Metallica: Enter Night (25 page)

The band was becoming road-hardened. Even James was starting to lighten up – onstage and off. He boasted to Xavier Russell, who joined the tour for a few days, about some of the adventures he was now having. Having spent ‘hours and hours in the bar’ they had decided to really ‘booze it up’ in Armored Saint bassist Joey Vera’s room. ‘We were all getting really ripped and started throwing bottles out the window. They were smashing and it sounded really neat. But that soon got boring, so I threw Joey’s black-and-red leather jacket out and it landed in the pool, which luckily had its cover on. We went down to get it and on the way back up to the tenth floor I decided to open the elevator doors between floors…we then got stuck for half an hour and everyone is like freaking out and I started shouting, “Get us the fuck out of here!” We finally get up to the tenth floor and by now I’m pretty [mad] so I see this fire extinguisher hanging on the wall. So I kinda took it down and started squirting people with it – all this CO
₂
or some kinda shit was comin’ out of it.’

Not coincidentally, it was around this time the band picked up the nickname, first gleefully reported in
Kerrang!
, of Alcoholica. James was going through his schnapps phase. That and beer and vodka, ‘embracing alcohol at a different level from the rest of us’, as Lars later put it. Lars had ‘more of the binge mentality. I’d go every night for three days. Then I wouldn’t touch a drop for the next four.’ For James it was different. Drinking was becoming another mask he could hide behind. ‘I think drinking made me forget a lot of stuff at home,’ he later reflected. ‘Then it became fun.’ It was a fan who’d come up with the name Alcoholica, designing a T-shirt based on the
Kill ’Em All
album cover, the title recast as
Drank ’Em All
and the Metallica logo supplanted by that of Alcoholica, the ghoulish hammer and blood pool replaced by an overturned vodka bottle, its contents spilling out. ‘We thought it was pretty cool,’ said James. ‘We had shirts like that made up for ourselves.’

The booze provided a lift in other, more tangible ways too. Most significantly, Hetfield was now finding his voice – real and imagined – as the frontman. Megadeth bassist David Ellefson recalls being ‘totally blown away’ when he caught the Metallica/Armored Saint show at the Hollywood Palladium in March. ‘I’d seen them play on
Kill ’Em All
at the Country Club [in Reseda, in August, 1983] and it was good [but] they hadn’t quite settled into the pocket yet, as all bands do once you’ve been on the road for a few years. But when I walked in [at the Palladium in ’85] I remember James coming out with his shirt off and it was just
ferocious
. Like, holy smokes, man! This band has arrived! There’s nobody like this doing this.’ Recalls Joey Vera, who watched Metallica from the side of the stage most nights of that tour: ‘It was a fire that was beginning to burn. That’s where I first saw it on a daily basis, in every small town. It’s one thing to see something in a magazine, or one show in a big city, but when we were on tour together we played every shithole across the US and that’s where you got to see, like, wow, this is having the same effect in front of two hundred people or in front of six hundred people.’

Hanging out on tour, they would take turns sharing buses between cities, recalls Vera: ‘They were just…very crazy. A lot of partying. They had already been to Europe. So we were always in awe of them because they had done that, begging for stories. How ugly the chicks were, how bad the food was, how many times they woke up in the gutter, so on and so forth.’ As the bassist, Joey was especially drawn to Cliff: ‘We had a kinship, Cliff and I, because we also listened to some jazz fusion. We’d have some conversations about Stanley Clarke and about all these other bass players that we liked when we were growing up. So he was someone who had another foot somewhere else in the music and was an excellent player and a pretty strong musical front in that band. I think that’s one of the reasons the band always looked to him for approval. He also had this really strong punk aesthetic…of doing it against the grain, going against the norm, someone who is basically an artist. That’s how I always perceived Cliff, as someone who was very strongly opinionated and very much not willing to do anything which would go against what he believed in. It was pretty evident back then that that mattered to the rest of the guys too.’

Mainstream rock was so conservative in the mid-Eighties, to see this guy with the flared trousers, the denim jacket, the long, straight hair and the weird, scruffy little moustache, it was an inspiration, says Vera. He talks about how Cliff, ‘almost had his own language. Just the way he would phrase things. He wasn’t one of these people that would come and say hello how are you today, the weather’s really nice. One time we played a show in El Paso, and we’re all waiting to go onstage. He opens our dressing room door and pops his head in and says: “Weakness is emanating from the crowd.” And he shuts the door. We’ve never forgot that. That’s like one of the classic Cliff quotes.’ He chuckles softly. ‘We took that as, okay, well, now we’ve got to go out and really fucking wake these people up. The Grand Master has come in and let us know where he stands…’

Machine Head vocalist Robb Flynn was a sixteen-year-old Metallica fan when he caught the tour at the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco. ‘That was crazy, a really intense show. The first time I’d seen a circle pit, first time I’d seen people headbanging. I went right down the front. I was like, “Holy shit, this is awesome!” I had never felt such a rush of energy. I was completely exhilarated. I didn’t even drink, I got dropped off by my dad so I was sober and I remember every moment of it. After that I was just like, we gotta start going to shows and drinking and buying drugs. That just seemed like what you were supposed to do.’ James Hetfield was now ‘the guy who everybody related to. I loved the other guys, too, but Hetfield was extremely…he was just so pissed [off] it was awesome. He was just so mad about everything it was like, fuck, yeah!’

As well as top-drawer management and a major US record deal, Metallica’s operation was expanding in other ways too. They now had major agency representation in both the USA – where they were now signed to ICM, personally handled by rising industry star Marsha Vlasic – and the UK, where Fair Warning co-founder John Jackson would become their booking agent. Their touring staff was also upgraded. Mark Whitaker, his time now taken up with full-time management of Exodus – making waves of their own with the
Bonded by Blood
album – was replaced by an English sound technician, ‘Big’ Mick Hughes, an apprentice electrician from West Bromwich who’d started out humping gear in his spare time for Judas Priest then graduated to live sound engineer with another upcoming Q Prime act, the Armoury Show. When the latter folded, Peter Mensch invited Hughes to work with Metallica, his immediate innovation to add a high-to-mid ‘click’ to Lars’ live bass drum sound, as a way of lifting the drums out of the bottom-heavy sound he’d previously been labouring under, adding more bounce and feel. Paul Owen, another English Midlander who had previously worked for Diamond Head, was also hired as monitor engineer.

Another significant new face backstage was that of soon-to-be-tour-manager Bobby Schneider, who had been working as the drum tech on David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour prior to receiving the invitation to join up with this, for Bobby, unknown new band. ‘I had never heard of Metallica,’ explains Schneider now, ‘nor had I ever worked for any metal bands at all. So this was a complete new world for me.’ He had been working locally in Boston when he got a call from the band’s temporary new tour manager, regular Rush man, Howard Ungerleider, who Bobby had previously worked for on a Rush tour as a lighting engineer. Recalls Bobby: ‘Lars’ drum tech had destroyed a hotel the day before so they’d fired him. So they were looking for someone right away and pretty much offered me the job [over the phone] and I flew out [to the W.A.S.P. tour]. I remember sitting in a room with Lars when he was trying to explain to me [what he needed]. He used to switch sticks in the middle of the set, a different stick in his right hand and a couple other things. In typical Lars fashion – and I don’t know the guy yet – he’s explained this same thing to me fifteen times. And I look at him and go, “I
got
it.” He goes, “Wow, you’re pretty confident, aren’t you?”’

When Ungerleider had to leave to return to Rush, he recommended that Schneider take over as tour manager. Bobby had already been tour-managing for smaller bands and handling production but this was something new: ‘Howard said to Mensch, “You know they love Bobby – you should just make him the tour manager.” So that’s where we started. I finished out that tour and they brought me back for a couple more. In the end, we had a six-year relationship. I definitely saw some changes in that time. I saw them grow up.’

Schneider characterises the W.A.S.P. tour now as ‘a breakthrough moment’ – for both himself and Metallica. ‘They were blowing everybody away. I wasn’t really into the metal world. I hadn’t lived in that world. The W.A.S.P. guys, all being six foot six tall, were very intimidating, and they were the ones who had most equipment. But the kids weren’t coming to see them. They were doing their best to be the headliner. But there was no question that Metallica [had] the vibe.’ Going from working for Bowie’s supremely accomplished drummer Tony Thompson to working for Lars Ulrich was also something of a leap of faith. ‘James used to spit on him all the time, when Lars would really get out of time, which was
often
. He’d be so off sometimes James would just turn around and glare at him.’ The spitting ‘was James’ way of telling him, “Dude, you’re really fucking bad tonight.”’ Searching for the positive, Bobby likens Lars’ drumming back then to being ‘almost like a guitarist. You know, he’s playing all kinds of triplets and fills…It never seemed that Lars fucked up the intricate parts. It was sort of the ongoing feel for it’ that so enraged James it caused him to spit. And while Lars may have been the business leader of the group, as far as Schneider could tell it was Cliff Burton the band relied on for the right words in their private moments, as human beings. ‘Cliff was the backbone. Cliff was the guy that everybody looked to. If there was a big decision to be made it was [done] in the inner workings. But it seemed to me, if there was something Cliff wasn’t gonna like, it wasn’t gonna happen. Cliff was the Keith Richards of the band. No one fucked with Cliff.’

The early weeks of the summer of 1985 found Metallica back in San Francisco, off the road but getting ready to go back into the studio and record their next album. The Metallica fire, as Joey Vera says, may have begun to burn more fiercely, but the biggest-selling album that year was the newly muscled and suddenly clean-cut Bruce Springsteen’s flag-waving
Born in the U.S.A
. (no matter the counter-intuitive message of the title track being largely misconstrued by a significant number of the fifteen million Americans who eventually bought the album). Looming on the horizon was the global feel-good event of the decade, Live Aid. What place then in this larger, strictly white-hat scheme of bigger and better things for the angry bombast of a bunch of heavy-metal-worshipping young heads from the tripped-out West Coast? Somewhere far off in the shadows, perhaps, certainly nowhere near the centre. But that was okay. Metallica needed the down-time to sit and write their future. Their next album – their first recorded directly for a major American label – would be their most important yet and they all felt the pressure of that even as they kidded around and acted like it was all just a game. It would also be the first Metallica album for which there were no hold-overs from the past to fall back on; no old Mustaine or Exodus riffs to repurpose and remould into their own, more interesting new image (although Dave would later claim, erroneously, that he’d had a hand in at least one of the new tracks). Just at that moment when they needed to demonstrate they had what it took to climb out of the musical ghetto thrash metal was already beginning to resemble, they would need to start again from scratch.

As would become their habit from here on in, Lars and James initially retreated to the garage at El Cerrito alone, roughing out early demos before inviting Cliff and Kirk down to jam along with some ideas of their own. As a result, while the Hetfield and Ulrich monikers would adorn all eight of the tracks that would make up the next album, already titled
Master of Puppets
after the best of the new numbers James and Lars had begun bashing into shape, only two would bear the names of all four members (the title track and album closer, ‘Damage, Inc.’); three with the addition of Hammett (‘The Thing That Should Not Be’, ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’ and ‘Disposable Heroes’), just one the additional Burton imprimatur (the by-now-obligatory Cliff instrumental, ‘Orion’), and two simply bearing the Hetfield-Ulrich stamp (‘Battery’ and ‘Leper Messiah’). Nevertheless, insists Hammett, ‘Ninety-nine per cent of it was conceived by the four of us. There wasn’t anything left over from the
Ride the Lightning
stuff, the
Kill ’Em All
stuff was already written [when I joined]. It was pretty much the definitive musical statement from that line-up, and it felt like it. We had really gotten to know each other’s musical capabilities and temperaments over that three-year period. And I could tell that it was really blossoming into something that was to be reckoned with. It was very consistent. Every song we came up with was just like the greatest thing. Every time we’d write another it was like, “Oh my god! It’s just another great conception,” you know?’

All but two of the new songs – ‘Orion’ and ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’ – were fully completed at El Cerrito that summer. Speaking with me more than twenty years later, Hammett laughed off Mustaine’s suggestion that he should have received a co-credit for ‘Leper Messiah’: ‘Even though Dave might claim that he wrote “Leper Messiah”, he didn’t. There’s maybe a chord progression that was in that song, like maybe ten seconds that came from him – that, ironically, is just before the guitar solo. But he did not write “Leper Messiah” at all. In fact, I remember being in the room when Lars came up with the main musical motif.’ Kirk still has tapes ‘recorded on a boom box in the middle of the room’ of the El Cerrito sessions, including works-in-progress such as ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’, ‘Disposable Heroes’, ‘Master of Puppets’, ‘Battery’ and the middle section of ‘Orion’: ‘Cliff wrote that whole middle part complete, with bass lines, two- and three-part harmonies, all completely arranged. It was pretty amazing. We were all really, really blown away.’