Metallica: Enter Night (28 page)

Flemming and Metallica never did manage to complete those mixes to their mutual satisfaction. Instead, they left Sweet Silence behind for the last time on 27 December and the master tapes were handed over in January 1985 to veteran LA-based studio fixer Michael Wagener, whose recent credits had included production work with Mötley Crüe, Dokken and Accept. Wagener may not have known much about thrash or even Metallica, at that stage, but he sure knew how to add a wonderful sheen to the mighty building blocks Metallica had painstakingly constructed at Sweet Silence with Flemming. With James and Lars looking over his shoulder, barking orders, Wagener set to work at Amigo studios on giving the latest Metallica opus a high shine.

Delighted with the results, Michael Alago gave the go-ahead for Elektra to schedule
Master of Puppets
for an early March 1986 release. He did enquire, at one point, about the possibility of a single being lifted from the album, maybe even a video to go with it – these were still the days when MTV was comfortable rotating rock videos on their daytime shows, although they had yet to actively promote any act as self-evidently uncommercial, at least in their corporate eyes, as the ‘kings of thrash’ Metallica. Elektra certainly had the budget to try and twist various influential MTV arms, however, if the band was amenable. The band was not. Indeed, over the coming years they would make a virtue out of their apparent refusal to make, as Lars put it, ‘suck-ass fucking videos like all the other lame rock bands’. Yet this was an attitude born not of rebellious fortitude but the shrewd micro-calculations for which Ulrich would become far more famous in the American music industry than his drumming. As Lars later told me, back in the 1980s, when MTV was a solitary cable channel, as opposed to the multi-strand, globe-straddling goliath it is today, lording it over dozens of lookalike satellite music TV channels, he and Peter and Cliff at Q Prime had weighed up the various pros and cons of making a video. Star pupil that he was, Lars already had the answer. ‘We figured, they’re not gonna show a fucking Metallica video anyway. Why waste money making one then? We knew we’d get more publicity out of not making a video than making one.’

And so it proved. An interesting stance to take for a band whose new album would be loosely themed around the subjects of manipulation and control; the puppet master and his expertise at twanging the right strings; making the right moves. The album sleeve reflected this idea almost too perfectly: a field of white crosses – inspired subconsciously perhaps by the penultimate scene from Hetfield’s beloved
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
, where Tuco Ramirez frenziedly scavenges for gold among a field of white gravestones – under a glowering hell-red sky from which hovers the Metallica logo, above which can be seen the puppet master’s hands, tugging at the strings attached to the crosses below. In fact, the image could be looked at in a number of ways, not least as a more direct reflection of the title song’s pointed reference to drug addiction (‘
chopping your breakfast on a mirror
’), the puppet strings those of the dealer’s, the white crosses those of his doomed clientele, the already brain-dead.

But it’s that more overpowering and deeply cynical image of the semi-visible forces of manipulation and control that really unsettles and eventually takes lasting root. Especially from this distance, a quarter of a century later, knowing what came next…

It must have been ten years later. So far into the future the past was another planet. I was walking the dog around the park one day in the wind and the rain. I was in my usual dog-walking gear: old jeans I didn’t mind getting torn or muddy, steel-toe-capped walking boots, several layers of T-shirts and sweaters, and the old leather Metallica jacket. Working on
Kerrang!
in the Eighties you’d get given a lot of stuff like that: band T-shirts, bomber jackets, baseball caps. All with the name of whatever band it was emblazoned across the front and the tour dates scrawled down the back. Hideous things you wouldn’t be seen dead in, most of them. There were exceptions, though. The occasional shirt that didn’t draw disdainful looks from passing females, or start fights in pubs full of beered-up lads.

The Metallica jacket was one of those. A heavy-duty, black leather replica of the classic American biker jacket; no tour dates to disfigure it; no gaudy pictures of muscle-bound monster-men brandishing swords, or scantily clad babes delightedly straddling dragons. The sort of jacket you could wear without embarrassing yourself. Except this was ten years later maybe and it was so worn and battered and encrusted with dirt and dog saliva that you could only just about make out the word ‘Metallica’ in miniature on the left breast pocket, and beneath that three more: ‘Master of Puppets’. The only other signifier of the jacket’s origins was the small hand-stitched cartoon skull that adorned the wrist of the left sleeve, now so caked in dried mud and threadbare you’d never have noticed it, unless you knew what you were looking for.

London parks are never empty, not even when it’s pouring with rain, but this day the place was bare, save for me and my German Shepherd Dog, a huge brute whose mouth was always full of squirrels and cats and other dogs. We were in among the trees, trudging along, my mind utterly gone, when I bumped into him – a Jesus-like figure with long wet hair and straggly beard, beatific smile on his young-old face, standing there before me suddenly, the rain dripping from his nose.

I looked at him fearfully. The only time strangers without dogs themselves approached you in the park it was never good news. I waited to hear what the problem was but he just carried on moving towards me, smiling.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘cool band.’

‘What?’

‘Where’d you get it?’

‘What?’

He nodded at the jacket. The penny dropped.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh…someone gave it to me.’

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Someone must love you very much.’

I didn’t know where this was going, thought he might be cool, might be psycho.

‘Wanna sell it?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’ll give you a thousand pounds.’

I looked at him. Was he serious? A thousand pounds…

He laughed. ‘Only kidding,’ he said. ‘Had you going for a minute, though, eh?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, feeling foolish.

‘Like you’d ever sell something like that,’ he said.

‘Yeah…’

‘Not even for a thousand pounds, eh?’

‘Oh…no…’

He walked off one way, still smiling. I walked off the other, the rain following me and the dog all the way home again.

The morning
Master of Puppets
was released in Britain, Martin Hooker walked from the MFN office in Carnaby Street across towards Wardour Street and into St Anne’s Court, where Shades was situated. He was shocked by what he found. ‘The kids were queueing outside all the way through the streets of Soho. They’d already got all of the albums in bags with a receipt piled up next to the till, floor to ceiling. It was something that will live with me for ever because it was like, “Holy crap!”’

The release of
Master of Puppets
in March 1986 brought both Metallica and thrash fully into the mainstream for the first time. Although it would quickly come to represent the end of Metallica’s association with the genre for those fans already in thrall to its snake-belly charms, the success of the album gave thrash a name and a face the rest of the previously disinterested rock audience could at last identify with. As with David Bowie and glam, the Sex Pistols and punk, or Iron Maiden and the NWOBHM, for the vast majority of music buyers uninterested in the sordid details, at least they knew what thrash was now, what it looked like, even what it sounded like. Thrash was Metallica. And, just as with Bowie and glam and Rotten and punk, however much Metallica moved over the coming years to disassociate themselves from their perceived roots, to push their music into newer, more interesting shapes, their calling card would always remain as the ‘godfathers of thrash’. Inventors of a musical legacy that now had more to do with the bands that came after them, it was the tag that both legitimised and ghettoised Metallica – a fact they would spend the rest of their career both railing against and, when it suited them, using as proof of their enduring grass-roots credibility.

On every level, though,
Master of Puppets
was a game-changer. One of the two best albums they would make, it remains, a quarter of a century later, the symbol of everything that continues to make Metallica interesting and exciting, the fact that they later moved so far away from its look and sound that they might have become another band entirely only further enhancing its occult appeal down through the generations, a momentous release seen now, justifiably so, as an utterly unrepeatable chapter in both their own story and that of rock itself.

In
Sounds
, under the heading ‘Thrash on Delivery’, the new album was hailed as ‘a synthesis of everything good and truly Metallica…the slow, the fast, the melodic, topped with that exquisite Metallica guitar sound, all treble and grit’. Lars, though, was again doing his best to waylay the inevitable thrash backlash – and catch the eye of those less partisan rock buyers he felt sure would get Metallica if they only gave it a try. ‘No one can simply write off Metallica as being thrash,’ he said. ‘The first album was, we know that, but this album is a totally different proposition.’ Added James, ‘We’d never try to forget what Metallica formed for, no way. It’s just that maturity in style breeds better material all round. Metallica now is variety with spice.’

Once
MOP
had sold more than a million copies worldwide and grazed the UK Top Forty, even the
NME
, then the bastion of anti-metal prejudice and cultural snobbery, felt obliged to put Metallica on its cover, under the guise of a better-late-than-never ‘investigation’, in which they also took sidelong glances at Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax, under the heading: ‘Breaking the Thrash Barrier’. Inevitably, given the reactionary aspect of the paper’s culture, begun in the 1970s as a commendable desire to disoblige various rock emperors of their new clothes, now curdled in the post-punk 1980s into an unseemly no-right-of-reply one-upmanship, Metallica became accused of purveying music ‘as a manifest form of gay pop’; an approach which Lars combated with an unusually straight face. When questioned on his views of Paris – the city the interview took place in – and that of the broader music scene in general, he commented: ‘I appreciate and understand a lot of the things you’re talking about…but for me and this band my interest is just music. The history of cities and what rappers get up to really takes a fifth fiddle to what we do.’ It was a face-off with no clear winner. Referring to James throughout the article as ‘Jim’, and Cliff as ‘Chris’, hardly endeared the clearly disinterested writer to the even-less-interested band, either.

As ever,
Kerrang!
led the way for both Metallica and thrash. The album received prime billing and a five-star review, concluding that while Metallica were rightly recognised as thrash metal’s most prominent icons, the new album proved they were now ‘something more, something far greater’. Just weeks before, the magazine had also launched a bi-monthly offshoot,
Mega Metal Kerrang!
, aimed specifically at the now-flourishing thrash metal market. On the cover of issue one: Metallica. Says editor Geoff Barton, ‘People just tend to think about what they call the Big Four these days – Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax. But by [1986] there were tons and tons and tons of bands all vying for a little piece of the thrash metal pie and we couldn’t really cover them all, to any great extent, within the pages of
Kerrang!
because there was a bunch of other stuff we needed to do as well. So
Mega Metal
was launched a hundred per cent as a thrash metal magazine. To cover the big names but also to bring in the relative minnows. Just do a heavier mag than
Kerrang!
, basically.’

The timing was spot-on. Metallica may have seen the fork in the road and taken it, but those who came after had no such qualms. They just wanted in. Not least Dave Mustaine’s new post-Metallica outfit, Megadeth, whose debut album,
Killing is My Business…and Business is Good
, had been selling steadily since its initial release on the independent Combat label in September 1985. Containing Dave’s original, much speeded-up version of Metallica’s renamed ‘The Four Horsemen’ – here given back its original title of ‘The Mechanix’ – Mustaine made plain his intention to ‘straighten Metallica up’ and prove that Megadeth, not the band that kicked him out, were the ones to lead the thrash generation. As Mustaine boasted at the time to Bob Nalbandian, ‘I thought I’d have a hell of lot harder time coming up with something better [than Metallica], but this is three times faster, more advanced and a hell of a lot heavier.’ It was certainly a technical masterclass in terms of sheer musicianship, now seen as the probable beginning point for what would later become known as techno-thrash or progressive metal. The songs themselves all reflected Mustaine’s angry, vengeful mindset, missing the twisted humour that would become a much-valued trademark later in the band’s career. Metallica were already in Sweet Silence recording
Master
when it was released, but the day it reached the shops in Copenhagen Lars took the time to go in and ask to listen to it on headphones. He got through the first couple of tracks, put the phones down and walked out, saying, ‘It was how I expected it to be.’

It wasn’t just Megadeth that now felt comfortable having a pop at Metallica in the music press. Kerry King of Slayer taunted
Kerrang!
, calling it ‘the Metallica mag’, before adding pointedly, ‘Too many bands have started to sound commercial who started out heavy,’ specifically citing ‘Mercyful Fate [and] Metallica’. Slayer offered the most powerful rejoinder to Metallica’s stated intention of moving ‘beyond’ thrash, and the most profound confirmation of the genre’s strength when just six months after
Master
was released their own
Reign in Blood
arrived in a blaze of glory. Mirroring
Master of Puppets
in that it was the band’s third album yet first release for a major US label – Def Jam, distributed through Geffen –
Reign
was viewed as its evil twin; an album that was everything, in fact, that
Master
was not: devoutly uncommercial, unswervingly confrontational, bringing new meaning to the idea of extreme heavy metal. Produced by Rick Rubin, whose die-hard rock and metal roots had only been hinted at in previous successful signings such as Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys – and who, tellingly, would do so much to restore Metallica’s musical reputation more than a quarter of a century later –
Reign
shoved Slayer to the forefront of the thrash metal scene, ousting Metallica along the way. Indeed, Rubin went out of his way in the studio to encourage Slayer to make their already ultra-heavy sound even more aggressive and elemental. The other crucial difference was the emphasis on speed, resulting in the album’s ten tracks, each a classic in its own right, being deliciously contorted into just twenty-eight minutes. Even on tracks such as ‘Criminally Insane’ – released as a red-vinyl seven-inch single in the UK, in a twelve-inch cardboard German cross sleeve, replete with chain for hanging round the neck – where the actual rhythm is funereal, the drums and guitars are machine-gun fast. The album’s most infamous track, though, was its opener, ‘Angel of Death’, which listed in excruciating detail the atrocities of Nazi death-camp spectre Dr Josef Mengele, resulting in Slayer being pilloried as Nazi sympathisers, although Mengele’s sickening practices are clearly meant to appal, not inspire. Ultimately, the impact of the album came from the elephantine power and needlepoint precision of moments like the demi-title track, ‘Raining Blood’. As metal musicologist Joel McIver comments: ‘
Reign in Blood
is where the entire extreme metal pantheon starts and finishes.’

Lars Ulrich agreed, commending Slayer for being ‘the most extreme’ of Metallica’s nearest contemporaries, going on to describe
Reign in Blood
as ‘one of the best albums of ’86’. He would insist on playing it for the last few minutes before Metallica went onstage: ‘It really gives me a kick [and] makes me want to go out there and beat the hell out of the drum kit.’ The only question, he said, was how much further Slayer would be able to take their music. ‘I think they’re maybe the most interesting because they’re so extreme,’ he conceded. ‘They don’t give a fuck about anything, which is cool. Maybe they don’t wanna take it any further.’

The only other ‘Big Four’ thrash act more intent even than Metallica on breaking out of the mould were old pals Anthrax. While their 1985 album
Spreading the Disease
stuck close to the thrash template as established by Metallica, who they clearly idolised, it already exhibited signs of the band developing their own identity, from the surprisingly clean guitar sound – destined to become almost as copied as Metallica’s relentlessly thrusting downstrokes – to their songwriting – such as ‘Gung Ho’, an almost camp take on macho soldiering, replete with martial effects – and skateboard-inspired image: shin-length shorts, gaudy, comic-book hero T-shirts, backwards-flipped baseball caps. It was a look and a sound – a whole new, much more East Coast-centric attitude – that would fully come to fruition on their next album,
Among the Living
, and attendant UK hit single, the Judge Dredd-inspired ‘I Am the Law’ (despite being banned by BBC radio, who blanched at the line: ‘
I am the law / You won’t fuck around no more
’). To their everlasting credit, Anthrax would also become the first thrash-generation metal band to embrace the rapidly rising hip hop scene, taking the breakthrough moves made by Aerosmith and Run DMC on ‘Walk This Way’ one step further with their own seminal rap-metal classic ‘I’m the Man’. ‘Just because we like metal it don’t mean our eyes are closed,’ Scott Ian told me. By then Jonny and Marsha Z, who unlike Metallica, the band had kept as managers, had signed them to Island Records, Jonny flattering Island chief Chris Blackwell: ‘You didn’t get Metallica, but this thing is tremendous, and it’s too heavy for any [other] label. Only a rebel like you…’