Metallica: Enter Night (16 page)

Meantime, Jonny had moved the band out of his house. ‘It was too intense.’ It all came to a head when the band raided their drinks cabinet one night and uncorked some bottles of champagne the Zazulas had been given as wedding presents. Jonny and Marsha talked to Anthrax, another unsigned local metal band that had a rehearsal space at a place called the Music Building in Queens where many bands also slept in their rehearsal rooms. Recalls Jonny, ‘I said, you know what, they need to rehearse, let’s get all their gear and get them down there too. ’Cos I had to get ’em out of the house.’ There were no spare rooms going, though, so Jonny fast-talked the building manager into allowing Metallica to share Anthrax’s room to rehearse, while using the loft to sleep in. ‘Imagine a gutted building,’ says Jonny, ‘old chairs and dirt and crap thrown around in this one big giant space. They cleared a little space in the rubble for them to lay down and sleep. It was
really
horrible. Marsha and I had no idea. We were hearing complaints, complaints, complaints…But to me I wasn’t really listening because I had enough to complain about myself. My place was ripped to shreds. It was like sixty people every fuckin’ night walking in and out of my place. It was crazy.’ For several weeks, the band lived on ‘white bread and baloney’. Kirk Hammett recalled how he ‘found a piece of foam on the ground, and I used that as my mattress to put my sleeping bag on’. There was no hot water, so the band was forced to bathe in cold: ‘It was brutal.’ Some mornings, badly hungover, having only crashed out a few hours before, they would be woken early by the piercing sounds of an opera singer going through her rehearsal routine. Anthrax leader Scott Ian recalls, ‘They had no money, they had nowhere to go, so we pretty much went out of our way to help them out in any way we could. We brought them to our houses to shower, and we gave them a refrigerator and a toaster oven so they could cook the hot dogs that they were eating cold. We just hung out as much as possible.’

Eventually another pal of Jonny’s named Metal Joe agreed to let the band sleep at his place, nicknamed the Fun House. Along with his best friend Rockin’ Ray, Metal Joe was one of the best customers at Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven. Ray ‘would spend his entire paycheque on metal albums. He would take home eleven or twelve albums at a time. Then that night everybody would go to his house – I’d say about forty people – and get stoned and crazy and put it on full blast. Metal Joe left a PA’s worth of speakers in Ray’s house. So we would blow everybody’s mind and they really got sucked into the metal.’ Another supporter from the same circle was Mark Mari, who would show up at the shows wearing a World War I army helmet with the word ‘metal’ written on it. ‘There were different gangs of metal mongers through the north-east. I would give each posse fifty tickets and say, hey, sell the tickets for the shows. These were guys your parents would run from! Scary, scary people.’ But they never let Jonny down or cheated him. They would come to his house and hand over the cash when all the tickets had been sold. As a reward, ‘I would give them first row. So they would be there in pride and everybody else would be behind them, you know? We’d do shows [where] we knew everybody’s name in the venue. We didn’t need security. That’s the world that I lived in from day one, and Ray and Joe were a real big part of it, in terms of keeping the band’s minds occupied and partying and hanging out and going crazy.’

By now Jonny Z had effectively taken over the day-to-day management of Metallica from Mark Whitaker. ‘I’d never managed before,’ he says, ‘but the adrenalin was so intense.’ Within weeks he had gone as far as announcing the formation of his own company, CraZed Management, in which Marsha was his fifty/fifty partner. In time they would also take on management responsibilities for Anthrax and Raven. Initially, though, ‘It was all about Metallica. Everything. Every day.’ Jonny adds, ‘It was like someone threw us a football and we just ran all the way down the field. And everyone was coming to get us, believe me. But we scored touchdowns.’

As acting manager, Jonny’s main priority now was to get a Metallica album recorded. He had his sights set higher, though, than merely getting a piece of plastic out on something like Brian Slagel’s fledgling Metal Blade imprint. But despite packing the crowds in at their gigs regularly, there were no major record labels in America in 1983 interested in a band like Metallica. The biggest-selling album that year was Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
. Six months after its release in November ’82, it was still selling more than a million copies a month in the USA and was only halfway through a run at Number One that would last for thirty-seven consecutive weeks. On 16 May 1983, the same week Metallica began recording their first album, NBC TV broadcast
Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever
, the show on which Jackson famously unveiled his ‘moonwalk’ during a captivating performance before his peers of his hit single, ‘Billie Jean’. The next day the whole country seemed to be talking about it. Fred Astaire telephoned the twenty-five-year-old singer personally to congratulate him.
Thriller
was now well on its way to becoming the biggest-selling album of all time – an achievement that helped transform the fortunes of the US record biz, then suffering from its second slump in three years. Before
Thriller
, US industry bible
Billboard
had reported that record shipments had declined by over fifty million units between 1980 and 1982. Before
Thriller
, US record companies had been drastically reducing staff and slashing budgets. Now, in its wake, came the era of the ultra-commercial blockbuster album. When, in 1984, Columbia – which had released
Thriller
and was one of the labels that laughed Jonny Z out of the door when he tried to bring them Metallica – released the next Bruce Springsteen album,
Born in the U.S.A
., they did so with seven singles already prepped for release from it, all of which would arrow straight into the US Top Ten. Meanwhile, their main rivals at Warner Bros readied themselves to launch five singles from Prince’s next album,
Purple Rain
, while Mercury, who had seen Def Leppard’s third album,
Pyromania
, beaten to the top spot in 1983 by
Thriller
, made sure they beat the odds with their next album,
Hysteria
, by hitting US radio with no less than seven singles from it – all of them major chart successes. As a result, all these albums sold more than ten million copies each in the USA alone, becoming the most successful of each respective artist’s careers.

The impact of the NWOBHM on the US mainstream had been minimal, barely registering at all outside the same pockets of hardcore underground interest that Metallica itself had sprung from. Of the handful of NWOBHM bands that actually made it across to America by 1983, only Def Leppard had enjoyed significant success, and then because Leppard were colourful and exciting – their impossibly youthful image cut from the same pop-rock cloth as contemporaries such as Duran Duran, their music sculpted in the studio by ‘Mutt’ Lange, the same production genius who had gifted huge chart success to AC/DC, The Cars and the Boomtown Rats; video-friendly, singles-oriented, pop-in-rock-clothing. Even Iron Maiden, the only other NWOBHM band now beginning to see success in America, had done so only after replacing their original short-haired, punk-style singer Paul Di’Anno with the more generic-sounding, trad-rock vocalist Bruce Dickinson. Maiden didn’t rely on mainstream pop success like Leppard, but they still had to tailor their sheet-metal riffs for a broader audience than the one they’d launched their career with in the UK. Indeed, the only other notable successes from the UK in the same period were Judas Priest, like Maiden from a previous generation, and, in 1987, Whitesnake, who followed Leppard’s MTV first template almost to the letter.

The only home-grown rock music that still held purchase with both US radio and the Top Ten album charts came from increasingly middle-of-the-road ‘melodic rock’ acts such as Journey and REO Speedwagon. Huey Lewis and the News, another San Francisco band in the ‘soft rock’ mould that hit Number One in 1983 with their
Sports
album, only did so, Lewis later revealed, after ‘a huge fight’ with the chiefs of their record company Chrysalis, who actually tried to get Lewis to either change his singing style or hand over vocal duties in the band to an entirely different singer. ‘They actually told me: “That kind of deep voice doesn’t get played on [US] radio any more,”’ he told me in 1984. Fortunately for the future of the News, Lewis, a tough New Yorker who had spent years ‘schlepping around the circuit’, was bloody-minded enough to ignore such ‘advice’. Fortunately for Metallica, Jonny Z was cut from similar, hard-as-nails New York City cloth and also ignored what the major label chiefs were now advising him to do with Metallica: forget about it.

‘We’d been to everybody,’ says Jonny. ‘Some of the biggest names in A&R in the United States turned down Metallica. I’m talking Columbia, I’m talking Arista, I’m talking most labels. The only place where there was any kind of communication and understanding of metal was this one fellow at Elektra named Michael Alago. We would go to Michael Alago and constantly talk to him about Metallica
and
Raven.’ A young rock fan from Brooklyn who had only just landed a job as talent scout, Alago would eventually be sufficiently persuaded by what Jonny Z had to tell him about Metallica to make a move. But not before the band had felt so left out in the cold that the only way they could see a way forward was to throw all caution to the wind and record the album on their own, without any record company support – in the bold hope of using it as bait to try and attract a major deal afterwards. ‘It wasn’t just balls,’ says Jonny. ‘You had to be absolutely mad to take a chance on something like that. It was like we were on a mission. And the mission was to take this band and make it a worldwide name – not knowing how the fuck to do it.’

I was homeless, sleeping rough on people’s floors and couches, carrying my whole life around in plastic carrier bags, me and the portable children’s typewriter. Xavier was one of the good guys, had a place in Notting Hill. The only caveat was you had to drink lots of whisky and Bourbon – Maker’s Mark, Crown Royal, Old Grandad, never Jack Daniel’s, ‘Too touristy,’ he said – and listen to Molly Hatchet. That is, play along to Molly Hatchet, on squash rackets, which we’d hammer away at like guitars, shaking our hair, performing for the grateful millions, usually at about two in the morning. Jesus, he must have had understanding neighbours, ’cos it was louder than hell in there whenever I visited and we got up to do a gig together. He’d light some candles, refill our glasses, whack on
No Guts…No Glory,
pass me a squash racket and off we would fucking well go…

This one night, though, he deviated from the norm. ‘’Ere, listen to this,’ he grinned, pulling out the plastic from an album cover I didn’t recognise. Of course, I didn’t recognise most of the album covers in his collection but you could tell this was something different, obviously new, because he couldn’t wait to play it. He didn’t even get the rackets out. He actually wanted me to listen to it. Tired from a week spent on the floor of some draughty old squat in King’s Cross, grateful not to have to sing for my supper, I flopped down on the couch and waited for it to begin. I didn’t have to wait long.

It sort of faded in on a cacophony of exploding guitars and drums, more like the climactic end of an album than the beginning. Then the band found its starting place and the thing kicked off and I burst out laughing. It was the fastest, funniest thing I’d heard since the first Damned album, and the first Damned album had been the fastest, funniest thing I’d ever heard in my life. It was FANTASTIC! Not because it was deep or momentous, but because it was – well – just so damn fast and fun. I assumed it must be some sort of punk band but when I asked for the album cover to look at, it was obvious straight away they weren’t punks at all. In fact, they looked like a bunch of Iron Maiden or Motörhead fans, out for a night at the youth club disco, revved up on Anadin and cider. Then I noticed the name – Metallica – and I laughed some more. Only X could have found a metal band named Metallica!

The next track began. ‘This is the one!’ he yelled in my ear. Sure enough, out came the squash rackets and up we got. Suddenly the whole thing was even more fantastic. The guitars! My god, they sounded like machines! Cars skidding and crashing, then veering away at the last possible moment in a gigantic cloud of burning rubber. It went on and on. How long was it? Fucking long, that’s how long! Then suddenly this back-arching guitar solo. Wow, so they really were metal. Then back to the riff and I didn’t know what it was we were listening to. It was so fucking loud and full-on and utterly unapologetic, I thought I was tripping.

When finally he left me to the couch, the bottle of Old Granddad empty, my head was still buzzing with it. ‘They’re gonna be huge,’ he’d told me, over and over. I didn’t believe it for a second; they might be amazing, a sort of teenage Godzilla, but that didn’t mean anyone besides lunatics like me and Xavier would ever buy them. Still, it had been mental while it lasted. When I awoke the next day I was really very ill…

Freed at last from the hellish Halfway House but still on his best behaviour, Jonny Z worked his indefatigable magic on behalf of Metallica once more and somehow found them a studio to record their first album in. Acting on a tip-off from Joey DeMaio, whose band Manowar had also just recorded there, Jonny fast-talked Paul Curcio, owner of Music America Studios, near Rochester in Upstate New York, into accepting an instalment plan with which to make payments. ‘This was mortgage money I’m spending,’ Jonny says now, ‘not something I’ve got put by I’m gonna invest.’ The band would have to work quickly, ‘Quick enough for an eight-thousand-dollar album.’ In fact, the album would end up costing nearer $15,000, pushing the Zazulas to the brink of bankruptcy.

Part of the deal was that Curcio would produce the sessions, with Jonny acting as executive producer. Meaning: ‘I was in the studio for most of the time. If I didn’t like it, it was changed.’ Later the band would complain they’d been locked out of the control room. But Jonny wasn’t fooling around. ‘They may think I was a control freak; I have no idea what the band’s take on me was because I was definitely a strange man. Just some fuckin’ oddball. I had to be!’ Recorded in under three weeks, most of the band’s later disaffection was directed towards the production, such as it was. Hetfield recalled: ‘Our so-called producer was sitting there checking the songs off a notepad and saying, “Well, we can go to a club tonight when we’re through recording. Is the coffee ready?” So right away we had a bad reflection of what a producer was.’ James would complain to Jonny: ‘I didn’t put in my heaviness yet.’ Jonny cites the track, ‘The Four Horsemen’ – the band’s refurbished version of Mustaine’s ‘The Mechanix’ – as a prime example. Or rather, he sings it, his voice alternating from weedy-sounding tic-tac chords to the more full-on punch of the power chords Hetfield was eventually able to get onto the recording. Jonny says that Curcio, who’d worked back in the early 1970s with the Doobie Brothers and Santana, ‘flipped out ’cos he thought Kirk Hammett was this son of Santana. So he made the entire [album] like a band doing rhythm tracks under Kirk Hammett’s brilliant guitar playing.’ Jonny had to sit the producer down and explain. ‘Then James went in and heavied-up the tracks and Paul [Curcio] was never happy with me again after that.’ As far as Jonny was concerned, ‘The first thing we had to beat was the vibe on
No Life ’til Leather
. That really displayed the power and force of the band. This album couldn’t come out sounding like tin. It had to sound like thunder.’

Jonny would get his wish. Although he and the band would have to wait until their next album to fully capture the thunderstorm of a full-on live performance, the first Metallica album – which they had decided would be called
Metal up Your Ass
, a title Lars had been saving since his days cruising around with Brian, Bob, Patrick and the guys looking for rare NWOBHM imports – would sound like nothing else out there when it finally appeared in the summer of 1983. All ten tracks came from their existing live set and, as such, represented a musical manifesto of sorts; self-referential, self-eulogising, utterly self-absorbed. From the opener – an up-to-date version of ‘Hit the Lights’, its gargantuan intro now faded in and Hetfield’s vocals overdosed with echo – to the rat-tat-tat of its flag-waving finale ‘Metal Militia’, replete with end-zone effects of marching soldiers, this was the sound of a young band announcing itself from the rooftops, remaking the world in its own image, and doing it with all the zit-faced arrogance and faltering, still-learning-to-shave steps only a very young and brash new band can. Production-wise, all the numbers previously gathered on cassettes such as
No Life ’til Leather
and the various live tapes appear in obviously superior versions, while the addition of Burton and Hammett clearly signals a more sophisticated melodic dimension, actually slowing one or two numbers down a fraction, adding even more weight to the hammer-swinging rhythms.

Early on, Jonny Z had identified ‘The Mechanix’ as the stand-out
No Life
track. Sure enough, it’s also the most impressive overall moment on the album, albeit re-presented in altered, much-improved form as a track now called ‘The Four Horsemen’. Ron McGovney had always considered Mustaine’s original lyrics ‘ridiculous’. The others had been less outspoken – until Mustaine was finally out of the picture, at which point Hetfield completely rewrote them. Gone were Dave’s cringe-inducing double-entendres – ‘Made my drive shaft crank…made my pistons bulge…made my ball bearings melt from the heat…’ – and in came some typically doom-laden Hetfield musings, mixing the metal-by-numbers imagery of lines such as ‘dying since the day you were born’ with yet more self-referential stuff about ‘horsemen…drawing nearer, on the leather steeds they ride…’ Musically, while its chugging main riff still owed a lot to Kiss’s ‘Detroit Rock City’, it was also the lengthiest, most complex piece on the album, full of surprising one-off motifs and thus the compositional progenitor of the increasingly complex, determinedly progressive material that Metallica would become famous for throughout the 1980s. Pitched at a considerably slower pace than Mustaine had always driven it along at, it also allowed the band to show themselves off in their best light, Burton’s swooning bass underpinning the juddering riffs with a classically framed, ascending progression that eventually gives way to a much more understated guitar solo from Hammett than the frenzied strafing Mustaine had always favoured. It’s a hugely ambitious number from a band still finding its feet in the studio, as if they had bolted together, Frankenstein-like, the still living parts of several other, now dead songs; one showing off their speed metal credentials, another showcasing Burton and Hammett’s abilities to introduce a much more textured approach. Similarly, the tracks ‘Phantom Lord’ (another of the four tracks Mustaine is given a songwriter co-credit for) and ‘No Remorse’ (one of the four credited just to Hetfield and Ulrich, with riff partially lifted from ‘Hocus Pocus’ by Focus) both demonstrated that there was even more to Metallica than Jonny Z’s ‘thunder’. There was crooked lightning to be had too, highs and lows, moon and stars – a whole new musical horizon coming quite suddenly into view.

The other major highlight, though, was one of the album’s shortest tracks, ‘Whiplash’. Inspired by the wild antics of one Ray Burch, a major Metallica fan from San Francisco, who had already distinguished himself at several of their Bay Area shows by almost knocking himself out (hence also the oblique Burch-inspired dedication on the back of the album sleeve: ‘bang that head that doesn’t bang’), as its title suggests, ‘Whiplash’ cracked along at a furious pace, sounding like a cross between prime-time ‘Ace of Spades’-era Motörhead and something even faster from the first, dementedly speedy Damned album. Every track on
Metal up Your Ass
teemed with energy but ‘Whiplash’ really does sound like the start of something new; as snotty as the rawest British punk and as rhythmically fleet-footed as early, shotgun-tempo Van Halen. There are other blisteringly paced moments on the album, such as ‘Motorbreath’ – a simple, four-chord verse and stop-start chorus, credited solely to Hetfield, that would be a guaranteed crowd pleaser for years to come – but if one wishes to identify the very moment thrash metal arrived spitting and snarling into the world, ‘Whiplash’ is indisputably it. This not least because of its prophetic chorus: ‘Adrenalin stars to flow / Thrashing all around / Acting like a maniac / Whiplash…’

The album’s only weak track was, almost inevitably, its most obviously commercial: a nauseous bit of old-fashioned heavy metal nonsense – co-credited to Hetfield, Ulrich and Mustaine but actually based on one of the first songs Mustaine had ever written as a teenager – called ‘Jump in the Fire’. Replete with shout-out chorus and a tediously telegraphed attempt at a catchy riff, ‘Jump in the Fire’ was so wince-inducingly rote it could have come from any of the chart-fixated LA glam-metal bands Metallica professed to loathe so much. To give them credit, they later recognised it as such – Lars jokingly suggesting it was, in fact, based on Metallica’s half-witted attempt to emulate Iron Maiden’s 1982 UK hit ‘Run to the Hills’ – but not before it was released as their own first UK single, though not, tellingly, their first hit. Equally straightforward but far more successful was ‘Seek and Destroy’, another song which would became a cornerstone of the live Metallica show for years to come, its audience sing-along on the simple, one-line chorus of ‘Searching…seek and destroy!’ providing the crowd with the opportunity to roar along, encouraged by James.

The only other places where the album would remain less than convincing came somewhat embarrassingly from the band’s principal members. Burton and Hammett shine throughout – the latter, despite being asked to reproduce guitar riffs, breaks and solos entirely conceived by someone else, a fact Mustaine would crow about for many years; the former in more subtle ways, and most directly in the shape of his own instrumental track, ‘(Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth’, an attention-grabbing, avant-rock fusion of classical triads, wah-wah pedal washes and pure distortion tethered to the ground by some fairly pedestrian drumming from Lars, and based on Cliff’s live show solo, introduced perfunctorily by studio engineer Chris Bubacz. Hetfield’s lead vocals, however, are still woefully undeveloped, caught somewhere between the screeching, chest-beating of a Judas Priest or Iron Maiden and the richer, more intimidating vocal burr he would grow into over subsequent releases. Lars’ drums – recorded in a large ballroom on the building’s second floor – are scattered comically over everything, endlessly rolling crescendos that sound like what they are: the work of an overenthusiastic amateur who doesn’t know when to stop.

‘The first album,’ Hetfield would later tell
Rolling Stone
, was simply ‘what we knew – bang your head, seek and destroy, get drunk, smash shit up.’ For all its instant underground cred, while many of the earlier demos of the songs had sounded like Motörhead meets Diamond Head, the finished album seemed aimed more towards the classic finesse of an early Iron Maiden or Black Sabbath. At this stage of their story, though, the first Metallica album was never going to just be about music. Its real achievement was to simultaneously define a new sensibility – the previously thought incompatible yet strangely thrilling, now it was here, melding of punk and heavy metal into something surprisingly far-reaching called thrash – and to reclaim credibility for a genre of music, heavy rock, which had become the provenance of those cultural illiterates left behind by the ground-zero arrival of punk.

First, though, Jonny and Marsha Z had to find a way to get the album released. No longer hopeful of landing a record deal once the album was recorded, with the band still sleeping on the floor at Metal Joe’s and the finished recordings in a box of tapes in the corner of their living room, Jonny and Marsha took their boldest decision yet: to effectively put out the record themselves. Says Jonny, ‘I figured, if we can buy [records] from a distributor, as we did as a record store, we could certainly sell them a record to sell to all the other record stores. We didn’t know that nobody from the distributors wanted to talk to you. The whole thing was we just did it.’ He laughs then adds, ‘Maybe I could have gone to someone like Metal Blade or Shrapnel on the West Coast, but this stuff was so new-sounding I didn’t know if anyone else would get it, you know? I was like the guy who didn’t know if he had a great idea or a stupid one, and I knew there was only one way to find out.’