Metallica: Enter Night (38 page)

‘I was so in the dirt,’ said Newsted, speaking more than ten years later. ‘I was so disappointed when I heard the final mix. I basically blocked it out, like people do with shit. We were firing on all cylinders, and shit was happening. I was just rolling with it and going forward. What was I gonna do, say we gotta go remix it?’ There were, he said, ‘still weird feelings going on…the first time we’d been in the studio for a real Metallica album, and Cliff’s not there’. Working alone with assistant engineer Toby Wright, he had used the same bass set-up as he would for a gig: ‘There was no time taken about you place this microphone here, and this one sounds better than that…should you use a pick, should you use your fingers? Any of the things that I know now.’ Recording three or four songs in a day, ‘basically doubling James’ guitar parts’, he was in the studio alone for less than a week during the whole three-month period the rest of the band were working with Rasmussen. ‘Usually nowadays I’d take a day per song. That’s what I do on albums. But back then, I didn’t even know anything about that shit. Just played it and that was that, right?’

Mike Clink says the lack of bass was an issue even when he was working with them: ‘They weren’t leaving enough room…sonically, to fit the bass in. But that was their concept and I think that if Cliff had been there it might have been a bit different. But with the new member, I felt he didn’t have as much to say. I think he was just happy to be there, at that moment. I think Jason just said, “This is the way it is, let’s roll with it.”’ He adds, ‘It’s also the sound of the guitar. It takes up a lot of room in the sonic spectrum. But ultimately that was the decision of the band and the mixer.’ Rasmussen makes the same point about the mix. ‘I know for a fact, since I recorded it, that there’s
brilliant
bass-playing on that album.’ Like Clink, however, Flemming was not responsible for the mix. That task fell to the production team of Mike Thompson and Steven Barbiero, whose previous credits included Whitney Houston, Madonna, the Rolling Stones, Prince, Cinderella, Tesla – and Guns N’ Roses’
Appetite for Destruction
.

Mixing took place during May 1988, at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, where James and Lars sat perched over Thompson and Barbiero’s shoulders. Interviewed at the time by
Music & Sound Output
magazine, Lars’ and James’ comments certainly back up Clink’s and Rasmussen’s claims that they – and not the producers – were the real architects behind the sound on
Justice
. Asked how it differed from
Master
, Hetfield said: ‘Drier.’ He went on: ‘Everything’s way up front and there’s not a lot of ’verb or echo. We really went out of our way to make sure that what we put on the tape was what we wanted, so the mixing procedure would be as easy as possible.’ Both men complained that they didn’t want it to be like
Ride the Lightning
, where ‘Flemming was in a reverb daze’. More tellingly, asked what they had learned from the ‘upfront and raw’ sound of the
Garage Days
EP, Lars specifically mentioned ‘that mix’, with James elaborating: ‘We learned that the bass is too loud.’

‘And when is the bass too loud?’ Lars chirped in.

‘When you can hear it!’ they answered together, laughing.

Joey Vera, who’d turned down the chance to do the job Jason eventually got but who was genuinely close to James and Lars – and Cliff – says Jason was ‘more than capable’ but that he’d heard ‘James may have played the bass’ on much of
Justice
. He also dismisses the idea that it was part of the ongoing hazing process: ‘I’d be surprised if they did anything like that. It would be too malicious and too premeditated.’ Instead, he believes it may have been ‘this psychological way of them sort of hiding the fact that they were still recovering from what they went through [with Cliff’s death] and that they weren’t quite sure how to get out of it.’ Also, ‘They didn’t want any attention going away from the fact that they were ploughing ahead…and the way for them to do that, sonically, is to make the drums and the rhythm guitars the loudest thing you hear.’ He concluded, ‘When Cliff was gone they had to make it evident that, you know, the two of us is what you’re gonna hear…it was a way for them to sort of heal themselves. Like, you know, we need to be heard, this is how
we’re
gonna be doing it. They didn’t want to be distracted by who the new bass player was or how that role fit in sonically.’

Whatever the truth, by the time mixing had begun in Woodstock, Metallica was already back out on the road, on the US version of the Monsters of Rock festival: twenty-five dates at the biggest outdoor stadia in America, performing to upwards of 90,000 people a night; fourth on the bill below headliners Van Halen, the Scorpions and fellow Q Prime clients Dokken. I travelled with the band for the opening two dates of the tour in Florida, at the Miami Orangebowl and the Tampa Stadium. ‘This has got to be the easiest trip we’ve ever done,’ Lars laughingly told me. You could see what he meant. Although Metallica was on in the middle of the afternoon, they were the hot ‘break-out’ band of the tour and audiences were uniformly ecstatic. With just a forty-minute set to perform, the band also had an unusual amount of free time to fill. ‘I’ve been drinking since I woke up this morning,’ James announced with a belch before they went onstage in Tampa, at the start of the tour.

It wasn’t just the drinking they were up to now. ‘It was fucking great,’ Lars would later boast to
Rolling Stone
. ‘Girls knew we were part of the tour and wanted to fuck us, but at the same time we could blend in with the crowd…Like, “Who gives a shit? Let’s have another rum and Coke and go back in the audience and see what’s happening.”’ Which is exactly what they did in Tampa; photographer Ross Halfin and I walked to the very top tier of seats at the stadium with them, where they dropped their jeans and flashed the audience. The only one who wasn’t regularly drunk was Jason, still exulting in his outsider status, nervously smoking weed alone back in his hotel room, or in the company of groupies too young to grasp his lowly status; still counting his blessings for finding himself in such a privileged, financially settled position, still wondering if Metallica would ever really feel like his band too.

There was now a small group of what they called their ‘tough tarts’ at every show; girls waiting naked in the showers; girls in bikinis they’d given passes to the night before whose names they could no longer remember; girlfriends of boy fans offered to the band almost ritualistically. ‘I couldn’t figure out why all of a sudden I was handsome,’ said Kirk. ‘No one had ever treated me like that before in my life.’ Both Kirk and Lars were starting to use cocaine more regularly, too. Lars primarily, he said, because ‘it gave me another couple of hours’ drinking’; Kirk because it brought him out of his shell. And because he liked being out of his head; sitting there, stoned, gazing at horror movies, some on TV, some just playing out in front of him in real time in his hotel room.

The biggest drinker was still James, who would regularly polish off half a bottle of seventy-proof Jägermeister. He was also into the vodka, although his brand had improved: he now favoured Absolut. ‘That whole tour was a big fog for me,’ James later recalled. ‘It was bad coming back to some of those towns later, because there were a lot of dads and moms and husbands and boyfriends looking for me. Not good. People were hating me and I didn’t know why…’

It wasn’t just irate husbands and boyfriends that James was falling foul of. Alcohol brought out the dark, mouthy Mr Hyde to his more usual monosyllabic Dr Jekyll. On a flying visit to London that summer, he had revealed to
Kerrang!
designer Krusher Joule just how black his drinking could make him: ‘James and Lars had come to the office to discuss their next tour programme, which Geoff Barton was helping them with. Afterwards I took them for a friendly drink and we ended up at a pub round the corner from where I live in south London. By now of course we’re all pretty pissed but we were having a laugh. Then one of my next-door neighbours showed up, a lovely woman, a little bit older and very straight, Mrs Normal. I remember turning round to introduce her and there was Lars standing with his cock out, just looking at her. Anyway, I told him to put it away, she was a taken woman, and we went back to drinking. Later, after the pub closed, we were walking back to my flat across this park and James started going on about “people coming to our country and taking our jobs”. I said, “Hang on a minute, mate, you are descended from the people who came into that country and stole it…”’

This was not the kind of mission statement James was likely to take kindly to, especially not after an evening of hard drinking. ‘All I remember next,’ says Krusher, ‘is we were going at each other. We literally just kind of ran at each other and hit. And I got him down! Face first, and put him in a headlock. You know, once you’ve got a headlock on it’s a pretty fucking powerful wrestling hold. You just pull back and they’re like, “Whoa! Stop!” Lars was standing there, pissing himself laughing. Then I realised that okay, I’ve got him down but once I let him go he’s going to fucking kill me. So I was like, “Lars, help me here. We’ve got to negotiate. I’ll let go of James if he promises he won’t hit me and I promise I won’t talk any more about the racist shit.” So Lars talked to James, I let go of him, nothing else was said and we walked to the flat.’

‘Things were starting to happen right then and things became available,’ said James, looking back in 2009. ‘Women, parties, you name it. We got sucked into that…It was fun.’ He admitted that it wasn’t funny, though, when he got so drunk he became violent: ‘There’d be the happy stage. Then it would get ugly where the world is fucked and fuck you. I became…the clown, then the punk anarchist after that, wanting to smash everything and hurt people. I’d get into fights – sometimes with Lars. That’s how resentments would get released, pushing and shoving, throwing things at him. He wants to be the centre of attention all the time and that bothers me because I’m the same way. He’s out there charming people, and I’ll be intimidating so people will respect me that way.’

Meanwhile, the band’s reputation continued to grow with every appearance they made on the tour. When it became known that the Metallica T-shirt was selling more than any other bar the official event tee, even headliners Van Halen began to take notice, with singer Sammy Hagar making a big deal of coming over and spending ‘face time’ with them both nights I was there. Merchandising was increasingly where it was at for the rock business in the 1980s. Iron Maiden had become millionaires from profits on their merchandising long before their record sales; many American bands whose limited popularity outside the USA only allowed them to play a handful of shows in Europe or the UK could only afford to do so because of the phenomenal sales from their on-site merchandising operation. Gone were the days when the most money concert-goers could be expected to shell out for a show besides their ticket price was a tour programme. By 1988, the business of selling tour merchandise had become almost an exact science with the biggest artists selling over two hundred separate branded items at their shows. Giant merchandising companies such as Brockum in the USA and Bravado in the UK reckoned on selling between $25 and $50 per head, per show, organising their merchandising stands at concert venues so that the most expensive gear – tour jackets, programmes, posters and baseball caps – was situated by the doors, ready to grab the fans’ attention as they entered. Smaller, much less expensive items – the two-dollar badges and wristbands, stick-on tattoos and denim patches – would be positioned closer to the door of the actual concert hall. ‘The idea was you’d get the big ten- or twenty-dollar hit as they entered, all excited,’ says one former merchandising vendor, ‘then systematically take every last dollar they had so that by the time they were ready to find their seats, you got their last dollar or two. The idea was for them to leave without a penny in their pockets.’ In Japan, where fans were already used to handing over their credit cards for in-concert ‘merch’, you could make ten times your usual profits. There, the promoters would arrange for the fans to buy their ‘mementoes’ on their way out of the venue, erecting barriers that snaked towards the exits past a long line of stalls selling every conceivable type of officially branded tat. ‘In Japan, they figured on making $100 to $200 dollars per head, per concert-goer, sometimes more.’

Shrewd as ever, Lars and Mensch had taken note of how the most successful merchandising brands in rock built heavily on the element of collectability; how it was no longer enough to simply own a Tour ’88 shirt; that the smartest bands produced a new shirt for each new situation they found themselves in. Here the undoubted ‘kings of merch’ in the 1980s were Iron Maiden, who had their own in-house artist and designer, Derek Riggs, producing both their record sleeves and their most collectable T-shirts and related tour merchandise; his most famous creation that of Eddie, the phantasmagorical monster who adorned every Maiden single and album – and consequently every significant piece of official Maiden merch. ‘I liked the idea because it gave you great visual continuity,’ Maiden manager Rod Smallwood would tell me, ‘and it made the Maiden sleeves just stick out a bit more than the average sort of “could-be-anything” sort of sleeves most rock bands used then. And it became a very important part of Maiden’s image, in that way.’ Like Metallica, Iron Maiden did not do TV; could not be heard regularly on radio. ‘But because Eddie struck such a chord with the Maiden fans, we didn’t need to be. Wearing an Eddie T-shirt became like a statement: fuck radio, fuck TV, we’re not into that crap, we’re into Iron Maiden. And, of course, we’ve had a lot of fun with Eddie over the years, trying to find new and ever-more outrageous things for him to be and do. Sometimes the ideas come from Derek; usually, though, they either come from me or one of the band. But it can be anybody or anything that inspires us.’

A self-styled English eccentric and former art-school drop-out, Riggs produced thousands of images of Maiden’s monstrous mascot in whatever setting the band’s career took them: from the very Devil himself on 1983’s
Number of the Beast
album, to mummified Egyptian god on the 1985
Powerslave
sleeve, to laser-packing time-cop on 1986’s
Somewhere in Time
. From there it was a short step to having Eddie become the defining image on all their merch; an idea that quickly developed into a goldmine for them. The possibilities were endless: Maiden plays Hawaii? Well, how about a picture of Eddie on a surfboard? Maiden does New York? How about Eddie as King Kong? The fact that Eddie had also transmogrified into part of Maiden’s travelling stage show in the 1980s was also not lost on Metallica and Q Prime. With Metallica now planning for their first arena-headlining tour, Lars decided they would need their very own Derek Riggs; even their own Eddie, perhaps. The others did not disagree.