Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘I was into bands that a lot of people were into – Kiss and Aerosmith and Black Sabbath and all that kinda stuff – and I knew there was something out there that was further out,’ says Scott. ‘Then I started seeing Judas Priest records and I looked at the pictures on them and I knew that this had to be what I was looking for … so then I just started buying records based on the covers themselves. I used to go to a record store in Costa Mesa, California, which was kinda between Huntington Beach and Newport Beach and we’d go to this store called Music Market and they’d have a bunch of imports there. And then we started seeing Neat Record releases and I found the Lead Weight tape that had Raven and Venom and Bitches Sin and all that stuff on it, and that was taking it a little further. And it kinda went from there.

  ‘But it’s a funny thing that Lars and I never jammed. I was a beginning guitar player, and I didn’t want to go out until I could really play. Lars was [starting out as] a drummer at that point, but he just wanted to play. He didn’t care that he wasn’t really up to a certain standard of proficiency as a drummer, he didn’t care, he just wanted to go out there and play. And you know, he did the right thing.’

  ‘People would come over to talk to me about Van Halen or whoever,’ says Ulrich, ‘and I’d be like “No, no, no, we gotta learn how to play [songs by] Trespass or that Witchfinder General song or Silverwing’s ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Are Four Letter Words’. I have recordings of me jamming those songs with other people, but they never got it. Hetfield was the only other person who got psyched about those bands …’

  Frustrated with the lack of progress, in the summer of 1981 Ulrich decided to take his New Wave of British Heavy Metal obsession to its logical conclusion by undertaking a road trip to England. On the evening of Friday, July 10, 1981 the seventeen-year-old pitched up outside the Woolwich Odeon in south London and handed over £3 in exchange for a ticket in the stalls to see his new favourite band. He would subsequently describe the evening as ‘life-changing’.

  When the hype around the New Wave of British Heavy Metal first began to build, Stourbridge quartet Diamond Head were billed as the scene’s equivalent to Led Zeppelin. Built around the high-pitched vocals and matinee idol looks of front man Sean Harris and the muscular riffing of guitarist Brian Tatler, the band’s independently released debut seven-inch single ‘Shoot Out the Lights’ attracted the attention of the United Kingdom’s major label A&R fraternity. All approaches, however, were rebuffed by manager Linda Harris, Sean’s mother, who wanted to build the band’s profile to a point where, like Zeppelin before them, they could dictate their career on their own terms. By the time the quartet released their debut album Lightning to the Nations on their own Happy Face records, Ulrich was a confirmed fan.

  ‘I’d heard the single “Shoot Out the Lights”/ “Helpless” and it was good, but it didn’t particularly stand out from all the other stuff coming out in 1980,’ Ulrich admitted. ‘But then I heard “It’s Electric” on a compilation called Brute Force, and it blew my fucking head off. Diamond Head had a vibe and an attitude no other band could match.’

  After the show, displaying the kind of breezy nonchalance that was fast becoming his trademark, Ulrich knocked on the stage door and asked to speak to Linda, with whom he had been corresponding by letter while awaiting delivery of his mail-order copy of Lightning to the Nations that spring. Astonished that a seventeen-year-old boy had flown across the Atlantic to see her son’s band, Harris immediately ushered the sweat-drenched teenager into Diamond Head’s dressing room. When Tatler enquired as to where Ulrich was staying, the young Dane shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know, I’ve just come straight from the airport.’ Given the lateness of the hour, and the fact that parts of south London had been on fire just one week earlier as racial discord spilled over into street riots, the guitarist offered to let the precocious tourist crash out at his parents’ house in Stourbridge. Within the hour Ulrich was sandwiched in the back of Sean Harris’s Austin Allegro bound for the West Midlands. ‘I think I was just pretty tenacious back then,’ he laughs.

  The drummer slept at the foot of Tatler’s bed for the next week, before relocating to Harris’s couch for another month. During his time, Ulrich accompanied Diamond Head to gigs in Hereford and Leeds, blagged Tatler and himself into the Heavy Metal Holocaust festival co-headlined by Motörhead and Ozzy Osbourne in Stoke on August 1, spent a small fortune on vinyl and passed many a night getting drunk on pints of snakebite in Stourbridge pubs. But not once did Ulrich mention to his friends the fact that he himself was a drummer with dreams of starting a band.

  ‘I was just some fucking snot-nosed Danish kid who was really excited about their music and, I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but I think they were psyched about having a guy around who was as passionate about their music as they were,’ Ulrich later recalled. ‘[I enjoyed] being around them and watching them write and, watching them play, watching them interact with each other, watching their relationship with the music around them, you know, in terms of Zeppelin and stuff that was inspiring them and so on. I was just interested then in how bands worked.’

  In mid-August Ulrich said farewell to his new friends and travelled south to London ahead of his flight to Copenhagen. He had one final mission in mind.

  In the summer of 1981, when their ferocious, feral live album No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith debuted atop the UK album chart, Motörhead could justifiably lay claim to being not only the noisiest rock band in the United Kingdom, but also the most popular. In the wake of their headline bow at the Heavy Metal Holocaust festival, the trio’s redoubtable leader Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister decided to capitalise on his band’s momentum by booking a room at Nomis studios in west London for the purpose of writing material for what would be their fifth studio album. To Lemmy, the unscheduled appearance of a slight Danish teenager at the rehearsal room door one August afternoon would prove to be only a minor distraction; for Lars Ulrich the experience was nothing less than ‘a mindfuck’.

  ‘Motörhead were obviously among my two or three favourite bands,’ says Ulrich. ‘I’d met Motörhead when they were opening for Ozzy in June 1981. That was their first kind of big tour of America so I followed them around California – San Diego, LA, San Francisco – I even drove behind the tour bus at one point. They were very easy-going, friendly people and invited me in. A month or two later, I found out they were rehearsing at Nomis [so I] rang the doorbell and within thirty minutes I was sitting in [their] rehearsal room.’

  As Ulrich sat in the corner of the room watching Lemmy, guitarist ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke and drummer Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor piece together riffs that would soon enough be unveiled to the world as the deathless ‘Iron Fist’, he found his excitement temporarily overwhelmed by a sense of envy. This was what he wanted for himself, this noise, this fury, this power.

  Eight weeks later Ulrich was back in Los Angeles. Never tired of the sound of his own voice, the teenager spent much of his first week at home in Newport Beach spinning tales of his adventures to his fellow metal nerds. The new Motörhead material sounded awesome, he assured them. Diamond Head were cool guys, just like us, he shrugged. And yeah, seeing Iron Maiden’s final gig with vocalist Paul Di’Anno in Copenhagen in September was kinda neat, but it was a bummer that the guy was so drunk when he and Stein tried to talk to him backstage. Listening enrapt, Brian Slagel almost forgot to tell his friend that he had some news of his own: he and John Kornarens had decided to put out a compilation album of their favourite unsigned LA bands.

  ‘So, hey, can my band be on the record?’ Ulrich asked.

  Slagel gently reminded his friend that he didn’t have a band.

  ‘I’m putting one together,’ the drummer insisted. ‘Save a space for me.’

  Slagel laughed and agreed that he’d reserve a place for Lars’s imaginary band, not believing for a moment that his friend was serious.

  ‘I remember specifically being in his house once listening to records and he had a drum set in the corner,
stacked up, and he was like, “I’m going to start a band,”’ Slagel recalled. ‘And I was like, “Sure you are Lars, I’m going to start a band too.” Because there was no way that that was going to happen.’

  That same evening though Ulrich placed a phone call to 13004 Curtis and King Road in Norwalk. When James Hetfield answered, the accented voice on the other end of the line asked if he wanted to be on a record. Sure, said Hetfield, sure. When the singer replaced the receiver, Ulrich immediately dialled another number. His second conversation of the day with Slagel was much shorter than the first.

  ‘I have a band,’ he said simply.

  2 – HIT THE LIGHTS

  The chairman and chief executive officer of Metal Blade Records is on his hands and knees in a storage cupboard at his company’s headquarters in Agoura Hills in Los Angeles County, rifling through a stack of dust-covered twelve-inch record sleeves.

  ‘It’s amazing how a bunch of kids hanging out in LA became this gigantic thing,’ he says. ‘I mean, look, I was in the right place at the right time. I’m just happy to have helped. It’s just weird how the whole thing has played out.’

  With a triumphant yelp, Brian Slagel emerges from the closet clutching a copy of his record label’s first ever release, catalogue number MBR 1001. The album’s crudely designed artwork, featuring a set of human skulls suspended in a cloud above the Californian coastline, is macabre but striking: above it the words The New Heavy Metal Revue presents Metal Massacre are picked out in stark silver type. Flipping the sleeve, Slagel points to the fifth and final band name listed on the album’s second side: Mettallica.

  ‘We spelt their name wrong,’ he laughs. ‘I don’t think it held them back.’

  It is a beautiful afternoon in Conejo Valley in Los Angeles, and in his black shorts, black trainers and black T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of Swedish occult metallers Ghost, Slagel is dressed for the skate park rather than the boardroom. A cheerful, convivial character, with a shaven head, black-rimmed spectacles and a neatly trimmed auburn goatee beard, Slagel could pass for a Silverlake bartender as easily as a LA record company mogul. But the silver and gold discs that hang from the walls of his sunlit office offer testament to his significance within the world of heavy metal. Over the years Metal Blade has brought uncompromising acts such as Slayer, Armored Saint, Behemoth and Cannibal Corpse to international prominence, and one month shy of his label’s thirtieth anniversary of operation, the fifty-one-year-old’s passion for uncovering and encouraging new bands remains undiminished.

  Slagel’s inspiration for the Metal Massacre compilation came, somewhat inevitably, directly from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, specifically the Iron Maiden-fronted Metal for Muthas New Wave of British Heavy Metal compilation, a collection overseen by Neal Kay and released by EMI Records in February 1980. As 1981 neared its end Slagel was working as a buyer for Oz Records in Woodland Hills. By night he ran his own metal fanzine The New Heavy Metal Revue, which he would print and sell at local concerts. Looking at the bands featured in the pages of his own publication, Slagel wondered why emerging metal acts from Los Angeles could not be showcased on a compilation similar to that masterminded by Kay. After receiving assurances from distributors that such a product would be marketable, he began contacting his favourite local bands to see if they might care to contribute to the project. Slagel then began the process of scraping together the funds necessary to make this vision a reality. By the spring of 1982 the twenty-one-year-old had amassed nine tracks and sufficient funds to commission a 2,500 unit press-run for the album. Just one thing was missing: the song promised to him by Lars Ulrich.

  A decade ago James Hetfield was asked by one of this book’s authors if it was true that he would never have formed a band with Ulrich had the drummer not dangled before him the offer of a track on Metal Massacre in October 1981. Metallica’s front man laughed long and hard before delivering his answer.

  ‘Well, every day there are things that can change the course of history,’ he said, deftly deflecting the question. Ulrich’s offer was ‘pretty interesting’, he said, not least because his one previous meeting with the young Danish drummer had ‘no vibe’.

  ‘At that time in my life I wanted to play music,’ Hetfield reflected, ‘I didn’t want to work.’

  ‘We certainly didn’t hit it off,’ admits Ulrich, looking back upon the pair’s first meeting in May 1981. ‘I had a drum kit that looked as if it had fallen out of a cereal packet and James likes to tell people that it fell over every time I hit a cymbal. He also likes to tell people that he thought I smelled bad, because of course Europeans don’t wash. Musically though I could tell that he was more gifted than Hugh Tanner, and after we were done playing and we knew we hadn’t clicked we actually hung out and had a pretty good time. It’s like when you take a girl on a date and you know that there’s no fucking chance you’re going to get laid, it takes some of the tension out.’

  After reconnecting with Hetfield in the autumn of 1981, Ulrich set about drawing the older teenager closer with a cautious yet determined attentiveness. At the time, both young men had day jobs – Ulrich delivered copies of the Los Angeles Times (a position for which he was paid a monthly stipend of $400), while Hetfield made stickers for pharmaceuticals for the Steven Label Corporation in Santa Fe Springs – but each evening the pair would convene in Ulrich’s bedroom or at Ron McGovney’s house to swap cassettes, pore over the latest editions of Sounds and listen to records into the night’s smallest hours. Slowly, brick by brick, the defensive wall Hetfield had built around himself throughout adolescence began to crumble.

  ‘At that time Hetfield was the shyest person I’d ever seen in my life,’ Ulrich recalls. ‘He could barely utter the word “Hello” and he certainly couldn’t make eye contact. He was incredibly shy and uncomfortable around people. I remember him meeting my parents; it was almost like hiding, pulling back. I’d just never been around people who were that uncomfortable around adults. But I instantly felt that there was a connection there. I could tell that he was passionate about music, and there was an attraction to him because he was gifted but he was very reserved. I just remember that we were a perfect match because I thought that I could help pull some of that stuff out of him; he made up for some of my lack of talent. I felt I could do something with his gifts. It was like a yin and yang kind of thing. I felt it instantly. I felt it from the get go.’

  ‘We shared a “let’s fucking do something” attitude,’ says Hetfield. ‘I knew he had a lot of connections and loads of drive. I’d jammed with other guys before, and told them to fuck off because they weren’t good enough. With Lars it kinda felt different.

  ‘When I hooked up with Lars, I still didn’t really trust anyone. But at least we enjoyed the same kind of music.’

  Having committed to making music together, one of the duo’s most pressing tasks was to decide upon a name for their new union. Naturally, Lars Ulrich had no shortage of suggestions. No stranger to choosing terrible band names himself, James Hetfield was nonetheless less than impressed as he regarded Ulrich’s initial list. The drummer’s ideas included Deathwish, Death Threat and Death Chamber. From this starting point, somehow it got worse: Nixon. Dumb Fuck. Bigmouth and Friends. Execution. Exterminator. Helldriver. Napalm. Vietnam. Thunderfuck.

  The singer wondered aloud whether his new friend might have any alternatives that were a bit less … shit.

  ‘Metallica?’ Ulrich suggested.

  The fact that this name was not the drummer’s to offer was not a matter that detained him. Inspired by the launch of Sounds magazine off-shoot Kerrang! – the world’s first dedicated hard rock/heavy metal periodical, titled in onomatopoeic tribute to the noise made when an over-amplified electric guitar is struck with force – in the summer of 1981, Ron Quintana, Ulrich’s friend from San Francisco, had determined to start his own heavy metal fanzine: the word ‘Metallica’ was among a list of possible titles he drew up for consideration. When Quintana sought Ulrich’s counsel on
the matter, the opportunist Dane made a mental note of the name and suggested that his buddy might like to go with the title Metal Mania. With Motörhead’s Lemmy now glowering from the xeroxed front cover of Metal Mania issue number one, Ulrich surmised that Quintana would have no further use for the alternative titles on his list. An approving James Hetfield immediately set to work on creating a band logo.

  Even as Hetfield and Ulrich edged closer to a creative union, Brian Slagel grew increasingly fretful over their participation in his planned compilation album. Eventually he placed a phone call to Ulrich to inform him that he and John Kornarens had booked a mastering session for the album at Bijou Studios in Hollywood. If Lars’s band missed the studio deadline, he was told, they would miss the cut. The drummer asked for the date and time of the mastering session and promised he would deliver. True to his word, at around 3 p.m. on the appointed day, he arrived at Bijou with a cassette tape in his hand. Mastering engineer Joe Borja placed the cassette on the console and asked the drummer if he also had $50 to cover the cost of transferring the track to two-inch audio tape. The colour drained from Ulrich’s face. Panicked, and potless, the drummer begged Slagel and Kornarens for help. As Slagel shrugged apologetically, Kornarens opened his wallet to display $52 in cash, which the Dane gratefully snatched from his hands. Borja took the money, inserted the cassette into a tape deck, and pressed ‘Record’ on the studio’s reel-to-reel machine, as Slagel and Kornarens sat back to listen to their friend’s band for the very first time.

  ‘Wow,’ said Slagel, ‘this is actually not bad.’

  ‘Hit the Lights’ had its origins in an unfinished Leather Charm song written by Hetfield and Hugh Tanner. Despite a title cribbed from Diamond Head’s ‘Shoot Out the Lights’, and a key and tempo on loan from Motörhead, in Hetfield and Ulrich’s hands its presentation and delivery was nonetheless thrilling. It begins, as all significant things should, with chaos: a swell of guitars building in heft, volume and density, a rattle of tom-toms and then a single guitar thrusting forward with an irresistibly propulsive riff. ‘No life ’til leather, we are gonna kick some ass tonight’ squeals James Hetfield, introducing a lyric as dumb as a sack of spanners but sweetly engaging in its naivety. Appropriately, given that the composition was pieced together in Ulrich’s Park Newport bedroom, the song is a bedroom fantasy with its foundations in the duo’s own gig-going experiences: at the time, of course, Metallica had no fans, ‘screaming’, ‘insane’ or otherwise. But, as a manifesto of intent, the track is quite startling in its clarity and ambition.