece who signed with a manager less high-powered but more on their level personally. In both cases, it might be suggested, the bands would live to regret their decisions as their careers never quite reached the heights achieved by so many others who did have the courage to sign with Mensch and Q Prime.