Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  Zazula revealed to Doughton his desire to speak with a member of Metallica, and was told by the voice on the other end of the line that Lars Ulrich (inevitably) would be in touch. The following day, the proprietor received a phone call from a young man with a thick European accent. With this, first contact was made.

  Zazula enthused to the drummer about his love for the music captured on a tape that was not even the best thing to which Metallica had put their name. In return, the drummer – ever the student of the underground metal scene – spoke of his familiarity with the activities of the husband and wife team on the East Coast. In a stroke resplendent in its chutzpah, Zazula then presented a proposition so startling that it might even have silenced Lars Ulrich. It was suggested to the Dane that his group transport themselves and their equipment across the United States from California to New Jersey. A practice facility in the New York borough of Queens was promised, as was accommodation at the Zazula family home in the Garden State, and a place on the bill for concerts headlined by Venom and The Rods

  At this point in their career, Metallica can be thought of as being like a shark: if they ceased moving, they would die. While other bands existed only in the present, Ulrich for one had trained his eye to search for future possibilities, and no risk was deemed too large. The drummer relayed Zazula’s suggestions to his band mates, all of whom agreed that it was a capital idea. There was, however, one significant obstacle to be overcome: Metallica lacked the means with which to embark on such an epic journey. Ever resourceful, Johnny Z had a solution.

  ‘We sent them fifteen hundred dollars to come across America,’ he recalls. ‘They got a one-way rental: a U-Haul van and a truck. Literally they had two drivers and they slept in the back with all their gear and they delivered themselves to my front door. It was basically, “Well we’re here – what do we do next?”’

  The journey to New Jersey in the U-Haul trailer took place at the end of March 1983. Accompanied by Mark Whitaker, the party decided that rather than waste time and money sleeping in motels en route, they would instead sleep in shifts on mattresses placed in their ride, and for the driving to be undertaken in shifts. Aside from food and bathroom breaks, it would be a caravan of uninterrupted motion.

  If the prospect of traversing a country the size of a continent had not previously struck Metallica as being a trepidatious, even ill-advised, endeavour, there can be little doubt that such thoughts did enter their minds once the journey was under way. To this day there is a culture in parts of the United States that finds it socially acceptable to drive while under the influence of alcohol; in the case of Dave Mustaine this tendency was indulged to a hazardous degree. Already a considerable drinker – in fact, the lead guitarist would subsequently claim that even at this point in his young life he was already an alcoholic – during the long journey from West Coast to East Mustaine failed to make the distinction between there being a time and place for getting drunk and its exact opposite. In the town of Laramie, in the border state of Wyoming, the group’s caravan jack-knifed after their truck – or truck driver – mishandled in the snow, forcing the party off the highway. While the travelling party dusted themselves off on the side of the road, and as each man laughed with relief at their scrape with danger, the group were almost decapitated by a passing eighteen-wheel lorry passing close enough by that the human face felt the blast of cold air from its slipstream. In the wake of the truck came a Jeep Wrangler, only this time the ride was headed straight for the now bewildered and discombobulated evacuees. Each man dived for cover, with Mustaine pulling Mark Whitaker from the path of the oncoming vehicle at the last possible second.

  ‘On the big continental trip from SF to NY it all kind of spilled over – there were a few things happening that became too much,’ observed Ulrich. In the same interview Hetfield confirmed that Mustaine had been drinking while in charge of the group’s vehicle, thereby risking the group’s lives.

  ‘If there had been a smash,’ he noted, ‘we could have all got killed.’

  ‘Fortunately no one was hurt,’ recalls Mustaine, while at the same time understanding that the near miss with him at the wheel quickly became a pivotal moment. ‘But the mood had changed. There was less laughter, more hostility. It could have happened to any one of us. We were all stoned or drunk, and we all lacked the expertise to drive the truck through snow-covered mountain passes. Unfortunately, I was behind the wheel at the time, and so the weight of the incident – the blame – fell on my shoulders. For the rest of the journey I felt like an outcast.’

  The reason for this is because what followed next has since become one of the most widely discussed and pivotal moments in the history of the group. According to Lars Ulrich, the decision to sack Dave Mustaine as lead guitarist was made during the journey to New Jersey.

  ‘The guy [Mustaine] couldn’t control himself under various situations,’ the drummer said. ‘On a long-term basis it would have become a problem. We decided [to find a replacement guitarist] somewhere between Iowa and Chicago.’

  Metallica and Mark Whitaker arrived at Johnny and Marsha Zazula’s home in Old Bridge, New Jersey, a week after departing the Bay Area. The group were unwashed, unkempt and uncouth. Offered something to drink, a number of the party simply helped themselves to whatever alcohol they could find in the house and drank straight from the bottles, carelessly discarding whatever scant concern they may have held regarding not having a second chance to make a good first impression. For their part, the Zazulas were wondering just what kind of venture they’d invested $1,500 of their own money into, not least because this sum accounted for virtually all of the couple’s available funds. At the time of Metallica’s arrival, Johnny Z was in the middle of serving a four-and-a-half-month sentence after being found guilty of conspiracy to commit wire tap fraud (to this day Zazula denies his culpability, and claims to have taken a ‘pity plea’ of guilty in order to avoid a costly trial that he could ill afford to defend). The result of this conviction saw the entrepreneur spending his week nights living at a local halfway house, a place he later described as being ‘a prison without guards’. Meanwhile at his own home, his wife and young daughter, Rikki Lee, were left to cope with the arrival of a group of feral young men on whom they had never before laid eyes.

  Today Johnny is the first to admit that the possibility that this was the start of a terrible mistake was a thought that had begun to journey across his mind. The first time Metallica were taken down to Rock’n Roll Heaven, Mustaine was so drunk that he spent much of the visit emptying the contents of his stomach on the floor of the International Indoor Market. Back at the couple’s home, things were scarcely more agreeable. With the exception of Burton – who would help put Rikki Lee to bed in the evening, and would often read the child a bedtime story – Marsha found herself broke and sharing her home with people who, in the case of Hetfield and Mustaine, expended their energies bending the elbow, or else, with regard to Ulrich, were intent on consorting with every female in the tri-state area under thirty years of age. As if this weren’t quite enough – and surely it was more than enough – in summoning these unruly charges from the other side of the United States, the Zazulas were without funds to pay either their mortgage or fuel bills. In a financial sense, the straits in which the couple found themselves were so dire as to require the delivery of food parcels from Marsha’s father.

  In a matter of weeks, Metallica’s digs moved from suburban New Jersey to New York City itself, an arrangement certainly more agreeable to the Zazula family (the final straw having come after the visiting party drank an expensive bottle of champagne saved from the couple’s wedding day). In order that his Californian guests have somewhere to practise for the shows Johnny intended for them to play in and around the five boroughs, the entrepreneur had secured for Metallica a practice facility in Queens. The Music Factory was a low-rent establishment in that borough’s Jamaica region which offered individual rehearsal rooms for the kind of bands who were content, or at least willing, to
pay their dues in the hardest of currencies. Approaching the establishment, visitors would be greeted by the sight of broken windows and piles of detritus, the aftermath of abandoned construction work; there was plaster board everywhere. In a city where the winter chill can be relied upon to exert its grip well into the early days of spring, the facility was both cold and foreboding. But with Metallica having long outstayed their welcome in Old Bridge, the Music Factory was for now their new home. Sleeping bags were laid out on the freezing practice room floor; jackets and T-shirts were employed as pillows. They were thousands of miles from home and in circumstances that at the time could only have seemed far less certain than history has proved them to be; Hetfield’s assertion in ‘Whiplash’ that ‘life out here is raw’ could hardly have seemed more prophetic.

  Help, though, was at hand. In 1983 Anthrax were a young New York power metal band managed by Johnny and Marsha Zazula. They were also ambassadors for both the fraternity of metal and the city in which they lived. Seeing their visitors newly arrived in a part of town in which they surely felt less than comfortable – in a way that Anthrax would have felt equally ill at ease had the East Coast band embarked upon a week-long journey westward, only to pitch up in the ‘socially crunchy’ location of Oakland’s East 14th Street – the locals were quick to offer the hand of friendship to a band who were seeing a side of New York not often glimpsed by tourists. Recognising that Metallica were in need, Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian and bassist Danny Lilker arrived at the Music Factory armed with a toaster oven, ensuring that in a setting resembling a Siberian Gulag the Californians could at least prepare for themselves food of a temperature higher than the frigid floors on which they slept. On another occasion, Lilker bought a famished Mustaine two slices of New York pizza, an act of kindness of which the guitarist still spoke a generation later.

  This generosity at the hands of virtual strangers was, though, the exception that proved the rule. Elsewhere, the problems witnessed by the members of Metallica in one of the saltiest neighbourhoods of New York’s largest borough were in many ways symptomatic of the malaise in which ‘Gotham City’ found itself in 1983. Thirty years after the rubber-soled feet of Hetfield and Ulrich first trod the soil of America’s largest city, NYC has become one of the safest urban conurbations in the United States. Under the mayoralty of Ed Koch, however, in the early part of the Eighties, the ‘City That Never Sleeps’ hardly dared do so for fear of violent attack. New York Law Enforcement Agency statistics for 1983 show that the murder rate in the five boroughs accounted for more than 5,000 deaths, more than twice the figure for 2011. In other reported crimes, more than 94,000 people were the victims of muggings, almost 60,000 were the subject of assault, while just shy of a quarter of a million homes were visited and plundered by unwelcome guests. Such activities were not confined to areas such as the Bronx or Alphabet City, two neighbourhoods that at the time had become shorthand for locations that required visitors to carry their own lives in their cupped and trembling hands. In fact, such was the extent of New York’s social problems during this period that even iconic locations such as Times Square and Union Square had become, at least under cover of darkness, the kind of places that were not safe to visit. A year before Metallica’s arrival in the city, the Los Angeles punk group Fear had arrived on the East Coast in order to appear as guests on the comedy programme Saturday Night Live, filmed at the NBC Studios in Rockefeller Center located between 5th and 6th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. Upon returning home to California, the punk group penned a song telling of their experiences, titled ‘New York’s Alright If You Like Saxophones’. ‘New York’s alright if you want to be pushed in front of the subway,’ sang front man Lee Ving, before adding that ‘New York’s alright if you want drugs in your doorway. New York’s alright if you want to freeze to death. New York’s alright if you want to get mugged or murdered …’

  Of those who knew Metallica during their initial days and weeks in the city, few were privy to the rumours surrounding the imminent departure of Dave Mustaine. It is also telling that a group that for more than a year had featured among its number three young men whose energetic appetite for alcohol (among other things) mirrored the sense of wild abandon that could be heard in the music they made, should choose to eject a member for the behaviour he exhibited when under the influence of an intoxicant beloved of all. In making this decision, Hetfield and Ulrich at least (the level of influence Burton exerted in a change of personnel that took place just four months after he had joined the band remains unclear) showed that even though they spent much of their time pissed, they were nonetheless perceptive enough to regard Mustaine as one might an unpinned hand grenade. This represented a radical realignment of Metallica’s internal balance of power. In the group’s earliest days, it was Mustaine who was Metallica’s principal guitarist, a role he eventually came to share with Hetfield. Similarly, while at first the singer’s shyness found him reluctant to speak to audiences between songs, the lead guitarist fulfilled the role apparently without effort. But as time passed, so Hetfield’s confidence grew. Not only this, but this confidence blossomed in tandem with a growing irritation and even embarrassment at Mustaine’s sneering and carelessly provocative remarks made to members of the audience. Despite the fact that Mustaine once occupied a position of power within Metallica, in the crisp air of New York City the band’s charismatic cornerstone was suddenly no longer as indispensable as he believed himself to be.

  Although Mustaine had relocated himself and his life to Northern California, like his band mates, he did not live with Hetfield and Ulrich. En route to the East Coast, however, the two parties were thrown together without respite; upon their arrival, the members of Metallica continued to live cheek by jowl, first at the Zazulas’ home in Old Bridge and then at the Music Factory in Queens. Problems that had merely simmered at a tolerable heat in California suddenly quickened to a rolling boil. Isolated as the source of this problem, Mustaine careered without care into Hetfield and Ulrich’s cross-hairs.

  ‘By now [life at the Music Factory had begun to take on] a pattern,’ is his recollection. ‘The more we drank, the more our personalities diverged … Lars and James would get weird, and by weird I mean silly – childish. The more they drank, the goofier they became. With me it was a different story. The more I drank, the more I sought an outlet for my rage and frustration. I wanted to get out and do some cruising and bruising.’

  Dave Mustaine played two concerts in New York as a member of Metallica, the first on April 8 at the Paramount Theater in Staten Island, the second the following evening at the L’Amour club in Brooklyn; on both nights the band appeared first on a bill that also featured Vandenberg and The Rods. On the afternoon prior to the second date, the Californian group found themselves loitering on the venue’s dance floor, waiting for their turn to sound check while onstage Vandenberg took an age to find their own sound levels. Despite the daylight hours, Mustaine was already drunk. As the musicians onstage continued to tinker with the music pulsing from the PA system, just fifteen feet in front of them stood Mustaine, impatient for his own group to take their place. But rather than tap his watch or offer an exaggerated shrug of impatience, Metallica’s most volatile member chose instead to loudly insult Vandenberg’s lead guitarist, Adrian Vandenberg. The musician onstage was told that he sucked, that no one gave a fuck about his band, and that he and his colleagues should remove themselves from the stage with immediate effect. Those watching this outburst were said to be amused and embarrassed in equal measure.

  But as the seasons in New York City were soon to change, so too were Metallica. On the morning of April 11, Mustaine was roused from his sleep by Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton and Whitaker. The lead guitarist enquired as to the reason for his interrupted slumber and was told that he was no longer a member of Metallica.

  ‘I said, “What, no warning, no second chance?”’ Mustaine recalled. ‘They just shrugged and said, “No.”’

  Shocked, yet unwilling to surrender whatever dig
nity he had to hand, the guitarist decided against appealing the decision with cowed and desperate pleas, and opted instead to enquire as to the time of his flight back to San Francisco. He was told that for him there was no plane. Instead, Mustaine learned that his transportation back to California would be provided by the Greyhound Lines bus company and would take four days. As if this were not galling enough, the now former member of Metallica was scheduled to depart in just one hour’s time from the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 8th Avenue in Manhattan. Hetfield drove the exiting musician to the bus station, and as the pair hugged goodbye the front man had tears in his eyes. He told his departing friend to take care of himself.

  ‘Don’t use any of my music …’ spat Mustaine in return.

  ‘It was a pretty sad time,’ the guitarist later reflected. ‘I remember James crying as he was driving me to the bus stop but Lars didn’t care. I think that’s when he started to blacken his heart and stopped being sensitive to people.’