Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  Rasmussen begged to differ. Not only that, but he recognised qualities in Metallica’s music that went unnoticed by the more formal ears of the jazz musicians, qualities such as ‘energy and attitude’. The producer took particular pleasure in finding himself in the orbit of Hetfield, whose talents the producer believes stand equal to the title of ‘the greatest rhythm guitar player in the world’. For his part, Hetfield was sufficiently impressed with Rasmussen’s work on Ride the Lightning that to this day it remains the front man’s favourite album of the three on which the Dane was the producer. Following Paul Curcio’s inattentive supervision of Kill ’Em All, the rhythm guitarist was encouraged by Rasmussen’s attention to detail. One of the first tasks asked of him was that he help Hetfield replicate the tone of his guitar as it sounded when played through the amplifier-head stolen in Boston. To do this, the producer assembled in a room ‘nine or ten’ Marshall stacks and cabinets – the result of him ‘calling pretty much everyone I knew in Copenhagen’ – and spent ‘two or three days’ in concert with Hetfield attempting to navigate their way towards the perfect tone. Once found, the guitarist then not only recorded his rhythm parts with forensic precision, but also overlaid them with two or three further takes played live rather than replicated by overdub, as is usually the case. For a man who just three years earlier had no desire to play guitar for Metallica, this was talent showcased to a precocious and even unique degree.

  From component parts that might be described as being ‘uneven’, in Sweet Silence Studios both producer and artists quickly located each other’s wave lengths and worked with tenacity, speed and purpose. Sessions took place under cover of darkness, with work beginning at seven in the evening and finishing some ten hours later. Band and producer would then unwind over bottles of beer and hands of poker, before retiring (Rasmussen to his home in Copenhagen, Metallica to Ken Anthony’s apartment in Brondby) to sleep the day away. This routine was adhered to on a daily basis for four weeks and a day.

  ‘The whole recording of the album was quite a smooth process, I think,’ is the producer’s recollection. ‘I mean, it was hard, but the energy and power they had meant that they were just going for it all the time.’

  Rasmussen was not only capable enough as a producer to guide Metallica’s ideas into a permanent form, but also young and enthusiastic enough to connect with the immediacy and energy of the group’s genetic code. With freezing temperatures outside the studio walls and little else to do other than work, minds were focused on a job of work both parties inherently understood to be one worthy of seriousness.

  ‘I could tell from early on that the album was going to be very good,’ says Rasmussen. ‘I could tell we were on to something.’

  Soon enough, this would be an opinion shared by many of the people who heard Ride the Lightning. In the thick of a Danish winter, however, the group had only their own and their producer’s instincts to guide them. But while the music was coalescing with certainty and fortitude, outside the studio walls Metallica’s business operation continued to judder in an alarming manner. As ever, the question was one of money, or, rather, the lack of it. According to Johnny Z, the budget for recording his charges’ second album had risen from $20,000 to $30,000, an escalation that caused the manager’s spirits to plunge. Phone calls to a lackadaisical Lars Ulrich did little to calm Zazula’s fears, with the drummer blithely asserting, ‘“Who can say how much a record costs? When it’s done, it’s done.”’ For his part, Johnny Z admits to being ‘pretty broke at the time’, the result, he says, of being ‘ripped off by our distributor in a major, major way’.

  ‘It was only later that we realised exactly how much we were ripped off for,’ he says. ‘But at the time all we knew was that Metallica were doing really well and yet we weren’t seeing the kind of money we should have been seeing.’

  In a state of increasing desperation, Zazula decided to fly to Copenhagen in an attempt to make first-hand sense of the situation.

  ‘It was my first time abroad and I was just eaten up,’ he recalled. ‘I was a Bambi in a forest full of hunters – all these English businessmen with their pots and pots of money, and me running up debts I didn’t even know I could pay. Not only had the album cost more than it was supposed to, but the band had blown all of their European money on the Venom tour. So I was going, “Woah, this is getting out of hand.”’

  On Metallica’s behalf Zazula discussed the possibility of a record deal for the United States with the Bronze label, an imprint which could lay claim to being the home of the Damned, Hawkwind and Ulrich’s heroes Motörhead (this despite the fact that the company was held in low esteem by the music industry at large). So confident were Bronze that they had secured Metallica’s services that the label decorated a bus with a banner announcing their new signings and parked the vehicle in full display of the ticket holders and music industry insiders gathered to see the Aardschock Festival in Zwolle, Holland, on February 11, 1984.

  In point of fact, representatives of Bronze were the first people outside Metallica’s camp to be afforded a listen to Ride the Lightning at Sweet Silence, an occasion which saw the label founder Gerry Bron and his son Richard deliver a crash course in how to make a calamitous first impression. In the presence of the album’s producer the pair asserted that Ride the Lightning’s sound was ‘crap’. Winning no prizes for diplomacy, the Englishmen declared that the work might be best salvaged by sacking Rasmussen, scrapping the entire session and drafting in Eddie Kramer, a producer and engineer famed for his work with Led Zeppelin and Kiss, to oversee a new mix. Hearing this, Rasmussen looked over to Ulrich and said of his guests, ‘they’re idiots’.

  Twenty-nine years after the fact, the producer is philosophical enough to realise that had Metallica ceded to Bronze’s wishes it would have been ‘just business’. Nothing personal. That said, Rasmussen was also of the opinion that the songs on which he and Metallica had collaborated featured ‘the fattest drum sound ever recorded’, and that the work ‘sounded killer’. Having punched in night shifts on behalf of Metallica and been close enough to the group to have ordered Kirk Hammett to take a shower because the guitarist had been wearing the same clothes ‘for a week’, he admits that had the group accepted Bronze’s thirteen pieces of silver he would have been ‘offended’.

  ‘Let’s put it this way,’ he says. ‘They were certainly not people I would trust.’

  In the end Ulrich decided that the Brons were not the kind of partners he wanted to climb into bed with either, and the label’s entreaties were politely rebuffed.

  ‘We decided,’ said the drummer, ‘that maybe we would be better off in the long run if we waited to see what else would happen.’

  The group’s decision to hold their nerve in the face of Bronze’s advances was a wise one: just two years after failing to secure the signatures of Burton, Hammett, Hetfield and Ulrich, the label went bust. At the time, however, Metallica’s hope that they would be ‘better off in the long run’ must have looked like a gamble even to their ever optimistic drummer. Following the completion of Ride the Lightning, the band headed to the United Kingdom for a proposed tour with The Rods and Canadian proto-thrashers Exciter, with the San Franciscans set to occupy the evening’s middle slot. Appearing under the banner of the Hell on Earth tour, the three-band package will be remembered, if it is remembered at all, as being one of the most grievous miscalculations in rock music history. Scheduled to run from March 21 to April 3, and booked into venues built to accommodate in excess of 3,000 people – rooms such as the Apollo Theatre in Manchester and the iconic Hammersmith Odeon in west London – the eleven-date tour made advance ticket sales that were so anaemic that audiences could have been transported to the concerts in a single minibus, and in some cases a taxi. A proposed appearance at the Newcastle Mayfair club on March 30 captured the imagination of just fourteen people, a figure rendered all the more remarkable for this being one of the tour’s more successful dates in terms of advance ticket sales. The number of peo
ple who paid money at the box office of the Hammersmith Odeon in anticipation of a concert booked for March 22 was just fifteen, this in a room that at the time held space for 3,300 people. To no one’s surprise, the Hell on Earth tour was cancelled.

  This left Metallica with time on their hands. The band were scheduled to make what would now be their debut appearance in the United Kingdom with a date at London’s Marquee club on March 27, with a second engagement at the same venue booked for April 8. In light of time being called on the proposed tour with The Rods and Exciter, rather than incur the expense and inconvenience of placing the four musicians on a return flight to San Francisco, the decision was made to keep the quartet stationed in London. It was left to Music For Nations to find accommodation for the visitors, which they did with a short-term let on a flat in Earl’s Court/Olympia. Safely ensconced in this picturesque quarter of the city, Metallica swiftly set about ensuring that their record company lost the deposit paid to secure the property.

  ‘I remember visiting them at the flat itself and, to be honest with you, I’ve seen better squats,’ remembers Gem Howard. ‘And this was quite a nice flat as well. They made a real mess of it. No washing up had been done whatsoever. All the plates were piled up on the coffee table in the front room. In the kitchen, someone had obviously buttered some toast and the pack of butter had fallen on to the floor, and whoever was responsible had just walked away from it and left it there. It was just disgusting.’

  For young bands visiting London for the first time in the early to mid-Eighties – particularly groups raised in locations such as Los Angeles and San Francisco – London resembled a city where only the language spoken by its citizens reminded them of home. The United Kingdom in 1984 was a place of turbid skies, boiled vegetables and pubs that not only stopped serving their customers at 11 p.m. sharp but which also closed in the afternoons. Were Metallica to have turned on a television set they would have had the choice of programmes from just four channels, while a stroll down the King’s Road on a Saturday afternoon might have attracted the unwanted attentions of Chelsea Football Club’s then significant hooligan element. America may have been the land of the gun and of violent crime delivered with terminal force, but when it came to bare-knuckle nastiness England in the Eighties was a hard act to follow. A pawn in the ideological battle between Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and the Left-leaning Greater London Council controlled by ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone, the nation’s capital was a city in stasis, populated in part, as Paul Weller observed in The Jam’s ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’, by people a number of whom ‘smelled of pubs, and Wormwood Scrubs, and too many Right-wing meetings.’

  But if London, compared with California, was a culture shock that assaulted all of the senses, another distinction between the New World and the Old Country did serve Metallica well. Unlike in the United States, the music industry in Britain enjoyed the benefits of a powerful music press. Magazines such as New Musical Express, Melody Maker and Sounds sold hundreds of thousands of copies each week and featured voices of such editorial independence and strength that they could either propel a group towards domestic stardom or else grind their faces into the dirt. The latter action was a pastime which the music press often particularly relished, rightly gaining for itself an international reputation for callousness and even brutality.

  But while in the spring of 1984 the likes of the NME and Melody Maker would not dream of dirtying their hands or the minds of their readers with the likes of Metallica – not yet, that is – there was a corner of the UK music press occupied by two fledgling titles that did view the group as being subjects worthy of mention. One of these was the small independent title Metal Forces, a publication dedicated specifically to heavy metal and hardcore punk’s fervent and burgeoning underground. Beloved of tape traders and other inhabitants of these genres’ lunatic fringe, the monthly publication was sold at the underground (in both the literal and figurative sense) Soho record shop Shades and via mail order. But while the circulation of Metal Forces may have been small to the point of insignificance, its influence in its field of expertise was nonetheless substantial. Usually excitable and often not fully literate, under the editorship of founder and editor Bernard Doe the title catered to its obsessive readership with opinions that were not so much forceful as tyrannical. In his review of Kill ’Em All, Doe himself wrote that the album was ‘one of the most awesome, fastest and heaviest pieces of vinyl’ he’d ever heard.

  ‘I’d urge every heavy metal fan to grab a copy of this album, and if when you’ve heard it you dislike Kill ’Em All then you can no longer call yourself a heavy metal fan,’ he declared. ‘You just don’t understand what heavy metal is about.’

  More significant in introducing metal’s feral new order to the genre’s rather stolid and conservative-minded mainstream was the contribution made by Kerrang!, which emerged every fortnight from an office on the South Bank of the Thames that was part music magazine HQ and part insane asylum. Kerrang! featured a cast of characters, many of whom would rather drink vodka than breathe and one who would be derelict in his professional duties to the extent of tossing a coin in order to determine whether or not to afford an album a glowing or scathing review. Nevertheless, the magazine put in much good, if sometimes untidy, work in heralding rather than merely defending the kind of groups derided by the more respectable members of the fourth estate. Many of the groups eulogised in Kerrang!’s garish pages were not up to much in either style or substance, but while the publication could not always be said to possess discriminating taste, it did resonate with a defiant conviction that harmonised with the appetites and temperament of its readership. It was in the magazine’s pages that Metallica found their spiritual home. From the point of view of Kerrang!’s staff the advent of the San Franciscan outfit and others following in their slipstream heralded the emergence of a slew of acts younger than the magazine itself which the title could claim as their own.

  ‘Personally, I’ve always preferred the American metal scene to the British metal scene,’ says Geoff Barton, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal champion who became Kerrang!’s first editor. ‘You had the Seventies monsters – Aerosmith, Kiss, Ted Nugent, Van Halen – but they couldn’t really be accessed then. But when the whole Bay Area thrash movement came about these bands were much more accessible. After a while, once you learned more about it, it was plain they had a lot more affiliation with the groundswell of what was going on at that time than perhaps their peers from the 1970s had.’

  In 1984 Kerrang!’s stock as measured by the London-based music industry was not high. Access to major label groups was offered first to the editors of the NME and Melody Maker, even if the music made by these groups was a bespoke fit for Kerrang!’s readership. With Metallica, though, this changed, with Music For Nations recognising that their energetic young charges were ideal material for the energetic young magazine. With this union, Kerrang! secured the jump on music publications that just a few years earlier had both the ear and the wherewithal to both announce and articulate the emergence of punk.

  While stationed in London, the members of Metallica kept company with journalists and employees of Kerrang!, but not always harmoniously. On one visit to the magazine’s offices James Hetfield became embroiled in a fist-fight with Steve ‘Krusher’ Joule, then the magazine’s abrasive designer. Barton recalls being confronted with the two men entangled on the floor, a startling sight even by the wayward standards of the magazine he then edited. During the same period, Kerrang! journalist Malcolm Dome invited Lars Ulrich for an evening’s libation at the St Moritz club in Soho, a location so befitting the phrase ‘dive bar’ that the words could have been paired together specifically to describe it. On this particular evening the pair were joined by Lemmy, then as now a man with a constitution as unbreakable as a diamond. Self-possessed to the point of insanity, Ulrich announced to his companions that when it came to the night’s drinking he would match the Motörhead front man ‘shot for shot
’. Predictably, this did not end well for the younger man.

  ‘He didn’t quite make it,’ remembers Dome. ‘At the end of the night I had to pour him into a cab. At the time the band were staying in west London and I remember him getting into the cab and the driver asking him, “Where to, mate?” He didn’t reply at first, so I asked him, “Lars, where are you going?”, to which he announced, “Denmark! Take me to Denmark!” So there’s me asking, “Lars, seriously, where are you going?”, and him answering “Denmark!” And, of course, there’s Lemmy, completely sober, totally fine.’

  On another occasion Cliff Burton decided to occupy a free day with a shopping trip to Oxford Street. He was joined by Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian, who was in London to discuss plans for his band’s second album with Music For Nations. Ian accompanied Burton into the centre of town in order that the bass player could purchase a new Walkman. Waiting for an underground train at Tottenham Court Road station, the pair were approached by two policeman, one of whom asked, ‘If we were to search you right now, would we find any drugs?’

  The pair’s answer, ‘No’, was not taken at face value by the two representatives of the thin blue line. Instead Burton and Ian were arrested on suspected possession of a controlled substance and were taken to the nearby Albany Street police station for questioning. Locked inside a windowless cell for hours on end, Burton found himself growing increasingly frustrated that the one free day afforded by Metallica’s schedule found him imprisoned in a Metropolitan Police nick. When the door to the cell finally did open, it was only to permit the entrance of two policeman, who instructed the suspects to strip to their underwear in preparation for a thorough body search. This search revealed a number of pills, belonging to Burton, which the officers suspected to be drugs of an illegal kind. Despite the bass player’s protestations that these tablets were nothing other than medicine for the treatment of allergies and a cold, he was told that neither he or his friend would be re-acquainted with their liberty before the items had been subject to testing in a police laboratory. While this took place, Burton was driven in a police van back to the flat he and his band mates were sharing in order that police could search the property for more ‘contraband’. Answering the door, Kirk Hammett was startled to see his band mate accompanied by six uniformed officers, and even more surprised when (without a warrant) the officers began to search the flat. When this exercise unearthed nothing, and the forensic lab report duly identified Burton’s seized property as being a phlegm expectorant, both young Americans were told they were free to go, sent on their way with a back-handed apology from the station’s commanding officer. Saying that he was sorry for their inconvenience, the policeman added that had this event occurred in the United States the suspects perhaps could have expected worse treatment. Not one to suffer such foolishness, Burton retorted that that in United States most officers had the wherewithal to differentiate between cold medicine and Quaaludes and would instead quickly have shifted their attentions to the business of catching real criminals.