Metallica: Enter Night (29 page)

Although they continued to be lumped in together in the media, from here on in, thrash’s Big Four would take their own very different paths, while still attracting an overlapping audience. The hardcore thrashers would stay with Slayer. ‘We heard
Master of Puppets
and me and my friends didn’t really like it, to be frank,’ recalls Machine Head frontman Robb Flynn. ‘We were wanting thrash songs, and we got a couple. But there was also acoustics and lots of harmonies, and we were like, “Whoa, what’s this? I’m not cool with this,” and [we] kind of abandoned Metallica. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve gone back to that record in my life since but at the time we were sixteen. I was worshipping
Reign in Blood
, and other bands had come along that were faster and heavier and maybe scarier.’ Malcolm Dome concurs: ‘People were now starting to look at Metallica as
significant
, rather than just really good. Their career was going places. They’d outgrown thrash and there was very much a sense that [
Master
] was an important record. It was a leap forward for Metallica and one of the most crucial records of the era for metal. Metallica were now discussed in the same context as, say, Iron Maiden, much more mainstream, and Slayer had become the kings of thrash.’ Even Xavier Russell, who had done so much to spread the Metallica message early on, now switched his critical allegiance to Slayer, describing
Reign in Blood
as ‘such a defining moment’ for the development of thrash, ‘mainly because of the production. Metallica’s [early] albums had always suffered slightly on the production. But when I heard
Reign in Blood
, I said, “Sorry Lars, but this is the dog’s bollocks, mate.”’

James Hetfield did not agree, putting up a spirited defence of Metallica’s attitude in a typically thrash-curious article in the otherwise utterly indifferent
i-D
magazine. ‘When people first started copying us it was a real compliment, but now we have to get away from the speed metal tag, ’cos all these bands have jumped on the bandwagon. The NWOBHM bands each had their own sound and feeling, but you can’t tell the difference between most of the new thrash bands. It’s fucked. So you’re the fastest band in the world…so what? Your songs suck.’ Speaking to me around the same time, Lars went further, insisting the very reason
Master of Puppets
got so much attention was entirely based on the fact that it wasn’t a thrash album. ‘We wanted to make an album that left all that scene behind; something we took time over and gave our best shot. Not something with a label.’ Interestingly, Gary Holt of Exodus, one of the bands Metallica was now being unfavourably compared to by hardcore thrash fans, says he agreed. It wasn’t to do with who was the baddest thrash outfit, he says, it was simply down to the songs: ‘Metallica made, in my opinion, probably the greatest metal album of all time in
Master of Puppets
. I don’t even want to call it a thrash album, even though it’s got plenty of that. It’s just a great, great record. They had a jump-start and they ran, you know, they worked really hard on their craft and they succeeded, and all credit due to them, you know?’

‘What it all came down to,’ said Lars, when we spoke in 2009, ‘was the element of variety. It was like, after you’ve written “Fight Fire with Fire” [and] “Battery”…what else are you gonna do? By repeating it you run the risk of watering it down, because they’ll never be as good as what you’ve already done. Or you have to go somewhere else and try something else. And for us, we had to go somewhere else and try something else, because there was too much other stuff that turned us on.’ As he pointed out, ‘I’ve heard in interviews that Kerry King has a very musical broad taste, and Scott Ian and all these guys. But we…just…went for it. And I’m not saying that in a self-congratulatory way but we sort of had a little of the devil-may-care attitude. Because I think we pretty early on said listen, we’re Metallica, we do what we do, and off we go now, we’re gonna try all these different things and have fun on all these different levels.’ Determined not to be ‘boxed in by the one-dimensionality of the thrash label’ they had braced themselves for ‘a fucking uproar in the thrash community about the sell-outs and the acoustic guitars and all that. But we had to go on that path because that was the truth; that was our truth. The sell-out would have been not to do it because then we would have bullshitted ourselves and bullshitted our fans, and that wouldn’t be right.’

Master of Puppets
would also, symbolically, become the album that defined Metallica’s philosophy from now on. Already so far ahead of the game in terms of whatever Slayer or Megadeth and Anthrax might be doing, far from competing for the thrash crown, Metallica had its sights set on the same mainstream rock audience that would make Iron Maiden’s
Somewhere in Time
, also released in 1986, and Ozzy Osbourne’s
The Ultimate Sin
, released the same month as
Master of Puppets
, the highest American-charting albums to date of both respective artists’ careers. Far from being the year of thrash, the biggest-selling rock record of 1986 was Bon Jovi’s
Slippery When Wet
, an album that epitomised the safe-as-milk, art-for-art’s-sake, hits-for-fuck’s-sake Reaganomic rock of the era more perfectly than any other. While Metallica weren’t looking to sell their music to exactly the same audience, in Lars Ulrich they had at least one member who recognised they were in exactly the same business and on that level at least – making chart albums, selling out tours, building up as broad a fan base as possible – Metallica certainly did want to compete.

In America the spread of coverage for
Master of Puppets
in the print media stretched as far as generally good regional newspaper reviews and the to-be-expected smattering of raves in the metal-specific rock magazines such as
Faces
and
Hit Parader
. But the heavyweight mainstream magazines like
Rolling Stone
still kept their distance, except in the context of a general overview of the rapidly ripening thrash culture. Most gallingly, Metallica found it all but impossible to gain a foothold even in the most specialist areas of FM rock radio. With no cool video to help spread the word via MTV either, the band would have to rely on promoting their album the old-fashioned way: by simply getting out there and touring. Or as Kirk put it, ‘just go on the road and tour until we dropped, which is what we literally did’. Here they did get an important leg-up, though, thanks again to the impeccable connections of Q Prime, who were able to buy them onto Ozzy Osbourne’s mammoth summer tour.

‘That was a real break for us,’ Lars admitted. ‘At the time, Ozzy was perceived as one of the most controversial metal stars in the US – he drew a really extreme type of crowd – which suited us down to the ground, because here we were as this even more extreme up-and-coming metal band that Ozzy was giving his kind of seal of approval to by taking out on tour with him.’ Ozzy later told me he’d never even heard of Metallica when his wife and manager Sharon first informed him who his new tour mates would be. ‘I used to walk by their trailer backstage and think they were taking the piss,’ he said, ‘’cos all you could hear was Black Sabbath blasting out of the windows. That and all the dope smoke.’ Far from trying to get a rise out of the star of the show, the band – especially Lars and Cliff, both long-term Ozzy-era Sabbath fans – simply could not believe their luck. ‘We were definitely in awe of him,’ said Lars. ‘Ozzy was a fucking legend…but by the end of it we’d had some good times with him.’ And so they had. Despite a recent much-publicised spell drying out at the Betty Ford Clinic, these were still very much Ozzy’s wild years and the Metallica trailer became a more frequent stopover for him as the tour progressed and he realised it was often a good place to get a drink and a smoke – and anything else he fancied – away from the disapproving gaze of Sharon.

Ozzy’s audience also quickly took to the band. ‘That was really the tell-tale,’ says Bobby Schneider. ‘I mean, I saw it, I guess, when I was in Europe. I saw the fanatic reaction and they were selling tickets but they were still two-thousand-seaters. But when they opened for Ozzy, that’s when the writing really was on the wall.’ He says that at some shows Metallica were now starting to sell almost as much merchandising as Ozzy – an indication of rising success in the American music business often more significant than record sales. As Sharon Osbourne once told me, ‘You can have a hit record in America and it won’t mean shit when you go out on the road, especially in the rock market. The crowd that buys tickets for the show won’t like you unless you really deliver, and a really good sign of that is how many of them want to buy or wear your T-shirt.’ According to Schneider, by tour’s end there were almost as many people in the crowd wearing Metallica shirts as Ozzy shirts. Crowd reaction ‘was just phenomenal. Yet it was still a little bit underground. I don’t even think they realised. And that was part of the beauty of it, actually. They were just kids out there banging it. I think they’d have been happy playing a club in front of five hundred people as they were in an arena playing in front of fifteen thousand people. Heads had not grown at all, whatsoever. There were very few demands, no rock stars. Everybody was close.’

Along with the success of the tour came increased album sales. By tour’s end in August – more than fifty shows opening for Ozzy, discovering what it meant to perform to tens of thousands of people in hockey arenas, convention centres, outdoor ‘sheds’ and coliseums, interspersed with a dozen or so smaller theatre and fairground shows headlining in their own right –
Master of Puppets
had sold over 500,000 copies, giving the band their first gold record, and taking Metallica into the US Top Thirty for the first time, peaking at Number Twenty-Nine. It would eventually spend seventy-two weeks on the chart. A quarter of a century later, it has now sold almost seven million copies in America, and almost as many more around the rest of the world. The Ozzy/Metallica tour had been the second-biggest ticket-selling draw on the US circuit that summer (only the Aerosmith/Ted Nugent tour out-grossed them). Once again, although it may not have been so obvious to the thrash fans, Metallica were leaving behind a trail for others to follow, helping to establish a new pecking order in mainstream American rock; a sea change that would result, over the next couple of years, in Slayer opening for Judas Priest, Anthrax supporting Kiss, and Megadeth doing the honours for Iron Maiden. All of them were hoping for the same knock-on effect on their careers the Ozzy slot had given Metallica.

‘I never expected it to be the success it turned out to be,’ said Kirk. Compared to what else was going on in the American album charts,
Master
‘was a huge orange among the bunch of apples’. He said he was ‘stunned’ when it went gold. Until then he had thought: ‘Maybe people just don’t understand us. Maybe we’re just doing something that’s going over people’s heads. But as we went on that Ozzy tour we converted a lot of people, night by night. And it gave us a lot of hope just to carry on. Suddenly we were selling albums and a lot of it had to do with just going out there and playing our asses off, putting on a great show, just bringing the music to the people in that way. Because radio just wasn’t having us.’ Kirk recalled a meeting on the back of the tour bus when Cliff Burnstein informed them they were about to have their first gold album. ‘He said something really profound. He said, “You guys will be able to put down payments on houses and I’m just really proud of you.” And the first thing that Cliff said was, “I wanna house where I can shoot my gun that shoots knives!” That was like a typical Cliff Burton thing to say…’

Not everybody was impressed, of course. A
Newsweek
reporter covering the tour described Metallica, variously, as, ‘ugly’, ‘smelly’ and ‘obnoxious’, concluding, ‘I hate them. But you can’t deny their success.’ Perhaps he was just thinking of Lars, who had taken to announcing proudly to anyone that would listen: ‘I haven’t had a shower for three days, man.’ His theory for this: ‘I think it’s got something to do with success; the
more
successful you are the
less
you feel like washing.’ Only James was able to remind Lars he had always been like that. But then those days suddenly seemed very far off indeed, with Lars now complaining in the UK press of the ‘four thousand [fans] surrounding the tour bus’ each night on tour. ‘The demand on your time increases enormously,’ he observed earnestly. It was everything he had dreamed of since he was a nine-year-old kid listening to
Fireball
by Deep Purple. Metallica also now felt the need to check into hotels under pseudonyms. As Lars pointed out, ‘If the fans have access to you all the time then you’ll be constantly disturbed at any hour by people.’ He certainly hoped so anyway.

Fortunately, Cliff was there to stop Lars – and everyone else – from going too far up their own arses, constantly asking: ‘What’s real to you?’ Kirk recalled how ‘Cliff had a lot of integrity, and his way of expressing that integrity was in one stock sentence which I still use to this day, and it was: “I don’t give a fuck.” He really just cared about the music and the integrity behind the music. He was just very, very real. I don’t know if he knew somehow that his time was limited but he really lived it like it was his last day, because he just wouldn’t settle for anything other than what he believed in. And that taught me a lot. To this day there are things…situations that I’m going through…I can just picture Cliff saying, “What’s real to you? What’s real to us in this situation? What really matters?” And he would go through a bunch of points that didn’t really matter. He would name them off and at the end of each one he’d say: “I don’t give a fuck!” He was a very, very strong guy. Stubborn at times, and because of that he and I would clash sometimes. But we really were just bros and he was a big influence on all of us.’

The only real blot on the horizon occurred when James badly broke his left wrist in a skateboarding accident, backstage before a show in Adamsville on 26 June. The show had to be cancelled and for the rest of the tour James was forced to perform without a guitar, his arm in a sling. Fortunately, Kirk’s guitar roadie for the tour was John Marshall of Seattle band Metal Church, who agreed to stand in on rhythm guitar until Hetfield’s wrist healed enough for him to play again. Nevertheless, when they arrived back in London during the first week of September, to get ready for the start of what would be their first full-scale British tour, they did so in incredibly high spirits. James’ wrist was still in plaster when the tour began on 10 September at St David’s Hall in Cardiff but the band knew this was their time.
Master of Puppets
had sold as many copies for MFN in Europe as it had in the USA, reaching Number Forty-One in the UK charts, and not even an inspired performance from Anthrax – thrilled to be there as support on what would also be their UK touring debut – could put a dent in their confidence as the band put on a stunning two-hour show. ‘This was still basically the set they would have done in a club,’ recalls Malcolm Dome. ‘No big stage shows like there would be in years to come. They had a huge backdrop of the
Master of Puppets
album sleeve, but other than that they just came out and blasted away. Just brilliant, street-level rock.’