Metallica: Enter Night (35 page)

Dave Thorne, then senior product manager in the International Department at Phonogram in London, wouldn’t normally have been involved in the Metallica campaign. Having recently worked with Bon Jovi, Rush, Cinderella, and several other rock-related Phonogram artists, however, he found himself in a central role in the Metallica deal, he says now, ‘because of my connections and understanding of heavy metal’. Thorne explains how the ‘key link’ in the deal had been Peter Mensch’s existing relationship with the label’s director of business affairs, John Watson: then Phonogram’s senior lawyer. The first time Thorne got wind of the deal was when he was called into the office of managing director David Simone, who was there with Watson. They told Dave they had the chance to sign Metallica and asked what he thought their long-term commercial prospects were.

‘I kind of got excited and said they are
the
band at the moment in the extreme metal scene’, characterising them as ‘the Rush of extreme metal’. When he added that Metallica had already sold 100,000 albums in the UK alone, Simone asked, ‘Yes, but is it gonna get bigger?’ To which Thorne replied, ‘With us as a company behind them, why wouldn’t it?’ Actually there were several reasons why Phonogram might not have been the right label for a band such as Metallica. As Thorne admits, all he got from the A&R department initially was ‘blank faces’. He adds, ‘They couldn’t have told you which way you held a guitar, never mind what sort of band Metallica was. They were signing bands like Soft Cell and Swing Out Sister – all these pop-driven, indie-type things.’

He recalls Mensch coming to London for a summit meeting with Simone, Watson, Thorne, and all the various heads of department, including marketing director John Waller and his boss Tony Powell. The thrust of Mensch’s presentation was: ‘This is not an A&R opportunity, the A&R on this band takes care of itself. This is a marketing opportunity…’ Says Thorne, ‘Mensch said, “Guys, don’t get yourselves excited. We’re not looking for you to be creatively involved in this. None of you except maybe that bloke” – pointing at me – “knows anything about this band. We want your sales, distribution and marketing.”’

Mensch won them over but, as he’d already conceded, very little of this had to do with the music. Says Thorne, ‘I suspect some of the powers that be thought, hey, this could be the new Def Leppard. I don’t think there was any real analysis of whether that was feasible. What we were talking about was building a stronger bridge with a big management company who we already had a relationship with.’ MFN had ‘great ears, great attitude; great tenacity in delivering what they’d done [but] were literally at the limit of their capability’. To get Metallica where they needed to go next, career-wise, it would take ‘serious old-fashioned marketing clout, delivering big campaigns, big discount deals, et cetera. Polygram, who were the distribution arm of the company, at the time, was pretty much the biggest distribution operation in Europe. So that’s what [Q Prime] were looking for.’

The first Metallica release on Phonogram would be a four-track twelve-inch:
The $5.98 EP: Garage Days Re-Revisited
– the title a reference to the subtitle of the B-side of the ‘Creeping Death’ single of three years before; an indicator that this was a collection of covers. It’s long been assumed that this was conceived as a handy way of breaking Newsted into Metallica before embarking on a full-blown album. In fact, the record was made at the suggestion of Dave Thorne, who saw their forthcoming return appearance at that year’s Donington Monsters of Rock festival as a perfect marketing opportunity for a new British release: ‘I said, “Look, this is an amazing sales opportunity. I know you’re not gonna have an album but we’ve got to put something out.” They said okay, we’ll go away and think about it.’ Thorne’s initial idea had been a straightforward single but Mensch told him, ‘We don’t do singles.’ Thorne responded, ‘Well, record something that will qualify for the singles chart but isn’t a single. They came back and said, “We’re gonna do
The $5.98 EP: Garage Days Re-Revisited
.” Even now, Lars still credits me with this idea, which is very nice of him. But I hadn’t conceptualised it.’

In fact, the idea – blasting out as-live versions of covers of underground metal and punk gems such as ‘Helpless’ by Diamond Head, ‘The Small Hours’ by fellow NWOBHM outfit Holocaust, ‘Crash Course in Brain Surgery’ by old-wave British metallists Budgie, and back-to-back versions of two songs by Cliff’s beloved Misfits, ‘Last Caress’ and ‘Green Hell’ – was simple but brilliant. Rehearsed, as the title suggests, in the garage – although not at their former El Cerrito bolthole but across the street in Lars’ newly soundproofed two-car garage at his very own house, bought with the extra money now coming in – then recorded in just six days at Conway studios in LA, ‘about the same time it took to load in the gear on the last album’, as James noted on the sleeve, the
Garage Day
s EP was a riot from start to finish.

Opening with the sound of James humming while other voices in the background titter, before Lars’ monstrous-sounding drums kick in and the whole thing takes off like a runaway train, just as the
Cliff ’Em All
video anticipated aspects of reality TV, so
Garage Days
massively predated the taste for lo-fi recordings of a decade later, emphasised by rule-breaking moments such as the fade-out of ‘Helpless’ fading back in again to the sound of guitar chords being wrenched from amps and Lars barking instructions from behind his kit. The speed and ferocity continue through the next track, Jason’s bass erupting over the improvised intro and turning the ostensibly vintage rock anthem ‘Crash Course in Brain Surgery’ into a wild punk-metal powerhouse. The opening track on side two – ‘The Small Hours’ – is given an even more brutal treatment, lumbering towards you over the horizon like some mutant one-eyed alien monster from Kirk’s growing collection of vintage sci-fi comics, smothered in nuclear dust clouds and the blood of puny humans. The real kiss-off, though, is the climax, two long-dead Misfits songs – ‘Last Caress’ and ‘Green Hell’ – bolted, Frankenstein-like, into one. Despite its defiantly wrongheaded lyrics (‘I got something to say, I raped your mother today…’), ‘Last Caress’ was one of Metallica’s catchiest tracks, its counter-intuitive sweetness wonderfully superseded by ‘Green Hell’, one of their fastest tracks since ‘Whiplash’, the whole medley lasting barely over three minutes; the joke compounded when the EP ends with an amusingly tuneless few seconds of the intro to Iron Maiden’s ‘Run to the Hills’. Ironically, the most Metallica-like track recorded at these sessions was actually left off the UK version of the EP, in order to qualify it for the singles chart – their commanding version of Killing Joke’s ‘The Wait’, any traces of humour once more suspended as the band do the seemingly impossible and all but make the song their own.

For a band that would increasingly make superior production the foundation upon which their albums would stand or fall, the hastily recorded, ‘not very produced’ – as they wittily credited it on the sleeve –
Garage Day
s EP arguably did more for Metallica’s reputation at that precise juncture in their career than the most momentous album release might have. It made Metallica seem fun and accessible, qualities that had eluded them since their first album. And, yes, it was a good way of introducing Jason Newkid, as he’s listed on the artfully ‘makeshift’ sleeve, to those fans waiting with folded arms to compare him to Cliff. It also gave Jason one of his first really good Metallica experiences, using his background as a carpenter and odd-job man to help Lars soundproof his new garage after the band decided they didn’t feel comfortable working out of a plush Marin County rehearsal studio shared by Night Ranger and Starship. Jason brought in strips of carpeting to soundproof the walls, with the help of Lars’ old pal from LA, John Kornarens (who still hadn’t got his fifty bucks back). As Jason recalled, ‘That was a fucking blast, man. You walked into the room, set up your amp the way you would live, put a microphone in front of it and you play the song. James was standing next to me…just doing his stuff. We recorded it there and then, mistakes and all. To me that’s one of the best-sounding Metallica records because of its rawness.’

The plan, explains Thorne, was for Phonogram to use its clout to ‘blast it straight into the charts. To make a massive statement about the band, and that’s of course exactly what it did.’ In fact, the EP went in at Number Twenty-Seven – good, not great, by contemporary chart singles’ standards but regarded as a significant success at Phonogram as the record had been released in only one format: a twelve-inch vinyl record. No CD, no cassette, no seven-inch formats. When Thorne had played a snippet of ‘Helpless’ at the weekly strategy meeting, ‘I kid you not, within thirty seconds, the press girls and virtually everybody else in the bloody room was going, “Oh, for god’s sake turn that off!”’ When the record actually became a commercial success, ‘That opened up the floodgates at Phonogram for Metallica.’ The EP also went gold in America, but for half a million album sales, because it wasn’t accepted as a single configuration. Marketed there as a mini-album, with the extra track, the cover of ‘The Wait’, now added, as it was for Japan, the package was retitled
The $9.98 EP: Garage Days Re-Revisited
. ‘They had to do that,’ explains Thorne, ‘or it simply would have sold that amount on import and Elektra [and CBS] would have missed out.’

Equally impressive, from their new record company’s standpoint, was the band’s willingness to help promote the record. They may not have been the usual type of singles-orientated artists Phonogram was used to dealing with but they more than made up for that by being down-to-earth and ready to roll up their sleeves. For most major artists, ‘coming into the country doing promo meant a handful of major interviews’, says Thorne. ‘Possibly a bit of TV and radio if it was available. Then you might get other members of the band to do some secondary interview type stuff. But Lars didn’t just want to talk to [the major music press], he wanted to talk to every bloody fanzine you’ve ever heard of and a load that you haven’t. Lars would come in and spend four or five
days
in our office. He’d do literally sixty, seventy, eighty fanzines. You couldn’t get him off the phone.’

Thorne cites this readiness to always meet the media halfway as one of the major contributing factors in Metallica’s later popularity with such temperamentally metal-hostile magazines as the
NME
,
Time Out
, the
Village Voice
,
Rolling Stone
, and so on, up to the present day and their current elevated status among the broadsheet newspapers. ‘It was a combination of Lars’ willingness to always go the extra mile for the media,’ says Thorn, ‘and also something else. It all comes down to the “c”-word: credibility. Every conversation I had with Peter Mensch, every meeting we had, every major decision we made, that was the word that was at the forefront: credibility. They would not do anything that would upset that applecart. They weren’t gonna sell out because they were a band of the people. They came up through the tape-trading scene and that’s where they wanted to stay. They didn’t want to upset those people.’

Maybe so but Lars, they discovered, was also Dave and the rest of Phonogram’s ‘go-to guy’ for both promotional issues and all relevant business decisions. ‘I would talk to Mensch and he would then say to me, “Okay, now you’ve got to talk to Lars and persuade him.”’ Peter, he says, ‘was obviously a guy who had a natural aversion to saying yes, especially to record labels. [So in the beginning] he got me to talk to Lars all the time. Lars was totally,
totally
immersed in the business side of things…he was the guy who had to be persuaded. He would then go to the guy who was the
real
decision-maker in the band, and that was Hetfield – on the big things.’

Another added bonus in the label’s attempts to garner maximum publicity for their first Metallica release was the band’s decision to play – billed as ‘Damage, Inc.’ – an unannounced warm-up show for Donington at the 100 Club in Oxford Street, the legendary venue where The Clash and the Sex Pistols had performed in the late 1970s. When, near the end of the hour-long set, Jason’s bass dropped out of the mix due to a technical glitch, word passed through the crowd that he’d passed out from the heat. The place was so unbearably hot and overcrowded it was impossible to verify this and when Jason’s momentary ‘collapse’ was later misreported in
Kerrang!
it only added to the gathering list of grievances and personal slights against him that Jason was now mentally compiling. He even suspected the band of planting the story to their cronies on the mag as another wind-up. As Dave Thorne says, ‘It was an insane night. My lasting memory was seeing Scott Ian being surfed around the whole crowd in front of the band…a crazy night.’

Two days later the band walked onstage at Donington, where they were third on the bill below ex-Black Sabbath singer Ronnie James Dio and headliners Bon Jovi. For thousands of Metallica fans, Donington was their first chance to see the new-look line-up. Conversely, for Metallica it was important to prove they had barely changed at all; that it was business as usual – not to diminish the loss of their talismanic bassist, but to demonstrate that this was not some insurmountable obstacle. That there was still great substance to what they did – and where they would be going next, no matter who now occupied the side of the stage to James’ right. The set began well enough with three crowd-pleasing relics from the Cliff-shrouded past: ‘Creeping Death’, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and ‘Fade to Black’. It wasn’t long, though, before they were dipping into the new EP in a neat bit of cross-promotional euphoria and future foundation-laying, injecting the huge element of fun the EP had winningly engendered, even down to wringing out the woozy intro to ‘Run to the Hills’ at the climax of the ‘Last Caress’/‘Green Hell’ medley.

Then, just as they were building towards the climax of their set, the audience’s attention was snatched away by the arrival overhead of the helicopter ferrying Bon Jovi to the backstage area. It seemed to take forever to navigate its way over the crowd, buzzing loudly towards the backstage area, where the ground was firmly ‘cleared’ by their ground staff security so that Jon and his band could disembark without having to engage with anyone else working there that day. ‘Fucking asshole!’ James raged when he came off stage. ‘He deliberately tried to fuck up our set.’ It hadn’t been quite that bad – a distraction, certainly, but one everyone bar possibly Hetfield got over quickly – but James took it personally. Grabbing a marker pen he scrawled the words ‘Kill Bon Jovi’ on his guitar. Jon Bon Jovi later told me it had all been a misunderstanding; that he was appalled that anyone would think he would deliberately try to ruin another band’s show, not least one appearing lower on the same bill as he. Jon made it clear, however, that he still recalled Hetfield’s comments on the Donington stage two years before about ‘spandex, make-up and oh baby’ songs and that there was no love lost between the two camps.