Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  The San Franciscan band meanwhile devoured the food proffered by Ozzy’s hand, all the while desiring to tear and taste the flesh that fed them. In 1986 the headliner was a man en route to becoming a brand that would be pinned beneath glass rather than an artist in the present tense, a transformation that was anathema to the younger band. In one revealing exchange Ulrich commented to a visiting journalist that she should be grateful to be backstage with Metallica rather than front of house watching Osbourne. The reason for this, the drummer explained with a roll of his eyes, was that the headliner ‘has got his back to the audience [and is] humping the drum riser’. Suddenly alarmed by the unguarded nature of his words, Ulrich retracted this statement and replaced it with party-line boilerplate.

  ‘We think Ozzy is great,’ came the on-message message. ‘He’s been really good to us on this tour. We’re honoured to play with him. He’s one of the people who started this whole thing. Say that [in print].’

  While on tour with Ozzy, each member of Metallica was allowed a per diem – the daily pocket money handed out by tour managers to the travelling musicians, yet another example of the state of perpetual adolescence in which musicians find themselves while on tour – of $30. Hammett spent this money on sushi when he could find it and on comic books. Hetfield meanwhile considered the idea of saving his stipend in order to finance the building of a half-pipe for skateboarding in the garden of 3132 Carlson Boulevard, a flight of fancy that would come to naught. Metallica, however, did ask their managers for the company line on the prospect of the band using skateboards on the summer afternoons of the Ultimate Sin tour, and received a reply from Q Prime that was some distance removed from the kind of passive-aggressive corporate double-speak typical of those that walk the American music industry’s more powerful corridors.

  ‘We told the management, “Hey, look, we’re thinking about taking boards out on tour,” recalls Hetfield. “I thought [Peter Mensch] was going to go, “Oh shit, no way, you can’t.” [Instead] he just said, “Well, you break something, you still play.”’

  ‘Yeah,’ harmonises Hammett, adopting the voice of the man to whom the band devoted a percentage of its pay. ‘You break a leg on your skateboard, you play onstage with a broken leg.’ On the Ultimate Sin tour no member of Metallica played onstage with a broken leg – though someone did with a broken arm.

  On July 26, in the hours that preceded Metallica’s performance at the Mesker Theater, Hetfield was riding his Zorlac skateboard on the concrete terra firma of Evansville, Indiana, when his wheels slipped from beneath his feet. Extending his left arm to break his fall, the guitarist hit the ground with a force sufficient to fracture bone. That evening, with Hetfield being attended to by medical staff, his three band mates took the rather noble decision to inform the audience in person that their band would not be performing for them, and to offer their apologies. This news was not universally well received by the hardcore, to the extent that even during Ozzy Osbourne’s set sections of the audience could be heard chanting the name ‘Metallica’. For the remainder of the the Ultimate Sin tour the support act performed as a five-piece unit, with Hetfield singing onstage with his arm in a cast while his rhythm guitar parts were played by John Marshall. (The job had originally been offered to Anthrax’s Scott Ian, a commission he reluctantly declined as his own band were due to commence pre-production on their third album with producer Eddie Kramer within weeks.) Mensch’s warning that should a member of the group break a limb as a result of their skateboarding activities they would be compelled to perform onstage in this condition proved correct. For the benefit of the paying customers, James Hetfield wrote the phonetic insult ‘Pha-Q’ in black letters on his white plaster-cast.

  Metallica would play a further six dates as support to Ozzy Osbourne. Following the final show – an appearance at the Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia, on August 3, James Hetfield’s twenty-third birthday – the group were addressed in their dressing room by Cliff Burnstein. The band’s co-manager had for his charges some good news, which he delivered in simple terms: Metallica had earned money in sufficient quantities that its members could now each afford to buy a house.

  As the days began to cool in the summer of 1986, to outside eyes at least Metallica were beginning to take on the form of the year’s unlikeliest success story. This was a role in which they excelled and revelled. As the group embarked upon their first headline tour of the United Kingdom in September that year, audience members in possession of a £6 programme were confronted with a headline splashed in bold yellow type across page three that read, baldly:

  THEY’RE DIRTY, OBNOXIOUS, NOISY, UGLY

  AND I HATE THEM …

  BUT YOU CAN’T DENY THEIR SUCCESS

  Beneath this quote – a sentiment attributed to journalist Dave Roberts from the now defunct US magazine Faces – is a picture of Metallica, each member dressed in a T-shirt and either jeans, black canvas trousers or else sweat pants. As journalist Sue Cummings had noted, with not quite perfect equanimity earlier in the summer, this was a union in which ‘no one [wears] platform shoes, spandex pants, designer leather, hairspray or make-up. Metallica are too proud to dress up; their uniform is the uniform of their average fan, the teenage American slob: sneakers, ripped jeans, T-shirts.’

  It is difficult for fans of Metallica who do not adhere to a stereotype not so much crudely drawn as finger-painted to view Cummings’s words with anything other than irritation. That said, a glimpse at the group photograph that appeared on the inner sleeve of Master of Puppets showcases four men who not only fit the profile of the ‘American slob’ but do so with sufficient relish that such an appearance is rendered not as a mark of shame but rather a badge of honour. Photographed by Ross Halfin in the living room of 3132 Carlson Boulevard on July 25, 1985, Metallica are seated on a sofa beside a coffee table atop which are strewn bottles of beer and that day’s edition of the San Francisco Examiner, the headline of which announces to its readers that [film actor Rock] ‘Hudson Has AIDS’. A copy of the Misfits’ twelve-inch single ‘Die Die My Darling’ and Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione’s latest skin trade magazine New Look also lie in shot. The subjects of the image greet the watching eyes at the other side of the lens with outstretched middle fingers and looks of off-duty disdain.

  Here Metallica resemble a gang at least as much as a band. More than this, they resemble a gang that has just been in a fight, and who hope that it will not be too long until they find themselves in another fight. Not only was such an image unusual when compared to the gloss lips and tinted highlights of the ‘hard rock’ community of 1986, it was also some distance removed from even the kind of bands who at the time proudly represented heavy metal in all its blokeish glory. Few bands were as unreconstructed in their devotion to the ‘full-English-breakfast’ school of mainstream yet still (relatively) heavy metal as Iron Maiden, a band on whom a long-haired devotee could not only depend but even set his watch by. But a glimpse at the English quintet as pictured on the inner sleeve of their 1986 album Somewhere in Time offers a vision of a heavy metal band as imagined by the curators of London Fashion Week. Despite being no more attractive than a mouthful of cockles, the five pale men nonetheless stand stock-still in poses of studied neutrality, their hair cleansed to a shine, their sleeveless T-shirts and blue jeans crisp and box fresh. Even for those who believed that the advent of thrash metal meant that heavy music was going to the dogs, by comparison Iron Maiden had gone to a stylist. Set against Halfin’s El Cerrito portrait, the result was the difference between five men who looked like brand-new waxworks on display at Madame Tussauds and a quartet that gave the appearance of rats in T-shirts living out their days in the squalor of an apocalyptic nightmare.

  Such visual and sonic defiance was not to everyone’s taste. Although readers of Kerrang! who took the trouble to nominate their choices in the magazine’s end-of-year poll for 1986 were sufficiently swayed by the San Franciscans’ charm to elect them to the position of the year’s third-best group (behin
d Iron Maiden and Bon Jovi), a minority were sufficiently unimpressed to secure for the group the tenth rung in the category of Worst Band. More tellingly, thrash metal – the genre to which Metallica were at the time still inextricably linked – was decreed by the readership as being the year’s second most boring subject.

  But for the thousands of exclusively young people who bought tickets for Metallica’s ten-date tour of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, the emergence of a new breed of American metal played by bands who looked exactly the same as their audience was a cause for jubilation. Dispensing with Oscar Wilde’s maxim that no good deed goes unpunished, the headliners returned the kindness shown by Anthrax in the borough of Queens three and a half years earlier by gifting the New York quintet the tour’s support slot.

  By the habits of today’s emerging American rock bands, Metallica’s 1986 tour of the United Kingdom is notable for two reasons. The first is that in the twenty-first century it is inconceivable that a group of an appeal sufficient to earn them a silver disc – as had been presented to Metallica almost two years earlier at the Lyceum – would wait until the advent of their third album before undertaking a full British tour. That said, when Metallica did finally decide to visit the parts of the British Isles often referred to by the London-based music industry as ‘the regions’, they did so with the kind of attention rarely seen from the overseas visitors of today. As well as performing to audiences in larger cities such as London, Birmingham and Manchester, the Damage Inc. tour also pulled up at the loading bays of venues situated in the rather more out of the way towns of Bradford and Newcastle. The group also performed in Belfast at a time when many American groups declined to visit this then conflicted city. But regardless of whether Metallica were working up a sweat in the megacity that is London or else in an historic and these days overlooked West Yorkshire mill town, night after night the words ‘Sold Out’ could be read on the frontage of venues and in letters placed upon the slates of front-of-house marquees.

  For metal fans of advancing years, the tour was without question the event of season, if not the year. Within weeks of the Damage, Inc. tour having left British shores, Iron Maiden and Saxon would also tour the island; to younger adolescent eyes, both bands would suddenly appear part of an older and stuffier order. And while Metallica’s position as the ringleaders of metal’s new cutting edge was accepted by all, the presence of Anthrax on the Damage, Inc. tour’s undercard lent the excursion an even greater sense of occasion. Such was the momentum now gathering behind the thrash metal movement that within seven months of Metallica’s first UK tour, Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer would each headline London’ s 3,300-capacity Hammersmith Odeon.

  Writing of the pairing of San Franciscan headliners and New York support act, in a review of the tour’s appearance at Dublin’s SFX Hall on September 14, Kerrang!’s Paul O’Mahoney observed that ‘this one had all the makings of a First Division football league top of the table clash’, a contest between ‘two of the meanest, most hellraisin’ rock ’n’ roll bands on planet Earth’. Having filed his entry for the most cliché-sodden opening paragraph in the history of music journalism, O’Mahoney then reviewed against type by asserting that while Anthrax ‘looked and sounded like a truly great band should’, for their part Metallica ‘didn’t quite click into gear as their mighty reputation suggested’.

  ‘The set was largely inconsistently balanced,’ the reviewer went on to say, ‘seeming to lag at times – oh, and the mere sight of an acoustic guitar onstage must have made many a Metallurgist throw up!’ With regard to the evening as a whole, O’Mahoney concluded that ‘My friends will be hearing about this because … Anthrax blew the Goddamn [Metallica] muthas away!’

  If this was the case in Dublin, it was not a scene repeated on the final date of the United Kingdom and Ireland leg of the Damage, Inc. tour. On Sunday September 21 Metallica’s tour bus pulled up at the stage door of the Hammersmith Odeon. Opened in 1932 as the Gaumont Palace Cinema, by the middle of the Eighties the balconied room had become an iconic venue for live metal due to its patronage by groups such as Iron Maiden and Saxon, the latter act having recorded their 1981 live album The Eagle Has Landed at the theatre. The Odeon’s status as a folkloric setting was further enhanced by another live album, Motörhead’s No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith, which despite not having been recorded in west London – the title actually referred to the final date of the band’s Ace Up Your Sleeve tour of 1980 – became a landmark for its authors and ensured the same status for the venue to which its title referred.

  The desire of young American metal bands to perform at the Hammersmith was so strong as to override the simple fact that the venue was entirely unsuited to music of the type. In 2003 the Odeon was renamed the Apollo – an occasion marked by an appearance from AC/DC – and the room renovated to the extent that its dance floor became an unreserved space free of seats. In 1986, however, the Hammersmith Odeon remained more or less unchanged from its days as a cinema, with rows of cramped raspberry velvet seats lining not just the balcony but also the space stretching from the back of the stalls to the lip of the stage. For fans wishing to express their passion for the sounds made by visiting thrash acts by partaking in the new pastime of ‘moshing’ – a phrase coined by Agnostic Front guitarist Vinnie Stigma and popularised by Scott Ian – a seat at the Hammersmith Odeon was no more suitable a location than the inside of a phone box.

  Despite this, the sense of anticipation inside the venue in the minutes before an intro tape of the theme music from The Blues Brothers announced the arrival onstage of Anthrax was both amphetamined and intense. As a voice from the darkness asked the entirely full room to welcome ‘the heaviest band in the world’ – some claim given that the support act were not even the heaviest band on the bill – more than 3,000 pairs of adolescent eyes were greeted by the sight of a group that at the time were thrash metal’s equivalent of The Muppet Show. Dressed in skateboard shorts and T-shirts, in 1986 Anthrax could lay a respectable claim to being American metal’s most energetic live band. Although providers of heat rather than light, over the span of a forty-five-minute special guest slot the impression made by the East Coast quintet was sufficiently startling (and, for that matter, original) to find support in a room packed with people very much in the market for new kinds of thrills.

  But to claim that Anthrax’s hit and run transmission was sufficient to steal Metallica’s evening is nonsense. Even with James Hetfield’s onstage presence impaired by an arm that would remain in its cast for another six days – and with the answer to questions about how best to occupy himself during the lengthy instrumental sections of his band’s songs never fully answered – the sight and sound of a band who were fast becoming the soundtrack to the lives of tens and even hundreds of thousands of people framed in such an iconic context was of proportions sufficient that many in attendance would remember moments of the sixteen-song set for decades to come.

  ‘Onstage at Hammersmith Metallica looked like a big band,’ remembers Kerrang!’s Malcolm Dome, his presence that night as inevitable as the following morning’s dawn. ‘They dwarfed the stage and they looked like they belonged. This wasn’t some small young band who were trying to look tough while wondering, “Oh God, what are we doing here?” This was a band who grabbed the opportunity and said, “We belong here. It’s taken us two years to get here. We should have been here earlier [in our career] but now we are here we’ve sold the place out. Not only that, but we sold out every other date on the UK tour as well.”’

  After Metallica had bid its audience goodnight with the peacenik-sentiment of the battle-hymn that is ‘Fight Fire with Fire’, hundreds upon hundreds of people surged to the wooden counter of the merchandise stand positioned by the exit doors of the Odeon’s ground-floor foyer. There, in a flurry of activity that itself resembled a concert groaning on the precipice of becoming out of control, fans battled to purchase items such as the Pushead-designed Damage, Inc. T-shirt for £8. Others bought themselves
a tour programme, the pages of which were perused as tube trains ferried concert-goers to other parts of London or to connections to outlying satellite towns. As the reader regarded the programme’s back cover, their eyes would have been met by a strange image positioned at the bottom right corner of the page. It was a picture of Metallica, an image that all members of the group had liked aside from Cliff Burton, who disdained the shot for it having captured him striking a facially comic pose. In order that the picture not be seen by wider eyes, the bass player had torn the original print and blinded his eyes with a sharp instrument. In spite of this – or, perhaps, because of this – as the man who had supervised the design of his band’s tour programme, Lars Ulrich decided to include the image anyway. The photograph’s two pieces were reunited with Sellotape, and the bass player’s disfigured face was hidden behind a black strip.