Mustaine

by Dave Mustaine

  That’s the way I felt. I had nothing left to give to Panic. And Panic had nothing for me.

  A FEW WEEKS later I was leafing through an alternative newspaper called the Recycler when I came across a classified advertisement by an as-yet-unnamed band that was in search of a guitar player. This was nothing out of the ordinary—the Recycler was filled with these sorts of announcements on a weekly basis; they were required reading for just about every aspiring musician in Southern California. Few of them sparked my interest, largely because I had no desire to be a hired gun in someone else’s band. I knew I was a pretty good guitar player; I also was beginning to come to the realization that I liked to be in charge. I was not good at taking direction.

  This particular ad caught my attention, though, since it was the first to reference not one or two but three of my favorite bands. The first was Iron Maiden. Nothing really special about that—you couldn’t play metal and not appreciate Iron Maiden. The second was Motörhead. Nothing unique there, either. The third, however, was a band called Budgie. Just seeing the name in print made my heart race. I’d been introduced to Budgie, a groundbreaking band from Wales—in fact, they are regarded in some quarters as the first heavy metal band—one night a few years earlier, while hitchhiking on PCH. The driver worked for a radio station in Los Angeles.* He was a decent enough guy. Shared some Quaaludes, kept the music blaring, and at one point, after finding out I played guitar, he smiled and said, “Dude, you gotta listen to these guys.” Then he inserted a Budgie tape in the cassette deck.

  I was instantly blown away. The speed and power of the music, without abandoning melody—it was like nothing I’d ever heard.

  Now here I was, reading the Recycler, wondering what to do with the next phase of my life, and it was like I’d been sent a message.

  Budgie!

  That day I called the number in the ad.

  “Hey, man, I’m looking for Lars.”

  “You got him.” The guy had a strange accent that I couldn’t quite place. He also sounded very young.

  “I’m calling about your ad? For a guitar player?”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Well, I know Motörhead and Iron Maiden,” I said. “And I love Budgie.”

  There was a pause.

  “Fuck, man! You know fucking Budgie?!”

  That was all it took. You see, Lars Ulrich, the kid (and, yeah, he was just a kid, as I would soon discover) on the other end of the line, was an avid collector of music from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM). And when I dropped the name of a band that was at the forefront of that movement, I was in. The thing is, I didn’t even realize until later that Budgie held such a prominent place in that world; I just liked their music. And Lars respected that, which just goes to show you that deep down inside, a very long time ago, we really were kindred spirits.

  We met a few days later at Lars’s condo in Newport Beach. Actually, it was his parents’ house, which I didn’t realize until I arrived. The drive was like a trip down memory lane, as Lars lived in a neighborhood not far from where my mother had worked as a maid when I was growing up. At one point, after exiting the Pacific Coast Highway, I came to a stoplight and realized that if I made a right turn, I’d be driving into Linda Isle, where my mom had cleaned toilets for the rich folks. If I took a left, I’d be at Lars’s place in just a couple minutes. After making the turn, I remembered that once, many years earlier, I’d put on a little bow tie and white shirt to help out while my mom worked for a caterer at a private party in this very same neighborhood.

  You can imagine what I was thinking when I pulled into the driveway in my old Mazda RX-7, with the rusted-out muffler rattling so hard I thought the windows might crack:

  “Silver spoon motherfucker . . .”

  Lars’s father, Torbin Ulrich, was a former professional tennis player of some renown. His mom was a housewife; I never knew too much about her. Lars was born in Denmark. Not surprisingly, he’d begun playing tennis at a very young age and was something of a prodigy himself. Supposedly, he’d come to the States with the idea of furthering his tennis career, but that soon took a backseat to his real passion: music, specifically playing the drums. I didn’t know any of this when we first met. All I knew when he came to the door that morning was that he was very young (I was twenty years old; Lars was not quite eighteen) and obviously had come from a different world than the one I had known.

  Backstage with Lars Ulrich and my longtime friend John Strednansky.

  Photograph by William Hale.

  I had no great expectations regarding this initial encounter. In a lot of ways, I was still very innocent. I had some pot and figured if nothing else, I’d hang out with this kid, get high, and listen to his plans for conquering the music world. We shook hands and went right upstairs to his bedroom, presumably to get down to business (whatever that might mean). The first thing I noticed when I walked into his room was that he had an assortment of interesting shit on the walls: pictures of bands, magazine covers. One that stood out right away was a big poster of Philthy Animal, the drummer from Motörhead, hammering away at this incredible drum kit, the skins of which were adorned with what appeared to be gaping sharks’ mouths.

  Very cool, I thought.

  A little more disconcerting was the gigantic stack of Danish porn on the nightstand. I was no prude. By this time I’d lived out my fair share of Penthouse fantasies. But this shit was strange. Not the kind of stuff you’d see in mainstream American skin magazines, but hard-core European strangeness: girls getting fucked by baseball bats and milk bottles, things of that nature.

  “Dude, this is a little weird, huh?”

  Lars shrugged. Part of it, I think, was that he looked so young. He could have passed for thirteen or fourteen, and it just seemed odd to be hanging out with him, leafing through Danish porn and talking about starting a band. And smoking dope, of course, which is what we did next. Lars had a bamboo bong sitting right out in the open (his parents rather obviously ruled with something less than an iron fist), and naturally the conversation gravitated to drugs. We traded war stories for a bit, and Lars told me about his favorite method of smoking hash. He’d dig a hole in the ground, bury the hash while it was burning, then dig a little tunnel and inhale the smoke through a screen on the other side. I tried to picture that: this little kid facedown in the dirt, sucking hash smoke into his lungs. I couldn’t imagine doing that myself, and I’m not sure what advantage this method provided over more traditional modes of delivery . . . but I had to admit it was inventive.

  So we talked for a while, got high, and eventually I asked Lars if he had any samples from the band he was trying to form. There were three people in the lineup already, he said: a singer named James Hetfield (James had not yet begun focusing on playing guitar for the band), a bass player named Ron McGovney, and Lars, the drummer. They needed a guitar player—a really kick-ass player—to complete the lineup. Really, though, the band was still in its embryonic stages. It had no name, no history of performing. What it did have, apparently (although I didn’t know it at the time), was an agreement between Lars and a producer named Brian Slagel, whose new label, Metal Blade, was about to release a heavy metal compilation called Metal Massacre. A spot on the album had been reserved for Lars’s venture; all he had to do was come up with a song, a band, and a recording.

  “Listen to this,” Lars said. He inserted a cassette into his stereo and played a rough demo of a song called “Hit the Lights,” written by James and one of his buddies from a previous band. The guitar work was by a guy named Lloyd Grant, who had played with Lars and James briefly, before I came along. The song wasn’t bad; the playing was uniformly sloppy, the sound quality even worse, and the singer had little pitch control or charisma. But there was energy. And style. When it ended, Lars smiled.

  “What do you think?”

  “You need more guitar solos, that’s for sure.”

  Lars nodded. He didn’t seem offended. I think he wanted to hear my honest op
inion. Lars had been looking for a guitar player who matched his taste in music, and maybe I fit the bill. Crude as it was, the tape reminded me of the NWOBHM stuff I’d been hearing. I understood the way those guys played guitar from a riff point of view. It wasn’t so much about strumming chords or arpeggiating—picking from one side of the guitar to the other—it was more like picking the same string over and over, to the point where it almost became monotonous. In that way, the riff had to carry the weight of the whole song. If that sounds simple, well, it isn’t. It’s incredibly challenging, because the guitarist is reliant on such a small measure of music. The effect, when executed properly, is almost hypnotic.

  I came away from that meeting with minimal expectations. Lars was painfully laid-back. Moreover, as I said, he was just so young—it was hard to imagine that he had any kind of grand plan for assembling what would eventually become the biggest heavy metal band in the world. Like a lot of kids with vaguely defined rock ’n’ roll dreams, he was just sort of stumbling along. I’d been there myself.

  The afternoon ended with a handshake and a promise to keep in touch, and then I drove back to Huntington Beach, bleary eyed and stoned. I didn’t know if I’d ever hear from Lars again. But he called just a few days later, wanting to know whether I’d be able to meet him and the other guys in Norwalk, where Ron McGovney lived.

  “For what? An audition?”

  “Yeah, kind of like that,” Lars said.

  I said sure, again figuring I had nothing to lose. It was either play this one out to its logical conclusion—see if these guys had any potential at all—or return to Panic, which was clearly a dead end.

  Classic Mustaine/Hetfield pose. We were destined for greatness–just not together.

  Photograph by Brian Lew.

  McGovney was a question mark to me. I knew nothing about him. Nor did I know much about James, who, as it turned out, was living with Ron. The two of them had been pals since middle school and were now sharing a duplex owned by Ron’s parents. In fact, they owned several units in the neighborhood, and Ron was given free reign to live in one and turn the garage space into a studio. It was hardly a lavish life—the entire neighborhood had a cheap cookie-cutter feel to it—but compared to the way I’d been living (selling dope to put food on the table), Ron appeared to have life by the balls. As did Lars.

  Ron did not make a great first impression. I was a bit of a hard-ass, a wanna-be street kid, and I was suspicious (and probably a bit envious) of anyone who seemed to have been handed an easier path in life. At the time Ron was working—or at least dabbling—as a rock ’n’ roll photographer, with a particular interest in heavy metal. He was always pulling out photos of other bands, most prominently Mötley Crüe. For some reason Ron was a huge fan of the Crüe, and I guess he figured it would impress people to show them pictures of Vince Neil spray-painting his hair or putting his clothes on. I didn’t understand it, and I still don’t. Any more than I understood the way Ron was dressed that first day, in his knee-high go-go boots; Austin Powers–style, skintight stretch jeans; studded belt; and carefully pressed Motörhead T-shirt.

  Yuppie metal. That was the look.

  I remember being fairly quiet that day. It was almost like I was a gunfighter, and I took the matter with an appropriate degree of seriousness. Mind you, I had never been on an audition before. Whenever I’d played in a band, it had been my band. There was no “trying out” for someone else’s band. Fuck that! I was a leader, not a follower. Playing backseat to someone else really didn’t sit well with me and indeed had put me in a bit of a foul mood. Simply by agreeing to drive up to Norwalk and endure the process of being evaluated and interviewed, I’d compromised my own integrity and standards. That’s the way I looked at it, anyway. What can I tell you? I was arrogant. And I was angry. But I had to swallow my pride. I was tired of dealing drugs and playing with a dysfunctional band. Maybe this other thing was worth a shot.

  I tend to flip people off a lot. Here’s proof. Me having fun backstage.

  Photograph by William Hale.

  There was a weird vibe almost from the moment I arrived at Ron’s place. In addition to Lars, Ron, and James, there were a few other people hanging out, including Ron’s girlfriend and a guy named Dave Marrs, a friend of Ron’s who would later work briefly as a roadie for Metallica. I’m not sure what they expected from me. I’d been pretty honest with Lars about how I filled the day. I told him I played music and sold pot on the side; in reality, of course, I sold pot and played music on the side. Regardless, he didn’t seem to care. And neither did anyone else.

  Lars introduced me to everyone as I unloaded gear from my car and brought it into the garage. While I set up, everyone else went into another room, which I thought was kind of weird. There didn’t seem to be any excitement about what we were doing. And as far as I could tell, I was the only one competing for the job.

  I plugged in my amp and calmly went about the business of warming up. Then I warmed up some more. I kept playing, faster and louder, figuring eventually somebody would walk in and start jamming with me; at the very least, I thought they’d come in and listen, ask me a few questions. But they never did. They just left me there to play on my own. Finally, after maybe a half hour or so, I put down my guitar and opened the door into the house. The entire group was sitting there together, drinking and getting high, watching television. I noticed, by the way, that James and Lars were drinking peppermint schnapps, which was almost comical. I didn’t know anyone who drank schnapps—it was an old ladies’ drink.

  “Hey—we gonna do this thing or what?” I asked.

  Lars kind of smiled at me and waved a hand. “No, man . . . you got the job.”

  Huh?

  I looked around the room. Was it really that easy? I didn’t know whether to feel like I’d been offended or complimented. My response vacillated between relief and confusion. Did they not care? Were they so impressed by my warm-up that they just had to have me in the band? (I knew I was pretty good, but I didn’t know I was that good.) Looking back on it years later, maybe they didn’t want to conduct a real audition—with all of us playing together—because it would have given me the opportunity to gauge their level of skill and musicianship. That strikes me as a bit ironic now, given the sometimes acrimonious nature of our relationship over the years, and the fact that I have often been portrayed as someone who was lucky to be in the right place at the right time, filling a temporary hole in the Metallica lineup.

  But I didn’t know any of this at the time. Both physically and in the way he dressed, Lars was as foreign looking as he had been the day we met, but I attributed that largely to his European upbringing. Ron was doing his thing, and James . . . well, James was rail thin, with black spandex tights tucked into boots and a cheetah-print shirt. Displayed prominently on his wrist was a wide leather bracelet with a clear patch in the middle of it—almost like the kind of thing a quarterback wears on game day, with the plays written on it. James, you could just tell, was trying really hard to look like a rock star. He had long hair shaped into a windswept coif, so that he resembled Rudy Sarzo, the bass player for Ozzy Osbourne.

  I tried not to laugh.

  Oh, my God. What am I getting myself into?

  Chapter 4

  Metallica—Fast, Loud, out of Control

  The Young Metal Attack is right; I am just a kid here still in Metallica.

  Photograph by William Hale.

  “You keep talking like that, I’m going to punch you in the mouth.”

  In the beginning it was as much about style as substance.

  I remember going out shopping one day with Lars and marveling as he spent the better part of the afternoon trying to educate me on the finer points of purchasing high-top sneakers. It was, apparently, something of a science, and Lars and I disagreed on the proper formula. Check out the early photos of Metallica and you’ll see me wearing shiny white leather Converse All-Stars with red stars on the side. This was my choice, not Lars’s. For some reason,
he was of the opinion that rock stars wore traditional Chuck Taylors.

  “Fuck that!” I said. “That’s like the kids on Fat Albert. I’m not wearing that shit.”

  I could be wrong, but I remember this as my first disagreement with Lars. It may sound like a petty detail, but I think it points to the inevitability of the dissolution of Metallica as it was in its infancy. Too many cooks in the kitchen. I was a band leader. So was Lars. Inevitably, the failure to agree on a common goal or to accept specific roles rose within the framework of the group. I’ve seen it time and again. Egos clash, combustible personalities ignite. The odds of surviving these obstacles—to say nothing of the financial, artistic, and managerial challenges—are astronomically bad.

  And yet, in retrospect, I understand what Lars was doing because I’ve done it myself: he was trying to form an image as well as a musical entity. His heart, I think, was probably in the right place. To me, it was his taste that was misguided. One day he pulled out a photo of Diamond Head, a British heavy metal band that he admired to the point of obsession—he’d even trailed them, Deadhead style, on a European tour the previous year.

  “Look at this,” he said. “These guys look like rock stars.”

  I just stared, slack jawed. There was a lot to like about Diamond Head, but fashion was not high on the list. I looked at that picture, saw all the black spandex, the white boots, the long, flowing dress shirts unbuttoned to the waist with the bottom tied into a knot, exposing the singer’s hairy navel, and I wanted to gag.

  “Lars, I can’t even believe a dude would dress that way. He looks like a chick.”

  See, there were lines of distinction that couldn’t be blurred. You had to decide what type of music you were going to play, and your appearance had to properly reflect that music. In that sense, Diamond Head was not my cup of black coffee. A lot of bands were like that. Consider the importance of hair. Everyone had long hair in those days, with the exception of the punk bands. In hard rock and metal, hair was long, and within that framework a decision had to be made: