Metallica: Enter Night (5 page)

Already a well-established loner at high school, like Lars Ulrich it was music that would finally bring James Hetfield into contact with other similarly obsessed classroom loners such as Ron McGovney, who later become the first bass player in Metallica. A fellow pupil at East Middle School, McGovney recalls meeting Hetfield in music class, drawn to him as ‘the only guy in the class who could play guitar’. Like James, Ron didn’t belong to any of the established school cliques. ‘There was the cheerleaders, the jocks, the marching band people.’ James and Ron ended up with other ‘laggers’ like their buddies Dave Marrs and Jim Keshil, ‘hanging around without any real social group’. Ron wasn’t solely into rock like James. He was ‘an Elvis freak’ who was ‘devastated’ when Presley died. Instead, he and James found common ground in the music of Led Zeppelin and ZZ Top, Foreigner and Boston. Dave and Jim were more like James; they were heavily into Kiss and Aerosmith. The odd man out, Ron eventually came round to the others’ way of thinking, bonding with them over British proto-metal acts such as UFO. As a result, Ron started having lessons on the acoustic guitar. ‘I knew nothing about bass,’ he recalls. He just wanted to learn how to play ‘Stairway to Heaven’. When, later that high school year, Hetfield started hanging out with two brothers named Ron and Rich Valoz, who played bass and drums respectively, and who then teamed up with another guitar-playing pupil named Jim Arnold, McGovney offered to roadie for them. The band called itself Obsession and like all high school bands they concentrated on cover versions of songs by their favourite artists. In this instance, that meant the easiest-to-play material by Black Sabbath (‘Never Say Die’), Led Zeppelin (‘Rock and Roll’), UFO (‘Lights Out’) and Deep Purple (‘Highway Star’). All three frontline members would take turns singing, Jim Arnold on the Zeppelin stuff, Ron Valoz on ‘Purple Haze’. James would be the UFO guy, tackling hard-line anthems like ‘Doctor, Doctor’ and ‘Lights Out’.

After a prolonged period rehearsing at the Valoz brothers’ parents’ house in nearby Downey, the new outfit eventually did the occasional gig: backyard ‘keg parties’, playing for free beer and the chance to show off. Mainly, though, they played every Friday and Saturday night at the Valoz brothers’ place. McGovney remembers the brothers as ‘electrical geniuses’ who had ‘wired up lights’ in the loft they built in their parents’ garage: ‘Dave Marrs and I would sit up there and work the control panel doing the lights, strobes and stuff.’ It was ‘this whole show in a tiny garage’. ‘We’d do Thin Lizzy,’ James told me. ‘We’d do like some Robin Trower…bands of the time that were somewhat heavy.’ James finally bailed out on Obsession, he said, when ‘I had brought an original song to play and none of them liked it so that’s when I basically kind of said goodbye to them. Because I wanted to start writing some songs and they weren’t interested in that.’ With James went Jim Arnold, joined by his brother Chris, to form another short-lived outfit called Syrinx. ‘All they played was Rush covers,’ McGovney recalled. ‘That didn’t last long.’

All the music came to an abrupt end, though, when James’ mother died agonisingly slowly of cancer, in 1980, after refusing treatment and even painkillers until right at the very end, when it was already too late. With James and Deanna forced to move in with their stepbrother, David – ten years older than James and now married and living in his own house twenty miles away in Brea, where he worked as an accountant – to begin with James would still make the twenty-mile trek back to Downey for rehearsals with Syrinx. That soon petered out as the implications of his mother’s death started to sink in and a different sort of gloom descended. James also broke up with his first semi-serious girlfriend. Nothing, it seemed, would ever go right again. Unruly as ever, Deanna was soon ejected from Dave’s – preferring to track down her father and join him. James, who ‘wanted nothing to do with’ his father, stayed put, seeing his parents’ divorce as the final spur to his mother’s illness. As he told
Playboy
in 2001: ‘My mom worried a lot, and that made her sick. She hid it from us. All of a sudden, she’s in the hospital. Then all of a sudden, she’s gone.’ Typically, tight-lipped James kept the devastating news of his mother’s death all to himself. ‘We had no idea,’ McGovney later recalled. ‘He was gone for like ten days and we had thought he went on vacation. When he told us that his mom had just died, we were stunned.’ According to her Christian Science beliefs, there had been no funeral for Cynthia, nor any designated grieving period. No time, as James later put it, ‘where you’re able to cry and get support. It was just: “Okay, the shell is dead, the spirit’s gone, and move on in life.”’

In Brea, James enrolled at Olinda High School, where he hooked up for a time with an aspiring drummer named Jim Mulligan and yet another guitarist, named Hugh Tanner, who he approached after seeing him carrying a Flying V into school one day. They called the nascent band Phantom Lord, although it never quite got out of the rehearsal stage, mainly due to the fact that they didn’t have a bass player. In desperation, James turned to Ron McGovney. Ron had never seen himself as a bass player, didn’t even own a bass. But James insisted it would be easy enough and that he’d show him the basic chords. McGovney reluctantly acquiesced, renting a bass from Downey Music Center, and the four-piece began practising together at a garage at Ron’s parents’ place. This was a shift in scene that also precipitated James suddenly feeling brave enough to move out of his stepbrother’s house in Brea and into Ron’s place back in Downey, taking a job as a janitor to pay his way – the first of a succession of menial jobs that would occupy him over the next couple of years. ‘My parents had a main house with three rental houses in the back,’ McGovney says now. ‘The property was going to be bulldozed to build a freeway. My parents let James and me live in the middle house rent-free. We converted the garage into our rehearsal studio.’ Having left high school, they both had a little money coming in now too. ‘I worked at my parents’ truck repair shop during the day,’ recalls Ron. James, meanwhile, had now gotten a job in ‘a sticker factory’ called Santa Fe Springs. They used their first month’s salaries to insulate the garage against noise, putting up drywall, while James painted the rafters black and the ceiling silver. Along with white walls and red carpet, Phantom Lord suddenly had a space to call their own and build from.

In the final entry in his high school yearbook, under ‘plans’, Hetfield wrote: ‘Play music. Get rich.’ As with most young bands, however, Phantom Lord splintered before it had even played a gig, signalled by the departure of Hugh Tanner, a decent guitar player but one who now had his eye on a career in music management. Undeterred, the others simply stuck an ad for a guitarist in the local music free-sheet
The Recycler
. Enter, albeit briefly, Troy James, along with a change in musical direction towards what McGovney describes now as ‘a glam thing’. It was still an all-American rock sound, but now leaning more towards the kind of flashy, chorus-heavy mien soon to be popularised by Sunset Strip archetypes like Mötley Crüe and Quiet Riot, both then making names for themselves on the Hollywood club scene, and like-minded, fully made-up British outfits such as Girl (fronted by future Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen and L.A. Guns frontman Phil Lewis), whose song ‘Hollywood Tease’ the new band would cover. They even had a new name to go with the new sound: Leather Charm. Hard though it is now to imagine gruff James Hetfield trying to pass himself off as a pouting glam-rock singer, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the new direction, even dropping guitar to concentrate on becoming a full-on frontman. It was also in Leather Charm that Hetfield came up with his first attempts at performing original songs, three of which, in reconfigured form, would eventually be recorded two years later for the first Metallica album: a prototype of ‘Hit the Lights’, which Ron McGovney later claimed Hugh Tanner came up with most of; and two Charm numbers James had more of a hand in, ‘Handsome Ransom’ and ‘Let’s Go Rock ’n’ Roll’, an improved and much speeded-up amalgam of which later became the Metallica epic, ‘No Remorse’.

Once again, however, the new band had only managed a couple of appearances at friends’ backyard parties when it fell apart. This time it was Mulligan who jumped first, preferring to take up the offer of a more challenging spot in another local outfit that specialised in Rush covers. At this point Troy James also quit, leaving James and Ron alone again in their silver and black garage. To try and help out, Hugh Tanner told them about an ad he’d seen in
The Recycler
: ‘Drummer looking for other metal musicians to jam with. Tygers of Pan Tang, Diamond Head and Iron Maiden’. It was the mention of Iron Maiden that had gotten his attention. None of the Leather Charm guys knew as much about the NWOBHM as Lars Ulrich – who did? But, lately, they had taken to including a version of Maiden’s ‘Remember Tomorrow’ in their set. James and Ron, however, were apathetic about the ad. Nothing had gone right lately, why should this? Hating to see them so down, Hugh offered to reply to the ad himself and set up a meet for them with the guy who’d placed the ad – some kid with a funny accent from Newport Beach called Lars – at a local rehearsal studio he’d booked under the pretext of recording a demo, and which James later claimed they ‘stiffed’ Lars on the bill for. Ron, never completely convinced about trying to make it as a bass player, was now concentrating more on a possible career as a rock photographer, so didn’t even bother to turn up to that first meeting with Lars. Not that it mattered. Neither James nor Hugh had anything good to say about the encounter afterwards. The kid was ‘weird’ and ‘smelled funny’. He couldn’t even really play drums. The whole thing was really a waste of time. ‘We ate McDonald’s, he ate herring’, was how James would summarise that first meeting twenty years later. Lars was simply ‘from a different world. His father was famous. He was very well off. A rich, only child. Spoiled – that’s why he’s got his mouth. He knows what he wants, he goes for it and he’s gotten it his whole life.’

The ill feeling, however, wasn’t entirely mutual. One of the first things Lars did, in fact, after returning home from his summer jaunt to Europe was call up James and invite him round to his house. James acted aloof, like he didn’t even remember who Lars was, giving him the ‘stay-the-fuck-away-from-me’ face. Shrewdly, though, Lars felt James might be less hostile to the notion of forming a ‘jam band’ with him, overlooking for the time being Lars’ obvious drawbacks as a drummer, if he had a better idea of who it was exactly he was dealing with. At the very least they could kick back and play some records together. Sure enough, the first time James visited Lars’ parents’ house his attitude instantly changed. ‘I would spend days just going through Lars’ record collection. He introduced me to a lot of different music.’ James, who ‘could afford maybe one record a week’, would be flabbergasted as Lars ‘would come back from the store with twenty!’ As Lars would later tell me, ‘When I came back to America in October of ’81 I was kind of energised from hanging out in Europe and then I called up James Hetfield because I thought there was something interesting about him and he seemed like he was pretty into the same stuff I was into.’ After such a stale first meeting, though, I wondered what had prompted him to persist with trying to get to know the taciturn would-be frontman. They were obviously quite different as people. ‘No shit!’ he snorted. ‘Absolutely.’ What was it then that intrigued Lars enough to try again? Initially, he said, it was because James was the only other person he’d found who might be interested in forming a band that played NWOBHM-type music ‘rather than copy Van Halen’. On a deeper level, he sensed something else, too. ‘Even though I didn’t spend a lot of time rebelling against a lot of things because my parents were too cool to rebel against, I spent a lot of time by myself immersed in the music world. And James spent a lot of time by himself and so on, so the one thing we share, even though we come from two different worlds, and two different cultures, is we are both loners. And in each other we found something that just connected with something deeper.’ He went on: ‘It was very difficult for me to find anything that I could relate to in Southern California. That’s why me and James became such good friends because we both sort of had social issues,’ he chuckled self-consciously. ‘Of a different kind but…’ He shrugged and looked away.

For James, that connection would not be manifest until later in his relationship with his new buddy, when Metallica began to assume the mantle of ‘family’ for him. First and foremost, it was simply about the music, he insisted. Yet the first time he went to Lars’ parents’ house he was deeply impressed by more than just the collection of records. The vibe was so different from his own former family home, where outsiders were rare and then only occasionally made to feel welcome, unless they shared the same religious beliefs, which would be quickly and decisively established. ‘I was searching for people that I could identify with,’ said James. ‘I couldn’t really identify too much with my family and, basically, as a child it disintegrated right in front of my eyes. There’s a part of me that craves family and another part of me that just can’t stand people.’ In Lars’ house, all were welcome, differences celebrated, individualism prized. And in Lars’ bedroom there was a whole wall of records, most by groups James had never even heard of. The next time he visited this Aladdin’s cave of NWOBHM treasure, he brought his tape recorder, filling cassette after cassette with the songs of Trespass, Witchfinder General, Silverwing, Venom, Motörhead, Saxon, Samson…it seemed never-ending. ‘I bombarded James with all this new British stuff,’ Lars said, ‘and soon he was sold on getting something together that would stand out in the ocean of mediocrity.’

Brian Slagel recalls hooking up with Lars not long after he’d returned from Europe. ‘He had a bunch of albums and, you know, I wanted to hear the stories, hanging out with [Diamond Head] and all this other stuff. I was insanely jealous, of course, but it was fascinating that he was able to do it.’ Before the trip to Europe ‘we were just kind of crazy kids running around. But when [Lars] came back he definitely was a little bit different. You could tell that he was so into being with the band and seeing their lives it gave him much more motivation to try to start [his own] band. That’s when he was really practising, playing drums a lot and trying to find people to play with. It really solidified for him after he came back from that trip.’ James had also been giving his future a great deal of thought while Lars was away in Europe, coming to the decision that he would continue as he had in Leather Charm, principally as a singer. Now, with only a drummer to jam with, he reluctantly picked up the guitar again. All they lacked initially was a bass player: inevitably, James suggested Ron McGovney, an idea which seemed to make sense to everybody – except for Ron, who didn’t fancy the new partnership’s chances at all. ‘When he and Lars first jammed, I thought Lars was the worst drummer I had ever heard in my life,’ Ron would later tell Bob Nalbandian. ‘He couldn’t keep a beat, and compared to [Leather Charm drummer Jim] Mulligan, he just couldn’t play. So I told James, “This guy sucks, dude.”’ Even after Lars started coming over regularly, Ron remained unconvinced. ‘I would watch him and James jam together, and it got better and better but I still didn’t feel like getting back into it.’