Metallica: Enter Night (17 page)

Jonny and Marsha had decided to call the label Vigilante, then changed their minds after Cliff Burton came up with a better suggestion: Megaforce, the title of a low-rent sci-fi action adventure flick released in the USA the previous summer. Tagline: ‘When the force was with them, NO ONE stood a chance!’ As a mission statement, it was certainly apt. In reality, it meant taking out a second mortgage on the Zazula family home. ‘Some of those days were the worst days of my life,’ Jonny later recalled. ‘My neck was in a noose.’ But with Anthrax, Raven and now even Manowar, who’d been dropped by the EMI-backed Liberty label, all knocking on their door, promising to sign to their new notional label, Jonny and Marsha pressed on. They were encouraged by Lars, who suggested taking a leaf from Motörhead’s book: Motörhead’s records were ostensibly released on a small UK independent label – Bronze Records – but distributed through the auspices of Polydor Records, part of the Polygram conglomerate.

Formed in London in 1971, Bronze was started by Gerry Bron, then best known for his production work on albums for heavy rock groups of the era such as Uriah Heep, Juicy Lucy and Colosseum. When Heep’s deal with Vertigo ended, Bron persuaded them to let him set up their own independent, with all manufacturing and distribution of their records going through Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, then the UK’s most successful independent. Later releases went through EMI and by the mid-1980s they were putting their roster – which now featured NWOBHM stalwarts (Motörhead, Girlschool), punk (The Damned) and early 1970s rock goliaths (Hawkwind, Heep) – through Polydor. Jonny took Lars’ suggestion seriously enough to invite Gerry Bron over to the USA, with the idea of having Bronze put out the Metallica album in the UK and Europe, while Jonny formed his own label to work with US distributors. It might have happened, too. Says Jonny, ‘[They were] offering money for me to get the fuck out of the way…After that went down, Marsha and I spoke to Lars and said, why can’t we just do it?’

In the USA, Megaforce found an ally in Relativity, who agreed to distribute the Metallica album, while over in the UK the newly founded independent label Music for Nations was similarly contracted to put out the album. From that point on, says Jonny, he and Marsha ‘did everything; recording, producer, plus the artwork, also designed by us’. Still intending to call the album
Metal up Your Ass
, the band had originally come up with their own idea for the album sleeve: an arm coming up through a toilet bowl, brandishing a machete. Jonny, who was up for it until the appalled sales force at Relativity intervened, then had the job of trying to explain that while he was fine with it, the distributors had told him they would consider it ‘commercial suicide’ to put out an album called
Metal up Your Ass
, let alone one with such an obviously offensive front cover. Recalls Jonny: ‘It was very stringent then. It was before [parent advisory] labelling but they still had this moral issue. Wal-Mart or any of what they call rack-jobbers, they wouldn’t touch the record.’ Outraged, nevertheless, at the thought of having to compromise, to keep the record stores happy, Cliff bellowed at Jonny: ‘Kill ’em all! Kill ’em all!’ Jonny laughs as he recounts the incident. ‘Cliff got real mad, but Lars goes, “Kill ’em all…That’s a good name.” I go, “That’s a great name!” The next thing you know the album was called
Kill ’Em All
.’ The eventual sleeve, based on another idea from Jonny, which he says the band ‘were very pleased with’, was as simple and brutal as the new album title: a sledgehammer resting in a pool of blood with the shadow of a hand reaching out. A hardly less subtle image than the original sword from the toilet bowl, perhaps, this cover design – which still surfaces on T-shirts today – was one that US retailers nevertheless felt more comfortable with. The rear sleeve picture was a simple landscape portrait of the band, all doing their best to look suitably solemn, all looking impossibly young, despite Lars’ attempt at facial hair.

Officially released in America on 25 July 1983,
Kill ’Em All
was not a hit but nor was it expected to be. The fact that it got as high as Number 120 in the
Billboard
Top 200 album chart was considered cause for celebration by everyone at Megaforce. Had anyone dared suggest to Jonny Z back then that the album would eventually sell over three million copies in the USA, ‘I’d have thought you were even crazier than me.’ What Megaforce lacked in clout was more than made up for in the freedom it allowed Metallica to forge their own identity – musically and image-wise. As Lars would later tell me, ‘Early on we had a very distant attitude to the business side of things. We firmly stood our own ground on things like what we played, how we looked, how we presented ourselves. Or how we didn’t present ourselves…Just doing what we were doing. The thing is there weren’t really any decent independent labels going in America when we were starting out. You really had to be the right package to get a record deal in 1983. But we said, “Fuck that!” and just plodded away, doing our own stuff and feeling great about it. Then suddenly there is an independent label and we do have a record out and a lot of people start buying it because there was never quite anything like this [musically] in America before.’ The fact they were initially shunned by the major labels worked in their favour. In 1983, he said, ‘the [major] record company philosophy in America has always been, well, give the public a choice of A, B or C but the menu stops there, and we’ll decide that a band like Metallica will not be on the menu because they are not saleable. So all the people got to listen to hard rock through Styx or REO Speedway or whatever. And then this band Metallica came out and they thought, “Wow, where has all this shit come from? How come we haven’t heard this before?” Because the record companies never believed that anything like that could actually sell. So we start selling a shit-load of records and at the same time James’ lyrics are different from all the clichéd crap that all the older metal bands spew out, and people started to take notice of that.’

Initial press reception, however, was hugely mixed. With the exception of
Kerrang!
, the mainstream music press in both America and Britain largely ignored the album. The metal fanzines that had supported the band from day one, though, went ballistic. Reviewing it in
Kerrang!
, Malcolm Dome wrote: ‘
Kill ’Em All
sets a new standard…Metallica know only two speeds: fast and total blur.’ The UK’s leading metal fanzine,
Metal Forces
, meanwhile, voted it the album of the year, and Metallica band of the year. In America, Bob Nalbandian, first off the block as ever, summed up his review of the album in
The Headbanger
with the words: ‘Metallica might just be America’s answer to Motörhead’ – the highest accolade Lars Ulrich or James Hetfield could have wished for in 1983.

There was only one major dissenting voice and that belonged, with a certain sad inevitability, to Dave Mustaine. Interviewed within a few months of the album’s release by Bob Nalbandian, ostensibly about his new band Megadeth, Mustaine couldn’t resist using the opportunity to sound off about what he saw as the dreadful shortcomings of
Kill ’Em All
. ‘I’m just wondering what Metallica are gonna do when they run out of my riffs,’ he sneered, adding, ‘I already smashed James in the mouth one time, and Lars is scared of his own shadow.’ As for his replacement, ‘Kirk is a “yes” man…“Yes, Lars, I’ll do Dave’s leads.” “Yes, James, I’ll play this.”’ Adding insult to injury, he claimed that ‘I wrote the most songs on that whole fuckin’ album! I wrote four of them, James wrote three, and Hugh Tanner wrote two!’ He insisted that ‘James played all the rhythm on that album and Cliff wrote all Kirk’s leads, so it shows you they’re having a lot of trouble with this “new guitar god”.’

It was the start of a mostly one-sided verbal war between Mustaine and Metallica that would persist, in various forms, to the present day. From his endless jibes in the press about how ‘Kirk Hammett ripped off every lead break I’d played on that
No Life ’Til Leather
tape’, to his snide comments to Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro in 2008: ‘I don’t really like him because he got my job, but I nailed his girlfriend before I left – how do I taste, Kirk?’ If there was any envy between Mustaine and Hammett, though, it wasn’t the new Metallica guitarist who was feeling it. As Mustaine’s collaborator and closest confidant, David Ellefson, points out, any ‘copying’ by Kirk Hammett of Mustaine’s original guitar lines on
Kill ’Em All
would have been deliberate: ‘To some degree Kirk put his own stamp on [
Kill ’Em All
] but that kind of music isn’t just random solo over three-chord blues riff. The solo is a part of the composition, every bit as crucial to the song as the lyric and the choruses. That’s what we
like
about the music. It’s the difference between when I went to see Van Halen and they were like a sloppy party band, and when I went to see Iron Maiden and they played every single solo note for note. As a fan, I hung on every note…I wanted to hear it
exactly
the friggin’ way it is on the record.’ Kirk sticking to the
No Life
template was exactly what was required. ‘I always saw it like they tried to honour all of the good that Dave did bring to the band. They used his songs, they gave him credit. They paid him for it. When we would drive down the street in LA and some guy would yell out, “Metallica!” to me, that wasn’t “Fuck you!” to Dave. That was, “Dude, you were in fucking Metallica!”’

Despite being largely ignored by the mainstream music press, by the end of 1983 the first Metallica album was already starting to be recognised as a watershed moment in the history of rock. It showed that, far from being dead – as the post-punk British music press had been trumpeting since the day Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten claimed to have fallen asleep while watching Led Zeppelin, calling them ‘dinosaurs’ – punk and metal had a lot more in common than previously acknowledged. You could hear the musical antecedents of the juncture where Metallica come into the conversation in the ironclad riffs and spat-out vocals of the first Stooges and Pistols albums, and there again in the warp-speed rhythms and clattering drums of the earliest Motörhead and Ted Nugent recordings. Not that Metallica seemed particularly conscious of the radical moves they would soon be congratulated for making: ‘We thought that whatever we did, there’d be people who would approach [the album] with a lot of hesitation, because it was so different back then,’ said Kirk Hammett. If to the uninitiated the tracks seemed to fly by in a blur, that was just the way it was, insisted James Hetfield: ‘We’d just keep practising and the songs would get faster and faster, and the energy kept building up.’ Playing the songs live was ‘always faster’ because of all the ‘booze and freaks dinking around, just the excitement’.

There was, however, far more to the new sound that Metallica, knowingly or not, were now pioneering than merely playing faster to keep the freaks that came to their shows happy. Apart from its sheer speed, the defining sound of thrash was to be found in the frenzied downstrokes of James Hetfield’s rhythm guitar playing. Until then, with few exceptions – the best-known being Johnny Ramone, whose single-minded reliance on downstrokes gave the Ramones their unique, ‘untutored’ sound – rock guitarists tended to allow their chords to ring out and resonate. Hetfield, in his determination to make his playing not just harder, faster, but to resonate in a less flamboyant way, developed what writer and guitarist Joel McIver characterises as ‘a staccato, palm-muted sound’. It was James Hetfield, he says, who really promoted this style, one that is now regarded as derigueur in metal circles. It was what McIver calls Hetfield’s ‘super-tight downstrokes…cupping his hand around the bridge for a perfectly taut sound’ that became the key element in the quintessential Metallica sound, ergo that of thrash metal. As McIver puts it, Hetfield pioneered a technique that made metal sound ‘not brash or rude or sexy, but like the future. The apocalypse had arrived, and it came in the shape of the right hand of a spotty teenager from the wrong side of the LA tracks.’

Almost immediately a whole new generation of rock and metal bands strove to emulate both the re-energised Metallica sound and the downtrodden look of its band members, beginning in general with the increased speed and intensity of the new music they were already calling thrash, and specifically with the dry-as-sand downstrokes that Hetfield had unwittingly turned into its signature sound. Dave Mustaine, initially more famous for his frenzied solos – and his barbed anti-Metallica comments – was shrewd enough to include Hetfield’s rhythmic gimmicks in his own band Megadeth, as did Kerry King of Slayer and Scott Ian of Anthrax. These three bands, along with Metallica, would soon become known as the Big Four of thrash, and the arrival of
Kill ’Em All
provided the launch pad for them all, especially once the specialist metal press – led by
Kerrang!
, but quickly followed by the same fanzines that had already been supporting Metallica – got hold of the idea. As with the NWOBHM, suddenly thrash was depicted as a thriving scene unto itself, which had seemingly sprung from nowhere overnight. Or, as Lars Ulrich laughingly puts it now, ‘From the mind of Xavier Russell!’

The son of film-maker Ken Russell, Xavier was a public-school-educated English teenager who had fallen in love with heavy rock in general and Lynyrd Skynyrd in particular just as the rest of his friends were falling for The Clash and The Jam. Working as a film editor in his own right, he had began writing for
Sounds
in the late 1970s as a hobby, always in longhand, mainly reviewing heavy metal imports from Europe and America. Encouraged by the magazine’s deputy editor and eventual NWOBHM inventor and original
Kerrang!
editor Geoff Barton, by the early 1980s Russell would become the first writer to give the name Metallica serious media exposure in the infamously hard-to-impress mainstream British music press. ‘Xavier was the person in the
Kerrang!
office really promoting Metallica’s cause,’ says Barton now. ‘He would be banging on about them incessantly, to the point where you’d think, oh god, just to shut him up let’s give them a two-page feature. So it was a hundred per cent down to Xavier, a lot of their early coverage.’