by Ian Christe
Danish thrashers Artillery with Metallica producer Flemming Rasmussen (Roadrunner Records)
The horror stories of writer H. P. Lovecraft, first explored by Metallica in “The Call of Ktulu,” were revisited in “The Thing That Should Not Be,” an ultraheavy, lurching number that rumbled like a colossal mountain on wheels. “It’s about huge things marching around!” Cliff Burton exclaimed to Metal Mania. “Huge fuckers so big they compete with buildings in size!” Addressing the hypocrisy on both sides of the PMRC’s metal-morality debates, James Hetfield hissed in “Leper Messiah”: “Circus comes to town / you play the lead clown” and “Send me money, send me green / heaven you will meet / make a contribution and you’ll get the better seat.”
Capping the momentum of Lightning, major-label Metallica was still brasher than all rivals—yet refined enough to challenge the heavyweights of heavy metal. Regardless of the album’s stunning and studied breakthroughs, the nonmetal press remained incapable of understanding Master of Puppets. Scribbled one mercifully unnamed Billboard reviewer, “Danish hard rock quartet again impresses with well-crafted arrangements and solid technique; material is usual run-of-the-mill metal, with hyper-speed guitars in the fore.” On the verge of becoming a household name, Metallica still did not merit a fact-check.
By 1986, America was in the full throes of an amazing rage to thrash, and the music business inevitably responded. Slayer was wooed from Metal Blade by rap impresario Rick Rubin for his label Def Jam, also home to LL Cool J and Run-DMC. This created a stir among music cognoscenti, who wondered not only how the most evil band on the planet would fare on a major label but also how they could mesh with their rap music labelmates. Soon Exodus and Megadeth both left the indie Combat for Capitol Records. Even the half-rotten deviled eggs in Venom joined the parade, inking the first direct artist contract with mail-order music consolidator K-Tel, of late-night television renown.
Together Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax comprised the “Big Four” of thrash metal. Anthrax had already jumped into the big time, releasing Spreading the Disease on Island Records in 1985. Compared with the ferocity of its peers, the attitude of Anthrax was downright festive. After cutting its teeth on Megaforce and touring with Raven, the good-natured Anthrax continually sought ways to differentiate itself from its old friends in Metallica. The group crafted a commercial formula that combined crunching speed guitars with the smooth, soaring voice of Joey Belladonna, whom guitarist Dan Spitz compared to Journey singer Steve Perry. Avoiding heavy metal clichés and downplaying rock-star behavior, Spreading the Disease invited friendly thrashers, traditional heavy metallers, and hardcore punk fans alike to join its high-energy party.
Dave Mustaine reaches out
Yet even as the Big Four signed to major labels and cultivated an audience of hundreds of thousands with mass distribution, advertising, and marketing, they took pains to keep core fans involved in their careers. Fully aware of their tape-trading roots, these bands were careful not to alienate their constituent base, and so they maintained contact with the fanzines and specialty radio stations that had supported them from the start. To promote Megadeth’s first major-label outing, Peace Sells But Who’s Buying?, Dave Mustaine wrote letters to radio hosts and fanzine editors listed in the back of Kick Ass Monthly and Metal Forces.
As they were tapped in to the stars of tomorrow, networks of tape traders became viable business alliances, offering young thrashers a third path to prosperity besides MTV and touring. Dutch label Roadrunner opened its American office in November 1986 with two employees. Finding talent was simple—all the company had to do was open up a copy of Metal Forces and read the demo reviews. Along with former Mercyful Fate front man King Diamond, Roadrunner signed contracts with two bands well known to tape traders: New York’s Carnivore and New Jersey’s Whiplash. “All the cool bands were coming out of the U.S.,” says Roadrunner’s A&R director Monte Conner. “That’s where all the happening signings were.”
Once Master of Puppets hit the Kmarts, a little piece of underground metal jumped into the carts of every family shopping for a jumbo carton of laundry detergent. As the band hoped, Metallica’s album sales began closing the gap between true heaviness and the MTV video metal scene. “We started covering Metallica around the end of Ride the Lightning,” says Ben Liemer, editor of Circus, a fan magazine that claimed a circulation of 480,000 in the late 1980s. “During Master of Puppets it must have been twenty-eight straight months we had a Metallica story. I’m not kidding. That’s what the kids wanted.”
Continuing the time-tested touring gambit, Metallica secured the coveted opening slot on Ozzy Osbourne’s Ultimate Sin tour, beginning in March 1986 and continuing across the entirety of America during the sweltering summer months. Metallica clearly hoped to follow Mötley Crüe, whose Shout at the Devil broke nationally during a 1984 touring stint with the madman of rock. Everyone respected Ozzy. The Americanized former Black Sabbath singer had a reputation for recruiting the next big thing as an opening act, as much as he did for scooping up hotshot young guitarists—Randy Rhoads from Quiet Riot, Brad Gillis from Night Ranger, and Jake E. Lee from Ratt.
Like most of his heavy metal contemporaries, Ozzy delivered on a promise to bring ever bigger and more grandiose stages to his audienee. The Ultimate Sin tour had the singer descending from the rafters while nestled in the lap of an enormous golden Buddha. Yet alone among his peers Ozzy clung to the viewpoint that the concert experience should be a mind-altering communal event with the vaguest threat of becoming a riot. To that end Metallica was a perfect match for Ozzy, and audiences agreed. Hovering in the Billboard Top 30 since its release, during the Ozzy tour Master of Puppets became Metallica’s first gold record, with sales of more than half a million copies and counting.
With image-oriented metal in regular rotation, MTV still mistakenly retained a wait-and-see approach to Metallica and the other Big Four bands. In contrast, Mötley Crüe spent the summer of 1985 cresting on the success of its “Home Sweet Home” video, a weepy lament about life on the road. Voted number one for weeks on end by callers, the video’s success eventually led MTV to institute a “Crüe Rule,” which stated that no video could be the viewer favorite for longer than three months.
As the network was reticent to add more metal, there was pressure on the existing roster of hot rocking video stars to airbrush away any outrageous hues. As Mötley Crüe covered moldy teen standard “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” and Twisted Sister covered “Leader of the Pack,” the video medium was systematically processing metal’s scary stalwarts into a repulsive form of rock nostalgia. Instead of fighting parents and the PMRC, video metal bands were entertaining them. The rewards of the mass audience were just too seductive. Even Judas Priest appeared uncharacteristically neutered in 1986 on its synthesizer-heavy Turbo, accompanied by a small fleet of stylized videos that depict the band’s adventures in a motorcyle-laden future world.
Worries of overexposure led MTV to consider cutting back on heavy metal in 1985. Instead Dee Snider helped initiate the Heavy Metal Mania specialty show. “I had the idea that they should at least give the viewers a metal show that they could focus the audience with,” he says, “because they’ll always tune in. I was trying to get some bands in there who had no videos, like Metallica. I would show little clips of them and try to get away from the mainstream. I remember Motörhead gave me an Ace of Spades jacket to wear. The only other way I could get them on was to use their music in the credit roll, because [Motörhead’s] ‘Killed by Death’ didn’t pass MTV’s muster.”
Metallica certainly had the budget to produce a video for Master of Puppets, but their managers advised against it. The band’s commercial aspirations and integrity were now balanced by the voices of experience. “Cliff Burnstein thinks that Metallica is gonna be big, but doing it in our own way,” Lars Ulrich explained to Kick Ass Monthly. “The way we’re gonna be big, hopefully in four or five years, is gonna be quite a different way than any other band has done it
, except maybe Iron Maiden. It’s gonna be a sort of thing where you don’t have to follow any trends or get airplay, you don’t need to make videos, you just sort of do it through a really good street buzz. Keeping a down-to-earth thing going with kids, doing what you wanna do.”
Kerry King of Slayer
(Jonathan Munro)
After five years with Metallica, Ulrich had experienced enough steady growth in his band to develop a bold and almost prophetic vision of success. “With the new management behind us, what we’re doing could be the next big thing,” he told Kick Ass. “Most of the bands coming today are trendy. What Metallica is doing is timeless. The public will change for us in a few years, instead of us changing for them.” Or, as James Hetfield summarized his blunt approach to breaking Metallica into the mainstream, “If it don’t fit, force it. If it breaks, it was defective and needed to be replaced anyway.”
Metallica’s rise was watched closely by old rivals who kept the competition lively. A year into the ringing success of Master of Puppets, Slayer struck back loudly with Reign in Blood, the album that would define its career. Still unrepentantly and mercilessly demonic, Slayer humbled its many black metal imitators while appealing to an extreme segment of society far beyond metal tape traders. Appearing on a record label known mainly for rap music, freakishly fast songs like “Criminally Insane” and “Angel of Death” attracted many fans who had previously shunned pentagram metal like the plague.
With new label chief and producer Rick Rubin, the band fused the dynamic peaks and lulls of Hell Awaits into a constant panicked frenzy of violent metal. Shepherded by the Nazis and Satans of Tom Araya’s frantically fast storytelling, Reign in Blood was a permanently metabolism-altering experience. It was the first time that Slayer’s sharp speed—increasingly influenced by hardcore punk—was not dampened by muffled, dime-store production values. When fans and critics complained that the LP clocked in at a scarce thirty minutes, guitarist Jeff Hanneman retorted that the ten songs featured just as many verses, choruses, and solos as on any Judas Priest record—metal was just faster now.
When James Hetfield cracked his arm skateboarding in Indiana during the summer 1986 tour with Ozzy, the remedy was simple—the band called on guitar technician John Marshall to handle rhythm guitar, and a new touring contract stipulated that Hetfield would stay away from skate ramps in the future. While the band was playing the best music of its career to a steadily expanding roar of approval, a few broken bones were just a chuckle to the Metallica juggernaut.
The next collision, however, was devastating. On a frozen stretch of Swedish highway the night of September 27, 1986, the Metallica tour bus flipped after sliding over a long patch of hidden ice. Cliff Burton was killed. “He just got thrown out the window, and boom, the bus landed on him,” Lars Ulrich told VH1. “By all accounts, he never woke up.” Furious and distraught, James Hetfield tracked backward along the highway in pajamas, looking for the treacherous ice, for somewhere to place wrathful blame. As the obscure NWOBHM band Aragorn had weirdly prophesied five years earlier on a Neat Records seven-inch: “Black ice / It’s a killer.”
Cliff was a wild twenty-four-year-old lamb, seemingly anointed against calamity. Dying young was something that happened to 1960s-era rock stars, obsolete figures of careless excess. Even with his bellbottoms, Cliff was not that kind of a throwback. He was vibrant and vociferous, a crucial ally in chaotic situations. His loss was the sacrifice of an innocent, a nightmarish fairy-tale scene complete with Cliff’s legs sticking out from beneath the tour bus like the Wicked Witch of the West’s. As Ozzy Osbourne had lost guitarist Randy Rhoads in a plane accident and AC/DC its singer Bon Scott to drinking, Metallica now had its own metallic martyr.
The entire heavy metal scene was collectively thrown into disbelieving grief. Testament singer Chuck Billy described to Sounds of Death how the bassist’s demise put the cash register success of thrash metal in perspective. “The representatives from Megaforce flew out to come see us play, and when they got to our rehearsal studio they were all bummed out. They told us they had been up all night long because they had just gotten word at two in the morning that Cliff Burton had died. We didn’t even feel like playing but we went ahead anyway and did a few songs without much emotion. When we were done, they said, ‘Okay, you’ve got a deal,’ but it was a really weird vibe.”
Jason Newsted of Flotsam & Jetsam recalls weeping at home in Arizona, his tears wetting the open newspaper. “I think Cliff was the real key guy to Metallica for a long time,” says John Bush of Armored Saint. “He kept it real. Not that the other guys didn’t, but he kept it extremely real. Just his look and his attitude. His whole persona was cool. It was pretty devastating when he passed away.” To commemorate the comrade they had once fed and housed at the Queens Music Building, Anthrax bought a page in Kerrang! reading, BELL-BOTTOMS RULE!! LAUGH IT UP, WE MISS YOU.
Burton was cremated, and his ashes were spread throughout favorite spots in the wilds of Northern California. At his memorial service on October 7, 1986, “Orion,” Burton’s lengthy instrumental composition from Master of Puppets, was played at the site of a simple stone marker. THANK YOU FOR YOUR BEAUTIFUL MUSIC, read the epitaph.
Where the departure of previous members had always brought a new beginning for Metallica, the death of Cliff Burton was the tragic end of the ambitious young era of the group. “I just recall our tour manager saying, ‘Okay, let’s get the band together and take them back to the hotel,’” James Hetfield told writer K. J. Doughton. “The only thing I could think was, ‘The band? No way! There ain’t no band. The band is not “the band” right now. It’s just three guys.’ “
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The Hollywood Glambangers
1983: David Lee Roth of Van Halen announces $1 million paternity insurance policy
December 1984: Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas “Razzie” Dingley killed riding in car with Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil
1987: MTV launches weekly Headbangers Ball specialty show
1987: The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years premieres
August 1987: Guns N’ Roses releases Appetite for Destruction
January 14, 1988: Fourth consecutive Dokken album certified platinum
Back in hazy Los Angeles, hair had grown dangerously high. The Hollywood clubs bounced new wave bands out on their skinny ties after Quiet Riot sold 4 million albums in 1984. Soon after, Mötley Crüe and Ratt each quickly sold their first 2 million each. In the wake of MTV’s timely discovery of heavy metal, the City of Angels sent out a national casting call for multiplatinum blonds and abusers of hair products of all kinds. By the time David Lee Roth left Van Halen for Las Vegas in 1985, the original hard rock hedonist of L.A. was barely missed— there was a surplus of contenders to take his place at the orgy.
A fabled rock and roll wonderland of triumphs and terrors, the stretch of West Hollywood known as the Sunset Strip hosted the most infamous heavy metal hangouts: in 1987 the Roxy, the Troubadour, Whisky-A-Go-Go, and the Rainbow Bar & Grill. In the mid-1960s and 1970s these clubs were spawning ground for the legendary likes of Love, the Doors, and the Runaways—all star-crossed bands whose stories ended in the gritty glory of jail, death, or rehab. In the metal era the Strip—the Great White Way of L.A.—was carpeted wall to wall with shaggy manes, its corners pasted thick with hand-printed posters advertising the misspelled names of a new generation.
To anyone with rock-star dreams, the smog of secondhand cigarette smoke and hair spray was an enchanting mist. “It was like arriving in an oasis in the desert,” says Dee Snider, who took his first trip with Twisted Sister to Los Angeles in 1983. “We’d been fighting this battle since I joined in 1976, and we pull into town at ten o’clock in the morning and Iron Maiden is playing on the radio. We heard our songs, and everywhere you looked, it was just heavy metal heaven.”
Smack in the middle of the revelry was Mötley Crüe, who claimed a centrally located party house above the Strip. Heavy metal poster kids in
America since their 1984 tour with Ozzy Osbourne, the decadent Crüe brought shades of symbolic satanic rebellion into the living room. As Armored Saint singer John Bush says of Shout at the Devil, “It’s probably not one of my favorite records, but it had a huge impact on the scene. It had an image thing that you couldn’t deny. Just the impact of opening up the cover [to see Mötley Crüe in doomsday drag, surrounded by flames]—the flamboyance of that was something you had to acknowledge, because it was that powerful.”
Several platinum albums later, the Crüe’s gaudy makeup had smeared across the city in a Max Factor nightmare of rouge, lipstick, and false beauty marks. One-upping the competition was sometimes a matter of practicing to the point of perfect musical chops—as was the case with Dokken, whose unusual guitar chords showed uncommon melodic force. More often young lookers in the crowd won attention by increasing the limits of the glamour and adding another swatch of leopard-print spandex to the singer’s microphone stand. Dirtbag rockers dyed, bleached, and teased their hair into synthetic floral displays, then spent their last pennies on platform boots, vinyl pants, ripped T-shirts, and extra-strength mascara.
One after another, bands from the Los Angeles clubs took heavy metal riffs and imagery to the MTV bank. Quiet Riot’s Metal Health sold 4 million, and its follow-up, Condition Critical, sold another million. Ratt’s first two albums, Out of the Cellar and Invasion of Your Privacy, each sold 2 million copies, and its third sold 1 million. Great White sold 1 million copies of its debut album, Once Bitten, and 2 million of the next, Twice Shy. The hook-savvy Dokken had a total of four million-selling platinum releases. As of 1987, Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil, Theatre ofPain, and Girls, Girls, Girls had all sold more than 2 million copies each, with no sign of relenting.