Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  This shot, along with the images which partnered the story, was taken by Ross Halfin, then, as now, one of the rock world’s best known and most prolific photographers. A complicated man possessed of a temper that made Dave Mustaine look like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Halfin had come of age in the pages of the rock fortnightly, most notably for his work with Iron Maiden. Despite the entreaties of Peter Mensch, however, as the days began to shorten in 1984 the photographer had yet to focus his camera in Metallica’s direction. Increasingly exasperated with this state of affairs, Mensch finally demanded of Halfin that he ‘stop being an asshole’ and come shoot his new band.

  ‘My original idea for the photo shoot was to reference the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet cover, as frankly I couldn’t think of anything else to do with them,’ remembers Halfin. ‘Sadly, there was no stuffed venison or wild boar in sunny Oakland, so I had to make do with a Chinese takeaway. Actually, we had to order two as the first lot that arrived, the band ate … Then I looked at Lars and thought, “I know, let’s spray him silver with a metal cake” … I still have no idea where the cake came from or the nuts and bolts we put in it. To this day, I think it’s possibly one of the worst photos I have ever taken; but, look, it seemed like a really good idea in 1984. I cringe now thinking about it.’

  Kerrang!’s decision to place Ulrich on its front cover was a bold plunge into the unknown. Although the magazine’s sales figures averaged 40,000 copies per issue, this figure was a tally aggregated from sales of thirteen issues combined. Even now it is unknown whether the only issue of Kerrang! ever to feature a drummer alone on its front page sold well or otherwise. Despite this, Metallica would appear on the front page of the publication a further fifty-three times. For his part Geoff Barton recalls that Ulrich ‘was instrumental in getting a lot of the journalists on board, with his sheer enthusiasm, persistence and his general nuisance-ness, shall we say. At that point he was the most recognisable member of the band; he was the face of Metallica. It was Lars who was really banging on about them all the time, and promoting their cause. It was his single-handed persistence that got them on the cover.’

  At the same time as his face could be seen grinning in newsagents from Edinburgh to Exeter, in December 1984 Lars Ulrich and Metallica landed once more at Heathrow Airport for the occasion of their third London concert. The group’s final live performance of 1984 took place at the Lyceum, at the time a Mecca-owned ballroom situated on Wellington Street in the heart of London’s theatre district. A Grade II listed building built in 1834 to the specifications of architect Samuel Beazley, despite laying a justifiable claim to being one of Westminster’s loveliest structures the Lyceum had in recent years staged concerts by bands as unruly as the Clash and Killing Joke. For Metallica to be appearing in a venue more than five times the capacity of the Marquee – this despite their music being played only on Radio 1’s late-night Friday Rock Show – provided hard evidence that their bandwagon was beginning to take on the form of a steamroller.

  Fittingly for a band who are often defined by their flaws, Metallica responded to this upturn in fortunes by delivering a set that remains one of their worst performances on British soil. Writing in Kerrang!, reviewer Howard Johnson confessed that ‘a poor sound didn’t help me make much punch-drunk sense of [the band’s] assault’, adding, ‘There are those in the know that profess that this wasn’t anywhere near Metallica at their hip-swingin’ best.’

  One of those not only ‘in the know’ but also in attendance at the Lyceum was Malcolm Dome, a man fast becoming the Forrest Gump on hand to witness the significant moments of Metallica’s early years. Dome concurs that while the group’s appearance in Theatreland did not amount to the ‘best performance the band has ever played … in fact, it was far from it’, nonetheless he is of the opinion that the concert was ‘a seminal gig because it came at the time when everything was clicking into a higher gear. The music they played, the size of the audience, the business side of the band, it was all going up a notch.’

  So much was this the case that an underwhelming performance on a Thursday night in central London offered no impediment to the band’s first flush of success. As Big Ben chimed a dozen times and ushered in the winter solstice, at the Lyceum the members of Metallica were each presented with a silver disc of Ride the Lightning commemorating sales in excess of 60,000 in Europe. This they had achieved with no promotional video, no seven-inch single and without a single note of their music being played anywhere on any radio station during daylight hours.

  In 1985 Metallica turned their attentions from the shores of Europe to the vast expanse of the United States. In the previous twelve months, the group had performed live on home soil on just three occasions, causing Ulrich to admit that ‘we have rather overlooked America recently,’ adding that ‘our timing has been rather bad because heavy metal is taking off there in a big way.’ With his usual attention to detail, the drummer also confessed that it was possible that Metallica ‘may have lost a little ground to other bands’.

  It is difficult to identify the ‘other bands’ to whom Ulrich is referring. At the start of 1985 Metallica’s forward momentum had propelled them beyond the horizon of thrash metal’s chasing pack. That this was so is no surprise, with the genre as a whole being not only nascent but also somewhat neutered. Slayer gnashed away merrily enough on Show No Mercy, the group’s debut album released in 1984, but did so with milk teeth. Meanwhile, Anthrax had to their credit the debut album Fistful of Metal, a set comprised of a skipful of clichés and not a single song worthy of the name. Elsewhere Exodus had yet to disentangle themselves from a legal quagmire that would delay the release of the band’s debut album, Bonded by Blood, by almost a year, while Dave Mustaine’s Megadeth were at the time seconded at Indigo Ranch Studios in Malibu recording their first LP, Killing Is My Business … And Business Is Good!

  In spite of their prolonged absence from North America, Metallica’s status on domestic soil was beginning to elevate. Re-released on Elektra Records on November 19, 1984, Ride the Lightning (despite an almost total media blackout), loitered for weeks at the lower end of the Billboard Top 200 album chart, much to the delight of both band and producer. As the LP sat atop the turntables of an ever increasing audience, in Oregon K. J. Doughton was taking receipt of up to 300 letters addressed to the authors’ fan club each week. A number of these correspondents were female fans who wrote that their attachment to Metallica sprang from a love of the song ‘Fade to Black’. Other communiqués, however, said quite the reverse, and chastised the group for having ‘sold out’, at the time the gravest assertion in the musical underground’s uncodified constitution. Other contributors, however, were rather more unhinged in the lengths to which they would go in order to display their commitment to Metallica’s cause. One such individual was a Texan gentleman rejoicing in the sobriquet ‘the Green Slime’, who wrote requesting that he be employed as the band’s official photographer. Enclosed with the letter were examples of his work, in the form of pictures of mutilated animals. Among these was a Polaroid of a rat that only seconds before had been the Green Slime’s pet, until it was decapitated. The photograph showed it lying next to an axe and the image was accompanied by the words ‘Goodbye Scooter’.

  Metallica began their second tour of North America at the Concert Hall in Toronto on January 19, 1985. The excursion would occupy the band’s time for the next two and a half months and would see their tour bus park at the stage door of no fewer than forty-five venues, ranging in size from the spacious Aragon Ballroom in Chicago – known locally as ‘the Aragon Brawlroom’, due to the often unruly nature of its patrons – to the rather more intimate Headliners pub in Madison, Wisconsin. Alongside Metallica, ticket holders were promised an evening’s entertainment from Armored Saint, a Los Angeles quintet with a growing reputation as an impactful power-metal outfit who would open the gig, and the headliners were W.A.S.P. (‘We are Sexual Perverts’), from the same city, a theatrical schlock rock turn with an act that com
prised stage blood, fireworks, female nudity and songs so knowingly stupid as to have surely been written with a glint in the eye (‘Fuck Like a Beast’ being just one example). Led by bandleader Blackie Lawless – cruelly dubbed ‘Bluey Clueless’ by the wags at Kerrang! – W.A.S.P. were equipped with a muscular sound and a good ear for a chorus; for their part, Armored Saint were a group whose music was of a quality that spoke of both a commitment to musicianship and a love of the genre in which they operated. Despite this, and unbeknownst to either party at the time, Metallica were beginning to drag metal into heavier waters in which both bands would eventually drown.

  Recalling the tour, Lawless remembers looking out into the audience on any given night and seeing division.

  ‘[It was] like an invisible line [had been] drawn down the middle of the room,’ he noted, ‘and half was theirs and half was ours. It didn’t matter what we were doing onstage. It looked like two opposing armies. Sometimes we just stopped what we were doing and watched.’

  ‘It was’, he remembers, ‘a war.’

  This image is striking, and is perhaps the first manifestation – and a physical one, at that – of Metallica as a polarising force operating within the parameters of a genre that in itself polarised opinions.

  Compared to the travelling horror show that was their first North American tour, the caravan with W.A.S.P. and Armored Saint offered proof that the San Franciscan group’s station had risen. The venues in which they appeared were larger than before, the crowds more vociferous; transport came in the form of a chromium steel tour bus rather than a pock-marked Winnebago; hangovers from the night before began under cover of hotel linen. Things were looking up.

  As was the case with Raven, Metallica got on well with the other bands on their 1985 tour of the United States and Canada, especially with Armored Saint, who apparently did not hold a grudge about the fact that their new friends had once attempted to steal their singer.

  ‘Right away we felt like [both groups] had a lot in common with each other,’ remembers Joey Vera, Armored Saint’s bass player, ‘and that’s probably what sparked the friendship to begin with. We had way more in common with them than, say, the guys in Ratt, for instance. We became quite close, especially on that tour. We would ride on each other’s buses and have nights drinking and hanging out.’

  Life on the road can equate to a prolonged, sometimes perpetual, adolescence, and in the case of Metallica this proved to be true. The band’s tour bus was christened ‘The Edna Express’, ‘Edna’ being the name given to the kind of young woman willing to spend the night with drunken, long-haired strangers.

  ‘Girls would come on the bus and just blow the whole bus,’ Lars Ulrich recalls ungraciously. ‘Like, “OK, here’s two girls, everybody get in line.” People would say, “Eww, she just blew that other guy …” “So? You don’t have to put your tongue down her throat.”’

  ‘They enjoyed what they did,’ says James Hetfield. ‘And, heh-heh, they were good at it. Back then, we all shared stuff. “I did her. Dude, here! Have my chick.” Lars would charm them, talk his way into their pants. Kirk had a baby face that was appealing to the girls. And Cliff – he had a big dick. Word got around about that, I guess.’

  ‘We all had pretty good pulling power, but some of us got a little more desperate than others,’ laughs Ulrich. ‘There were certainly times where it was about quantity rather than quality.’

  With their night’s work done, the group would behave in a manner befitting their new nickname of ‘Alcoholica’. Lars Ulrich would claim that he knew that Metallica were being viewed with a measure of success by the fact that promoters would comply with their booking’s request for vodka by supplying bottles of premium Absolut rather than common-or-garden Smirnoff. With the band lit like fuses, the settings in which they found themselves were often ripe for misadventure.

  Following a performance at the Rainbow Club in Denver on March 5, Hetfield found himself bending the elbow in the company of Joey Vera in the Armored Saint bassist’s hotel room. Hung over the back of one of the room’s chairs was Vera’s leather jacket, which the visitor regarded with an appreciative eye. Asking if he might try on the garment, Hetfield was told by Vera to be his guest. Placing his arms inside the sleeves, the guitarist walked over to the window of the room as if to inspect himself in the reflection afforded by a dark sky. Vera nodded in agreement when told that his possession was a fine piece of apparel. His head ceased this motion, however, when he learned that his guest intended to throw the jacket out of this window, in order to see if it were capable of flight.

  Vera’s leather jacket caught the cold night wind and glided towards earth like a raven. Its owner watched in bewilderment; in a manner good-natured rather than confrontational he chided Hetfield for being ‘an asshole’. The bassist did, however, insist that his friend accompany him down to the hotel’s swimming pool, beside which this most beloved and essential component of the metal fan’s wardrobe now lay. This done, the pair rode back to Vera’s room, eight floors removed from the terra firma of the Mile High City. As the carriage ascended, Hetfield thought it a capital idea to hit the red emergency button and stall the lift on its pulleys, a course of action that heralded the loud attentions of a ringing alarm. Their minds focused by the insistence of this cacophony, the occupants stared at one another and wondered, ‘Holy shit, what is going on?’ Within minutes, they could hear the voices of hotel security workers shouting on the other side of the lift’s closed entrance. The employees then proceeded to bang on the elevator’s steel doors in an attempt to prise open a space through which the trapped guests might escape. To the sound of screeching steel, Hetfield and Vera were met by the sight of black shoes at eye level and realised they were trapped between floors. A member of the staff crouched down, looked the men in the face and asked, ‘What the fuck are you guys doing?’

  ‘So we’re looking up at this guy from the hotel and thinking and saying, “Oh shit, man, sorry,”’ remembers Joey Vera. The bassist was told to wait where he was, and that the workmen were going to descend to the floor below in order to better secure his release. Rather than viewing this news as being just one example of the kindness of strangers, instead the two men saw their chance to escape. As the employees made their way to the hotel’s concrete stairwell, Hetfield and Vera eased themselves out of the bottom of the lift, dropped on to the carpet of the lower floor and ran in the opposite direction from the men headed down to set them free. While a more sensible man might have viewed this incident as amounting to enough foolishness for one night, Hetfield decided that his work in Denver was not yet done. Pulling a fire extinguisher from the one of the walls in the hallway, the guitarist began spraying water all over Vera, chasing him through the hotel’s corridors and ‘squirting this shit everywhere’. As he did this, some of the liquid found its way into the sensors of the building’s sprinkler system, immediately activating not only the sprinklers but also the piercing sound of a fire alarm. Suddenly, the wacky high jinks at the hands of a travelling rock musician had become a matter of emergency protocol, not to mention a security risk. The author of songs about fighting to death and refusing to live by the rules laid down by mainstream society, Hetfield responded to this escalation of events by scurrying to his room in order to hide. Meanwhile Vera entered his own room, switched off the lights and lay, fully clothed, beneath the covers of his bed, feigning sleep.

  ‘I’m just laid there pretending I’m oblivious to all this commotion going on,’ remembers the bassist. ‘In the meantime the fire department shows up and evacuates the entire hotel. So there are, like, 250 or 300 people in their pyjamas and underwear sprawled out in the parking lot and I’m still in my room looking out of my eighth-floor window going, “Holy shit! What the fuck just happened?” We got into a lot of trouble for that; I remember we had to pay some fines and James and I got a good talking to. I would say that Denver was the most memorably stupid night of the entire tour.’

  Five days later, with W.A.S.P. having
left the caravan in order to support Iron Maiden on the English band’s World Slavery tour, the two bands arrived in Los Angeles for a sold-out performance at the 4,000-capacity Hollywood Palladium. Situated at the east end of the much eulogised Sunset Boulevard, the Palladium is a rather drab-looking, sun-bleached art deco structure that from the street at least gives the appearance of being more a forgotten picture house than a venue with a storied and glittering past. Inside, however, the room resonates with the memory of feet gliding atop a vast circular dance floor and of cocktails sipped by patrons seated at tables positioned on either of the venue’s twin balconies. Opened in 1940 (and re-opened following an extensive renovation in 2008), the Hollywood Palladium has hosted events ranging from concerts by the Grateful Dead and hometown punks Bad Religion, to performances by Richard Pryor, to political events featuring John F. Kennedy and Doctor Martin Luther King Junior (the appearance of whom in 1965 led to the LAPD discovering 1,400 lb of explosives in a nearby apartment).

  Alongside occasions such as these, the arrival of Metallica in their ‘Edna Express’ may have been viewed as amounting to very small beer indeed. But the performance that evening qualified as a triumph not only in the sense of being the best and most successful appearance in the city in which the group formed – admittedly, not a high bar to clear – but also in its significance with regard to the battle lines that were being drawn in the world of music played with distorted guitars by young men in need of a haircut. On the same street as the Palladium, two miles west the musical mindset of bands hustling on the Sunset Strip saw them smearing yet more gloss both over the music they were writing and on to the lips through which they mimed these songs on music television. As successful as this strategy may have been – at least in the shorter term – authentic it was not. After years of rejection by many of Hollywood’s musical taste-makers, down at the Palladium Metallica were finally finding an audience in the market for music powerful enough to slap the bitter taste of hairspray from the back of their throats. A jubilant James Hetfield duly celebrated the occasion by back-flipping into a sea of outstretched hands at the climax of set closer ‘Motorbreath’.