Metallica: Enter Night (7 page)

Although it would be some time before initial pressings of
Metal Massacre
finally became available, in June 1982, now they had a tape to play people, even if it was only of a notional band, Lars and James became re-energised in their pursuit of making Metallica a flesh-and-bones reality. As Brian Slagel says, ‘The
Metal Massacre
album made them a band and gave them something to do.’ Unlike now, where something like that would have first seen the light of day on a MySpace page, ‘At that point, for what it was worth, being on an album meant something to people.’ Still unable to persuade Ron McGovney to play the bass, for a short time they recruited ‘a dude with black hair’ whose name, they say, none of them can now remember, and who didn’t really fit the bill but was deemed better than nothing – although only just, apparently, as they ousted him soon afterwards. At this point, James finally wore Ron down. ‘My musical contribution to Metallica was very limited,’ McGovney says now. Unlike Leather Charm, where Ron had ‘felt more of a team vibe with James’, in Metallica he simply ‘played what James wanted me to play. Sometimes he would take my bass and play the song, and I would just copy what he did.’ From the word go, Metallica was always, he says, ‘James and Lars’ band’. To begin with, he says, ‘We played a lot of cover songs, so both of us were just copying others’ work.’ Even ‘Hit the Lights’ ‘was a Leather Charm song’ that James had ‘brought with him to Metallica’. Practising in the garage he shared with James, he insists that Metallica was ‘just a hobby for me just like dirt bike riding or going to watch bands in Hollywood clubs’.

Where Ron’s motivations lay was his business; as far as Lars and James were concerned, as long as he turned up for rehearsals it didn’t matter. With an
actual track
about to be released on an
actual album
, this was no longer a time for seeking out the perfect musical partner and far more a case of ‘getting the show on the fuckin’ road’, as Lars put it. Indeed, even James had yet to settle on what he felt would be his long-term role in the band, vacillating between wanting to be a straightforward frontman in the Steven Tyler and Sean Harris mould, and deciding his best bet was actually off to one side, head down, playing rhythm guitar.

Meanwhile, after yet another ad was placed in the
Recycler
, they finally found someone who they decided just might be the answer to their prayers. His name was Dave Mustaine and he was about to help Metallica become a legend, although not entirely in ways any of them could have foretold. ‘I answered the phone one day,’ McGovney remembered, ‘and this guy Dave was on the other end, and he was just spieling this baloney like I could not believe.’ Lars: ‘I got a call from this guy and he was just so OTT: “I got all this equipment; my own photographer, my own this, my own that.” He didn’t have a clue what we were talking about musically, but he had enthusiasm. He was pretty quickly turned on, which was cool because everybody else in LA had this career thing – Quiet Riot, Ratt and Mötley Crüe were big bands, and everyone else in Hollywood was doing imitations.’ Dave Mustaine had no desire to imitate anybody. He was already his own biggest hero.

Born, as he would tell me, ‘at the witching hour’ – meaning midnight or ‘two minutes after’, as he put it – on 13 September 1961, in La Mesa, California, David Scott Mustaine was the classic product of a broken home. The disgruntled son of an alcoholic father, John, and mistreated mother, Emily, Mustaine had grown up messed-up and furious across several different locations in Southern California, with Emily forced to keep moving to escape the abusive attentions of her only son’s estranged father. By the time Dave answered the ad in
The Recycler
he lived alone in his own dishevelled apartment in Huntington Beach, from which he routinely sold weed, pot – nothing too heavy but enough of it to keep both himself and his regular customers high. A tall, good-looking guy with a lot of reddish-blonde hair and a lot more attitude, some said he was an asshole. Actually, a lot of people said he was an asshole – and often they were right. But the hard, confrontational exterior masked a highly intelligent young man with an exceptional gift as a guitarist and songwriter. Indeed it might be argued that it was Mustaine’s belligerence that supplied his artistic edge: compelling, outspoken, and in his own way, supremely honest. And consequently more than a little bit scary…If the contrived profanities and vulgar machismo were doomed to overshadow much of the brilliant music he would make throughout his rarely dull career, Mustaine was also responsible for making some of the most innovative heavy metal recordings of his time. And what a time he was destined to have.

James Hetfield, whose own shattered background meant he could relate to any embittered boy from a broken home, felt an immediate connection with his brash new acquaintance. Dave Mustaine felt it, too: ‘I think that James and I are very much the same man,’ he later reflected. ‘I think that we grabbed an angel, split him in half, and both of us are possessing that power.’ As time would go on, however, James began to see Dave less as a brother and more as an evil twin. As well as being more adept on guitar than James, he wasn’t averse to usurping him onstage, too, sensing James’ insecurity and seizing on it to become the frontman, announcing the names of songs, rapping with the audience, even on occasion seemingly trying to outdo James’ singing. Until he joined Metallica, Dave had been in a group of unknowns named Panic, with whom he had assembled an impressive array of guitars and amps, something which the eagle-eyed Lars was quick to note, more or less deciding to offer the new guy the gig before they’d heard him play. Equally opportunistic, Mustaine picked up on the vibe immediately and made himself right at home. ‘I was [still] tuning up when all the other guys in the band went into another room. They weren’t talking to me, so I went in and said, “What the fuck? Am I in the band or not?” and they said, “You’ve got the gig.” I couldn’t believe how easy it had been and suggested that we get some beer to celebrate.’

Beer, it transpired, was a must at a Dave Mustaine rehearsal. ‘As a kid,’ he would later tell me, ‘everyone always said that I was going to end up an alcoholic like my father. You see, alcoholism is hereditary, it’s in the genes. I just could not drink.’ Unfortunately for his career in Metallica, he was some ten years away from discovering that fact. ‘In my childhood,’ he went on, ‘I did martial arts, and then I started getting into dope and thought no one could fuck with me. In reality, if anyone had tried it I would have been destroyed.’ Maybe. But that wasn’t the impression James and Lars had back in 1982. On top of the drug-dealing and alcoholism, as well as the karate-kicking, confrontational nature of this apparently unstoppable force of ill-intentioned nature, there was also an undisguised suggestion of occult knowledge. It’s true, he told me, ‘I believe in the supernatural. My elder sister is a white witch. I dicked around with her stuff when I was a kid.’ To do what, though? Occult rituals? Invocations? ‘I found a “sex hex”,’ he said nonchalantly, ‘and I used it on this girl I had the hots for. She was this cute little babe, looked like Tinkerbell. She didn’t want to have anything to do with me. So I did my little hex and the next night she was in my bed.’

Anything else?

‘One time I did one on this guy who picked on me when I was going to school. He was enormous. But without going into it too much, I did a chant, basically asking the Prince of Darkness to devastate this fella and stop him messing with me. Later, the guy broke his leg and he can’t walk straight now. I stopped messing with witchcraft after that, but it made me feel good at the time. Retribution,’ he cackled.

Whatever else he brought to the mix, the arrival into the nascent Metallica line-up of a guitarist of Mustaine’s ability brought an immediate leg-up, in terms of the band’s own musical self-image. ‘Pretty quickly [after Dave joined] things began to happen,’ said Lars, ‘because of those three words that have worked throughout our career – word of mouth. These outcasts started turning up, people who liked music a little more extreme than that served up by the American music industry. We took the riff structures of AC/DC and Judas Priest and played them at Motörhead tempos. And then we threw in our X-factor – and we don’t know what it was. We had this European sound and attitude but we were an American band, and there was no one else in America doing it.’

Interviewed in
Rolling Stone
fifteen years later, Lars would claim he could ‘never remember ever thinking about the future much’ when Metallica started. That he was ‘always so caught up in the present. Where I come from in Denmark, this whole American thing about goals is not a big thing. You’re taught very early on in America that you have to have goals. I never bought into that. We were always real comfortable in the present, in our little world, continuing with blinders on.’ Back in 1982, though, the Lars Ulrich everyone knew then that they remember best now was someone who clearly had found his one true path – and wasn’t about to dawdle along the way. Diamond Head’s Brian Tatler recalls Lars writing to tell him about the new band. ‘I’ve got this classic letter that says: “My band’s called Metallica and we rehearse six nights a week and it’s going pretty good.” I think he says, “The guitarist is pretty fast, you’d like him.” He doesn’t mention his name but I presume it’s Dave Mustaine. This would have been in early ’82. And I think he sent a cassette of “It’s Electric” to Sean [Harris] because they must have done a demo of that as well [which] we were flattered by – that somebody had bothered to work one of our songs out.’ Mustaine, he adds, had ‘worked the solo out note-perfect and that was impressive’.

Certainly there was a new focus to the band. Ron recalls him and James coming home from work each day and meeting up with Lars, who still lived at his parents’ house but had recently taken a job working behind the till at a gas station to help pay his way in the band, and Dave who had his own apartment and ‘was self-employed in “sales”, if you know what I mean’. With the four-man line-up now seemingly set in stone, the band ventured forth to play their first gigs, beginning with a shaky set at Radio City, in nearby Anaheim, on 14 March 1982, where the set comprised largely of their three-track demo, plus one other original and a handful of Diamond Head covers posing as originals: ‘Helpless’, ‘Sucking My Love’, ‘Am I Evil?’ and ‘The Prince’, interspersed with ‘Hit the Lights’ and their only other original tune ‘Jump in the Fire’, a new number that Mustaine had brought with him, plus the NWOBHM nuggets: ‘Blitzkrieg’ by Blitzkrieg, ‘Let it Loose’ by NWOBHM hopefuls Savage and ‘Killing Time’ by Irish band Sweet Savage. As Lars later confessed, ‘Our trick back then was not to tell people that these songs were covers; we simply let them assume they were ours. We just didn’t introduce them, so we never actually laid claim to them, but…well, you get the idea.’

At this stage James was still trying to make it work as a guitarless frontman. With Ron sticking mostly to the shadows as he studiously plucked away at the bass lines James had taught him, and Lars gurning furiously at the back, any early showmanship, including song introductions and audience interaction, was conducted by the comfortably voluble Mustaine. ‘There were a lot of people there,’ James later recalled. ‘We had all my school friends and all Lars’ and Ron’s and Dave’s buddies. I was really nervous and a little uncomfortable without a guitar and then during the first song Dave broke a string. It seemed to take him an eternity to change it and I was standing there really embarrassed.’ With the exception of the prematurely ‘seasoned’ Mustaine, none of them had ever played a regular club show before. ‘Dave was the only one who really looked comfortable,’ says Bob Nalbandian, who was also there. ‘You could tell he was used to being up on a stage, he had no fear. The others didn’t look like they really knew what they were doing.’ Lars’ later diary entry for that first gig read: ‘Crowd: 75. Pay: $15. Remarks: 1st gig ever. Very nervous. Only band. Dave broke a string on the first song. Played so-so! Went down pretty good.’

More memorable, and impressive, were their second and third ever performances, playing two opening sets for authentic NWOBHM royalty Saxon, at the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Strip. The band had recorded a three-track home-made demo, featuring a newly recorded ‘Hit the Lights’ with the new four-man line-up, Sweet Savage’s ‘Killing Time’ and Savage’s ‘Let it Loose’. When they found out that Saxon was booked to play the Whisky, Ron took a cassette of the demo over to the club, where he happened to bump into Tommy Lee and Vince Neil, drummer and singer, respectively, of then up-and-coming LA glam-metal outfit, Mötley Crüe, who he’d recently taken pictures of.

McGovney recalls: ‘They said: “Hey Ron, what’s up?” I told them that Saxon was doing a gig at the Whisky and I wanted to try to get my band to open up for them. They said, “Yeah, we were gonna open up for them but we’re getting too big to open.” They offered to take Ron in and introduce him personally ‘to the chick that does the booking’. She must have been impressed, either by the tape or the quality of the band’s contacts, because she phoned Ron the very next day and told him, ‘You guys are pretty good…you remind me of this local band called Black ’N Blue’ – another band, coincidentally, on the forthcoming
Metal Massacre
compilation. Says Ron, ‘Anyway, she said, “Saxon is scheduled to play two nights; we’re gonna have Ratt open for them the first night and your band can open the second night.” So we actually have Mötley Crüe to thank for getting us that gig, which was a major break for us back then.’

Brian Slagel, who was at the Saxon show, remembers it well. James, still without a guitar to hide behind and wearing tight leopard-print pants was ‘interesting’, he notes kindly. ‘I mean, they played decently, which was surprising enough. But [James] was so shy and didn’t have a whole lot of stage presence. He was playing guitar before that obviously but they wanted him to be like the frontman. There definitely wasn’t an amazing amount of confidence. You could tell he was a little intimidated. But they pulled it off pretty well. It easily could have been a train wreck and it was not. But [James] felt so uncomfortable up there that I think that’s why he immediately started to play guitar [onstage] afterwards because he felt more comfortable having something else to do, other than just trying to sing.’