Metallica: Enter Night (24 page)

One American metal band that went through a very similar experience with Q Prime in the mid-1980s and never regretted it is Queensrÿche. Like Metallica, Queensrÿche’s first, eponymously titled EP had been released on their own independent 206 label in 1983, while the band was managed by record store owners from their hometown of Seattle. The band was picked up for a major deal by EMI America but two albums into its career, despite rave reviews in America and the UK, career-wise felt it was essentially treading water. Enter Q Prime, who Queensrÿche singer Geoff Tate now describes as ‘extremely valuable’ in getting the band to the next level. Says Tate, ‘They had such clout and muscle as far as being able to demand what they felt was best for the artist. In regard to the record companies, the production, going on the road and doing deals with promoters, you know, clout with MTV. They were very well respected and they had success under their belts and so people listened to them. They didn’t have a lot of opposition to their plans, and so, yeah, it was a big plus to have that kind of muscle.’

Of the four albums Queensrÿche would release over the ten years they were managed by Q Prime, the first three went platinum in America – not through putting the pressure on the band to make any commercial adjustments to their sound, Tate hastens to point out. Quite the opposite, he says: ‘Q Prime had a very simple philosophy, and that is: follow your muse. Follow what it is that you want to do artistically and that will always be your calling card. At the end of the day whether you sell records or not you still have the fact that you followed your artistic calling.’ The key lesson Mensch and Burnstein preached, he says, was ‘“Never
ever
listen to anybody. You didn’t listen to anybody in the beginning and look where you are. So follow what it is that you want to do.” And I liked that immediately. Upon meeting them that was the thing that really struck me, that they weren’t gonna sit there and tell us what kind of clothes to wear or what kind of notes to play. They didn’t have any interest in that at all. They just wanted to manage bands that had something to say. Bands that had a destiny, I guess, you’d say.’ As for the individuals, ‘Peter and Cliff are true gentlemen. I have the utmost respect for both of them. They both have strengths in different areas and they were wise enough to recognise what each of them did well and allow each other to pursue those interests. Peter was always much more in control of the touring aspect and road life. Cliff was more into diplomacy and talking. Any issues within the band, he would be the one that would come and talk to everybody and kind of reason things out. Peter was kind of like the big stick; he would come in and bash people over the head.’

Be that as it may, Michael Alago insists now that he was already speaking to Jonny Z about signing Metallica ‘long before Q Prime’s involvement’, denying that Mensch and Burnstein had any direct influence on his decision. ‘At the time they were being handled by the Zazulas and not Q Prime. For me it was all about the band and their dedication to the music.’ It just so happened that ‘Q Prime were scouting them out the same time I signed them’. But as Jonny Z points out, it was Q Prime who ‘closed the deal’. Consequently, Jonny now believes that while he was involved in preliminary discussions with Alago, Mensch and Burnstein had probably been talking to Alago’s superior, Tom Zutaut. ‘The deal was, basically, in conversation. Then [Q Prime] came in and closed it. They may have closed it from the top while we were working from the bottom up.’ However it worked, the fact remains that by the time Metallica were ready to put pen to paper on an eight-album deal with Elektra in New York, they were no longer being managed by CraZed Management. Jonny says Marsha already had an inkling something was up, suspicious over the number of phone calls Lars would suddenly have to take from ‘Aunt Jane’. Jonny chuckles ruefully, ‘Marsha was telling me they kept calling Aunt Jane. Aunt Jane I think was Peter or Cliff. “I have to call Aunt Jane.” We think that. But who knows?’

For Lars Ulrich, though, it wasn’t about ditching Jonny and Marsha. They had ‘always been good people’. But ‘if we were to go next-level’ they would have to take drastic steps, as they had previously with Ron and with Dave, and as they would again in the future when it came to others in their rapidly expanding organisation. For Lars, meeting Peter Mensch was like finding the final piece of the jigsaw, or being introduced to the bigger, smarter, older brother he never knew he had. Despite their outward differences – Lars the garrulous young hell-raiser to Mensch’s scowling party-pooper – beneath their seemingly uncomplementary façades lay two strikingly similar egos.

Both men were hugely driven, insanely ambitious overachievers, always on the clock, never able to switch off, never wanting to. Almost immediately after they started working together, Lars looked up to Peter, trusted his instincts completely, knew he was the right man for the job. By the same token, Mensch was savvy enough to see past the beers and the laughs, to grasp instantly that here was someone as determined as he to get to the top, and that it would be a good fit: Lars the smiling frontman, charming the pants off everyone he met; Mensch the enforcer standing at his side, making sure everyone paid attention and took this shit seriously.

‘Interesting’ is the tactful way Martin Hooker now describes his dealings with Mensch, subsequent to his takeover of Metallica: ‘He was hard work, I have to say.’ Gem Howard is less guarded. Working with Metallica’s new American managers ‘was weird. Peter Mensch seems to have not really much respect for anybody and the only time I met Cliff Burnstein, when we had a meeting with him…they actually treated us with contempt, really. The only thing Burnstein was interested in was trying to find a Metallica sweatshirt that fitted him. That’s all I remember of him.’ Others share similar feelings. ‘It was always difficult with Mensch really,’ recalls then
Kerrang!
editor Geoff Barton, who describes his relationship with the manager as ‘abrasive’. He goes on, ‘Being an American, he didn’t really understand the power of the British music press. The press in the States didn’t have that same kind of influence.’ So while Mensch regarded journalists like Barton as ‘an ant willing to be crushed under his feet’, the reality was that he exerted far less control over the then-all-powerful British music press than he would have wished.

That said, there are many who worked closely with Q Prime – former employees and record company executives – who have nothing but good to say about them. When one of the record company people who worked with Def Leppard in the 1980s became seriously ill, she awoke one morning to find her hospital room filled with flowers – courtesy of Peter Mensch. Another former employee at Q Prime’s New York office from that time who left under difficult personal circumstances in the 1990s still insists they would go back to work there ‘in a second’, and that, despite the unhappy way they left, it was still ‘the best job I ever had’, pointing out the enormous pressure Mensch and Burnstein were always under. ‘Faxes and phone calls at three in the morning, I don’t know how someone deals with that kind of pressure.’ Certainly there was no mistaking Mensch and Burnstein’s abilities as managers. They didn’t win every time – Armored Saint might arguably have had a bigger career had they ignored Q Prime’s advice and gotten themselves over to Britain and Europe to capitalise on their early popularity there, just as Metallica had in the days before they had come under Q Prime’s raven-like wing; Warrior Soul and Dan Reed Network were other Q Prime acts that arrived with a bang, media-wise, in the Eighties and left with a whimper, comparatively speaking, sales-wise. But those that did flourish under their tutelage did so spectacularly and by the end of the decade Q Prime would boast multi-platinum acts such as Def Leppard, Metallica, Queensrÿche, Dokken, Tesla and Cameo. In 1989 they were hired to oversee the Rolling Stones’
Steel Wheels
comeback world tour.

It had actually been Xavier Russell who effected introductions between Q Prime and Metallica. ‘Mensch phoned asking me for their number,’ he recalls now. ‘This was pre-mobile phone days and they were pretty hard to track down. I remember I had to phone Kirk’s mother in San Francisco. I said, “I need to track down Lars urgently.” She said, “Well, we can get him to a pay phone,” because they weren’t on the phone at the El Cerrito house. This is how archaic it was. I then remember Lars phoning me up from a phone box in America, reversing the charges. I said, “Look, Mensch needs to talk to you. He’s serious about wanting to sign you.”’ The next thing Xavier heard, the deal was done. He points out that Mensch and Burnstein could hardly have been the only ones sniffing around Metallica at that time. He believes Iron Maiden manager Rod Smallwood may also have been interested: ‘Lars always worshipped the way Maiden was managed – their artwork, the sleeves, the tours. He always wanted to be represented by somebody like Smallwood. But I don’t think Smallwood was really into that sort of music. Mensch knew something was gonna happen.’

Says Jonny, ‘I got to tell you something; it shattered me to lose them, for years. Because I thought we would have proved to everybody that we could have taken it all the way. It would have happened with us as well. It was on fire when we gave up the band! Absolutely blazing! It was in the middle of everything going on.’ The deal eventually struck with Elektra allowed Megaforce to continue with the US release of
Ride the Lightning
up to the first 75,000 sales. But then, says Jonny, ‘The first seventy-five for any band that’s brand new is [the main part of the job]. After that it’s just taking orders.’ He claims Howard Thompson, then a main player at Elektra, later ‘came up to me and said that Marsha and I did a million-dollar job to really break this band. It would have cost Elektra millions to get the band to the level that they were handed Metallica. That’s one of the best compliments I took.’

Ultimately, though, the separation was ‘not very fun’. Indeed, three years later, as a guest at Jonny and Marsha’s home, I would sit and listen to him semi-jokingly describe Q Prime as ‘Thieves! Fuckin’ thieves!’ When I remind him of it now, he sighs and says: ‘Can I tell you something, they probably are. What they did was probably thieve-ish. But the band probably came to them complaining and moaning and asking for a saviour, to get to the next level. Lars, you remember, always,
always
wanted to be in the same league as Def Leppard. He felt that if he had Def Leppard’s manager, it’s possible. And again, I was not proven in the arena level, in those days. Marsha and I had not done any giant venues – and they wanted to be where that knowledge was guaranteed to exist.’ He is not allowed to ‘discuss the terms’ because of the confidentiality clause in his eventual written agreement with Metallica. ‘But I’ll see if I can put it to you in a mild way. We were asked, legally…to negotiate a separation.’ Another deep sigh. ‘You know, if it ain’t right, you can’t manage a band. You don’t want to be hated. I want to be loved! So it would have been punishment for us also to have gone on. It was a surprise but I can’t say anything [except] I felt the history would have been the same or maybe even better with me and Marsha.’

We would never know.

I sat on the corner of the bed in my hotel room, watching Gem go at it.

He’d taken a picture from the wall, laid it flat on the coffee table and was chopping out lines of coke on it.

‘There are two things I’d rather you didn’t bring up to the band,’ he said.

‘Yeah, what’s that?’

‘One is this whole thrash thing. They’re really sensitive suddenly about being called thrash. They feel like they’ve gone beyond all that now and that this new album is something different.’

‘Okay,’ I said. No biggie. It had been the same during the punk thing. I’d lost count of the amount of bands I’d interviewed in my early days on
Sounds
that no longer wished to be labelled simply as ‘punk’. ‘New wave’ was the desirable new sobriquet for the would-be pop intelligentsia and so that’s what you wrote – if you wanted to stay in with them. It was the same with all the old NWOBHM bands. By the time I’d started writing about Iron Maiden and Def Leppard for
Kerrang!
it would never have occurred to me to describe them as NWOBHM. That stuff was good for getting known in the early days but turned into a pain in the arse once it came to second or third album time. The novelty had worn off and everybody was desperate to distance themselves from it. No one still described Pink Floyd as psychedelic, did they? Or The Beatles as Merseybeat or mop-tops, God forbid.

‘What’s the second thing?’ I asked, eyeing the coke impatiently.

‘Er, this,’ he said, handing me a rolled-up pound note.

I snaffled up a couple of fat ones then sat back, fighting the welling nausea as the stuff trickled down my throat.

‘Why…They don’t like coke?’

‘Oh, they like it all right. A bit too fucking much! No, if they find out I’ve got this they’ll do it all and there’ll be none left for us.’

‘Fuck that,’ I said.

‘Too right…’

We sat there a couple more hours, doing our thing, getting ready to go to the studio and see the band. I liked Gem. He was old-school, knew how to get the party started. The band was lucky to have him. And now they would have me, too. Not a thrash writer but a proper mainstream music critic here to bestow his blessings – or something. That was certainly the spiel I’d been on the receiving end of when I’d been invited to fly to Copenhagen to check out their new album
, Master of Puppets.
‘It’s different this time,’ I kept being told. ‘This is the one that’s going to break them into the mainstream.’

I nodded dutifully then waited for the plane tickets to arrive. I didn’t give a toss about who was breaking into the mainstream. I just liked Lars, who’d I’d met at Donington back in the summer. A right laugh. I’d watched his band struggling to drape their dark musical backdrop across the unfeasibly sunlit stage, while doing their best to avoid the bottles and catcalls, the usual drunken Donington crowd detritus. Then later that night, back at the hotel, wasted in the bar, Lars had pointed to the unconscious figure of Venom singer Cronos, slumped at a nearby table, face down in a sea of pint glasses, and suggested we get our pictures taken with him. We stood there sniggering while the magazine photographer aimed his lens, waggling our willies in Cronos’ slumbering ears.

Now this, waiting to go to the studio to hear what Metallica had been up to in the studio all these months later. It hadn’t really dawned on me yet that they might be a band to take very seriously. They were thrash metal; the musical equivalent of silly drunken boys sticking willies in your ear and I had been there many times before. Surely by now we must have seen it all, I thought…

Suddenly, in the autumn of 1984, everything changed for Metallica. Under their agreement with Elektra, Megaforce would hand over US rights to
Ride the Lightning
after 75,000 sales. The way the album was already flying out the door, Elektra prepared to rerelease it in November, by which time it would already have sold twice as many copies as
Kill ’Em All
. Although Jonny and Marsha were ‘heartbroken’ to say goodbye to the band, the Elektra deal did help Megaforce stay afloat at a time when they were still struggling with near-crippling debt. As Jonny says now, ‘Our prize for breaking Metallica was losing them. But by the end people were swarming to see them.’ The Elektra money he ‘put into Anthrax and Raven’.

In the UK, Martin Hooker of Music for Nations was also disappointed to see the band go, but in his case the new deal worked more heavily in his favour. ‘[Megaforce] sold the band to Elektra for America. So Elektra were getting the rights to that album [
Ride the Lightning
] that we’d paid for. In return they very kindly gave us [the next Metallica album]
Master of Puppets
for free. We still had to pay the band a very handsome advance but we didn’t have to pay any of the recording costs; which was fair because we’d paid for the previous album.’ It also meant ‘somebody else had the hassle of the studio side, overseeing it’. In the meantime, MFN could continue marketing Metallica records with impunity – something that they took spectacular advantage of during the latter months of 1984 when they released a twelve-inch EP of ‘Creeping Death’. The B-side comprised newly minted versions of two NWOBHM classics – Diamond Head’s ‘Am I Evil?’ and Blitzkrieg’s ‘Blitzkrieg’ – from their days in Ron McGovney’s garage. Hence the informal title they gave the single’s cover versions, ‘Garage Days Revisited’.

Gem Howard recalls that sales in the UK and Europe ‘were just
phenomenal
on that. I think in the end we sold something like a quarter of a million copies, all told.’ It wasn’t just the content that sold the single – Diamond Head singer Sean Harris later recalled being nonplussed when Peter Mensch called for copyright permission to use ‘Am I Evil?’: ‘I was like, “Well, I can’t see the point, but yes you’re welcome to!”’ – it was the ingenious way MFN marketed the record. Tapping into his previous experience at Secret of selling multi-format ‘limited edition’ singles and EPs to the hardcore collector punk audience, Hooker shrewdly released ‘Creeping Death’ in a special coloured-vinyl edition. In America, where Elektra had elected not to release a single, MFN sold more than 40,000 copies of the ‘Creeping Death’ twelve-inch just on import. When orders began to outstrip their ability to manufacture more, MFN simply improvised and released it in a different colour. Recalls Gem, ‘We pressed [“Creeping Death”] on every colour vinyl we could find. We’d get a phone call from an importer in New York saying could [they] have another three thousand coloured-vinyl after we’d decided to put it out in blue or something. I went, “Yeah, okay.” Then I’d phone up the pressing plant and they’d say, “We haven’t got any blue vinyl left.” And I’d go, “Well, what have you got?” and they’d go, “We’ve got some yellow…” So I’d phone back New York and say, “Can’t do blue, can do yellow and you can have them in seven days, any good?” They’d say, “Okay, done.” And it literally was like that. I know that we did blue, red, green, yellow,
brown
. “They’ve only got brown.” “Okay…” I don’t actually know how many colours we did in the end. I think we did it in clear as well. And gold, of course…’

Many Metallica fans would buy the record again and again just to collect the set. Sales began to rocket so high in Britain and Europe they began to sell more copies of the ‘Creeping Death’ twelve-inch than they did of
Ride the Lightning
. Boggle-eyed, the rest of the biz took note and within two years singles in multiple formats became the industry standard in the UK, with releases being staggered so that new formats appeared every week for up to eight weeks in the knowledge that many fans were simply buying repeats. (This practice was later restricted under new legislation.)

All of this was done with the blessing of the band – or certainly Lars. ‘Lars was
always
the spokesperson,’ points out Hooker. ‘Any business you had to do, everything went through Lars.’ But then Lars wasn’t like other drummers. He knew there was no music to be made without the business side being taken care of too, and vice versa. As Hooker says, ‘It’s always helpful if you’ve got one guy in the band who has his business head screwed on. So many bands haven’t a clue. Metallica always kind of knew where they wanted to go. They had one guy who was great doing the interviews and the business. It left the others time to take care of the music.’ He adds, ‘But that’s also something that American bands have that English bands
never
have. Like Twisted Sister were unbelievably professional; so together and business-minded, but without selling-out on the music front. Metallica were very much that way.’

Delighted though they were over this newfound excitement abroad, now they had a major deal Metallica were in a hurry to get back on the road in America. But Burnstein and Mensch brought their experience to bear and persuaded them that their best move now would actually be to return to Europe where their profile remained highest, and begin touring as headliners. With Elektra not prepared to put their full marketing machine behind
Ride the Lightning
until it was rereleased in the States in November, a US tour in the New Year was a more sensible option, allowing momentum to build. ‘Which is exactly what happened,’ says Hooker. With fellow MFN act Tank in to provide support, Metallica kicked off their twenty-five-date Bang the Head That Doesn’t Bang tour on 16 November with a show at the Exosept club, in Rouen, France, before moving on to Poperinge, Belgium, then heading south for shows in Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Montpellier and Nice. Concerts in Milan, Venice and Zurich followed before the tour arrived for seven shows in West Germany, interrupted only by a quick drive across the border for a smoke-ringed sell-out date at the notorious Paradiso club in Amsterdam. After that the highlight was a gut-busting hometown show for Lars at the Saga club in Copenhagen, which a ‘very proud’ Flemming Rasmussen attended, the tour concluding with more sold-out club shows in Sweden and Finland.

The final night of the tour was an ambitious one-off UK date at London’s Lyceum Ballroom on 20 December. Part of a larger strategy to push Metallica’s profile in Britain further towards the same level it now enjoyed in Europe, the band also appeared on the front cover of
Kerrang!
for the first time. Featured on the cover of the Christmas 1984 issue of the mag was a sole picture of a sunglasses-wearing Lars Ulrich, head thrown back in drunken exultation, and – bizarrely – spray-painted silvery pink, holding a similarly spray-painted, nuts-and-bolts-encrusted Christmas cake. It seemed an incongruous image for a band then building a stiff reputation for itself as a non-glam, walk-it-like-you-talk-it street metal outfit unprepared to bow to commercial pressures. But to the rest of the industry the subtext was clear: the pictures for the cover and inside story were taken by Ross Halfin,
Kerrang!
’s number one photographer, the story written by the magazine’s deputy editor, Dante Bonutto – both close personal contacts of Peter Mensch, flown to San Francisco to hang out with the band at El Cerrito. ‘I thought: how have they managed that? ’Cos Diamond Head never made the front cover of
Kerrang!
,’ says Brian Tatler, laughter tinged with envy. ‘The only reason he’s got that, I thought to meself, is ’cos he’s said, “Yeah, you can spray me, I’ll do whatever you like to get on that front cover.” Whereas Diamond Head would probably have been a little more, “We’re not doing that! I’m not gonna be made to look silly.”’

Far from being silly, as far as the band’s new set-up was concerned, it was another giant leap forward. ‘Getting your band on the cover of
Kerrang!
meant you immediately sold more records,’ shrugs Gem Howard. Everyone who had ever shown support for Metallica in Britain was invited along to the Lyceum – also billed as a special Christmas show – headed by Bonutto, Xavier Russell and the rest of the
Kerrang!
team. Writer Malcolm Dome recalls being invited to listen through a headset to what Cliff Burton was playing onstage. ‘It was surreal. I mean, he was doing what he needed to do to keep the beat and so forth, but the rest of his playing didn’t seem to fit what the others were doing at all, as though he was in a world of his own. It was absolutely extraordinary.’ Questioned later by Harald O about his more spontaneous approach to playing live, Cliff shrugged it off with a smile. ‘Yeah, well, you get so you know the song like the back of your hand and you can just flip off and do different stuff. It’s funner that way, it keeps me entertained. You know; something to do.’ Sure, Cliff.

After a break back home in San Francisco – Lars resisting the urge to spend the holidays at home with his family, as Cliff and Kirk would do, in order to keep James company at El Cerrito – the first three months of 1985 found Metallica on their first extended run of US dates for over a year. Second on a three-band bill headlined by W.A.S.P., and opened by old buddies – and now fellow Q Prime clients – Armored Saint, the tour officially got under way on 11 January with a packed show at the Skyway club in Scotia, New York. It was the start of the band’s longest tour yet: forty-eight shows in sixty-eight days that would establish them as the hottest new street-level band in the USA. Closest rivals Grim Reaper – the last of the NWOBHM-generation bands to get a foothold in America – had sold over 150,000 copies of their debut album,
See You in Hell
(released in the USA at the same time as
RTL
on the independent Ebony Records label, distributed by RCA). But that would be their peak. Slayer’s debut
Show No Mercy
had notched up 40,000 US sales in 1984, enough to become Brian Slagel and Metal Blade’s biggest hit yet but not enough to touch what Metallica was now achieving. (Anthrax and Megadeth would not release their first significant albums until much later in 1985). By the time Metallica’s US tour had climaxed with a headline show at the Palladium in Hollywood on 10 March, Elektra had added another 100,000 sales to the 75,000 Megaforce had already done in the USA, the album reaching Number 100 on the
Billboard
chart. In the UK, meanwhile, the album had gone silver for over 60,000 sales; double then treble that figure across Europe. They were also now making inroads into the lucrative Japanese market, where Q Prime had set up a deal with CBS (soon to become Sony). It had cost a great deal of money to get to this position – on tour support, on advertising and promotion, on recording costs and simply keeping them fed and out of trouble – and they certainly weren’t in the position yet where they could look forward to significant royalties. Indeed, when they were home Cliff was still living with his parents while James, Kirk and Lars clung to their garage couches at the Metallimansion in El Cerrito. But they were certainly on their way. You could feel it in the air at every show they did that year. When the tour finally came to a noisy, drunken halt with one last show, at the Starry Night club in Portland, Metallica dragged on the members of Armored Saint for the encores, concluding with a rowdy version of ‘The Money Will Roll Right In’ by San Franciscan punk rockers Fang. A self-referential bit of theatre among the beer-laden laughter, but deep down inside Metallica were no longer even half-joking.