Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘From start to finish it’s a complete package,’ says Kirk Hammett. ‘It’s young, raw, obnoxious, loud, fast, energetic, and inspirational, and everything in between. When it came out, it was the achievement of our lives. We could hold it and show people and go, “Hey, look, we made an album! We’re on vinyl.” It was a great feeling.’

  ‘I remember the first time I heard Kill ’Em All, I thought, “Blimey, this is a bit different”,’ recalls English rock journalist Malcolm Dome, who reviewed the collection for Kerrang! ‘To me, it was Venom played by superior musicians. Musically, they were a better band than Venom. You could hear Motörhead in there as well. You could hear Diamond Head in there, and you could hear Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. You could hear all those traditional things in the make-up of the album. But clearly they were doing something a bit different. Now, you look back and listen to it and think, “Well, it’s not really that fast at all.” But at the time it seemed to have an incredibly fast pace. And also, the fact is, they had really good songs as well: they had a really good sense of structure, really good melodies, and although the production was comparatively non-existent, what that meant is that it allowed the band space in which to breathe. So to this day it sounds like a very sharp record.’

  At the time the effect must have been piercing. While the once street-tough bands who populated the Los Angeles metal scene were preparing to tousle up their hair and water down their sound in preparation for an assault on the mainstream, here was an album released by a band whose hands were unlikely to ever uncap a can of hairspray (or deodorant, for that matter). For anyone paying attention, it would soon become clear that battles lines were being drawn between those who opted for a form of hard rock that often amounted to little more than pop music played loud, and a sterner form that required – in fact, insisted upon – greater commitment from the listener. In terms of musical circumstances not all of which were under their control, Metallica already represented a black flag raised high, around which adherents might gather to salute. Not only did they serve as standard-bearers for those whose musical tastes ran to groups with little mind for compromise, but they were also the first American heavy metal band to take the influence of European groups and translate this into a new form.

  But while it is certain that Kill ’Em All was a compelling calling card, what is equally sure is that in the summer of 1983 few rallied to their cause.

  When Johnny Z had invited the group to New York just months earlier, his plans, such as they were, had been to secure for them a record deal. Quite what Zazula had in mind regarding this pursuit is unclear, but while his endeavours as a small-change (although in time undeniably important) tri-state metal hustler were admirable enough, it is unlikely that his work on the ground in the name of the musical underground went noticed by the men with expense accounts and corner offices of the major record labels of the United States. Johnny Z found that his enthusiasm for Metallica was not shared by the American music industry at large.

  ‘I’d been all over to the record companies and they laughed in my face,’ he recalled. ‘They told me I was crazy, or said, “Please don’t play this.” Or just, “We don’t want to see you.”’

  With a bill for recording costs from Music America Studios yet to be paid in full and no takers for Kill ’Em All from either major record labels or significantly sized independent imprints, the problems faced by Zazula were mounting like the clouds of a coming storm. The reality of his circumstances did not make for easy reading: he had a criminal record, a young child, and an unruly band for whom he was suddenly responsible.

  What Johnny Z was to do next comprised an act of such audacity that his thinking appears to fall between the two stools of courage and lunacy. Unperturbed by the lack of interest in Metallica from the music industry at large – or perhaps realising that he had already reached the point of no return – Zazula refused to accept defeat and instead decided that he would forge his own path. Re-mortgaging his and Martha’s home in Old Bridge, the impresario founded his own record label, Megaforce, on which he would release Kill ’Em All. The album would be distributed by the independent company Relativity.

  ‘We just didn’t pay our bills,’ he shrugs. ‘We’d come home from the studio and we’d be dealing with our electric or our mortgage would be sixty days behind. As far as finances go, it was crazy. Everything we had went into the band.’

  When Kill ’Em All was unveiled to the American public in the summer of 1983 there was nothing to suggest that the mainstream music industry had judged the state of the market incorrectly, or that Johnny Zazula would have the last laugh. Initial sales of the album were so pallid that the title did not graze even the lowest reaches of the US Billboard Top 200 album chart. This was a period when even acts that were viewed as being mainstream metal bands, as distinct from hard rock groups such as Van Halen or Quiet Riot, received little in the way of radio or video support in the US (in fact, a year later Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson would wonder aloud onstage at Los Angeles’ Long Beach Arena why it was that his group was able to fill the 13,500-seat room for four nights without their music appearing on that nation’s airwaves) and Metallica were no exception to this rule.

  But while the reception afforded to Kill ’Em All did not warrant the attentions of the major record labels (at the time, such corporations usually came calling with contract and inducements to bands who had sold 100,000 albums on an independent label), by the standards of the style of music Metallica were making not to mention the fist-to-face nature of Johnny Zazula’s business operations, the response to Kill ’Em All from the underground metal fraternity was encouraging. Despite an initial pressing of just 1,500 copies – a number surely necessitated by their manager’s finances – Kill ’Em All took up where No Life ’Til Leather had left off and quickly found a small but dedicated audience within the musical underground. With nothing other than their own industry to propel them, as the choruses of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ resonated on the final evening of 1983 Kill ’Em All had been re-pressed four times and sold a not insignificant 17,000 copies in the United States.

  More than any other musical form, the success of a metal band is determined by perspiration as much as it is inspiration. Groups such as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden had found success in the US by touring from coast to coast, and in doing so had shown a willingness to visit the kind of unheralded towns and cities that even in the early Eighties were beginning to decay. At the time, heavy metal was a form of music that attracted a solidly working-class audience; groups seeking success would find favour in blue-collar cities. Married to this was the fact that much of the mainstream media viewed metal bands and their audiences as being not so much off-limits as beneath contempt, forcing such groups either to accept defeat or else to plough on regardless. Given the adolescent sense of anger inherent in much metal music of the period, it is no surprise that many bands opted for the latter course of action.

  Metallica’s first proper tour of the United States saw them share a bill with the English group Raven. Formed in Newcastle in 1974 by brothers Mark and John Gallagher and Paul Bowden, the trio signed with the independent rock label Neat (also based in Newcastle) for their first two albums, Rock ’Til You Drop (1981) and Wiped Out (released the following year). The group’s music might best be described as being prototypical, a mixture of high-energy rock, power-chord anthems as well as the occasional nod to more progressive elements. While both albums dented the lower reaches of the UK album chart, Raven gained most attention from their energetic live appearances. Concerts would see the band take to the stage wearing garments such as American football helmets and ice-hockey body armour, with the performers ringing every ounce of energy from their audience with shows they themselves described as being ‘athletic’. Certainly, the group’s commitment to giving their paying public value for money each and every night, regardless of the circumstances in which they found themselves, was to have a marked influence on the young group with whom they were about to head out
on tour.

  ‘We knew how to get a reaction, whatever it took,’ says vocalist/bassist John Gallagher today.

  As with Venom, Raven caught the ear of Johnny Z, who with his usual sense of derring-do invited the trio to the United States. The band made their American bow with Riot and Anvil at the Hallowe’en Headbanger’s Ball at the St George Theater in Staten Island. Zazula released the trio’s third album, All for One, on the new Megaforce label just a month after unveiling Kill ’Em All. Given this, the notion of placing the two bands together on one tour made perfect sense.

  According to John Gallagher, Raven met their tour mates for the first time at the Zazulas’ home just a day or two before the excursion began. The front man recalls Ulrich as having a ‘stick of dynamite up his arse’, as being ‘the mover and shaker’ who ‘asked 20,000 questions’. The other members of the group he recalls as being ‘very Californian … very laid back’. Yet to be unburdened of his offstage shyness, Hetfield is remembered for not speaking ‘two words’ all evening, while Kirk Hammett gave the impression of being a rookie draft-pick who was ‘just pleased to be a part of the whole thing, this big adventure’. As ever, Cliff Burton’s sense of serenity and magisterial remove registered as a quality belonging to someone who could lay claim to being ‘the epitome of cool’.

  Embarking on their first tour, Metallica found themselves in circumstances of such squalor as to make the Music Factory look like the Waldorf Astoria hotel. John Gallagher remembers the experience as being ‘complete punk rock guerrilla warfare’, the kind of operation that either makes bones or breaks spirits. All tours require their participants to surrender privacy and personal space for the communal confines of dressing rooms and tour buses. The more rustic the tour, the tighter its musicians are packed together. On the freeways of America, the members of Metallica and Raven lacked the space to even draw a picture of someone swinging a cat.

  The Kill ’Em All for One excursion lasted for two months of the American summer and travelled from city to city in a Winnebago Johnny Zazula had procured for the occasion. As the tour was set to conclude with three concerts in the Bay Area, James Hetfield painted the words ‘No Life ’Til Frisco’ on one side of the vehicle. Inside the ride were packed seven musicians, five roadies – three for Raven, two for Metallica – as well as sound man Mark Whitaker; thirteen people crammed inside a vehicle designed for nothing like that number. For the first few dates of the tour the travelling party were not even afforded the necessity of hotel rooms in which to rest after each show. As the Winnebago drove through the treacle-thick air of an uncommonly intense summer, none of its occupants were able to sleep. Such were the levels of exhaustion that following the fourth date of the tour – an appearance at the Rat club in Boston – the groups demanded that the local promoter hand over the keys to her apartment in order that the visitors might recuperate. Gallagher recalls opening the front door and being met with a dwelling that appeared to be the habitat of ‘a hoarder’, a place with ‘piles of crap everywhere’ and ‘a gigantic lump of human hair down the couch’. Taking stock of this sight – ‘It was,’ recalls the Englishman, ‘just filthy.’ – Raven decided that they would sooner take their chances back in the Winnebago. Coarsened by weeks sleeping at the Music Factory, Metallica, however, decided to stay.

  Unsurprisingly for a tour of a vast country by bands whose profiles were in some cities microscopic, the Kill ’Em All for One tour was an excursion comprised not entirely of high points. Performing at the Cheers club in Long Island, just outside New York, Metallica found themselves seen by fewer than fifty people, none of whom, according to Gallagher, ‘gave a shit’. At Harry’s Bar in Roland, Oklahoma, Raven faced a scene ‘totally out of the Blues Brothers’, with the audience throwing anything they could lay their hands on in the Englishmen’s direction. Used to performing before unruly punk crowds at home, though, the trio were equipped to deal with such situations and had by the end of their set transformed their fortunes to the point where the crowd were dancing on the tables. Witnessing this, Ulrich asked John Gallagher how on earth his group had managed to salvage the situation?

  ‘I remember Lars afterwards going, “Hey, how did you do that?”’ he says. ‘I replied, “Well, we believe in what we do. Don’t you believe in what you do? And [if you do] then why don’t you go up there and show them?”’

  Gallagher reflects that, as the more experienced touring group, ‘it was cool [that Raven] were able to be mentors’ to the young quartet. That said, the thirty-one-date tour was Metallica’s first time at the rodeo, and it showed.

  ‘A lot of time they were just borderline out of control,’ he recalls. ‘They’d have their act cleaned up for the gig, but once the gig was over all bets were off. They were a party band, that’s for sure.’

  To the outside eye the Kill ’Em All for One tour sounds like the kind of occasion where nightmares are lived and memories are made. Audience numbers in some cities may have been small, but the size of the impact made upon some in these audiences was significant. In Texas the package was seen by members of a then unheralded (and awful) glam rock band by the name of Pantera, who, witnessing the energy and ferocity emanating from the stage, took stock of their own music and decided to change direction. In time this group would become one of the most popular and uncompromising names in American metal. Elsewhere, on the fringes of the US Midwest, a young thrill-seeking photographer named Gene Ambo took possession of Kill ’Em All and discovered an album that for him smashed down a wall and presented metal with a tranche of new possibilities. ‘The first time I heard [the record] I thought, “Woah, this is fucking heavy,”’ he recalls. ‘It was something totally different. It was like listening to your old Scorpions records on 45 [rpm], like Judas Priest but without all of the clichéd bits.’ On the strength of his reaction to their first album, Ambo decided not to wait until the Kill ’Em All for One tour arrived in his home town for a date at the famous Metro venue – an appearance John Gallagher recalls being one of the highlights of the tour – but instead decided to equip himself with a six-pack of Old Style beer and a submarine sandwich and board a train for the long journey from Illinois to Maryland. There the photographer attended a performance at the Coast to Coast Club in Baltimore. After Metallica’s set, Ambo headed backstage in order to introduce himself, and the two parties became fast friends. On subsequent visits to Chicago, the group would stay at the lensman’s home in the central north of the city, and on one occasion Ambo went so far as to lend Kirk Hammett a set of clothes to wear onstage. The reason for this, according to the photographer, was that Hammett was dressed that day in tight leggings and slip-on black footwear of a kind worn when practising yoga. Ambo took one look at the lead guitarist’s attire and said, simply, ‘Dude if you go onstage dressed like that in Chicago, they’ll kill you.’

  But even as Metallica’s reputation grew, the group’s insecurities regarding their own abilities still nagged. Ambo recalls being asked by Hetfield whether he knew of any capable vocalists who might be willing to join the band, a question which caused its listener to respond with incredulity.

  The photographer recalls that he ‘looked back at [Hetfield] and said, “Dude no one wants to hear a singer. No one wants to hear melody. They just want you to yell at them!”’

  Thirty years after this anti-musical advice was offered, it has become common for metal bands who display all the smooth edges of sandpaper not only to make a living from the music they make, but in some cases to make a killing. In 1983, though, Metallica were pioneering earth-shifters constructing a road that for all they knew may well have led to nowhere. At times on the Kill ’Em All for One tour their passage to the promised land must surely have borne a striking resemblance to a highway to hell.

  As days turned into weeks, inside the Winnebago the touring party found itself in conditions more akin to the gruelling road trips undertaken by Sun Records artists such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis in the Fifties (where these now musical legen
ds found themselves driving through the day and night in cars in order to show their faces in village halls in no-horse towns all over the United States), rather than the jet-propelled mile-high luxury of groups such as Led Zeppelin. In the middle of July, the party drove for thirty-six hours in temperatures of 110° Fahrenheit in order to reach the punchline-inviting town of Bald Knob in the central southern state of Arkansas. There the performers played their sets at the Bald Knob Amphitheater, a vast outdoor facility that on this occasion was populated by an audience that numbered in the low hundreds. Some thirty years later, the abiding memory of John Gallagher is of the bands sharing a stage with ‘insects the size of helicopters’ and of trucks selling fried catfish. It was, he reveals, ‘a complete culture shock’.

  Twenty-four hours later circumstances veered yet further towards the surreal, as the tour reached the Pine Bluff Convention Center in the town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Upon disembarking from their Winnebago, the touring musicians were met by a local promoter who had recently dined on the misinformation – perhaps supplied from a telephone caller in Old Bridge, New Jersey – that earlier in the tour the bands had performed a show at the 17,000 capacity Madison Square Garden in Midtown Manhattan. In 2013 it is tempting to forgive the acceptance of such a bald-faced lie by a gullible promoter with the defence that in the days prior to the advent of the Internet greater latitude was afforded to unscrupulous opportunists happy to discard any facts that lay in the way of a good story. The reason for this is that anyone raised in the age where all information is within the reach of a fingertip tends to believe that prior to the computerised age people were incapable of finding out anything for themselves. The truth is, though, that the notion that Metallica and Raven were in possession of profiles of sufficient size for them to perform at ‘the Garden’ was a lie of such arena-sized proportions that it could easily have been dispelled either with a phone call to the venue itself, or even a glance at the Billboard album chart, on which neither group could be found. Upon hearing the news of the tour’s popularity on the American East Coast, John Gallagher thought to himself, ‘Hmm, someone has been bullshitting.’