Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  RON McGOVNEY: In the beginning, James just wanted to be a singer. I was the only Metallica bass player who had to play without a rhythm guitarist. But James was really not comfortable. He needed something in front of him, so he decided, “You know what, I don’t want to be the singer anymore, I just want to play guitar.” We started auditioning singers. We wanted to get John Bush from Armored Saint, and he wouldn’t do it. Finally, James said, “The heck with it, I’ll just play and sing.”

  JOHN BUSH: Lars was a real big Armored Saint fan so he asked me to join Metallica, and the reason I was reluctant was that Armored Saint was happening. The wheels were going and we were moving. I was like, “These are my buddies I grew up with, I’m not going to just quit Armored Saint. Yeah, Metallica’s happening too, but this is my thing.”

  KIRK HAMMETT (ex-Exodus, Metallica): We were all looking for the most extreme stuff, and back [when I was in Exodus], the most popular music was Mercyful Fate, Venom, Motörhead. . . . Then this band came into town called Metallica. That was the sound that everyone was looking for but no one could actually execute until Metallica came along and showed everyone how to do it. There were pockets of bands in LA and New York that played heavy metal, but it was Metallica that brought it up to the next level.

  LARS ULRICH: We played faster and heavier and louder and more obnoxious and more out there than any of the rest of them. And slowly people started taking notice. In the beginning, it’s not that they actually appreciated what we were doing. It was more like, “What the fuck is that?”

  BRIAN SLAGEL: We’d go to Hollywood and drink, and then we’d end up at Betsy Bitch’s mom’s house. We’d have big, gigantic parties: Bitch, Armored Saint, Metallica, Savage Grace. We’re all drinking heavily. One night they were playing “Ace of Spades” by Motörhead [on the stereo] and there was a huge dog pile. That was the thing back then. You’d tackle somebody and everybody else would jump on top. Literally, there’d be thirty people. At the end of the night we noticed that [guitarist] Phil [Sandoval] from Armored Saint was limping. He had broken his ankle in the dog pile. He claims that Dave Mustaine broke his ankle on purpose.

  JOEY VERA: I think Dave saw Phil in the pile and jumped on his leg in a way where he knew that it was going to cause some hurt, which is why he felt guilty about it for so long. I thought it was an accident for the longest time. We were all pretty drunk, and he was no exception.

  DAVE MUSTAINE: Harmless verbal jousting gave way to nasty, personal insults, paving the way for a physical confrontation. They targeted Lars, probably because he was the smallest. . . . As the guys from Armored Saint dog-piled on top of Lars, I ran across the room and applied a side kick to the first person in my path, Phil Sandoval. The first thing I heard was a loud crack! Like the sound of a branch snapping in half. I’d broken his ankle. I tell this story not to brag, but simply as a way of pointing out how I felt about Lars, James, and Cliff. I would have done anything for them.

  RON McGOVNEY: LA was kind of a bust. I remember playing a gig at Lars’s high school. It was an auditorium. The stage was set up for a school play, so it looked like the inside of someone’s house. Lars was in the living room, I was in the bathroom, James was in the kitchen. The place was full when we started, and by the time we ended, there was probably about ten people there. They all walked out. In LA, everybody was trying to do the Mötley Crüe thing, standing there with their hair teased, and we’d come out looking like we just walked in off the street. But every time we made trips to San Francisco, the audiences went wild. There would be more and more people, until we were headlining.

  KIRK HAMMETT: When people say thrash started in LA, it really didn’t start in LA. Metallica was kicked out of LA because they weren’t understood. I’m sure that after the fact, it was really convenient for people to say, “Oh, yeah, it started in LA.” But no, it started in San Francisco.

  BRIAN SLAGEL: As Metallica got better, Lars called and asked if I knew a bass player. We had just signed Trauma from San Francisco, which Cliff Burton was in. I put them on Metal Massacre II. They played a show at the Troubadour. Cliff was just amazing. I told Lars about him, and Lars and James went to see the show and Lars said, “That’s going to be our new bass player.” Cliff wanted them to move to Frisco and they said, “Fine.” They’d had a huge reaction up there that they didn’t get in LA, so they moved. In fact, when Metallica was playing in LA they were deemed too punky. They got banned at the Troubadour for being too heavy.

  CLIFF BURTON (1962–1986) (Metallica): Trauma went down to LA and while we were there, Lars and James saw us and decided that they would like to have me in their band. They started calling me, and I came to their shows when they played Frisco. Eventually Trauma started to . . . annoy me. They were starting to get a little commercial in different ways, so I said, “Later.”

  RON McGOVNEY: At one of my last gigs in San Francisco, Cliff [Burton] was hanging out quite a bit. I knew who he was and I knew they were looking at him, and I saw that was pretty much the end of it right there. One time I wasn’t at rehearsal but my bass was sitting there and Mustaine says, “Well, I just fucking hate Ron,” and he took a beer and poured it into my bass. Me not knowing that, the next time I go to practice, I plug it in and it shocked me. At one gig I had a bass stolen. The last time I saw it, it was behind Dave when we were playing, and one of our roadies was supposed to pick it up and bring it on. Well, our roadies were his friends, so it disappeared. All this stuff started to be too much for me, so I quit in November 1982. What bothered me most was that James and Lars threw a blind eye to it. They just didn’t even recognize or realize what was going on. A couple days after I quit, they left for San Francisco.

  In the early eighties, San Francisco was a fertile landscape for thrash. Not only were there hordes of fans to support the music, there were several clubs that understood the marketability of the new genre. The most famous was Ruthie’s Inn, located in Berkeley, on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay. In the same way CBGB was the New York City breeding ground for punk bands like the Ramones, Blondie, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Ruthie’s broke countless thrash acts, including Exodus, Metallica, and Testament.

  GARY HOLT: Ruthie’s Inn was kind of our home. It started out as a blues club; we were the first metal band to ever play there. At the show, the band before us was just some rock band and their family members’ friends stood at the front of the stage with their drink glasses and left them at the front of the stage. Then we came on, and in no time there’s broken glass everywhere and blood all over the stage. One girl that was part of that rock band crowd liked us so she was up front rocking. Suddenly, [our vocalist] Paul [Baloff] put his hand in a puddle of blood and smeared it on his face. This girl ran screaming for her life.

  BRIAN SLAGEL: We did the Metal Massacre show at Ruthie’s with Bitch and Cirith Ungol. But Cirith Ungol dropped out, so I asked Metallica if they wanted to play and they said, “Sure, why not?”

  BETSY BITCH (Bitch): After the show they provided each band with a case of beer backstage and Dave Mustaine stole our beer.

  CHUCK BILLY: After every gig at Ruthie’s, everybody would venture back to Paul’s house because it was the closest place. We’d roar there all night. One day he got evicted, so instead of having a house-leaving party, we had a house-wrecking party. Me and six friends walked in and there wasn’t a lot of damage done yet, so we threw a twelve-pack of beer right through the front window, and then we went up and down every hall and put our fists and legs through every wall. That really spread the madness and everybody went off, and in five minutes the whole place was taken apart.

  HARALD OIMOEN (D.R.I., photographer): Ron Quintana from Metal Mania once printed a picture I took of James and Kirk in bed together. And they stuck El Duce’s from the Mentors’ head in the middle of the bed, like they were sleeping with El Duce, as a joke. I didn’t realize I was supposed to keep those pictures for myself and James got so upset. I showed him the magazine and he had this smile, then the smile turned i
nto a frown. He said I would never take photos of them again and he kicked me in the stomach. It was this really bad scene, but that was also the alcohol talking. Lars, when he would drink, would get really obnoxious. He punched me in the face one time at an Angel Witch show for no reason. And then he started urinating right in front of me at the bar.

  In 1982, shortly before McGovney left the band, Metallica recorded the legendary No Life ’Til Leather demo, which electrified the tape-trading underground and led to a recording contract with Megaforce Records.

  JONNY ZAZULA: A guy came by [my record store] who had just come back from San Francisco and he played me the Metallica tape, and I thought it was unbelievable. The song “The Mechanix,” especially, took me by storm. Then I saw an article in [Brian] Slagel’s magazine written by K. J. Doughton [the original head of the Metallica fan club]. So, KJ got Lars to contact me. He sent me a letter and I called him up. The next thing you know, I had twelve shows booked for them with Venom, Vandenberg, the Rods, Twisted Sister. That brought the Metallica family and the Zazula family together.

  SCOTT IAN: I was hanging out at Jonny Z’s record store and he puts on this tape, and I’m like, “Holy fuck, what’s that?” He says, “It’s this band Metallica from San Francisco. It’s their demo.” I’m looking at this cassette case No Life Til Leather. I’m like, “Whoa, this is crazy.” He says, “Yeah, I got it a week ago. I’m bringing them to New York. I’m gonna start a label and put out their record.”

  BRIAN SLAGEL: My friend John Kornarens got No Life Til Leather. We used to have parties at the record store I worked at in Woodland Hills. So, he put in this cassette tape and tried to make me guess who it was. I was like, “What, some band from England?” He goes, “No, that’s Metallica!” I was like, “Man, they’ve come a long way in a short period of time.”

  TOM ARAYA (Slayer): We were doing the same thing at the same time, so it wasn’t really groundbreaking to us. It was, “Dude, check out this tape, No Life Til Leather. Kinda sounds like us.” We were like, “Who the hell is this?” The same thing with Exodus. We had heard of them, but when we got up to San Francisco and saw them they blew my mind because we were so similar.

  BRIAN SLAGEL: Megaforce were flying bands like Raven and Anvil in to audition them, and we were trying to do the Metallica thing. Metallica came to me and said, “We can do a record for ten grand.” I said, “Where am I gonna get ten grand?” I had a little money I had saved from working at Sears, and I borrowed $800 from my aunt, and that’s how I paid for Metal Massacre. I was only twenty years old, just doing it as a fan.

  JONNY ZAZULA: I sent Metallica $1,500 figuring the money would get them to New York. But I never thought about what’s gonna happen when they get here. So they come over in this U-Haul, and three of the guys were sleeping in the back and two of the guys and a tour manager were in the front. They traveled through the desert and everything with that door closed in a U-Haul truck. That reality hit me—these guys will do anything to make it. But Metallica fell in our lap. We didn’t know what we had and we didn’t know what to do because they were young and they were wild. The first second we were together, they raided everything there was out of the liquor cabinet in my house. They drank all the bottles down without even using glasses. They were all raging drunk and Dave Mustaine is throwing up all over the place. I was like, “Hmm, this is going to be interesting.” They stayed with me and Marsha for a little while, but that wasn’t working out.

  RAT SKATES: Jonny Z bullshitted Metallica to get them. He didn’t have any of the things he was promising them. The only thing he got was a couple of shows booked. It’s actually beautiful when I think of it now because everyone’s spirit was so intense and so strong. Lars went on the phone and was like, “This dude I don’t know called from New Jersey and says he’s going to book us shows and he’s got a record label going, so he’s going to send us some money. We can get a Ryder truck and drive out there.” They don’t have anything on paper. They don’t even know where they’re staying, and they didn’t ask questions. They just got into the truck and drove.

  SCOTT IAN: Not long after I first heard Metallica, Jonny Z says to me, “Hey, Metallica’s on their way. They’re in a U-Haul and they’re driving across from San Francisco with all their gear. I got them a room at the Music Building where you guys rehearse.” Now, the Music Building was a burnt-out squat in South Jamaica in the worst neighborhood in Queens that would rent rehearsal rooms. You’d pay $250 a month and have a room 24/7, but you were risking your life getting in and out of this place. So Jonny’s like, “Do you mind meeting Metallica at the Music Building? It would be great if you can show them around.” I said, “Of course,” because me and [ex-Anthrax bassist Dan] Lilker (Brutal Truth, ex-Nuclear Assault) were there every day anyway. So Metallica shows up and we were instant friends. We were probably the first people they saw when they got to Queens. Mustaine was still in the band and they were still rehearsing and finishing the songs for Kill ’Em All. We gave them a toaster and a refrigerator. They used to come to our houses to shower. These guys had nothing.

  JONNY ZAZULA: Anthrax had a practice place in the Music Building. It was a very nice room. And since Metallica had no place to stay, we told them, “Don’t you worry. You can stay in Anthrax’s room.” Then the manager [of the Music Building] came up and said, “No, no one can sleep in these rooms. If we get caught, they’ll close us down.” But he felt sorry for the band so he puts them on the roof in a giant storage area with broken furniture. It was really shitty. When I went up to see them, James was making a bologna sandwich and trying to put a bullet belt together, and everyone else was just jamming away to escape the reality of where they’re staying.

  SCOTT IAN: Lars knew how to play drums, but he definitely wasn’t the most accomplished drummer. But James [Hetfield] and Dave [Mustaine] were both sick guitar players already, and Cliff was the maestro. I used to listen to them jam the songs that would go onto Kill ’Em All. In the beginning, Lars had a hard time keeping up, that’s for sure. He had no problem playing fast, it was just a case of what he was playing. It was a mess. I would definitely say Lars learned on the job, and he learned how to play drums for Metallica by being in Metallica. Even today, Lars’s drums only work in the context of Metallica. You couldn’t put Lars’s playing in any other band. Lars plays specifically for James’s rhythm style, and in a way, that’s amazing.

  JONNY ZAZULA: Metallica started working in the Music Building with Dave Mustaine. He was a big part of that band. He co-wrote four of the songs [on Kill ’Em All], including “The Mechanix.” But Dave drank an awful lot. I think he did everything a lot. The problem was he was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and when he got drunk, you never knew if you were gonna have this happy-go-lucky guy or this sloppy, terrible guy with a bad fuckin’ attitude. A lot of times he was just out of it and played all the wrong shit. It got to the point where he was in a real bad mood all the time and they were all just paranoid. There was a big black cloud walking around with Dave and I think the band felt it, too.

  SCOTT IAN: Metallica were the only ones there in the middle of the night at the Music Building in their shitty room drinking beer. Mustaine would get super-drunk and fuck with other people’s rehearsal rooms. A band would show up the next day and there’d be a mountain of garbage piled up in front of their door because Mustaine would go get all the garbage cans and dump them in front of the practice room door of a band he didn’t like. Of course, everybody knows who did it because Metallica was the only band there overnight. Once, Metallica was opening for the Rods and Vandenberg at L’Amour. Vandenberg is sound checking at 4 p.m. and Dave is ripped. He’s screaming at Adrian Vandenberg, “Get the fuck off the stage. You suck.” The other dudes in the band are trying to run and hide. Metallica didn’t even have a record out yet.

  RAT SKATES: Dave had a reckless drinking problem and it was very obvious. He would say stupid things onstage into the microphone and he wasn’t the front man. James was supposed to be the man talking to th
e crowd and Dave would just embarrass them.

  RON QUINTANA: As much of a problem as Dave was, he was still the most charismatic guy in Metallica. He was way ahead of James at that time. He was the guy who would yell out between every song and get people involved and into the show.

  DAVE MUSTAINE: Right before things went south for me and Metallica, James kicked my dog. I was selling pot [at the time]. When I would go play a concert, people knew that my pot was sitting in my apartment saying, “Come keep me company.” Y’know? So I was broken in on. People stole everything that I had—all my stash. I figured, “Screw this. I’m gonna get some dogs to stay in the apartment when I leave. So I got two dogs and I took one of them up to rehearsal one time. She put her paws up on Ron’s car. James kicked her right in the side. I said, “What’d you do?” [And James said,] “She put her paws up on Ron’s car.” [I said] “It’s a dog. That’s what they do. You don’t kick animals.” So, we went into the house, we started arguing some more, I ended up punching him in the face, and I think that was the root of why I lost my job.

  KEVIN HODAPP (photographer): I was shooting Metallica, and before the show Lars came up to me and said, “Don’t take any pictures of Dave Mustaine.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, we’re getting rid of him.” I knew Mustaine was getting kicked out of the band before he did.

  RON QUINTANA: We had a going-away party for Dave, but he didn’t know that’s what it was [laughs]. Dave always got drunker and crazier earlier than everybody else. That night, Dave was already drunk and passed out. So somebody drew dicks all over him and we took pictures around his drunk body. Dave would outdrink all of us, and if he didn’t get in a fight, he’d pass out. But a lot of the fights he got in weren’t his fault. A girl would suddenly fall in love with Dave and he got hassled by the boyfriend and they’d be fighting. But when they kicked out Dave, I really thought it was over for Metallica because Dave was such an outrageous, crazy guy. It was really fun to see him onstage with the band. And [guitarist] Kirk [Hammett] didn’t have that kind of personality.