Metallica: Enter Night (34 page)

The five-date Japanese tour took place, as scheduled, between 15 and 20 November: three shows in Tokyo, plus one each in Nagoya and Osaka. The set now included a decent enough bass solo immediately after ‘Ride the Lightning’ but in every other respect Jason was seriously struggling. ‘We’d all pick on him,’ tour photographer Ross Halfin later told Joel McIver. ‘We’d all get a cab and make him get a cab on his own. It started off as a joke and then it got really beyond a joke.’ Bobby Schneider agrees: ‘Jason fit [musically] but the razzing of Jason was terrible. They never really gave him a chance.’ He explains, ‘All of us, me included, started really making it hard for Jason. First as a joke but it started to get…they were sort of childish jokes in my mind, you’re just razzing the new guy. But as it started coming from them as well, then a lot of people on the crew…because you know what that’s like. Once it becomes okay to bully somebody then most people unfortunately, the shitty human nature that we have, without really realising it, you jump on.’

What Jason later characterised as ‘hazing and a lot of emotional tests’ included such stunts as telling everyone they introduced him to that he was gay; signing meals and drinks to his room; and invading his hotel room at four in the morning. ‘Get up, fucker! It’s time to drink, pussy!’ Pounding on his door until it almost came off the hinges. ‘You should have answered the door, bitch!’ Grabbing hold of his mattress and yanking it off the bed with Jason still lying on it, then piling everything in the room – TV, chairs, desk – on top of him. Fifteen years later, Newsted still recoiled at the memory as he told
Playboy
, ‘They threw my clothes, my cassette tapes, my shoes out the window. Shaving cream all over the mirrors, toothpaste everywhere. Just devastation. They go running out the door, “Welcome to the band, dude!”’ The only reason he put up with it, he said, ‘Because it was Metallica, it was my dream come true, man. I was definitely frustrated, fed up and kind of feeling unliked.’ More recently, he said: ‘I didn’t sleep properly for three months after I joined Metallica. They’d charged thousands of dollars to my table at a restaurant. I had no idea about it. I was a hired musician at that point, earning $500 a week. Before I joined, I was still rubbing nickels together.’ As if to add insult to injury, Lars recalled how in Tokyo, ‘all these kids gave us gifts. Jason didn’t get any, though – they thought he was part of the road crew. So he had a temper tantrum. Poor guy. Maybe we should have got him a T-shirt with the statement: “I’m Jason, dammit, gimme a gift!”’

Clearly there was something more going on here than the normal high jinks associated with a touring rock band. The problem was twofold. First there was Newsted’s generally diffident personality; on the one hand so awed by his plunge into the deep end – not just joining his dream band but trying to replace its most important figurehead – that he tried to cover up his nervousness and lack of experience by putting on a front that more than one observer mistook as arrogance; on the other, having to find a way to come to terms with his newfound role, no longer as leader of the band but as the newbie, do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do hired hand – an incredibly precarious balancing act that almost inevitably left him flat on his face.

Then there were the more subtle tensions, which he simply could not be expected to appreciate. Jason arrived in Metallica determined to do the right thing, to not blow it, to do things to the max. This was the earnest young guy, after all, who once tacked a set of ‘band rules’ to the wall of Flotsam’s rehearsal room. The others, however, especially Lars and James, were not only entering that new stage success brings, where the shine has worn off enough to let you mess around with things and make up your own rules, but were also still so fucked-up over Cliff’s death that they were easily irritated by Jason’s out-of-synch mewling. It was like Ron McGovney all over again. Jason, though good enough on bass, was never going to be as good as Cliff. Jason was a Metallica and thrash metal fan. Cliff was Cliff, into Kate Bush and Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Misfits and Lou Reed. Lars was especially outraged when Jason hinted he could use the extra practice, too. What the fuck? Jason was trying to do the ‘right’ thing at a time when the right thing no longer existed, had been left crushed under the bus with Cliff.

Above all, there was simply the enormous anger and resentment still growing inside all of them, James in particular. ‘There was a lot of grief that turned into spite towards Jason,’ admitted James in 2005. ‘That is…pretty human, I would say.’ Or as Lars put it, speaking with me in 2009, ‘It was difficult. I think certainly one could argue that maybe we didn’t give [Jason] a fair shot. But we also weren’t capable because we were twenty-two years old and we didn’t know how to deal with this type of stuff. We didn’t know how to get through those types of situations other than jump to the bottom of a vodka bottle and stay there for years…we weren’t particularly embrasive [sic] and welcoming, you know.’ He gave a small self-deprecating chuckle. ‘So I think, certainly, you know, most of the fault lies with us.’

Lars, in fact, grew to dislike Jason so much during that Japanese tour that he went to Mensch and insisted they fire him, and that the whole thing was a big mistake. ‘I know for a fact,’ said Halfin, ‘Lars wanted to fire him. He wanted to replace him. But Peter Mensch said to him, “You’ve made your choice, now live with it.”’ He added, ‘He just didn’t get on with him as a person. It wasn’t because of Jason’s playing skills; it was purely because he didn’t get on with his personality.’ This was a view corroborated by Bobby Schneider: ‘I remember Mensch sitting down with them in some bar in Japan and saying, “You guys gotta fucking stop this. He’s
in
your band. You’ve made him a band member. So just get on with it. He’s the right choice.”’

The trouble was Metallica hadn’t just hired a bassist, they’d hired a fan. Where they had schemed and plotted to persuade Cliff to join their band, Jason had given up everything to be with them. They had replaced the one guy they all looked up to with the one guy they all looked down on – Jason Newkid, as they tauntingly nicknamed him. No wonder they felt so uncomfortable having him around all the time. He wasn’t one of them and never would be. They resented him – anyone – parachuting into their story. Fuck his bass. Turn it down.

Speaking just a couple of years after Jason had been hired, Lars was still staunchly repeating the party line although he was already starting to sound like he was trying more to convince himself. ‘Look, when Cliff died, we could have taken our time before deciding what to do,’ he conceded. ‘But we didn’t, and that felt like the right thing to do.’ Just a few nights after the funeral, ‘I sat and drank some beer and listened to the
Master of Puppets
album – all of it. And then it hit me. The next couple of weeks would have been shit but we started setting up auditions, spending hours on the phone, and then we got Jason Newsted and started jamming, and then we initiated Jason with some club gigs…It was good for us, the right thing for us to do. No time to dwell. From the accident to doing a gig was five weeks. The reason I talk about this is that what was right for us might not have been right for other bands…’ When the writer Ben Mitchell asked James in 2009 whether he thought they had toured again too quickly after Cliff died, the singer replied: ‘I think we did everything too quickly after that. Getting a bass player, touring. We went straight back out. That was management’s way of dealing with the grief: “Just play it out through your music.” Now it feels like there wasn’t enough grieving or enough respect paid, and enough of just dealing with each other and helping each other through. We went out on the road and took a lot of it out on Jason once he joined. It was more like: “Yeah, we have a bass player but he’s not Cliff.”’

There was no time for looking back in 1986, though; the Japanese dates were immediately followed by a short US and Canadian tour at the end of November, before finally returning to Europe – the scene of the crime – at the start of 1987 to finish up the dates they’d been forced to cancel when their tour bus skidded off the road and took at least one glorious possible future with it. ‘I did another tour before we went back there,’ says Schneider. ‘Me and Flemming Larsen, actually, went out on tour with Slayer and neither one of us could sleep on the bus. I mean, I had to pass out to go to sleep. For years and years and years I had to sleep on a certain bunk or on the front couch.’ To help Metallica over any residual feelings of insecurity, in fact, Q Prime hired an American bus driver to travel with them. ‘He came with us and watched the other driver drive; that’s what his job was…to keep an eye on things.’

When, in April 1987, they released their first long-form video, a tribute to their man down, titled
Cliff ’Em All
, it seemed from the outside like an act of closure. Basking in a renewed round of rave reviews, within weeks of its release,
Cliff ’Em All
was certified both gold and platinum in the US music video charts. All surely was now well again in Metallica’s world. In fact, the deep and unsightly wounds inflicted by Burton’s death would remain open, continuing to fester for at least another twenty years, by which time a despairing Newsted would finally have had enough and thrown in the towel, leaving the band to try and do what they should have done in 1986. Not tour, not record, not paper over the ever-widening cracks, hoping it would be all right when they came to again in the morning. That day was coming whether they liked it or not. Meanwhile, things would just get worse – the pain, the bitterness, the recriminations and resentments, the awful guilt – stalking their rapidly growing success like an ever-lengthening shadow, night waiting to fall.

Compiled from bootleg footage recorded by fans, personal film clips belonging to the band and photos sourced from various locations, both official and unofficial,
Cliff ’Em All
was a groundbreaking release. More than a decade before such concepts as ‘reality TV’, the unscripted, unplanned, apparently random nature of the material came as a delightful surprise, whether one was a dyed-in-the-wool Metallica fan or merely a random viewer. By turns amusing, sad and surprisingly insightful, it’s the kind of thing we take for granted in these YouTube-inflected times but which seemed utterly revelatory back then: Cliff chilling out smoking ‘the greatest pot to hit these shores’; the band walking en masse into a liquor store and stealing enough beer and bites to see them through the evening; all this amidst a flood of Beavis and Butthead-style sniggering. Most of all, some glorious footage of the band in its earliest days, from Cliff’s second gig at the Stone in April 1983, via the Day on the Green in ’85 and several fan-shot bootleg clips from the summer ’86 Ozzy tour, where it became clear just how powerful a presence Burton was onstage and off – and how young and unconfident James in particular often was, not least when Dave Mustaine was still ruling the roost from the opposite side of the stage. Imagine that: caught in the spotlight between Cliff Burton on one side and Dave Mustaine on the other, behind you that little lunatic Lars. No wonder James felt he had a fight on his hands just keeping up.

After the tour the plan had been to begin writing for the next album, a process broken up with a smattering of lucrative festival dates scheduled for the summer. However, things changed when Hetfield broke his arm again in yet another skateboarding accident, this time in an empty swimming pool in Oakland Hills with Kirk and their pals Fred Cotton and Pushead. James had been wearing all the protective gear this time, he had been ‘just a little too vertical,’ recalled Cotton. ‘As soon as he came down into the bottom of the pool you could hear the snap.’ Forced to cancel what should have been a career-boosting appearance on NBC-TV’s highly influential
Saturday Night Live
, Cotton claims Q Prime subsequently ‘made James sign something that promised he wasn’t go to skateboard any more’. Instead, the focus now switched to something even more important: recording their first release under their new deal with a major British record company: Phonogram.

Master of Puppets
had marked the end of Metallica’s licensing deal with Music for Nations. Unlike Jonny Z in his struggle to retain control against the encroaching interests of the much larger and more powerful Q Prime, Martin Hooker was not only keen to renew the band’s contract but he also had the financial means to do so. Peter Mensch, however, had bigger fish to fry. He wanted Metallica on a British and European label commensurate in size to Elektra in the USA and CBS in Japan. Specifically, he wanted them on Phonogram, where he already had Def Leppard. ‘We did offer them a considerably bigger deal than Phonogram,’ says Martin Hooker, ‘worth well over £1 million, which at that time was the biggest deal we’d ever offered anyone.’ He adds, ‘Unfortunately, Q Prime weren’t even prepared to discuss it as it suited their purposes to have the band at Phonogram.’ In fact, says Hooker, Q Prime, who were ‘amazed at our offer’, had already agreed the deal with Phonogram without even speaking to MFN. ‘When we found out, we then offered them a very generous new deal just to hold onto the catalogue that we already had. I explained that this would be very beneficial to the band as an extra income source that wouldn’t be recouped against tour support or recording costs et cetera on the new album [as it would at Phonogram]. I thought this made a lot of financial sense for the band. Needless to say I was incredulous to find out that Q Prime had already agreed to throw the existing catalogue into the Phonogram deal.’

Says Hooker: ‘My back catalogue was still selling truck-loads. So they [must have] really, really wanted those three records, to help them recoup their balance…they obviously pressured him and eventually, I think like a year later, when the second term expired, they took the back catalogue off me, which was totally within their rights to do so, of course.’ Hooker would have one last laugh, though. When Metallica left for Phonogram, MFN rereleased
MOP
as a ‘limited edition’ double album, claiming that the extra-wide grooves on the vinyl gave the music a more crystal-clear sound. ‘I wouldn’t say that it was any
better
,’ concedes Gem Howard now, ‘but it was
louder
. Because you can cut it much louder when you’re doing it at forty-five rpm on a twelve-inch, because there’s more room in the grooves, which makes it sound better…’ He goes on: ‘It seems laughable now but in those days we were getting kids writing to us saying how wonderful the sound quality was and we sold tens of thousands of it – incredible.’ Gem says the final figure for combined British and European sales of all three Metallica albums on MFN is now in excess of 1.5 million, or ‘about 500,000 each’.
MOP
remains the single biggest-selling album Music for Nations ever released.