Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  Ulrich’s frank assessments of his colleagues’ performances on March 27 were an early indication both of his own exacting standards and of the tensions that were already starting to surface in his new band. By his own admission, Dave Mustaine was ‘rarely sober and always stoned’ during his first six months in Metallica, and the guitarist’s constant desire to be the centre of attention grated with Ron McGovney who concluded that his new band mate was less interested in Metallica’s music than in ‘the kicks, the parties, the fame’. For his part, Mustaine was (justifiably) concerned that as musicians his colleagues simply were not capable enough to share a stage with him: ‘There were times when James and I wanted to kick Lars out,’ he admitted, ‘and times Lars and I talked about letting James go.’ Hetfield, meanwhile, was having his own crises of faith. Painfully self-conscious and cripplingly insecure, the singer was concerned that he possessed neither the voice, the looks or the charisma to front the group.

  ‘I was open for anybody doing it,’ he later confessed. ‘I thought that the band wouldn’t make it without a front man. I thought that singing and playing guitar didn’t look right, and the singer couldn’t be focused enough.’ Entreaties were made to several of the area’s star front men – John Bush from Armored Saint and Sammy Dijon from Ruthless among them – but no firm connections were established.

  A decision was reached instead to recruit a second lead guitar player, so that Hetfield might be freed up to focus solely on singing once again. On April 23, the band made their debut as a five-piece at the Concert Factory in Costa Mesa, with one Brad Parker, aka Damian C. Phillips, in their line-up. It would prove to be a short-lived union. No sooner had the words ‘And coming up next … Metallica’ fallen from the MC’s lips than Parker appeared onstage on his own, treating the crowd to his finest Eddie Van Halen impressions, as his bemused colleagues looked on aghast from the dressing room. When the band convened in Ron McGovney’s garage later that same week for the purpose of recording their first ‘proper’ demo tape, Parker was not invited to attend.

  Untitled, but often erroneously referred to as the ‘Power Metal’ demo, the four-track demo tape was split between two Mustaine compositions – ‘Jump in the Fire’ and ‘The Mechanix’ – and two re-worked Leather Charm originals – ‘Hit the Lights’ and ‘Motorbreath’. Crudely recorded, while the four songs manage to capture the young band’s raw energy, the collection is more notable for featuring some of the worst singing and most excruciating lyrics ever committed to tape. In fairness to Hetfield, he had already voiced his own concerns about his singing ability months prior to the recording. But from the moment he delivers the opening line of ‘Hit the Lights’ here, with his keening vocals lathered in reverb, the singer’s discomfiture is as palpable as it is painful to hear. That said, this awkwardness is easy to understand when one considers the nature of the lyrics submitted for him to sing by Mustaine. Already hamstrung by one of the most lumpen riffs in Metallica’s catalogue, the earliest recorded version of ‘Jump in the Fire’ is further besmirched by Mustaine’s priapic adolescent poetry that sees the narrator talk of ‘Movin’ [his] hips in a circular way’ and confessing his desire to ‘Pull your body to my waist, feel how good it fits’. This, though, was poetry comparable to the finest works of Sylvia Plath when placed alongside the overripe masturbatory fantasy that is ‘The Mechanix’.

  ‘You say you wanna get your order filled,’ sings Hetfield, ‘Made me shiver when I put it in, Pumping just won’t do ya know … luckily for you.’ There then follows a chorus which, with its references to bulging pistons and cranked drive shafts, reads like J. G. Ballard might were the author to turn his hand to writing the letters page for a top-shelf magazine.

  Despite this emphatic lack of grace, the band’s momentum continued to gather pace. A pair of gigs were booked for May, a further two in June and four in July, while August saw no fewer than seven shows pencilled into Ulrich’s diary. It was at the first of these, an August 2 headline appearance at the Troubadour that James Hetfield punched his drummer for the first time.

  Ironically, that evening’s concert was one of Metallica’s best performances to date. At the conclusion of their nine-song set, the audience inside Doug Weston’s storied venue called the quartet back to the stage for an encore. The problem, however, lay in the fact that the band had not rehearsed for such an eventuality, and consequently had nothing prepared. During a hastily convened backstage discussion, Hetfield suggested that the band might re-emerge to play ‘Blitzkrieg’ while Ulrich put forward Diamond Head’s ‘Helpless’ as his preferred choice. After a show of hands ‘Blitzkrieg’ was nominated and the band trooped back onstage to warm applause. But as Hetfield approached his mic stand, Ulrich, in clear defiance of the principles of democracy, began beating out the intro to ‘Helpless’ instead. Thrown completely off-guard, the world’s most acutely self-conscious front man stuttered and stumbled through the lyrics, his face ablaze with embarrassment. When the song ground painfully to its conclusion, Hetfield walked to the back of the stage, hurled his guitar straight at Ulrich and slugged the shell-shocked drummer hard in the stomach.

  ‘You fucker!’ he raged. ‘Don’t you ever do that again.’

  Elsewhere, though, matters were progressing in a rather more pleasing manner for the occasionally fractious quartet. Three weeks on from the release of Brian Slagel’s Metal Massacre compilation, a collection which served to highlight in the starkest terms the gaping chasm in attitude and tone between Metallica and contemporaries such as Ratt, Bitch and Malice, the quartet found themselves in a recording studio once more, this time at the behest of local punk rock impresario Kenny Kane. Kane told Ulrich that he’d been given his own label imprint by the fast-rising Anaheim record label Rocshire Records and that he wanted to make Metallica his first signing. The drummer duly booked the band into a small Orange County recording studio called Chateau East on July 6, where they cut versions of the seven original tracks they had written to date: ‘Hit the Lights’, ‘The Mechanix’, ‘Motorbreath’, ‘Seek & Destroy’, ‘Metal Militia’, ‘Jump in the Fire’ and ‘Phantom Lord’. A significant improvement on the uneven ‘Power Metal’ demo, the recordings were crisp, sharp and aggressive, the work of a band beginning to find their own voice and range. Ulrich duly amended his band’s upcoming gig posters with the information that the Metallica EP would be released on September 1. When Kenny Kane took possession of the master tapes however, he phoned Ulrich in a rage, claiming that Metallica had duped him. The songs, he claimed were ‘too heavy metal’. Why, he demanded to know, had Metallica not recorded the punkish songs he had heard them play live? Ulrich had to calmly explain that those songs were, in fact, cover versions. Kane said he could take the tapes back and do with them as he wished.

  In the weeks that followed, Lars Ulrich and his friend Patrick Scott dubbed literally hundreds of cassettes from this master tape, now titled No Life ’Til Leather, in tribute to both the opening line of the tape’s opening track and the title of Motörhead’s 1981 live album, and posted them to every fanzine writer, every tape trader, every record store owner and every gig promoter in their address books. In a matter of weeks, the tape was everywhere.

  ‘Kornarens had got a copy of the demo at the record store and he said “Hey, I wanna play you something, but I’m not going to tell you who it is,”’ recalls Brian Slagel. ‘So he played the tape and I thought it was really good. I thought it was some new English metal band, because he didn’t tell me who it was. I said, “This is pretty good, what is this?” and he said, “You don’t want to guess?” I said, “No, I have no idea.” He said, “This is Metallica.” I said, “Wow, this is Metallica? Wow, they’ve really gone so far!” Because it was incredible.’

  In the weeks that followed, Lars Ulrich was inundated with requests for interviews from fanzines located all over America. Among these were Ron Quintana’s Metal Mania, Bob Muldowney’s Kick Ass Monthly, K. J. Doughton’s Northwest Metal and John Strednansky’s Metal Rendezvous. Fro
m his booth in a Chevron filling station at which he was now employed, the young Dane spoke passionately about his band’s desire to initiate a new age for metal. When Quintana asked Patrick Scott to conduct an interview with Ulrich for Metal Mania, the two friends sat giggling in Ulrich’s Park Newport bedroom as they composed the notice, which concluded that Metallica had ‘the potential to become US metal gods’.

  ‘We were just laughing at the stuff we were talking about,’ says Scott now. ‘It just seemed so far-fetched at that point.’

  But as Metallica’s fortunes were falling into place, the band’s members were falling out with one another. This discord began with an argument over a dog which descended into a fist fight the aftermath of which saw Hetfield tell Mustaine that he was sacked from the band.

  ‘At the time I was dealing drugs to survive,’ explains Mustaine, ‘and, whenever Metallica were playing concerts, people knew I was gone so they’d break into my apartment to steal my dope. So I figured I’d get a couple of pit bulls to guard the place. I took one of them to rehearsal one day and it put its paws on the bass player’s car. I guess James thought she was going to scratch it, so he pushed her off with his foot. We started arguing. And then I hit him.’

  As Hetfield wiped blood and phlegm from his face, Ron McGovney tried to intervene to protect his friend. Mustaine deflected the bassist’s attack and flipped him over his hip, sending McGovney crashing down on to an entertainment centre in the corner of the room. As a stunned Ulrich looked on in disbelief, Hetfield screamed at Mustaine to get out of his friend’s house.

  ‘You’re out of the band!’ Hetfield roared. ‘Get the fuck out of here!’

  ‘Fuck you!’ Mustaine retorted. ‘I quit.’

  The break-up lasted all of twenty-four hours. The following day, the guitarist sheepishly tendered his apologies to Hetfield and McGovney, and was reinstated in the group. But the events of that afternoon would not quickly be forgotten.

  ‘That,’ the guitarist reflected some twenty years on, ‘was definitely the beginning of the end for me.’

  At the start of October 1982 James Hetfield was moved to write Metallica’s first love song. The words he penned in his notebook, however, were not inspired by a girlfriend, but rather by a city situated almost 400 miles north of his home town. An unabashed love letter to San Francisco and its fanatical heavy metal community, the members of which gathered nightly ‘to maim and kill’, ‘Whiplash’ contained the singer’s most direct and affecting lyrics to date.

  Metallica’s first invitation to play the city by the Bay came courtesy of Brian Slagel, who had spent the weeks since the release of Metal Massacre putting plans in place for an LA metal showcase at the Stone nightclub on Broadway. The band were actually a last-minute addition to the September 18 gig, with Slagel only calling on his friends after Cirith Ungol were forced to drop off the bill, but Ulrich deemed the opportunity to reconnect with old friends in Northern California worthy of the five-hour drive up Interstate 5.

  The metal scene in San Francisco had taken on an irresistible momentum since the launch of Metal Mania fanzine in August 1981. The city got its own specialist hard rock/heavy metal shop with the opening of the Record Vault on Polk Street at the beginning of 1982. That March, Ron Quintana and his friends Ian Kallen and Howie Klein were granted their own Saturday night metal show, Rampage Radio, on the University of San Francisco’s KUSF college radio station; the following month city-centre nightclub the Old Waldorf on 444 Battery Street announced the launch of a new weekly metal night, Metal Mondays. In the weeks that followed, Iron Maiden, Motörhead, Scorpions and Saxon made stops in the city and the number of denim-and-leather-clad adolescents on Broadway began to multiply. It was into this fecund environment that Metallica came on September 18. They arrived at The Stone to find local glam-rockers Hans Naughty onstage … and more than half the audience sitting on the floor with their backs to the band.

  San Francisco’s ‘Trues’ had an unambiguous attitude to live shows in their parish. The message for both audiences and local bands such as Exodus, Violation and Blind Illusion alike was simple: go hard or go home. Gigs were violent, chaotic affairs, punctuated by vicious acts of aggression visited upon those whose commitment to the scene was considered by ‘Trues’ such as Rich Burch and Toby Rage to be less than total.

  ‘A lot of those shows were patrolled by people who were in – for want of a better word – gangs,’ reveals Machine Head front man, and life-long Bay Area resident, Robb Flynn. ‘Exodus had the STB, which stood for Slay Team Berkeley. These were the guys that would walk over people’s heads. They would line up stools at the back of the pit and use these to launch themselves on to the stage. They would run from the back of the room and end up taking out half of the band. Honestly, some of the shows were absolutely crazy. They were terrifying.’

  Having been arrested that afternoon on Broadway for drinking alcohol out of open containers, the members of Metallica had a little frustration of their own to work off as they walked on to the stage of The Stone at 10.30 p.m. that evening. But nothing in their short career had prepared the band for the reaction that would greet their set-opener ‘Hit the Lights’. Instantly the room erupted into frenzy, with fans screaming every word of Hetfield’s escapist anthem back into the singer’s face.

  ‘The sheer intensity was incredible!’ wrote Brian Lew in his review for Northwest Metal. ‘Fusing the pile-driving madness of Motörhead and Venom with their own insanity, the band devastated with a non-stop, fast and ultra-furious set of heavy metal.’

  ‘It was our first encounter with real fans,’ said Hetfield. ‘It was like, these people are here for us, and they like us, and they hate the other bands – and we like that ’cause we hate ’em too.’

  ‘As soon as we went up there we noticed [that] people [were] there for the music, not for the chicks that were hanging out, not for the scene, not for the bar, it was for the music! They weren’t hanging out at the bar they were at the edge of the stage waiting, for Metallica.’

  ‘Everyone in San Francisco was wearing Motörhead and Iron Maiden T-shirts,’ recalls Ulrich, ‘where in LA it was about hair and posing. So that was exciting to us. We had maybe 300 kids there, where in LA we couldn’t give 300 tickets away.’

  ‘First real great gig,’ the drummer noted in his diary. ‘Real bangers, real fans, real encores. Had a great fuckin’ weekend.’

  Exactly one month later, Metallica returned to San Francisco for a Metal Monday show at the Old Waldorf. Also in the city that evening was English music journalist Xavier Russell, in town to file an article for Kerrang! on Mötley Crüe, who were supporting local heroes Y&T at the Concord Pavilion. Russell had stopped off at the Record Vault earlier in the week and had fallen into conversation with Ron Quintana, who had handed him a copy of Metallica’s No Life ’Til Leather demo.

  ‘That night, in a drunken haze, I played the tape over and over again, my Sony Walkman literally shaking with my excitement,’ Russell recalls. ‘My first reaction was total shock – this was new; it was like crossing Ted Nugent with Motörhead and then putting it through a blender at 120 mph.’

  As Russell arrived at the Old Waldorf on October 18 he was met by Ulrich, who recognised the writer from his byline photograph in the pages of Kerrang! As Metallica’s stage time neared, Russell asked his new friend what the gig would be like.

  ‘Wait and see,’ the Dane replied with a laugh.

  ‘They were in the middle of the bill, a band called Laaz Rockit was headlining, and a band called Overdrive was opening, and they were fantastic,’ Russell recalls. ‘Mustaine and Hetfield were like two brothers that didn’t get on, each pushing the other out of the way, but it was so exciting. There’s certain bands where the minute you see them, you just know they’re going to go all the way.’

  In the early hours of October 19, Russell placed a phone call to his bosses at Kerrang!

  ‘In ten years’ time,’ he told them, ‘this will be the biggest band on the planet.’


  At the tail end of November, Metallica journeyed up Interstate 5 for their third and fourth Bay Area shows. When they left Los Angeles on the afternoon of November 29, none of the four knew that the weekend would mark the final appearances of their original line-up.

  The catalyst for change had been dropped into their already volatile mix one month earlier. Emboldened by the success of his debut Metal Massacre show in San Francisco, Brian Slagel had decided to return the compliment by staging a San Francisco metal night in his home town. James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich’s decision to show their faces at the Whisky a Go Go at midnight that evening stemmed purely from a wish to say hello to their old friend. The pair arrived as the band Violation were packing away their gear, and an act named Trauma were positioning their own backline on the stage. Within half an hour, one member of this band had made such an impression upon Hetfield and Ulrich, that the pair agreed that Ron McGovney’s days as Metallica’s four-stringer were numbered

  ‘We heard this wild solo going on,’ Hetfield recalled, ‘and thought, “I don’t see any guitar player up there.” It turned out it was the bass player … with a wah-wah pedal and this mop of hair … We met him after the show. We said, “We’re in this band, and we’re looking for a bass player, and we think you’d really fit in. Because you’re a big psycho.”’

  ‘It literally was one of those Kodak moments where we both looked at one another and said, “Dude, we have to get this guy in Metallica,”’ recalls Ulrich. ‘I’d never seen anybody like him – his look, his mannerisms, his whole vibe. After we’d swapped numbers I started going to work on him immediately.’

  Clifford Lee Burton was born in Castro Valley, a region of 60,000 people located in the inland Alameda County some twenty-five miles from the bridges and skyscrapers of San Francisco. The third and final child of Jan and Ray Burton – respectively a Californian-born school teacher and a highway engineer born in the state of Tennessee – the youngest member of the Burton family joined first child Scott and only daughter Connie at 21:30 hours on February 10, 1962.