Metallica: Enter Night (6 page)

Still very much the new kid on the block, a high school guy hanging out with older-seeming dudes who held down regular jobs, it would have been easy for the novelty to wear off, to be worn down by the long drive each day after school from Newport Beach to where Hetfield and McGovney lived, where he knew at least one of them didn’t rate him at all. But this was Lars Ulrich, and now he’d finally found someone apparently willing to try and make his half-dream come even partly true he wasn’t to be thwarted. Besides, he told me, ‘after coming back from Europe I was on fuckin fire!’ Although he never discussed it, Lars was also determined to prove to his parents that he hadn’t made a bad move in dropping the tennis. That he had this music thing all figured out. ‘We weren’t careerist,’ he would insist, years later, but Lars Ulrich never did anything by halves. So when he claimed his ‘big hard-on’ at that stage merely extended to ‘playing fifteen New Wave of British Heavy Metal songs in LA clubs’ the fact that he and James would get together ‘every day at six’ where they ‘went for it’ like there was no tomorrow shows how determined both kids were to turn these jams into something much more solid and long term. ‘Playing those songs was like headbanging taken one step further,’ said Lars. An apt description for everything he would attempt to do over the subsequent four decades.

Nevertheless, Brian Slagel remembers Lars being ‘pretty frustrated’ during this period and that he and James eventually stopped jamming for a while. ‘It was going nowhere,’ says Slagel. ‘It was really hard for Lars because James was the only guy he met who had any sort of understanding of the kind of music that Lars was into. James was into some of the same stuff but they couldn’t really find anybody to jam with.’ There had been one positive development, however: the discovery of a name for the nascent band Lars and James were putatively putting together – Metallica. This, though, was not something either James or Lars could truly lay claim to. Indeed, the name ‘Metallica’ had been bandied about by another Anglophile friend of Lars’, met through the tape-trading scene: Ron Quintana. Ron had first gotten to know Bob Nalbandian and the crew after getting a letter published in an early issue of
Kerrang!
. Inspired both by
Kerrang!
and the smaller but in his eyes equally impressive success of Brian Slagel’s
New Heavy Metal Revue
fanzine, Quintana now looked to start his own like-minded American publication.

Ron Quintana recalls the night he showed Lars a list of names he had come up with as possible titles for his long-dreamed-of ‘super heavy metal magazine’. Lars had travelled up to San Francisco to stay with Ron during the lull with James and the two were ‘always throwing band and ’zine names around when we would hang out or go to local record stores’, Quintana says. Lars had previously shown Ron a list of prospective band names – ‘the worst, most generic, Americanised, like, car names. Hot-rod names, trans-am names’ – including Red Vette and Black Lightning. In return, Ron showed Lars a list he’d made of possible titles for his new mag, including
Metal Death
,
Metal Mania
and several other of a similar ilk. Also on the list Ron showed Lars was the name
Metallica
. Lars said, ‘Oh, that’s a cool name.’ Then, quick as a flash: ‘What are you gonna call your magazine, how about
Metal Mania
?’ Ron fell for it. ‘I thought it was funny,’ Quintana says now, ‘because I had started
Metal Mania
in August of ’81 and hadn’t talked to Lars in at least six months when he called and told me he’d named his band Metallica. I was already on issue number three and happy with the
Metal Mania
name. I didn’t even think Lars could play drums at that time!’ Plus, he says with a laugh, ‘I liked
Metal Mania
as a moniker better than
Metallica
.’ Until then Lars and James had compiled a list of over twenty possible names, including Nixon, Helldriver, Blitzer and – an early frontrunner, certainly as far as Lars was concerned – Thunderfuck. Once he’d left Ron’s that night with ‘Metallica’, though, the conversation was closed. Crazy kid all right, funny accent, clever as fuck.

It was through another friend of Lars’ that he got his next significant break. Since he’d begun working at Oz Records and running his fanzine, Brian Slagel had been seeing less of Lars, Bob, Patrick and the guys. He was also now helping to promote local metal shows at a small club called The Valley, and had even begun doing a few pieces on the local LA scene for
Sounds
. He was also now doing some work with local radio station KMET – an album-oriented rock station known to its many listeners as The Mighty Met – supplying records via the store for a weekly metal show hosted by DJ Jim Ladd (soon to be famous as the ‘fictional DJ’ on Roger Waters’ 1987
Radio K.A.O.S
. album and tour, among many other notable cameos he has made on disc and film over the years). The fact that Lars also ‘lived so far away’ meant Slagel ‘didn’t really see him as often’ any more. All that was about to change, however, when Brian had the idea of putting out his own independently produced compilation album, tentatively titled
The New Heavy Metal Revue Presents…Metal Massacre
. Inspired by the earlier
Metal for Muthas
, ‘What really motivated me,’ he says now, ‘was the fact that there were actually some good bands playing in LA and nobody knew or cared that they existed.’ Bands like another of his faves from those days called Exciter, featuring George Lynch on guitar, who would later find fame with the band Dokken. ‘I just loved that band,’ says Slagel, ‘and nothing ever happened with them – because nobody cared. That really bummed me out.’

A couple of years down the line, seeing the next generation of LA club bands like Mötley Crüe and Ratt, Slagel decided to do something about it. He went to some of the importers he worked with, the guys supplying records for the shop’s loyal metal clientele, and told them: ‘Hey, if I put together a compilation of local LA metal bands would you guys sell it? And they all said, “Sure.” All motivated by what happened with the NWOBHM scene,
Metal for Muthas
and those sorts of compilations. I thought it would be a cool thing to try and put something like that together for here in LA.’ At high school Slagel had worked part-time at Sears, a commission job selling typewriters and cameras, from which he’d been able to save a little money to ‘go to college at some point’. Now he put every penny of those savings into the
Metal Massacre
album, along with $800 borrowed from a kindly aunt, plus a little from his mother. John Kornarens also put in what he could, in exchange for ‘assistant producer’ credit. All the bands had to do was volunteer their music. Says Slagel, ‘I just went to all the bands and said if you can record something I can put this compilation album out, and they all said, “Sure, why not?” It was kind of the only exposure they were gonna get, you know?’ Even then, ‘I was barely able to scrape enough money to press twenty-five hundred copies.’ The 2,500 albums would cost him ‘a little over a dollar a unit, so maybe three or four thousand dollars total’. At a time when regular albums sold for $7.99 in normal stores,
Metal Massacre
would retail for just $5.50. ‘They probably cost about a dollar-fifty to make, then probably another fifty cents on top for shipping, then maybe we got three bucks, maybe $3.50 for them, then we had to pay the bands a little bit. So really it wasn’t a money-making venture. I didn’t really care about that. I just wanted to get exposure for all these bands in LA. I didn’t even think about starting a label or anything, this was more an offshoot of the magazine.’

With all the deals done with the bands ‘on a handshake deal because we had no money to pay for a lawyer or anything’, nothing was put into writing until a recently graduated lawyer named William Berrolm, who happened to have an office on the floor above Oz Records, offered to help Slagel draw up contracts for a cut rate $10 an hour. ‘I thought I could probably afford that, maybe. So he ended up doing some contracts and we went back to the bands to get them to sign off on something. He’s still our lawyer today,’ Slagel adds. (Berrolm would go on to represent artists of the stature of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Garbage, Nirvana producer Butch Vig and ‘a ton of big people’.)

When Lars Ulrich got to hear what his buddy Brian Slagel was now up to ‘[He] just called me up one day and said, “Hey, if I put together a band can I be on your compilation album?” I said, “Sure, no problem, why not?”’ The only issue, says Slagel, was that ‘Metallica didn’t exist, at that point’. Lars and James didn’t even get together to jam very often any more ‘because they couldn’t find anybody else to play with’. But when Lars heard about
Metal Massacre
, he decided he didn’t need a band. He just needed James to agree to help record what amounted to a demo tape. Weeks passed, though, before Brian heard any more from Lars. ‘I called him up and said we’re kind of coming down to the wire here on getting your song on the record, what’s the story? He said, “Give me a date and a time when I have to have it and I’ll make sure I get it [to you] by that time.”’ Everything went quiet again until the day came when Slagel and Kornarens were actually at Bijou Studios, mastering the disc. They had all but given up on Lars when suddenly, at around three that afternoon, the door burst open and there stood their crazy little pal with the funny accent – holding a cassette in his hand. Brian laughs as he recalls the scene. ‘They recorded the song on this little tiny Fostex recorder, like a little cassette recorder that had like four channels. It wasn’t really something you would record to put out. But that’s all they could find and afford. They did it basically the night before, just him and James. They had Lloyd Grant, James’ guitar teacher, do the lead.’

In order to get the recording onto the finished disc, it first had to be transferred onto a reel-to-reel tape, for which the studio charged $50. More problems. Recalls Slagel: ‘Lars doesn’t have fifty dollars,
I
don’t have fifty dollars. Luckily my friend John had the fifty dollars so he loaned us the fifty bucks so we could get the thing bumped up and mastered and finished.’ Brian says he doesn’t know if John ever got his fifty back. As Kornarens later recalled: ‘Lars suddenly starts to panic and he gets all frantic and he looked over at me and goes, “Dude, have you got fifty bucks?” And, you know, fifty dollars was a lot of money back then. I pull my wallet out and there was fifty-two dollars in there, which was a lot of money for me to be carrying around back in 1982, but I had it, so I gave it to Lars and he says, “You’re going to be known as John ‘50 Bucks’ Kornarens on every Metallica release in the future!” Anyway, he made it onto
Metal Massacre.’

‘Hit the Lights’, the track Lars and James had recorded together for Slagel’s compilation, although credited solely to Hetfield/Ulrich, may well have been, as others now suggest, an old Leather Charm number originally configured by Hugh Tanner. But what the pair did with it under their NWOBHM-influenced guise in Metallica took the song in a wholly new direction, right down to Hetfield’s cringe worthy, high-pitched, Diamond Head-style lead vocal. Mostly, though, it was about speed and power, and compared to every other track on
Metal Massacre
– which featured other, ostensibly far more developed groups such as Ratt, Malice and Black ’N Blue, all of whom would later land major record deals – Metallica’s ‘Hit the Lights’ stood out like a sore thumb. Although corny of lyric (‘When we start to rock / We never want to stop…’) and featuring a typically singsong, playground-dumb melody, ‘Hit the Lights’ exploded from the speakers in a blur of speed and noise, sounding like one long crescendo, making everything else on
Metal Massacre
sound horribly ponderous, irritatingly slow and immediately dated. With Ulrich on drums, Hetfield on guitar, bass and vocals, it also featured a guitar solo by the only other person to appear on the track and another significant bit-part figure in the early Metallica story: a tall, black, Jamaican-born guitarist named Lloyd Grant, who Lars and James had first auditioned for the band some months before. As Grant later recalled, ‘I answered an ad in
The Recycler
that read “Heavy Metal Guitarist Wanted for music much heavier than the LA scene”.’ Likened later by Lars to ‘a black Michael Schenker’, while Lloyd ‘could play leads like a motherfucker’, according to James, he didn’t make the cut mainly because ‘his rhythm stuff was never very tight’.

James did, however, consider Lloyd good enough to take a few guitar lessons from him. Just hours before Lars was to take in the cassette of ‘Hit the Lights’ to Brian Slagel, James decided the track could use a little oomph in the shape of a typically blistering Lloyd Grant guitar break. As they only had a four-track recorder – one track each for guitar, bass, drums and vocals – there was no room for overdubs. However, with the end of the song tailing off into nothingness, James suggested they ‘punch a lead [guitar solo] in on the vocal track’. And so they stopped off at Lloyd’s house on their way to Bijou Studio and ‘hooked up some little fuckin’ amp [through which Lloyd] just ripped through a solo. It was the first take.’ As James says, ‘It’s a fuckin’ great solo!’ So much so it would survive subsequent re-recordings of the track right up to the first Metallica album a year later.

According to Grant, he already knew the song from his failed audition with the band. ‘“Hit the Lights” was composed by James and one of his friends. I remember the day I went over to Lars’ house, he said, “Check out this song” and he played me “Hit the Lights”. We were both into that heavy kind of shit.’ When Lars later called Lloyd with the idea of him adding a guitar solo to the recording, Grant agreed, but told him he didn’t have time to ‘make it over to Ron McGovney’s house to do the recording so James and Lars brought the four-track over to my apartment and I did the solo on a little Montgomery Ward amp.’ Lars, he added, though ‘very easy to get along with’, was always ‘one hundred per cent intense with the music. He had very strong ideas and opinions.’ James, on the other hand, ‘was very quiet’.