Metallica: Enter Night (9 page)

While the formula may have been as straightforward as Lars suggests, the long-term effect was something not even he could have predicted. As such, the arrival of Metallica, and with them this new phenomenon called ‘thrash metal’, was a watershed moment in rock history: the end of heavy metal as it had become, post-punk – either lugubrious rhythms dredged from a river setting the scene for jiggery-pokery lyrics about Satan and his followers, or self-conscious anthems full of whinnying guitars and blow-dried vocals – and the beginning of a whole new thing that began by offering an alternative to the staid old ways and ended up replacing them. Thrash discarded those clichéd images of heavy metal as readily as punk, but kept the muscle and musicianship. Punk was about singles; thrash about albums. After that the two had more in common than not; dressed down in street clothes, determinedly proletariat, its appeal lying far beyond the remit of the pop or rock mainstream. Compared to anyone who had gone before, Metallica were closest to Motörhead in terms of stripping back rock to its most vital components. But there was a comic aspect to Lemmy and his man-boys, a knowing wink, a glint of the gold tooth that Metallica did not share. Lars and his guys were far more earnest in their musical endeavours, dressed head to foot in black, building their songs into musical movements before they could barely play their instruments. Metallica was a more purist experience and to be a thrash fan meant taking the music to a far more serious level: closer to the deep emotional abyss of
Dark Side
-era Pink Floyd or the self-absorbed self-righteousness of the early Clash. Not quite as bleak as Joy Division, but then Joy Division didn’t come from sunny southern California where the light is so bright it bleaches the shadows. So while Metallica, and with them the template for thrash, would include some of the old-school rock trappings – show-stopping drum displays, cartwheeling solos on a Flying V, even the occasional power ballad – regular rock fans instantly recognised them and it for what they were: something new, something different, something less instantly likeable but perhaps more ultimately meaningful. In time, thrash would become successfully commodified and labelled – it was something to do with skateboarders, something to do with classic
Marvel
comic books, something to do with smoking pot, with taking speed, with hellacious beer drinking, something to do with tattoos and piercings and dirty white sneakers – but originally it had nothing to do with any of those things. It was simply about the obsession of a failed teenage tennis protégé with the early 1980s new wave of British metal, and the fact that Metallica was quintessentially American. Ten years earlier Lars would have been just as happy drumming in a Deep Purple-style band. Ten years later he’d have been in his element in a Soundgarden or an Alice In Chains. It just so happened that in 1982, when he formed his first – and last – band, the music they set out to play was still so unheard of, so unlikely, he ended up inventing a whole new genre on his own. As he later told me, ‘We didn’t call it thrash; we’d never even heard the term till we started reading about it in British magazines like
Kerrang!
. It was like, we’re thrash metal? Okay, it sounded cool…’

The term ‘thrash metal’ was still some way off from entering the lingua franca of international rock just yet, though. In the meantime, Metallica continued to plough a lonely furrow. ‘Played like shit!’ Lars would note in his gig diary after another half-empty show at Radio City in June, ‘Went down so-so.’ At the Troubadour in July they went on so late ‘everybody had gone home’, he recalled, while a show at the Whisky in August, where they ‘started at 9.15 with no one around’ was commemorated with one word in block caps: ‘SHIT!’ Looking back on those days nearly twenty years later in an interview for
Playboy
, James would recall how he and Lars simply ‘liked a kind of music that was not accepted, especially in Los Angeles. We were fast and heavy. Everything about LA was short, catchy songs: Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Van Halen. And you had to have the look. The only look we had was ugly.’ In fact, photos of the band in its earliest guise show them demonstrably trying to fit in with the prevailing trends while reaching out for something of their own true identity. As the writer Xavier Russell, an early champion of the band in the UK rock press, puts it, ‘It was Ratt and Mötley Crüe from the waist down, black spandex and bullet belts. Then on top they’d wear Motörhead T-shirts or Saxon.’ Their very first line-up shot has James dressed in billowing white shirt and tight jeans, a Motörhead-style bullet belt around his hips; Dave and Ron in much the same get up, although Dave also sports a waistcoat over his white shirt, while Ron favours a Motörhead T-shirt; and Lars, most wince-inducing of all, in what appears to be an early Metallica T-shirt but with an overshirt tied, girly-fashion, around his ribs. They all have long, blow-dried hair. At many of their earliest shows both James and Dave wore white, striped spandex pants – a look inspired by Biff Byford of Saxon. ‘We had our battles with spandex,’ James grudgingly admitted in
Playboy
. ‘You could show off your package. “Wear spandex, dude. It gets you chicks!”’

It wasn’t until halfway through the first Metallica US tour a year later, in fact, that James finally ditched the spandex, after his one and only pair of pants caught fire while he was drying them next to a heater. ‘A hole melted right in the crotch. It was like, “They’re not real pants, are they? They’re like pantyhose.”’ After that, he stuck to jeans. Even their occasional good gigs left a bitter taste. The first time they got an encore, James recalled, ‘It was a Monday night at two in the morning at the Troubadour and there were about ten people there.’ Then, having decided what they were going to do for their first encore – ‘Let it Loose’ by Savage – Lars arbitrarily struck up the beat to an entirely different number, ‘Killing Time’ by Sweet Savage, ‘because it started with drums’. James, who had forgotten the lyrics, was so furious that when the number finally came to its calamitous conclusion he walked over and screamed, ‘You fucker!’ at Lars, then punched him hard in the stomach. ‘People were going, “Huh?”’

Metal Massacre
quickly sold all 2,500 copies of its initial pressing, mainly thanks to Slagel’s work at Oz Records, where the store’s main independent distributors – Gem, Important and Green World – ‘bought them all right away. In fact, about a month later they wanted more.’ After a short-lived manufacturing and distribution deal with a small fly-by-night operation called Metalworks, which pressed up a few thousand copies but which Slagel says he was ‘never paid a dime for – it was kind of a whole nightmare’, Slagel negotiated his own distribution deal with Green World, later known as Enigma. It was through Green World that his Metal Blade label would blossom into an actual record company, rereleasing the original
Metal Massacre
album – the new pressing of which would also replace the original Metallica four-track with the new, eight-track version on
No Life ’til Leather
– and putting together a follow-up release,
Metal Massacre II
. From there it was a short step to releasing stand-alone records by single artists. ‘I was a one-man record company,’ Slagel says now, ‘involved in the recording of it, the mastering of it, I did all of the artwork, did all of the promotion…kind of everything.’ Early Metal Blade releases included albums by other original
Metal Massacre
artists, Bitch and Demon Flight, followed by EPs from newer names such as Armored Saint and Warlord, both of whom would first be heard on
Metal Massacre II
. The fledgling label really hit pay dirt, however, in 1983, with the debut album from Slayer,
Show No Mercy
. Although Slagel admits he ‘didn’t really see a big connection at first’ between Slayer’s gargantuan rhythms and Metallica’s sheet-metal riffs, Slayer would go on to become one of what is now regarded as the Big Four of thrash metal, and the only really serious rivals to Metallica’s crown as ‘inventors’ of thrash, a claim that would grow in credulity as the years passed. Unlike Metallica, who would move early to broaden their musical horizons (and audience), Slayer refused to soften their approach or seek mainstream approval; the earnest, faith-keeping Clash to Metallica’s more maverick, rule-breaking Sex Pistols.

Suitably encouraged, in September 1982 Brian Slagel decided to put on a dedicated Metal Massacre show in San Francisco, at a small club called the Stone. Nearly two hundred people showed up, the largest crowd most of the bands on the bill had ever played to. Metallica, who were the big hit on the night, had only been added to the bill as an afterthought. ‘The bill was going to be Bitch, Cirith Ungol and I can’t remember who the third band was going to be,’ says Slagel. When Cirith Ungol was forced to pull out at the last minute, ‘I called Lars and asked if Metallica would like to do it, no money but a gig.’ Typically, Lars agreed – then worried later about how they would actually get to San Francisco. It was to prove a wise decision that would have far-reaching consequences. As Lars observed in his gig diary, it was Metallica’s ‘First real great gig. Real bangers, real fans, real encores. Had a great fuckin’ weekend. Fucked up a lot onstage!’ Certainly, they weren’t note-perfect, says Slagel, but the band was slowly starting to hit its stride, encouraged by the very different response their music received in San Francisco. Unknown even to Lars, the
No Life ’til Leather
demo had been a hit on the underground scene in San Francisco, thanks in no small part to the proselytising in Ron Quintana’s
Metal Mania
fanzine. At the show, they were amazed to hear the audience actually singing some of the lyrics to the songs. Afterwards, some even asked for autographs! ‘It was a trip,’ says Ron McGovney, ‘we couldn’t believe it.’

They were also starting to write new material that reflected their improved status as a gigging band. Added to the seven
No Life ’til Leather
tracks, all of which they performed at the Stone, was another new number recently worked up in Ron’s bungalow: ‘No Remorse’ – a tour de force built around at least three different riffs, dating back to James’ pre-Metallica days, any of which would have been catchy enough to build a whole song around, but subjugated here to a greater sonic whole, laced with Mustaine’s enflamed guitar solos and propelled by Lars’ stop-start drums, before suddenly taking off into yet another, entirely different section, lightning-fast, the number climaxing with a bomb-blast finale. It would become the template for what would become the trademark Metallica sound in their earliest, groundbreaking years. Not that the band was ready yet to stray far from its roots. The encores were two Diamond Head songs, ‘Am I Evil?’ and ‘The Prince’, both of which were now sounding more like trademark Metallica numbers and less like covers – a line the band was still happy to blur.

The most significant outcome of the Stone show, though, was the reaction of the crowd. ‘It was our first encounter with real fans,’ said James. ‘It was like, these people are here for us, and they like us, and they hate the other bands – and we like that ’cos we hate them too.’ Says Brian Slagel, ‘In LA [Metallica] were kind of looked at like a black-sheep band because they were way too heavy compared to what the other bands were doing at this point. Even Mötley and Ratt were getting more commercial and that’s kind of where the scene was going. So they didn’t go down so well. But when they came up to San Francisco that night, all of a sudden they have all these kids there that went
crazy
for them. Just
loved
them and loved what they were doing. It was really amazing. I was like, holy shit! Even the band was like, wow, we never saw that coming!’ Eager to keep that good feeling going, the band booked a follow-up show in San Francisco, at the Old Waldorf, for October. It was only a Monday night – the deadest night of the week – but they played it like a Saturday night. They didn’t even bother with the safety net of the Diamond Head covers this time, just went out and blasted through the
No Life ’til Leather
demo plus ‘No Remorse’. Again, ‘the people went nuts’, Ron recalled. Among them was Gary Holt, guitarist in local San Francisco outfit Exodus, who would open for Metallica at a November show at the Old Waldorf – later immortalised on another officially sanctioned live tape for the traders to play with, dubbed
Metal up Your Ass
. He recalls that ‘they were great but they were really sloppy. Lars could barely play his drums and they were really drunk onstage. But they had this raw punk energy.’ Such was their growing reputation in San Francisco the band even took out an ad in local music free sheet,
BAM
(Bay Area Music). It cost $600, a great deal of money to shell out for an otherwise penniless unsigned band in 1982. Fortunately, they had good old Ron to pay for it – again. ‘It was probably Lars’ and James’ idea,’ said Ron. ‘They laid the ad out and showed it to me and said it will cost $600. I said, “Okay, Lars…James, where’s your money?” and they said, “We don’t have any money.” I was the only one that had any money, so I wrote out a cheque for $600 to
BAM
. Till this day I never got that money back.’

The only real fly in the ointment was the increasingly hard to handle Dave Mustaine. Slagel recalls the guitarist coming up at the first Stone show and telling him, ‘You’re gonna hear something from somebody that’s not true.’ Explains Slagel, ‘Apparently what had happened was they had gone through all the beer that the promoter had given them and they wanted more beer. And the promoter I guess didn’t feel he should give them more beer or wasn’t giving them the beer quick enough. So Dave just went behind the bar and grabbed a case of Heineken and took it backstage and they drank it. When the promoter found out about it he got upset and decided not to pay them the hundred bucks [fee] and it became this big thing. I’m like, oh boy. But it was a classic Dave Mustaine moment in the early days.’ Indeed, Mustaine’s overbearing personality and wayward behaviour – not helped by his daily over-consumption of weed and alcohol – had been causing the band problems almost from the start. Ron, in particular, found the grating, confrontational Mustaine distinctly at odds with his own more steady, even-keel personality. Ron was the one who rented a trailer so they could load the drum riser and all their other gear and have it towed up to San Francisco in his father’s 1969 Ford Ranger. Ron, who had never been to San Francisco before and found himself driving around Chinatown trying to find the club while the other three were ‘back there in the camper shell drinking and partying, and I’m just pissed [off]’.