Metallica: Enter Night (14 page)

Even Hetfield’s later assertion that Mustaine’s drug-dealing was a factor – ‘the money he had coming in was not legal’, James told writer Mat Snow in 1991, ‘and his buddies would come in to rehearsal and things would go missing’ – sidesteps the real reasons behind his dismissal. More to the point, said Hetfield, ‘He was obnoxious. That was kind of what we were into back then, but when it turned in towards us, it was inevitable he’d be out.’ Says Brian Slagel, ‘That was James’ and Lars’ band from the beginning and, you know, Dave had a pretty full personality as well. It was unfortunate and a bummer because he’s a phenomenally talented guy and musician. But when I heard about it I couldn’t say that I was shocked.’ Looking back now, Ron Quintana characterises Mustaine as ‘hardcore hard rock, but he was hard to read. As well as I got along with Lars, Dave had a totally endearing personality and was the face of 1983 Metallica. Dave had charisma galore and I honestly thought they wouldn’t be as good without him. But he was kind of like 1977 Ozzy: alcoholic and occasionally dangerous to himself and others.’ He adds, ‘Dave drank more and faster than anyone at every party and was often dead drunk by the time the party started. He often was passed out [and] if he was awake somebody might get punched! Sober, he was the life of the scene, but he never stayed sober. I don’t think he ever got in a fight until he’d had a drink.’ Often it would be because ‘some girl gravitated towards him then her aggravated boyfriend would always show up and get bloodied’. Other times it most definitely was Dave’s fault: ‘He would almost always be a centre of attention and consequently a target. James was usually an ally in some shenanigan, but always in the background and usually overshadowed.’ Quintana refutes any suggestion that Mustaine was still dealing drugs in San Francisco: ‘Dave drank and smoked everything but didn’t know enough locals to be dealing back then.’ Ultimately, Quintana says, Mustaine ‘could be a train wreck’ but when they set off for Jonny Z’s ‘it looked like a strong foursome that would stick together’.

According to Bill Hale, another friendly face from those days then taking his first tentative steps as a photographer for the
Metal Rendezvous Int
. fanzine: ‘Lars always had a plan.’ Hale thinks Lars probably knew he was going to replace Dave Mustaine with Kirk Hammett as early as the first show Metallica and Exodus played together at the Old Waldorf in November 1982, although, ‘I don’t think Kirk knew it yet.’ He adds, ‘Dave was funny [and] he wasn’t as violent as he’s [now] claimed to be – none more than anyone else in San Francisco.’ He cites Paul Baloff of Exodus as ‘the king of excess’, compared to whom, ‘Dave wasn’t that bad.’ He also suggests that Metallica may have misfired in their decision to dump Mustaine – musically, at least: ‘With Cliff and Dave, that band was monstrous! I would have put that line-up against Black Sabbath of ’72 or Deep Purple [in the same era]. They were a monster band, and everybody knew, whatever it was, Metallica had
it
.’ It was deeply unfair, he says, that after Mustaine got kicked out ‘everybody ganged up on Dave – Dave’s an alcoholic or whatever. But we all have to remember, Dave wrote most of the first [Metallica] album plus the second album, Dave [had] the ideas.’ Compared to his successor, ‘Dave is a much more of an aggressive player, a cutting-edge player.’ That he subsequently formed his own multi-platinum-selling band, Megadeth, speaks volumes, while Hammett remains just ‘a lead guitar player in a band. So you know…’ Hale concedes, however, that career-wise, replacing the combustible Mustaine with the rock-steady Hammett was ‘why Metallica went far. All of a sudden there’s just two leaders in the band.’ Had Mustaine stayed, ‘I can only imagine how tumultuous the whole process would have been.’

If there was a positive aspect to Mustaine’s sense of betrayal, it was that it fired him up to prove the others wrong. Within months he had moved back to LA and formed his own innovative new metal band, Megadeth, in which he would not only play lead guitar but also sing. Second-in-command in the new outfit would be bassist David Ellefson, an eighteen-year-old from Minnesota who had moved out to LA with three buddies a week after graduating high school in 1983. One morning Ellefson was in his apartment chugging away on the bass intro from Van Halen’s ‘Running with the Devil’ when he heard a voice from the apartment above scream, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ followed by the crash of a flowerpot hitting his window-side air-conditioner. ‘I was like, jeez, these people in California aren’t friendly like they are in Minnesota.’ The same day one of his roommates reported seeing ‘some cool-looking guy with long blond hair’ walking around outside the building, barefoot. Deciding they needed ‘to meet some people’, one night they went upstairs to Mustaine’s apartment and knocked on his door and asked where to buy some cigarettes. ‘He slammed the door in our faces.’ So they knocked again and asked if he knew where to buy any beer and this time ‘he opens the door and lets us in’. Ellefson goes on: ‘This was early June ’83. He’s talking about this band Metallica that he was in and which I hadn’t heard of. I knew about the New Wave of British Heavy Metal but he seemed to know all about it.’ Mustaine played Ellefson the
No Life
demo. ‘I thought it was awesome. It had this very haunting heaviness to it that intrigued me, almost kind of scary. It had kind of a darkness to it.’ Mustaine gave Ellefson the full story. ‘San Francisco, New York…playing gigs at Staten Island, Jonny Z, and then the inevitable resentment about it because he wasn’t in the band any more.’ Explaining why he’d been fired, ‘The main thing was: “It [was about] attitude, not ability.” That was his kind of tagline.’

Mustaine’s new band Megadeth, he told Ellefson, would be his revenge on Metallica. ‘Sure, without a doubt. It was a vengeful, spiteful return from Dave,’ says Ellefson. Mustaine’s ousting from Metallica ‘totally explains the pressure, the angst [and] frustration’ he continues to exhibit about Metallica to this very day. ‘Maybe even to some degree the broken heart that Dave had about being fired. Because, you know, Dave is kind of a gentle spirit underneath all of the ferociousness and the anger. Underneath of that is a real genuine, actually real sweet guy at times. I think for him a lot of it was, yeah, obviously their success. But I never got the feeling Dave ever played guitar for money anyway. That never fuelled him.’ For Dave Mustaine, ‘it was more just the broken heart of losing his friendship and his buddies’. As James Hetfield later conceded, ‘It’s obvious [Mustaine] had the same drive as us – he went on to do great things in Megadeth.’ Had he been allowed to stay, ‘There would have been myself, Lars and him all trying to drive and it would have been this triangulated mess.’ For that reason, not for the drinking or drug-dealing or in-fighting, but because he represented a genuine threat to the hegemony of the band, ‘Dave had to go’.

Brian Slagel had seen Kirk Hammett play in Exodus and knew he was ‘a great player’. Equally important, ‘he seemed like a really nice guy’. When he heard about Kirk replacing Dave in Metallica, ‘I knew people in Frisco who knew Kirk and I would ask around and everybody said the same thing: the guy’s an
incredible
guitar player, he’s a super-nice guy and he’s probably the perfect fit for that band.’ From the East Bay town of El Sobrante, Kirk Lee Hammett was born 18 November 1962, to a Filipino mother (Chefela) and an Irish merchant marine father. The middle child, Kirk grew up alongside an older half-brother Richard Likong (from his mother’s first marriage), and a younger sister Jennifer. ‘I was a typical urban child,’ Kirk would tell me. ‘I grew up in the city. I went to Catholic school, a couple blocks down from my house. From the time I was six years old to the time I was about twelve I would just walk to the school alone. You can’t do that these days in San Francisco. You pretty much can’t do that anywhere these days. But, you know, I was a very poor Catholic schoolboy.’ He ‘wasn’t very good at being Catholic’ though, he says, his main memories of his schooldays now revolving around ‘reading monster magazines and horror comic books. Occasionally I’d get caught [and] the teacher would take it away.’ Although he was non-confrontational, he developed a passive-aggressive stance that would later serve him well in Metallica. When the nuns threatened to call in his parents for a serious talk about his comic-reading habits, ‘I remember looking at them straight in the eye and saying, “That’s fine because they know all about it.”’ Even as an adult, Kirk was always the guy firing up a joint and reading a comic book, or watching a horror movie. His favourite: ‘a tie between the original 1931
Frankenstein
movie and
Bride of Frankenstein
’.

When, in fifth grade, he flunked his religious education class, ‘I came to a conclusion that Catholicism was just hypocritical, hypercritical…it wasn’t congruent with my reality.’ More interested these days in Buddhist philosophy, reality for Kirk Hammett as a child was a stepbrother eleven years older plugged into a percolating music scene on his doorstep that was about to change the world: ‘[Richard] was full-on into the whole hippy thing. He was going to the Fillmore and seeing bands like Cream, Hendrix, Santana, the Grateful Dead, Zeppelin…all these monumental bands and gigs.’ There were also the conversations ‘about LSD and acid’ he overheard between Richard and his father. ‘Being a merchant marine, [my father] was exposed to all sorts of things. He was very broad-minded, very open to the whole hippy lifestyle at first.’ Kirk’s long hair was ‘another thing that the nuns really did not like. I would regularly get reminders to cut my hair because it was touching my collar.’ Punishment beatings from the nuns became a regular thing: ‘Generally rulers were the weapon of choice. I got some of it, you know.’

Brother Richard also played guitar and was ‘a pretty big influence’ on Kirk’s playing. When, in 1975, their parents decided to move out of San Francisco to the suburbs, Richard, who was now twenty-three, stayed behind in the city. Kirk, who looked up to Richard and missed having him around, bought a guitar ‘partly because I wanted to play, but partly because I wanted to be like him too, I wanted to emulate him’. Richard, though, was a strummer, the kind of part-time guitarist who liked to play along to Bob Dylan records. Kirk would have ‘different goals, a different plan altogether’. Simply ‘to become the best I could on the instrument. I wanted to be Jimi Hendrix.’ He added laughingly, ‘But, you know, without all the funny clothing.’ As a teenager, most of what Hammett learned on guitar came from playing along to records, beginning with Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’ before working his way through albums by Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Queen, Status Quo and similar acts. By the time he’d worked out the thirty-minute-plus version of ‘Dazed and Confused’ from the live Led Zeppelin album,
The Song Remains the Same
, which he calls ‘a riff dictionary’, he was already playing in his own high school outfits. By then he’d also become obsessed by UFO’s Michael Schenker, who eschewed traditional blues-based guitar solos for playing modes – ‘scales that sound almost classical’. Rhythmically, Schenker was ‘out the door’, said Kirk. ‘To this day, UFO are my favourite band in the whole world.’

Gary Holt, who understudied to Kirk in Exodus, before taking over as main guitarist after he split for Metallica, recalls ‘this skinny kid with Coke-bottle-bottom glasses’. It was meeting Kirk at sixteen and seeing him play that sparked Holt’s own interest in learning guitar. ‘He taught me some Rolling Stones song. I don’t remember what it was. But I picked up guitar really fast.’ The first time either of them met Metallica was when they opened for them at the Old Waldorf. ‘We were just two separate bands of complete fuck-ups. We got really drunk and we dug each other’s music and we wrecked shit and broke everything and had zero respect for anything or anybody, and I think a lot of that’s that punk rock attitude that we both shared.’ When Lars, James and Dave moved into Mark Whitaker’s El Cerrito abode, various members of Exodus would also stay over. ‘We felt like it was our house, too. We had some
insane
parties at that place. We only played with Metallica five or six times but when they moved to the Bay Area we hung out constantly. We’d just get really drunk and get really ripped. I remember one night at the Metallica house not having any mixer and drinking vodka and maple syrup. Fucking awful! But it worked, you know?’ They had also begun to experiment with drugs. Recalls Holt, ‘Hell, before Kirk left for Metallica, him and I spent a whole summer just taking acid two or three times a week.’ He adds, ‘Methamphetamine was [also] a drug of choice in Exodus, which decades later spiralled out of control. But James just drank, Lars I remember getting gacked out, doing blow [cocaine] with him more than once, and Cliff just liked to get high [on pot].’ In Exodus, ‘if it wasn’t nailed down we’d snort or swallow it. We were
all
motorheads, you know?’

Despite the stoner mien, Kirk was serious about his music. In common with James Hetfield, it was more than just a creative outlet for the teenager; it was a shield against a home life that had now turned sour as his parents’ relationship began to splinter, resulting in his father walking out when he was seventeen. ‘I was abused as a child,’ he revealed in a 2001
Playboy
interview. ‘My dad drank a lot. He beat the shit out of me and my mom quite a bit. I got a-hold of a guitar, and from the time I was fifteen, I rarely left my room. I remember having to pull my dad off my mom when he attacked her one time, during my sixteenth birthday – he turned on me and started slapping me around. Then my dad just left one day. My mom was struggling to support me and my sister. I’ve definitely channelled a lot of anger into the music.’ He added that he had also been abused by a neighbour ‘when I was like nine or ten’, adding: ‘The guy was a sick fuck. He had sex with my dog, Tippy. I can laugh about it now…’ Heavy metal, he added dolefully, had the power to bring outsiders in from the cold. ‘Heavy metal seems to attract all sorts of scruffy, lost animals, strays no one wants.’

Having graduated from the inexpensive Montgomery Ward catalogue special that he’d started out on, with a four-inch speaker for an amp, to a 1978 Fender Stratocaster by the time he was gigging with Gary and Exodus, he was now wielding a customised 1974 Gibson Flying V, which he took a part-time job at Burger King to save money to buy a Marshall amp for. Having graduated in 1980 from De Anaza High School, he was also now studying English and psychiatry at college when he got the call inviting him to audition for Metallica. Like Lars, he was taken aback by the NWOBHM. Like Cliff, he’d also studied classical music, performing Haydn and Bach in a high school trio. He was also taking regular guitar lessons from someone now regarded as one of the world’s greatest living players, Joe Satriani, with whom Hammett would learn the formalities of music theory, modes, arpeggios and harmonies.