Metallica: Enter Night (39 page)

Metallica found their own Derek Riggs in one of James’ skateboard pals: Pushead – real name: Brian Schroeder – who he had first met at a Venom concert in 1985. ‘He’d seen something I’d done for The Misfits,’ Pushead recalled for me, ‘and he asked if I could get him a T-shirt of it. I said, sure, no problem. Then he wore it on the back of the
Master of Puppets
album, and that’s when the whole Misfits cult thing took off.’ When Pushead moved from LA to San Francisco they met up again through the skateboarding scene. Working from his one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, surrounded by his collection of skulls (cow, monkey, alligator, human) the first thing Pushead did for the band was what became known as the ‘Damage, Inc.’ T-shirt: ‘James wanted something like an animal type thing – like a wild beast…[But] it didn’t work for me. So I went to a human skull and made the head a little bigger. James wanted fangs, so I drew them in, and he wanted the mallets, so I did that. Then they all came over and I showed it to them and they loved it.’

Next came the sleeve design for the
Cliff ’Em All
video: the four faces of the Burton-era line-up in suitably fearsome pose, arranged clockwise on a charcoal-grey background. As a fun piece it was just about acceptable. It was with his T-shirts, though, that Pushead’s designs really came into their own. Next came the now highly collectible ‘Crash Course in Brain Surgery’ T-shirt: a gruesomely amusing, typically skull-based example of classic Pushead splat. Now, with the 1988–89 world tour about to begin, they asked him to step up production, beginning with an illustration for the inside sleeve of the
Justice
album cover: a hand, with the word ‘f-e-a-r’ tattooed onto its fingers, holding a hammer onto which their four – just about identifiable – faces are drawn. It was also a Pushead illustration that adorned the cover of the official 1988–89 Damaged Justice world tour programme, a play on the album’s ‘blind justice’ sleeve: the Statue of Liberty as skeletal fiend, its scales wreathed in bandages, its sword lowered. They would also commission him to come up with sleeve designs for the two singles from the album: ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ and ‘One’. Mainly, Pushead was to concentrate on designs for the numerous merch items that would feature throughout every leg of the tour.

Drawing a great deal of his inspiration at that time from better-known 1980s comic book artists such as Kevin O’Neil, famous for his Torquemada series in the same groundbreaking British weekly,
2000AD
, that gave the world Judge Dredd, Pushead was also indebted, he confessed, to psychedelic Sixties poster legend, Rick Griffin, although he bridled at any suggestion that his own lurid designs may have been similarly drug-induced. ‘I’ve never taken drugs and drawn,’ he frowningly told me. ‘I’ve been straight since I was in high school. I don’t even drink coffee.’ Human skulls were what ‘inspire me the most’, he said. The only commission still missing from his portfolio, he noted somewhat sulkily, was for a full-bore Metallica album cover. ‘I’d love to, obviously,’ he said, ‘But they haven’t asked me yet.’ It would be another fifteen years before they did, his outlandish pictures considered simply too cartoonish for the increasingly serious-minded way Metallica came to view their albums, until, finally, in 2003, they came up with an album –
St. Anger
– so clearly trauma-induced that a Pushead design was actually deemed a palatable corrective. In the meantime, so cool was Metallica’s new Pushead-designed merch considered, that he quickly became the designer of choice for other huge rock names of the era such as Aerosmith and Mötley Crüe (his skulls-in-straightjacket T-shirt became the second most popular item of merchandise on the Crüe’s wildly successful 1989
Dr Feelgood
tour).

It was in New York at the end of June that Lars says he first realised how far the band had come since their previous American summer tour, with Ozzy, two years before. Hanging out after lunch with Cliff Burnstein, the manager had a treat in store for him. Suggesting they take a swing by the office of their booking agent, Marsha Vlasic at ICM, Lars was astounded when Marsha pulled out a tour schedule of dates provisionally booked for the band’s own arena-headlining tour later that year. ‘I look down at the first two weeks, and Indianapolis is there. Now, Indianapolis was always this joke between me and Cliff, about how in Indianapolis they just don’t get it. That was the barometer. Lo and be-fucking-hold, we go to Indianapolis, and there are nine thousand people there. I remember thinking, “Wow, maybe all those people in Middle America
will
get it.”’

There was a break in August, between the end of the Monsters of Rock tour and the start of Metallica’s own headline world tour. Lars flew with his wife Debbie to London where they stayed at Peter Mensch’s house, between brief visits to Debbie’s parents’ place in the Midlands. Lars also took the opportunity to do some hanging out backstage at that year’s British Monsters of Rock show at Donington, headlined by his old favourites Iron Maiden. Also on the bill were his new favourites Guns N’ Roses, who he would actually spend most of his time with, sharing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s with Slash – whose trademark top hat Lars was famously pictured wearing at various drunk intervals – and swapping war stories with their notoriously troubled singer Axl, whose white leather jacket with the Guns N’ Roses logo emblazoned across its back Lars was so taken with he later order a similar one for himself. (This was made to order by Brockum, the US merchandising company both bands shared, and the subject of much piss-taking from James and the others when it arrived.)

There was also one other band on the bill that Lars was more surreptitiously fascinated with: Megadeth. ‘I always got the impression that Lars was always wanting to see what Dave [Mustaine] was up to, and was kind of inquisitive and always intrigued by what Dave did,’ says ’Deth bassist David Ellefson now. ‘It seemed like Lars especially wanted to retain a friendship and maybe competitively kind of always know what Dave was up to.’ It was no surprise to either Ellefson or Mustaine then when Lars wandered over to their dressing room area backstage before they went on. High from his visit with Guns N’ Roses, Lars was already too out of it to pick up on the bad vibes emanating from the band. As Ellefson explains, ‘The whole group was just in dismay and disarray and dysfunction, because of [heroin] addiction.’

Both Ellefson and Mustaine had been junkies for over four years by then, during which time their ‘disease’, as Mustaine called it, had cost them a manager, girlfriends and several potentially great line-ups of Megadeth, whose career was, astonishingly, still then in its ascendency. ‘I started off using,’ Mustaine would tell me matter-of-factly, ‘then it turned into abuse and then into full-blown addiction. It got like I couldn’t see what was going on. I was powerless…When Dave [Ellefson] and I first hooked up together, the extent of our getting high was just beer and pot. But we were hanging out with these jazz players, and jazz is synonymous with drugs. And they’d be saying, “Dude, all the greats do heroin! Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, blah blah blah”. I was kind of fascinated by the thing of being a junkie too.’

At the time of the Donington ’88 show, Mustaine told me, ‘I was spending $500 a day…on that stuff.’ Having only just flown in for the show the day before, however, none of the band – with the possible exception of Mustaine – had been able to score. As a result, says Ellefson, they were all ‘really, really strung out’. He just about managed to ‘get through the show’. What made it worse, he says, is that they had reached that desperate stage as junkies where they were now lying to each other about who had smack and who didn’t. For all Ellefson knew, Mustaine had some but wasn’t telling him. Or maybe the whole band had somehow been able to get hold of something – and not told him, wanting to keep what little they had for themselves. Paranoia was rampant. ‘Yeah, absolutely, because at that point the heroin thing is very dark, is very deceptive, it’s very deep. It’s just evil. All the dishonesty…everything is complete dysfunction, everything is bad.’

Seemingly oblivious to all this, Lars felt welcomed inside the Megadeth dressing room and settled down to ‘chew the shit’ with his old buddy Dave. Mustaine, in a surprisingly good mood for a junkie allegedly out of gear, even invited Lars up onstage to join them on the encore, which he duly did, singing along on backing vocals to ‘Anarchy in the UK’. The crowd, grasping the significance of what was happening, dutifully cheered and played its part. Then the band and Lars staggered off back to the dressing room area, the Metallica drummer who had plotted his downfall with his arm around Dave Mustaine’s neck. I was also there that day and recall registering only mild surprise at this unexpected turn of events. Lars liked to hang out, everyone knew that. And maybe big bad Dave had finally forgiven him. Maybe…

I was more perturbed when, wandering around the backstage area an hour or so later, I spotted what I imagined to be some drunken reveller face down in the dirt, barely moving. Concerned at his lifeless state, I went over to see if perhaps he was in need of some help, only to find, when I managed to turn him over, that it was Lars. He got to his feet very unsteadily, grinning, though, as only the seriously stoned do when they’re feeling pleased with themselves. ‘Hey, Mick,’ he slurred, flinging his arms around my neck, ‘how ya doing?’ He started giggling. Wow, I thought, he must be really drunk. Then he pulled back and I noticed his eyes. They were utterly pinpricked, his face a mask of sweat.

‘What have you done?’ I asked, concerned.

‘Been hanging out,’ he giggled.

‘Are you okay? Do you need help? Can you even stand?’

‘I’m fine,’ he drooled. He walked off, swaying as he went.

Fortunately, Lars’ excesses were not confined specifically to drugs and alcohol. Still the same teenage nerd at heart that had misspent his youth collecting tapes and bootlegs when he should have been practising on the tennis court, Brian Tatler – delighted that Metallica had, yet again, decided to release a recording of an old Diamond Head song, ‘The Prince’, on the B-side of their forthcoming ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ single – recalls travelling down to London to hang out with Lars at his hotel, going to Shades to buy Metallica bootlegs (Lars already had over forty in his hotel room that he’d collected on tour). When Lars suggested they return to the Midlands together for Sunday lunch with Debbie’s parents, Brian assumed he meant they take the train. ‘Fuck that,’ said Lars, and simply hailed a taxi. The bill, which Lars paid in cash: £180. Plus sizeable tip. ‘He’s always been incredibly generous like that,’ says Tatler. That was the first time, though, he felt, that Lars had demonstrated any sign of rock star excess.

The fourth Metallica album…,
And Justice for All
, was finally released on 5 September, just as
Master of Puppets
was officially certified platinum.
Master
had taken eighteen months to sell its first million copies in America;
Justice
would take just nine weeks, peaking at Number Six, their highest US chart position yet. Reviews were uniformly positive, with
Kerrang!
summing up the general view when it concluded that the album ‘will finally put Metallica into the big leagues where they belong’. At record company level, however, behind closed doors there were serious concerns. Although the album would eventually match its American sales in Britain and Europe, it would take much longer to do so. Dave Thorne at Phonogram, who considered the production ‘appalling…particularly the lack of bass on it’, spent the first few weeks of its release defending it to ‘large numbers of opinionated people in the record company [who] were coming knocking on my door going, “This record sounds shit, what’s the matter with it?”’

Nevertheless, the album went straight into the UK chart, reaching Number Four, an unqualified commercial success for an act that had never broken the Top Forty with an album before. The British and European legs of the Damaged Justice tour were also a sell-out, beginning in Budapest a week after the album’s release. The tour reached Britain in October, where they sold out three nights at the Hammersmith Odeon. The big surprise of the tour was the band’s new stage show, their first attempt at anything elaborate, featuring a twenty-foot replica of the album sleeve’s blindfolded and bound Statue of Liberty – nicknamed Edna after Iron Maiden’s Eddie – which collapsed melodramatically at the endless climax to ‘…And Justice for All’ each night, its head falling off as if guillotined. This was the era of the heavy metal pantomime as acceptable stage spectacle – led by Maiden’s ubiquitous Eddie figure, now brought to life for the encores each night, and Dio’s even sillier dragon (nicknamed Denzel), which singer Ronnie James Dio would ‘do battle’ with onstage – and in this context Edna’s plummet to disgrace every night was almost dignified by comparison. Nevertheless, it could have its comic, Spinal Tap-esque moments, too, on the nights when the statue simply refused to collapse or just its head would roll off the stage into the audience, or half an arm would fall off, swaying gently before toppling onto the drum riser.

These were minor concerns, however; day-to-day cares easily overcome in the bar of the hotel every night. The band was already thinking ahead. Taking a wrong turn towards a dressing room one night in Newcastle, I found Lars and Mensch huddled together over a cassette player, scrolling back and forth through the seven-minute-plus ‘One’ looking for places where they might be able to edit it down to a length suitable for US radio to play. Seeing immediately that I had intruded on a sensitive moment – certainly for Lars, for whom the concept of editing album-length tracks into radio-friendly singles had always been antithetical to the Metallica philosophy – I accepted Mensch’s suggestion to ‘get the hell out’ and closed the door behind me. In retrospect, though, it was exactly this sort of pragmatism that would soon separate Metallica from the likes of Iron Maiden and Motörhead; groups they had grown up worshipping at the altars of but were now poised to leave far behind – on every level. It was no longer enough for Lars Ulrich to be in ‘the fastest, heaviest’ band in America, he now had his sights set on a much larger glittering prize. Not just best, but biggest.