Metallica: Enter Night (26 page)

Although Burton only received co-writing credits on three of the eight tracks, Hammett felt strongly that ‘people don’t talk enough about Cliff’s contribution to that album’. Not just things like the evocative ‘volume swells’ on the bass intro to ‘Damage, Inc.’, which had evolved from the improvised bass solo he performed each night on tour, but to the overall sound and direction the band now took: ‘I remember him playing the intro to “Damage, Inc.” on the
Ride the Lightning
tour. It has all those bass swells and harmonies on it. What was really amazing, I remember him saying, “Yeah, it’s based on a Bach piece.” I asked him which one and I’m not sure if I’ve got the title right but I’m pretty sure he said it was “Come Sweetly Death”, or something like that.’ The piece Kirk’s referring to is ‘Come, Sweet Death’, from the
69 Sacred Songs and Arias
that Johann Sebastian Bach contributed to Georg Christian Schemelli’s
Musical Songbook
, which contained nearly a thousand song texts for voice and accompaniment but written down as a figured bass – musical notation indicating intervals, chords and non-chord tones, in relation to a bass note, providing harmonic structure. A very Burton-like musical preoccupation.

Continued Kirk, ‘I remember when I first heard the riff to “Damage, Inc.”, I thought, wow, how simple but how effective. And I have to say, that one line – “Honesty is my only excuse” – that’s a great line, but it’s influenced by Thin Lizzy and a track from
Shades of a Blue Orphanage
.’ Again, however, Kirk has got it slightly wrong, the track he referred to, ‘Honesty is No Excuse’, is not from
Orphanage
but the eponymously titled debut album from Thin Lizzy, in which singer Phil Lynott ends verses with the line, ‘Honesty is my only excuse’. Kirk was absolutely spot-on, though, when he said that
Master of Puppets
was characterised by ‘all sorts of strange influences like that’, including a short guitar passage at the end of the verse on ‘Disposable Heroes’ that was the guitarist’s attempt at a military march. ‘Like bagpipes or something. I watched a lot of war movies, trying to find something that was like a call to arms. Like something a bagpipe player would play as they were going into battle. I didn’t really find anything but that’s what I came up with.’ He laughed. Some influences were more familiar, as with the acoustic intro to the track that would open the album, ‘Battery’ – another deliberate attempt at ‘an Ennio Morricone thing’, while still retaining some of the actual chords from the subsequent track.

With the songs all but complete, the band set about finding a studio to record them in. With Flemming Rasmussen back onboard as co-producer, Lars would have been happy to return to Sweet Silence in Copenhagen but none of the others wanted that. Enough of the cold and snow already, protested the Californian boys, let’s make the album somewhere warm and sunny, even if it meant doing it in much-loathed LA. So Flemming flew into LA and he and Lars spent two weeks in July being chauffeured around in a Lincoln town car, paid for by Elektra, checking out studios. ‘It’s what the record company rented,’ a red-faced Lars protested when one journalist bumped into him and asked jokingly if he was now a rock star. ‘We didn’t order it!’ But rock stars are what Lars Ulrich and Metallica were fast becoming – much to their drummer’s secret delight.

The problem, as Rasmussen recalls, was trying to find a studio in LA that provided a comparable set-up for the drums. ‘We had like a huge storage room in the back of [Sweet Silence] with a really big, wooden room with a lot of ambience in it. That’s where we ended up putting the drums [on
RTL
]. We needed a [similarly] huge live room to record the drums for [
Master of Puppets
] so we drove around checking out studios.’ Unable to find what they were looking for, Lars went back to the rest of the band and again put the case to them for returning to Sweet Silence. What ultimately swung it, recalled Kirk, was that the dollar rate was such that it made recording the album in Denmark much cheaper than it would have been in America, allowing them for the first time to really take their time in the studio. ‘We’d also had great results in the past with
Ride the Lightning
and knew the studio and all the people there. The familiarity of it all made sense to us. And we really wanted to be somewhere where there wasn’t a whole bunch of distractions. At least, for the three of us – Lars was out all the time!’

With sessions not due to begin in Copenhagen until September, Q Prime took the opportunity to squeeze the band onto the bills of three of the biggest rock festivals that summer: England’s increasingly famous annual Monsters of Rock show at Castle Donington on 17 August; the even more prestigious Day on the Green festival at Oakland Coliseum on 31 August; plus an appearance at the Loreley Metal Hammer festival in Rhein – the West German equivalent of Donington – on 14 September. Worldwide sales for
Ride the Lightning
were now approaching half a million but the band was still viewed very much as underdogs, curiosities at best, next to more established names like ZZ Top, Marillion and Bon Jovi (all of whom followed Metallica onto the stage at Donington) and Scorpions, Ratt and Y&T, all above Metallica at Bill Graham’s Day on the Green festival a fortnight later. Only the crowds seemed to really know who Metallica were, especially in Europe, where they had sold most records and were now increasingly seen as the next big thing. At the Rhein festival, at which ‘Disposable Heroes’ was given its first public performance, Venom was also on the bill, in the slot above Metallica. Standing backstage, listening to them pounding through ‘Seek and Destroy’, Jeff Dunn was astonished to hear ‘the whole audience singing it. Then James shouting, “What the fuck was that?” and then the whole place going mad. James had that rapport with the audience; they were his that night. It was at that point I can honestly say that Metallica were starting to overtake us – the European gig where they definitely made their mark.’

In the hotel bar the night before the Donington show, Lars had told me they were ‘in the mood to kill’. When later I asked if he thought Metallica had succeeded he nodded his head enthusiastically. Of course they had. ‘When we walked onstage at Donington, I thought we were showing both the other bands and the kids in the audience that we have a different way of presenting ourselves, way, way apart from people’s preconceived ideas of what a band like Metallica is all about. I think a lot of people are slowly starting to understand and appreciate that what we do, and the way we do it, is
real
. What you see is what you get, no faking. What you see of us like onstage is what we’re like all the time, we don’t start pretending or hamming it up.’

Certainly there was no faking the non-stop rain of objects that were hurled at the stage from the 70,000-strong Donington crowd that day, including plastic bottles full of urine. Not just for Metallica, but throughout the entire event, as if ritualistically. Marillion singer Fish, then at the height of his fame, was brave enough to tell the crowd: ‘Those of you who are throwing bottles, people down the front are getting hurt, so fuck off.’ This did bring a temporary halt to the disgusting deluge. But those bands lower on the bill not popular enough yet to get away with something like that were forced to grin and bear it. James Hetfield, though, had other concerns when Metallica took to the stage in the middle of a swelteringly hot afternoon. Squeezed between Ratt and Bon Jovi, the sort of poodle-haired pop-rockers Metallica professed to despise, James announced to the crowd, ‘If you came here to see spandex, eye make-up, and the words “Oh baby” in every fuckin’ song, this ain’t the fuckin’ band!’ Cue another hail of beer cans and bottles. As usual, Cliff Burton had his own way of dealing with things. Ducking beneath a flying pear, which ended up embedded in his bass bin, he coolly sauntered over to his stack, plucked out the pear, took a couple of ironic bites out of it then slung it back into the crowd, to general all-round cheers. As he later ruefully recalled, ‘Donington was a day of targets and projectiles. [Stuff] was piling high on the stage all throughout the day, and freaks were flipping.’ Then added with a straight face: ‘I think they liked us, though.’

At the Day on the Green festival two weeks later, this time Metallica were bigger creators of mayhem than any of the 90,000 in the crowd. The show itself had been a memorable occasion. Recalls Malcolm Dome, who was there covering the event for
Kerrang!
, ‘It was the first time I’d seen Metallica so high up the bill at such an important show. The headliners were the Scorpions, second on the bill were Ratt, and Metallica were just below them, with Y&T, Yngwie Malmsteen and Victory below them. I know it was a hometown show for them but this was a stadium and yet it was clear they belonged on the bigger stages. One thing about Metallica, they always grew into whatever new context they found themselves in. And yet they were still a people’s band, you could tell by the audience reaction. They knew how to relate to the fans, as in we’re still of the same mentality as you lot, we understand you. We are on this big stage here only because we have the music to carry it forward and entertain you but we haven’t changed at all.’

As if to prove it, after the show Hetfield ran amok in a Jägermeister fit and, egged on by one of his East Bay pals, smashed up the band’s dressing room. Wrecking rooms had become a regular sport on their own tours, but as James later confessed, the Day on the Green rampage was ‘the worst’. Having got it into his head that, as he put it, ‘the deli tray and the fruit had to go through a little vent’, when the vent proved too small he simply decided to ‘make a hole’. As a result, the backstage trailer the band was using to change in was all but destroyed. Promoter Bill Graham, whose long career had seen him work with prolific room-breakers such as Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, summoned the singer to his office like the headmaster summoning a recalcitrant pupil for a flogging. Graham told him sternly: ‘This attitude you have, I’ve had the same conversation with Sid Vicious and Keith Moon.’ Informed in no uncertain terms that no further destruction of property would be tolerated and that he would be sent the bill for the damage he’d already done, as James later ruefully observed, ‘I realised at that point there was more to being in a band than pissing people off and smashing shit up.’

Once again, it was left to Cliff to bring things back to a more manageable state of affairs. Malcolm Dome recalls the bassist giving his bandmates a severe dressing down after the show. ‘I remember him looking at Lars, like, “One more word from you and I’m gonna fucking punch you!”’ That quietened things down – for a while, anyway. Kirk Hammett: ‘Cliff was the most mature out of all of us. He had a quiet strength [and] was very, very confident. A lot of times the rest of us would defer to him in times of insecurities. He just had so much confidence, he had confidence to spare. He just seemed so much wiser and much more responsible than the rest of us. He was the guy when I would do something stupid, or Lars or James would do something stupid, he was the guy who would say, “What the hell were you thinking?” Or: “That was a really stupid thing to do!” He was always the guy to reprimand us.’

The day after the show, a badly hungover James, Lars and Kirk met up at San Francisco International airport to catch the flight to Copenhagen. For the first time they would be setting aside proper time to make an album, as opposed to simply tacking on some studio time at the end of a tour and aiming, essentially, just to record their live set. Everyone was buzzing, except for Cliff, who never showed up. ‘I remember James, Lars and I waiting at the gate and paging him and he never showed up,’ smiled Kirk. ‘So we had to get on the plane without him. Cliff was good at missing things because he moved on his own time. He smoked a lot.’ They tried calling him from a payphone but only got the outgoing message on his new answer-machine. But they understood where he was at; that big brother Cliff was probably kicking back at home in a fog of bud-smoke and beer fumes, maxed out. It didn’t take much figuring. Cliff also knew the first few days at Sweet Silence were likely to involve sitting around while Lars got his drums together and James lingered endlessly over the guitar sound. He’d join them later, he decided. After the excitement of Day on the Green, he needed a change of pace anyway.

Recording at Sweet Silence started on Tuesday, 3 September 1985. The band was still jet-lagged and missing its bass player but in every other respect they were in the best shape of their lives. The hectic two and a half years the Ulrich-Hetfield-Burton-Hammett line-up of Metallica had been together had seen it coalesce over more than 140 gigs and two albums into a fist-tight proposition. In the eighteen months since they’d completed
Ride the Lightning
they had leapt forward as songwriters, as the new material they were now coming up with proved to them. They also had the ironclad confidence only nearly a million albums and singles sold worldwide can bring. ‘There was a sense of [expectation],’ said Kirk. ‘It did feel like we had a huge amount of momentum behind us, people supporting us and pushing us all during the creation of that album…that this album was another big step forward.’ Just to make sure, Lars had recently taken it upon himself to book drum lessons. He had been embarrassed by his amateurish approach in the studio the first time he’d worked with Rasmussen; he was going to show the producer how different things were now. Kirk, too, although always a conscientious pupil, had been away from home a long time and the summer of 1985 was his first prolonged spell back working with Joe Satriani – himself now about to embark on a recording career – since before he’d joined Metallica.

No more sleeping in the spare room, either. With Elektra now paying the bills the band could afford to book into the luxury Scandinavia Hotel, where Lars and James shared a junior suite and Kirk and Cliff shared another. ‘It just made the stay a lot easier for [the other three],’ said Lars. ‘We thought we were just on top of the world!’ laughed Kirk. Even Cliff, who arrived at the start of the second week there, began to settle down and enjoy the surroundings. As winter arrived and the nights got longer and colder, away from the studio, with their guitars and a plentiful supply of strong black hash, Cliff and Kirk ignored the snow on the ground outside and turned their room at the Scandinavia into a home from home. ‘For a bass player he played a lot of guitar,’ Kirk recalled. ‘In fact, he would drive me crazy with it. We’d come back to the hotel after a night of gallivanting, like totally wasted at three in the morning or whatever. But instead of crashing out he would immediately want to set up the electric guitars and start playing for a couple of hours. I’d be exhausted but then I’d totally get sucked into it and start playing along with him. He would talk me into figuring out certain guitar parts of certain songs so that I could show them to him. Eventually that led to figuring out guitar solos so that he could play them on guitar. He was obsessed with Ed King, one of the guitar players in Lynyrd Skynyrd. He said that Ed King was his favourite guitar player, which was pretty weird.’