Metallica: Enter Night (27 page)

When they weren’t playing guitars together, they were playing poker. ‘We’d go out and play poker for eight hours straight after being up for twenty-four hours,’ said Kirk. ‘We’d find a seafood restaurant that was open, eat raw oysters and drink beer, scream at the natives while we were drunk.’ They were, he said, ‘some of my best memories’ from that time. James and Lars were also hanging out more again. As on their previous visits to Denmark, when they weren’t working the two liked to get stuck into the Elephant beer. Recalled Lars, ‘In late November, early December, they have something called Christmas beers, which is just an excuse for everyone to drink their Christmas sorrows away. It’s twice as strong as regular beer. Every time we went out and drank these Christmas beers, James would start trying to talk Danish – completely pissed out of his face!’

Once they were inside Sweet Silence every night, however, it was all business. Far from merely carrying on where they’d left off with
RTL
, the new album would be something else again, they decided – beginning with the sound quality. I put it to Rasmussen that, listening back now, it’s as though they had made some giant breakthrough with
Ride the Lightning
and were now intent on taking it somewhere new with
Master of Puppets
. ‘Yeah, that’s exactly how it was,’ he replies. ‘We were pretty pleased with
Ride
. But when we were gonna do
Master
we really tried to [raise] the bar and just make everything actually better than we were capable of. We knew we had a bunch of really good songs so we put the bar up really high, really worked a lot on that.’

Luck played its part, too. The band had recently received a new Mesa/Boogie amp endorsement, ‘But the new amps sounded really crappy.’ So one of Flemming’s first jobs, in a weird echo of his initial task on the
Ride
sessions – trying to find a new guitar amp to emulate the sound of James’ stolen amp – was to ‘fiddle around’ until he ‘actually created that guitar sound’ we now hear on the album; something distinct to Metallica that, as he says, ‘has more or less followed them for the rest of their career. We could all feel it.’ Flemming also recalls trying to get Lars to work to a click-track for the first time, in an effort to improve his wayward timing: ‘It was either that or James and Lars playing it till the drum track was cool.’ To boost his confidence, Q Prime flew over Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen’s favourite Ludwig snare drum – a late Seventies replica of the hand-engraved black nickel-plated brass shell-drum originally manufactured by Ludwig in the 1920s called a Black Beauty. ‘We set it up and it was just brilliant,’ Lars glowed.

These were mere details, though. What Rasmussen noticed most was the vast improvement in their overall technique. ‘Musician-wise they were all like a million times better because they’d been on the road for a year and a half. James was
brilliant
at that time. It was unbelievable. Some of the rhythm guitars, he’d more or less do them in the first take then we’d start doubling up and that would more or less be the first take too.’ Laying down identical rhythm tracks – one on each side of the stereo mix – Hetfield now got into the habit of adding a third layer on top, jokingly nicknamed ‘the thickener’. Because of that: ‘We could get
really
picky about it,’ says Rasmussen, ‘and make sure they were all right where they were supposed to be because James was so good at it that it was just a matter of taking the time that we needed.’ Cliff and Kirk also exerted more influence this time around: ‘All of them contributed more. If people had an opinion they said it. I definitely know Cliff did that a couple more times.’ Although he was only co-credited with three tracks, it was Cliff’s influence that gave so many of the album’s tracks a neo-classical feel, by turns complex, magnificent, ominous, grandiloquent; turning them into musical pyramids of multiple movements, determinedly in opposition with the verse/chorus formula of most rock bands at that time. Where in earlier days Lars was fond of pushing each new number to such inordinate lengths they often threatened to collapse under their own weight, none of the multiple-part tracks they were recording now sounded anything other than totally spot-on.

Lyrically, the new material was several moves on from what had come before too. James may later have downplayed much of the thrusting new content as simply ‘about playing live’, but that was like his hero Clint Eastwood’s man with no name in
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
suggesting there might be a spot of bother further down the road. It would be another five years before Hetfield was ready to completely bare his soul and start writing brutally frank songs about his real-life emotional state, but there were no schoolboy ‘Metal Militia’s on
MOP
; no more glory-of-rock ‘Phantom Lord’s. In their place were songs about addiction (the title track, all light-and-shade dynamics, the Zeppelin of thrash); American TV evangelists (‘Leper Messiah’, title lifted from David Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’); madness (‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’, about an unjustly incarcerated patient at a mental hospital, hence the misspelled ‘sanitarium’ of the bracketed title, prefaced by the lonely chime of a treated guitar note); and of course their old friends war (‘Disposable Heroes’) and death (‘Damage, Inc.’) – both instant thrash classics, performed at psychotic speed, the fastest, all-out headbangers on an album that, ironically, signalled the band’s fond farewell to thrash. With its woozy intro utilising a range of harmonies, volume swells and effects, ‘Damage, Inc.’ was also Metallica’s metaphorical adieu, perhaps, to their early innocence, as they eagerly awaited the rewards and trappings of major stardom, which – although they still didn’t talk about in places where they might be overheard – they were all now anticipating with varying degrees of feverish delight. Hetfield spelling it out in the lyrics: ‘
We chew and spit you out / We laugh, you scream and shout…’

Seen as a whole,
Master of Puppets
was in many ways merely a new, vastly improved version of
Ride the Lightning
. Certainly the track sequencing followed the template almost to the letter, beginning with the atmospheric acoustic guitar intro before segueing into the super-fast, ultra-heavy opening track, ‘Battery’ – in reference to their days playing the Old Waldorf club on San Francisco’s Battery Street; a nasty collision between punk and metal that made no apologies to either rigidly defined culture. There followed the monumentally epic title track; swaggering death march – ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’ (like ‘The Call of Ktulu’, inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, its lyric ‘
Not dead which eternal lie / Stranger eons death may lie
’ the same paraphrased quote that also appeared on the cover of Iron Maiden’s
Live After Death
, bought by Lars during their stay in Copenhagen). Then there was the spooky demi-ballad, ‘Welcome Home…’ and so on up to and including the by-now-obligatory eight-minute-plus, bass-led Burton instrumental, ‘Orion’; the small white dot in the ocean of black the band veils the rest of the album in, yin to its yang, Cliff’s solo seeping in so seamlessly it’s unclear where the guitar fades out and the bass takes over. Nevertheless, the total track-for-track effect of
Master
was a quantum leap on from anything Metallica had achieved on
Ride
, and while these days both albums tend to be mentioned in the same breath, historically, where the former was Metallica’s first exceptionally accomplished recording, the latter would swiftly become recognised as their first stone-cold masterpiece; their
Led Zeppelin II
; their
Ziggy Stardust
; their legacy. There would never be a Metallica album quite like it again.

‘It was like we’d got it right this time,’ Kirk told me. ‘The cohesiveness from song to song, track to track, made perfect sense to us. It was almost as if it was self-creating. Ideas were just flowing and coming out of nowhere. From the beginning, when we first started writing, all the way to the end, it just seemed as though there was a non-stop flow of really, really great ideas. It was almost magical because it seemed like everything we played went right, every note we played was in exactly the right spot, and it couldn’t ever have gone any better. It was a very, very, very special time. I remember holding the album in my hands and thinking, “Wow, this is a fucking great album, even if it doesn’t sell anything. It doesn’t matter because this is such a great musical statement that we’ve just created.” I really felt that it would pass the test of time. Which it has…’

Certainly there was a sense of occasion to proceedings when I visited the band at Sweet Silence a week before Christmas 1985. Still fretting over the final mixes, the only track they would play me with all the vocals was ‘Master of Puppets’ itself; an astonishing experience I was completely unprepared for. I had been expecting first-rate heavy metal. Instead I got Sturm und Drang, the giant studio speakers veritably shaking as the maelstrom of drums and guitars came roaring volcanically from their cones. Cliff was standing next to me on one side, Lars on the other, nodding along; Cliff’s eyes closed in deep concentration, Lars the opposite, his eyes almost popping out of his head, sneaking sideways glances at me, seeing how all this was going down. I asked to sit down as they then blasted out unfinished, part-vocal mixes of ‘Leper Messiah’, ‘Battery’, ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’, just called ‘Sanitarium’ at that stage, and ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’, James and Kirk wandering in and out the door, the TV in the corner mutely showing Kirk Douglas raging away in
Spartacus
.

Afterwards, back at the Scandinavia Hotel, I sat with Lars in the bar talking, drinking Elephant beer as we taped an interview. At one point I asked why so many of their more towering numbers seemed to change course so often, going from hoodlum-fast to zombie-slow, often just as things were really starting to get going. He asked for an example and I pointed to one of the songs they had just played me: ‘Master of Puppets’. ‘What a riff!’ I told him. ‘Sabbath would have killed for that in their heyday. Then, just as things really started to take off, this big downward curve; like taking the record off and putting something else on.’ Why did they have to do that? He looked at me, stunned. ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about that,’ he frowned. ‘It may be that we try hard to stay as unpredictable as possible.’ He sat there chewing it over. I hadn’t meant to confuse him, it just seemed…well, an obvious question. ‘We don’t like the idea of playing it safe at all,’ he eventually decided. ‘We always like to try and do things that work out a bit different from what even we imagined them to be.’ He concluded, ‘I think the key to any success we might have as a band lies in the fact that we follow our own instincts, and not what we think people want to hear.’

Five years later, once it no longer mattered, he was able to be more honest with me, and would ruminate on how ‘in the past we’d do a rough version of a song and I’d go home and time it and go, “It’s only seven and a half minutes!” I’d think, “Fuck, we’ve got to put another couple of riffs in there.”’ In 1985, however, right there as they were finishing up what was to become one of the most important albums of their career, he immediately went on the defensive at any suggestion that the songs might be overlong or unnecessarily convoluted: ‘There have been times when we’ve been working on a new number that has started life as maybe a four- or five-minute piece. But we’ve ended up extending it just because our ideas haven’t ended there.’ He added tetchily, ‘If we can make the number a bit longer, a bit more interesting, and still make it work, then why not?’

When I teased him and asked if they had ever tried – just once – to write a commercial hit song, he relaxed again and admitted, ‘One time and one time only,’ citing ‘Escape’, in so many words, their Thin Lizzy-esque romp from
Ride
. The fact that neither Music for Nations nor Elektra had eventually chosen it as a single – the former preferring the more à la mode ‘Creeping Death’, the latter not bothering to release a single at all – only reinforced their conviction, he said, that they should never ‘depend on adapting to whatever mode popular music is in at any given moment. We’re into sticking to what we wanna do, sticking to all the things we, as a band, believe in. And if we can stick to what we are, sooner or later people will have to change their ideas about us and not the other way around.’

I had been asked not to throw the ‘thrash’ word around willy-nilly, but of course I couldn’t resist. What about it? I asked. Caught between the inevitable accusations of sell-out from the hardcore thrash crowd that would surely come their way once their fans had heard the new album, and the blind prejudices of mainstream critics who had never even listened to their music, merely knew the name as synonymous with thrash metal, might they be in danger of pleasing no one but themselves? Lars shrugged, admitted the whole subject irritated him ‘a lot’, insisting they would receive the recognition they needed from the people who mattered most – Metallica fans. Fuck the critics. ‘If you take the extremes on our new album, which to my mind would be “Damage, Inc.” and “Orion” – the amount of ground we cover is so big, so vast, it really pisses me off that anybody would want to stick us with one label. Yes, we do a few thrash songs but that’s not all we like to do. That’s by no means the only thing we’re capable of doing and doing fucking well. We’re not afraid to play a little slower sometimes, we’re not afraid to throw in melody or harmony, we’re not afraid to prove to people that we are a lot more musically competent than they might expect.’ Neither he nor the others, he claimed, had ever seen Metallica as epitomising the thrash movement anyway: ‘I accept that we had a lot to do with the way that whole scene took off. We were the first band to sound like that. But we never thought of ourselves as a “thrash band”. We were always an American band with British and European metal influences.’

Afterwards we all went out to dinner, the band, Music for Nations’ Gem Howard and me. There were no stars in the room, just soldiers. Least starry of all was James, a tall yet hunched presence who eyed me suspiciously, only finally coming out of his shell after several beers and vodka chasers. The only even vague concessions to image were their choices of T-shirts. James, a serial message-bearer, was wearing the same Pushead-designed T-shirt for the then totally unknown punk rockers The Misfits that he would later be pictured in on the back sleeve of
Master of Puppets
– right next to the picture of Cliff aiming his huge middle finger straight at the camera, not a trace of mirth on his poker face. It was the same at dinner. While Lars laughed so loud the people at the next table got up and moved to another one further away, James scowled and a clearly stoned Kirk seemed immersed in his own far-off world, Cliff kept his eyes on me when he knew I was looking and only spoke when I didn’t expect him to. Looking like he’d been born into a pair of faded Levi flares, Cliff was clearly a cool number, asked few questions, told no lies. But not remotely cold, just warming up nicely, thank you. I recall he had immaculate hair, long, past his shoulders but positively gleaming with cleanliness and good health. He may have liked to portray himself as a kind of neo-hippy throwback to an earlier, Woodstock-encrusted age, but Cliff Burton was clearly a meticulous person and no stranger to the mirror on the wall. When Gem and I finally escaped in a taxi, all four of them ran after us and tried to yank open the cab doors to stop us. For Gem and I, who had left our beds at six that morning in order to get to the airport in London in time to spend the day with the band in Copenhagen, the night was almost over. For Metallica, it was clear the party was only just getting started.