Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  Owing to a claim even more odoriferous than that emanating from the inside of their Winnebago, Metallica and Raven found themselves booked in an arena built to accommodate 10,000 people. Come the evening of the concert, barely 300 people had gathered for the performance, not all of whom were impressed with the entertainment on offer. As it must, the show went on, with both groups performing beneath two meagre lighting rigs held aloft by trusses anchored by fork lift trucks. Whatever this hot summer night resembled, it was not an evening at Madison Square Garden.

  The nearer the Kill ’Em All for One tour juddered towards its denouement, the more the problems faced by its personnel increased. Following an appearance at the Country Club in the Los Angeles suburb of Reseda, a booking for which Lars Ulrich had been saving a consignment of brand-new cymbals (presumably believing LA to be the kind of ‘special occasion’ city for which his new equipment was suited) the travelling party headed north on Interstate 5 for the five-hour drive to San Francisco. There, the Kill ’Em All for One tour would draw to a climax with a triumvirate of performances at the Keystone Clubs in Palo Alto and Berkeley, and, finally, The Stone in San Francisco – three clubs that have since become notable simply for the fact that bands such as Metallica used to play there. En route to the Californian group’s adopted home city, the wheels on their long-suffering and fully ill-equipped Winnebago completed their final revolution. The van’s engine died not with a cough or a whimper, but instead exploded with a force sufficient to cause smoke to billow from the vehicle’s every orifice. The sight of this was enough to propel Ulrich himself out of the ride and thirty yards up the freeway before anyone else had even exited the vehicle.

  Temporarily stranded, the group convened in what John Gallagher recalls as being ‘a weird little town straight out of the Twilight Zone’ until alternative transport was sourced. Deciding to complete their journey not on Interstate 5 but rather on back roads leading south to north, at one point the party travelled along a road on which one side was abutted by a cliff edge and a sheer drop of several hundred feet. It was the kind of scene at which one which one might expect to see Wile E. Coyote in fruitless pursuit of the Road Runner. While some of the passengers reacted to this sight with gallows humour, others were less cocksure. From a seat in the rear, the voice of a young man with a Danish accent could be heard to say, ‘Kirk, I’m really scared. Can I hold your hand?’

  For musicians coarsened by the experience of a two-month tour that had seen them endure gruelling conditions, bear witness to backwater cities, and amass enough experience to gain a crash-course understanding that it was indeed a long way to the top for anyone desiring to rock ’n’ roll, such a request did not fall on sympathetic ears. For the final hours of the journey to San Francisco, it was Ulrich who found himself in the barrel as everyone in the vehicle laughed themselves silly at the drummer’s expense.

  Following an adventure that, if not quite a trial by fire was at least an ordeal in heat, the sight of the seven square miles that comprise the city of San Francisco came as a welcome relief to the members of Metallica. The three shows the band performed upon their arrival re-affirmed to the group that their five-month absence from Northern California had only served to make the hearts of the local underground metal community grow fonder. As with each of the quartet’s previous Bay Area performances, the three appearances – on a bill strengthened yet further by the addition of Exodus as the opening group – were attended by audiences in possession of energy levels which surpassed anything seen in the preceding two months. For while the Kill ’Em All for One tour had been met with approval in cities such as New York, Chicago and Bridgeport in Connecticut, the sight of slam-dancers clambering on to the stage, only to immediately propel themselves on to the heads of those gathered in the front rows, proved that the Bay Area still contained the greatest number of hotheads of all the hotbeds that made up the emerging US thrash metal scene.

  The travelling musicians marked the end of their great and surely never-to-be-forgotten adventure with a party at the Metallica Mansion on Carlson Boulevard. After a summer spent either asleep in a vehicle or else in motels of a kind where rooms were available for rent at hourly rates, this modest suburban bungalow may well have resembled the kind of luxury on offer at Claridge’s. But if this was the case, the scene didn’t bear this resemblance for very long. As drinks flowed fast, the party-goers listened to bands such as English punk thugs the Anti Nowhere League and responded to this music by slam-dancing through the living quarters and breaking just about everything in sight. At one point an unidentified guest decided it would be a good idea to start a fight with Raven drummer Rob Hunter, an undertaking the assailant was ill-equipped to finish. Instead the aggressor found himself knocked out cold by a punch of such force that it broke a number of bones in Hunter’s hand.

  With Metallica at last ensconced on home soil, the group turned their attentions to the business of composing new material. Even at this point in what could hardly yet be called their ‘career’, the group displayed character traits that could almost be described as being schizophrenic. This was a union that appeared not to be equipped with an ‘off’ button, but while Metallica’s capacity for waking up in the morning having little recollection of what occurred at the end of the night before is without doubt, to portray the group as being one whose sole concern was the pursuit of a good time all of the time is a construct without foundation.

  Indeed, before anyone had even heard his name, Lars Ulrich understood that in order to realise his dream – actually, his aim – of guiding Metallica to the position of being the biggest band in the world would require talent married to discipline and graft. In this he was aided by Cliff Burton, a man whose commitment to making music had been noted not just by his supportive parents but also by everyone he encountered. In Kirk Hammett Metallica had finally found a lead guitarist committed to mastering his instrument not as a means of securing fame but as an end in itself (and unlike his predecessor, these talents were not kept in time by the metronomic beat of a ticking time-bomb). Most impressive of all was the development of James Hetfield, who assumed the role of front man with an authority that belied his own uncertainties. With Dave Mustaine dismissed, Hetfield began to emerge from the monosyllabic shyness in which he had previously been cocooned. Coupled with this was his growing skill as a rhythm guitarist capable of composing first-class riffs with just a flick of the wrist. Together, the four musicians were starting to coalesce into a formidable unit.

  As the nights began to draw in during September 1983, inside the cramped confines of their El Cerrito garage Metallica punched in shifts that would soon enough yield results that were both startling and surprisingly progressive. For once, the group could be said to have time on their side when it came to determining the direction their next musical steps would take. Although the quartet would once more play the Keystone Club in Palo Alto, this date was scheduled for Hallowe’en, some seven weeks after the completion of the Kill ’Em All for One tour. Following this, on the docket were a further four bookings at various Bay Area clubs, plus a return to the Country Club in Reseda, at which the group debuted the songs ‘Fight Fire with Fire’ and ‘Creeping Death’. During the same set Metallica also performed a new composition, the final details of which they had yet to wrestle into position, a lengthy instrumental presented under the working title ‘When Hell Freezes Over’. In time this track would metamorphose into the classic ‘The Call of Ktulu’. Three days later at The Stone the band premièred another new composition, titled ‘Ride the Lightning’. Unbeknownst to the people gathered to see the band play at either club, these audiences had between them heard what would become 50 per cent of the headliners’ second studio album.

  Armed with a cache of fresh material, as autumn hardened into winter, Metallica once again left San Francisco, this time for a short tour of the Midwest and eastern United States. After playing shows in Illinois, Wisconsin and Ohio, the group headed back to the Eastern Seaboard for dates in New Je
rsey and New York state. On January 14, 1984, the quartet were scheduled to perform their now expanded live set at the Channel Club in Boston. On the night prior to this appearance, Metallica’s three-man road crew – a body of men that comprised the ubiquitous Mark Whitaker as well Dave Marrs and guitar tech John Marshall – drove a truck into which was loaded the group’s backline of amplifiers, drum kit and guitars four hours north from New York City to Massachusetts. Arriving in a city gripped by frigid weather and what Marshall recalls as being ‘four feet of snow’, the crew parked the truck outside the hotel in which they were booked to sleep. Given the frigid temperature of the outside air, rather than leaving Metallica’s guitars to potentially warp in the cruel night air, instead the party carried the instruments up to their rooms for safe-keeping. With New Jersey as their starting point, Metallica themselves were scheduled to travel up to Boston the following day.

  On the morning of the performance, however, Kirk Hammett was awoken by the sound of a trilling telephone. Picking up the receiver, he was confronted by a confusion of voices, one of which was saying ‘Oh no, oh no, I can’t. No, I can’t. No, no, I can’t … I can’t do it.’ Despite being just seconds into his waking day, Hammett inferred that this panicked voice was not the bringer of good news. ‘No, I can’t tell ’em, I can’t tell ’em,’ the speaker continued. ‘Tell us what?’ wondered Hammett? Eventually the speaker was replaced by someone capable of placing sentences together in something approaching a cogent order. Hammett listened as the voice at the other end of the line delivered a message the gravitas of which brought Hammett’s day into the sharpest of focus.

  ‘Guys,’ he was told, ‘[all of your] equipment has been stolen.’

  In the exchange that followed Hammett learned that at some point during the night thieves had broken into the band’s equipment truck and not only relieved the ride of its entire cargo, but also nicked the truck itself. This raid, under cover of darkness, saw Ulrich dispossessed of his drum kit, Hammett relieved of his Marshall head cabinet, and Hetfield bereft of his much-loved modified Marshall head cabinet and speaker. Also stolen was a suitcase containing books dedicated to music theory, as well as technical matters relating to the production of live music. Suffice to say, Metallica’s appearance at Boston’s Channel Club was promptly cancelled.

  Receiving this news from a prone position in New Jersey, Hammett took possession of the facts and replied with a single word.

  ‘Fuck.’

  5 – FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE

  With snow on the ground, and a truck filled with drums and amplifiers God knows where, for Metallica the new year blues of 1984 bit hard. Following their cancelled appearance in Boston, they were scheduled to fly to Europe for their first tour of the continent. But as a consequence of the actions of light-fingered New Englanders, these plans were placed on ice.

  ‘We were very depressed,’ admitted James Hetfield. ‘We were stuck in New Jersey, bumming.’

  So dispiriting were their circumstances that Hetfield was inspired to write a lyric which eclipsed anything he had penned before. ‘Fade to Black’ tells the story of a life so hopeless that suicide is presented as a valid means of escape. The perspective from which this tale unfolds takes the form of a first-person narrative. ‘I have lost the will to live, simply nothing more to give,’ wrote Hetfield. As the lyric expands into metaphor, it showcases an early example of the author’s underrated poetic ear, with the assertion that ‘growing darkness [is] taking dawn’ and that ‘I was me, but now he’s gone’.

  For Hetfield a lyric that came from a sense of self-imposed powerlessness broke new ground. Other words written for Metallica’s as yet untitled and unrecorded second album also shifted position from the tough-guy bravura that splattered the lyric sheet of Kill ’Em All to scenarios where the narrator finds himself trapped in circumstances beyond his control. The recently premièred ‘Ride the Lightning’ takes as its subject matter a condemned individual whose last moments on earth see him constrained beneath the leather straps of an electric chair. Terrified that the state is acting to switch off his lights in this manner, he asks, ‘[Can] someone help me? Oh, please God, help me, they are trying to take it all away.’ As when Johnny Rotten asked of the citizens on the east side of the Berlin wall to ‘please’ not to be waiting for him (in the Sex Pistols’ 1977 song ‘Holidays in the Sun’), the appearance of the word ‘please’ gives ‘Ride the Lightning’ a quality different not only from the material its author had written before, but also from the music with which Metallica’s own stood comparison. Notions of vulnerability and helplessness were, and are, prospects about which Hetfield held genuine fears. Even when couched in the metal-friendly narrative confines of state execution (and in another instance, of being trapped under ice), songs sung from this point of view lent the material a level of authenticity that had been absent from the group’s earliest work.

  But with ‘Fade to Black’ Hetfield had taken an extra step towards revealing feelings of failure and futility. Here was a narrator left powerless not by outside forces, but rather by the ghosts that haunted the corridors of his own mind. One should not confuse the circumstances faced by the narrator of ‘Fade to Black’ with those of Hetfield himself – ‘I’m sure I wasn’t really thinking of killing myself,’ the front man conceded – but what can be said is that in translating and transposing personal misfortune into a convincing scenario of a much darker hue, the lyricist did successfully complete the alchemical process of turning real life into art.

  ‘It was my favourite Marshall amp, man!’ he said, by way of explaining the giant leap that saw a stolen speaker and amplifier-head provide the catalyst for a song about suicide.

  Armed with an album’s worth of new material in various stages of development – from songs that had been rehearsed at length and committed to demo tape, to others still under construction – Metallica set about the business of finding both a studio and a producer who might translate their music to a twelve-inch oil-based canvas with greater care and skill than that shown by Paul Curcio on Kill ’Em All. In this pursuit, the band – or, in all likelihood, the band’s drummer – had aced their homework.

  In the winter of 1984 Copenhagen-born Flemming Rasmussen was co-owner and in-house producer of Sweet Silence Studios, a recording facility then located on the outskirts of the centre of his home town, the Danish capital. Born on New Year’s Day, 1958, Rasmussen joined the staff at Sweet Silence and was only eighteen when in 1976 the facility was bought by fellow Dane Freddie Hansson. Just four years later he was invited by Hansson to buy into the business, and in 1980 the engineer became joint owner of the premises. Despite having attracted the business of artists such as Ringo Starr, Van Morrison and Cat Stevens, not to mention being established as a favourite location of Danish jazz ensembles, it was Ritchie Blackmore’s decision to record his band Rainbow’s fifth studio album Difficult to Cure, at Sweet Silence in 1981 that brought the establishment to the attention of Lars Ulrich. Featuring a hit single in the form of the Russ Ballard-penned ‘I Surrender’, the nine-song set was produced by Rainbow bassist Roger Glover, but inspection of the album’s small print reveals that the credit for recording Difficult to Cure belonged to one Flemming Rasmussen, a fact that did not go unnoticed by a group in San Francisco who were quickly learning not to miss a trick.

  ‘In those days there was no email or anything, so a call came into the studio, which was taken by [Freddie Hansson],’ recalls Rasmussen. ‘I was told that there was this band coming over called “Metallisomething”, and I went, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do it.”’

  Not for the first time in their short life, Metallica found the stars aligning in their favour. Despite its underwhelming if not entirely disastrous commercial performance in the United States, Kill ’Em All had found a receptive audience in Europe, and in the United Kingdom in particular. The album had been released in Britain on the fledgling independent rock and metal label Music For Nations, which licensed the record without signing the band directly to
the label. When it came to the matter of a second album, however, Music For Nations were sufficiently impressed by Kill ’Em All’s commercial performance to place its creators under contract. With these rights came responsibilities. When Johnny Zazula inevitably ran out of money needed to pay for the studio costs incurred in recording Ride the Lightning, it would fall to his band’s new record label to settle the account.

  Music For Nations was launched in 1983 by music industry insider Martin Hooker. Hooker had earned his wings in the trade at the blue-chip corporation EMI, where he worked with such artists as Paul McCartney, Elton John and Kate Bush. To his delight, in 1976 the label – at the time, the very embodiment of the British establishment – signed the Sex Pistols, only to hurriedly discard them following the storm of notoriety surrounding the song ‘God Save the Queen’. Hooker realised that as long as he was in EMI’s employ he would have little control over the artists with whom it was decided he would work, and so determined to take action. While still working at the company’s offices in South Kensington, he secretly established his own independent imprint, fittingly titled Secret. Within six months, he had sufficient confidence in his new venture that he decided to devote himself to it in full, and handed in his notice at EMI.