Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

  Paul Brannigan Ian Winwood

  Faber Faber Rock Music (2013)

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  Rating: ★★★★☆

  Tags: Arts Photography, Music, Musical Genres, Heavy Metal

  Arts Photographyttt Musicttt Musical Genresttt Heavy Metalttt

  Metallica have sold in excess of 100 million albums and won seven Grammys. Their journey from scuzzy Los Angeles garages to the stages of the world's biggest stadia has been an epic and often traumatic one, and one of the few truly great rock 'n' roll sagas.

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  ****No music writers have been afforded greater access to Metallica over the years than Paul Brannigan and Ian Winwood, two former editors of Kerrang. Having conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with the band, they have between them gained an unparalleled knowledge of the group's history and an insiders' view of how their story has developed: they have ridden in the band's limos, flown on their private jet, joined them in the studio, been invited to the quartet's 'HQ' outside San Francisco and shared beers and stories with them in venues across the globe. There are countless memorable stories about the band never before seen in print, tales of bed-hopping and drug-taking and car-crashes and fist-fights and back-stabbing that occur when you mix testosterone and adrenaline, alcohol and egomania, talent and raw ambition.

  Perceptive, emotionally attached, and intellectually rigorous, Birth, School, Metallica, Death will be the essential and definitive story of this extraordinary band. Volume I takes us from the band's inception through to the recording and eve of release of their seminal, self-titled, 1991 album.

  Review

  The scrupulously researched story of the band's early days with deep detail gleaned from over two decades of first-hand exposure to the guys and new interviews with key supporting figures. (Ben Mitchell Q Magazine)

  It's hard to imagine the tale of San Francisco metal behemoths Metallica being told any more authoritatively than it is here. (Stevie Chick Mojo)

  Journalists Paul Brannigan and Ian Winwood have worked closely with the band over the years, and it shows, both in the access they've gained, the anecdotes they witnessed first-hand and the warmth they afford their subjects. No stone is left unturned as the band's insane life is meticulously researched ... Volume 2 will pick up the baton next year to complete the picture. On this evidence, it'll be worth the wait. (Emma Johnston Classic Rock)

  Big, and impressive, and, like its subject, irresistible. (Robert Collins Sunday Times)

  The Metallica story has been told many times before, but seldom as entertainingly or as smartly as this ... Ian Winwood and Paul Brannigan's vivid prose makes this well-worn saga seem somehow fresh and fascinating again. The second volume promises to be an absolute belter. (Dom Lawson Metal Hammer)

  This objective study is a refreshing approach to the traditional music biography. Even the most knowledgeable fans will eagerly await the second volume. (Publishers Weekly)

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  The Ecstasy of Gold

  1 No Life ’Til Leather

  2 Hit the Lights

  3 Jump in the Fire

  4 Seek & Destroy

  5 Fight Fire with Fire

  6 Creeping Death

  7 Damage, Inc.

  8 Blackened

  9 The Frayed Ends of Sanity

  10 Nothing Else Matters

  Acknowledgements

  Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photographs

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  THE ECSTASY OF GOLD

  On June 5, 1993, Metallica drew a crowd of 60,000 rock fans to Milton Keynes Bowl for their first open-air headline show in the United Kingdom. While this deliberately recalled such grand occasions as Led Zeppelin’s historic two-night stand at Knebworth House in the summer of 1979, the quartet’s appearance at the verdant man-made arena on that overcast June evening represented a very singular triumph, a triumph of determination and talent over compromise and equivocation. This was a group that had begun their journey not so much on a road less travelled as on a thoroughfare entirely of their own making. In the nine years that had elapsed since the San Franciscan band first played live on British soil, an appearance before just four hundred people at the Marquee club in central London, they had plotted their course to the stages of the world’s largest venues with a ferocity of purpose that was always determined, and sometimes plain perverse. For the longest time, Metallica had resisted playing the standard music industry games, yet despite this – actually, because of this – the group had acquired millions of fans.

  With their 1983 debut album, Kill ’Em All, Metallica staked their claim to be the fastest, heaviest metal band on the planet. Three years later their pivotal Master of Puppets album sold one million copies worldwide without a single, a promotional video or any support from mainstream radio or television, establishing the Bay Area quartet as the most compelling band of that decade. With the 1991 release of their self-titled fifth album – universally known as ‘The Black Album’ – this most uncompromising and defiantly independent collective became international superstars.

  But even as Metallica shifted the tectonic plates upon which mainstream music stood, their audience affixed themselves to the group with a devotion that was remarkable even by the standards of modern metal. In acknowledgement of this fiercely obsessive fan-base, the band chose the occasion of their European tour in summer 1993 to deliver a most brazen statement. This they issued on the back of a black T-shirt displayed on boards erected behind and above the heads of the merchandise sellers exchanging soft clothing for hard currency at ‘The Bowl’ on June 5. On its front the faces of the four members of the visiting band were featured, each man’s forearms positioned in a manner that resembled the crossbones on the flag of a pirate ship. It was, though, the words emblazoned on the reverse side of this garment that truly kidnapped the imagination:

  ‘Birth. School. Metallica. Death.’

  One might drive oneself mad attempting to replace the third of this quartet of words with the name of a different band. The field occupied by those that might make the claim that life can be distilled down to just four components, only one of which is nominated by choice, is vanishingly small. The Clash, perhaps; Nirvana, probably; the Grateful Dead, certainly. The difference is, of course, that each of these groups exists only in the past, their reputation burnished and buffed by the soft touch of nostalgia. But Metallica made this claim not only in the present tense but at the very first point at which they would not appear foolish. In doing so, the band exalted their own position without seeming to demean that of their audience. Rather than appearing arrogant, Metallica were simply being emphatic. It was a statement of chutzpah and brio entirely typical of the band. Two decades on, this is a group still equipped to make such a claim. And this is the story of their most extraordinary union.

  What a long strange trip it has been. Formed in Los Angeles in 1981 by James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, and fuelled by the influence of Motörhead, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) and nihilistic American punk rock, Metallica began life as front-runners of the nascent American thrash metal scene, an underground community powered by fanzines, the trading of badly dubbed cassette tapes and a peer-to-peer buzz gradually amplified from a whisper to a scream. But in the three decades that have elapsed since the release of their debut album, the band have effectively developed into two separate groups. One of these is a crowd-pleasing operation that rolls into motion each summer as the quartet convene in foreign fields and stadia to play songs – mos
t of which are more than twenty years old – for tens of thousands of people in exchange for appearance fees in excess of a million pounds each night. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that these days Metallica spends its entire time in the pasture. Because for the ‘other’ Metallica, a group that constantly seeks to stand in opposition to the established order, the fear of becoming creatively irrelevant is a demon that never sleeps. This anxiety has led the quartet to act with a sense of creative and artistic derring-do the fearlessness of which borders on the reckless, as evidenced by their collaboration with Lou Reed on 2011’s brutally uncommercial Lulu album.

  Occasionally Metallica as brand and Metallica as band coalesce as one. This was the case on the weekend of June 23 and 24, 2012, when the group staged the inaugural Orion Music + More event, their own bespoke, self-curated music festival. The gathering was staged at Bader Field, an abandoned airstrip in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and featured appearances from groups as diverse as Modest Mouse, the Arctic Monkeys, Best Coast, Roky Erickson and Fucked Up. The event also featured installations such as a showcase of James Hetfield’s classic cars and a display of guitarist Kirk Hammett’s collection of vintage horror movie memorabilia. Elsewhere a talk was given by music journalist Brian Lew, one of the authors of Murder in the Front Row, a fabulous coffee-table book chronicling the Bay Area thrash metal scene that first gave Metallica life. Indeed such was the scope of the lovingly compiled festival that Lars Ulrich was even moved to joke that Orion Music + More would feature Metallica toilet paper, with each patron afforded the choice of which band member’s face to despoil.

  While at pains to point out that Orion was emphatically not a ‘metal’ festival – ‘Because we’re doing it, it gets branded as a particular thing,’ Lars Ulrich noted. ‘If Radiohead does it, it’s cool. If we do it, it’s not.’ – inevitably and fittingly, Metallica themselves headlined their own event. On the first of the two evenings, the group performed their 1984 album Ride the Lightning in its entirety for the first time, while night two saw ‘The Black Album’ profiled in full. As has been their tradition, the quartet called time on their set both evenings with ‘Seek & Destroy’, one of the highlights on their debut album. Introducing the song on June 24, James Hetfield addressed the mass of people gathered in the darkness before him at Bader Field.

  ‘We’ve had the spotlights on us all night,’ he said. ‘[Now] we want to turn it on the fifth member of Metallica … [you] the Metallica family.’

  Hetfield’s belief, some might say obsession, that Metallica and their audience together comprise a family is strong and sincere. For their part the feeling of the people that have provided his band with wealth beyond their dreams and sometimes pressures beyond their nightmares is mutual. But while this union may be familial, it is not democratic. Metallica’s first responsibility has always been to please themselves, it is just that in doing so they have managed to delight millions of people.

  This book is the first of a two-volume biography. It spans the period from the childhoods of James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich to the point at which Metallica stood ready to secure the title deeds to the planet with the release of ‘The Black Album’. For the authors it has been an excursion into the world of a ‘family’ that at times resembles a mafia organisation, occasionally a cult, and often the coolest gang in the world. In pursuit of the story we have attempted to retrace the journey made by our subjects. These endeavours have taken us from the front door of the erstwhile ‘Metallica Mansion’, the bungalow in which James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich roomed together upon relocating to San Francisco’s Bay Area, to the building that once housed Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen, where both Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets were recorded, to stage left at various stops on the quartet’s most recent world tour. Combined with this are insights gained from interviewing Metallica on scores of occasions. As teenage rock fans we stood in the front rows of Metallica concerts in the United Kingdom and United States; as working journalists we have flown on the band’s private jet and sat in dressing rooms from Cowboys Stadium in Dallas to the BBC Television Centre in London’s White City. We have seen the band perform with an orchestra in Berlin and on the back of a lorry, in front of an audience of just two people, in Istanbul. Theirs is a remarkable story, one embracing community, self-belief, the pursuit of dreams and the continued dominance of a musical form they have made entirely their own. Volume two of Birth School Metallica Death, set for publication in the autumn of 2014, will document the band’s journey into a future as yet unwritten, their status as the Led Zeppelin of their generation assured. No rock band will ever again come to equal their success.

  The game’s over: Metallica won.

  1 – NO LIFE ’TIL LEATHER

  On the bathroom wall of Metallica’s headquarters in San Rafael, California, there can be seen a photograph of the band as they appeared in 1982. Shot in the dressing room of one of the insalubrious San Francisco nightclubs where they served their apprenticeship, it captures four young men in the aftermath of a live show, stripped to the waist and bristling with attitude as they leer into the camera lens. Drenched with sweat, adrenaline and testosterone, it is a snapshot of teenage machismo so studied and gauche as to appear almost charming.

  Today the image holds bitter-sweet memories for James Hetfield. When Metallica’s front man appraises the image, he can see beyond his band’s two-dimensional posturing and recall, with genuine warmth, a more innocent time, a time of youthful excitement, camaraderie and shared dreams. But, inevitably, his eyes are drawn to the centre of the frame, to the acne-scarred face of a sad, damaged teenager, ill at ease with the world and furiously unhappy with his place within it. And blacker memories are quick to surface, recollections of betrayal, abandonment and loss. It was, says Hetfield, a difficult time.

  When it comes to telling stories, musicians are not always the most reliable of narrators. Beyond its blue-chip corporation boardrooms, the music business is run from offices full of the trickery provided by smoke and mirrors, where perception and reality rarely share desk space. In the battle to transform artists into brands, truth is often an early casualty, and musicians’ back stories are carefully manipulated, manicured and managed. But when James Hetfield rolls out one of the rock ’n’ roll industry’s favourite clichés, telling you that without music, without Metallica, he’d be ‘dead, dead or in jail’, he does so without a flicker of a smile, without a trace of self-doubt. That boy in the photograph, he’ll tell you, was a ‘really sad kid’ who had imploded with his own anger. Music, he says, ‘cracked the shell’ he’d pulled around himself since early childhood, and became his ‘escape and therapy and saviour’.

  In the mid-Nineties Metallica’s front man commissioned the renowned Californian tattoo artist Jack Rudy to ink on his left forearm an image of an angel delivering a single musical note through tongues of flame into his outstretched hands. Within the piece, an image signifying struggle and salvation, are the Latin words Donum Dei – ‘A gift from God’. And if the welter of motivational mantras tattooed elsewhere on James Hetfield’s upper body – Live To Win Dare To Fail, Carpe Diem Baby, Lead Us Not Into Temptation, Faith – are designed to act as road markings for his journey ahead, that one simple tribute serves to signal his gratitude for paths not taken.

  ‘A gift from God’ was the phrase that Virgil and Cynthia Hetfield employed when informing family and friends of the birth of their first-born son, James Alan, on August 3, 1963. Faith had brought the couple together as the decade of peace and love dawned. A truck driver by trade, with a modest haulage company of his own, Virgil Hetfield spent his Sunday mornings doing God’s work, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to the children of his adopted home town, Downey, California. Cynthia Hale (née Nourse) had initially accompanied her sons Christopher and David to Sunday School classes from a sense of parental obligation, but in the wake of the dissolution of her first marriage, Virgil Hetfield’s calm, thoughtful meditations on suffering and strength in adversity began to
chime within her with a profound resonance. Romance soon blossomed. When the couple married in Nevada on July 8, 1961, Cynthia thanked her Lord and Saviour for delivering unto her a second chance of happiness.

  On the face of it, the newly-weds were very different people. California-born Cynthia was vivacious, creative and liberal-minded, a thirty-one-year-old artist and graphic designer with a love of light opera and musical theatre; five years her senior, Virgil was taciturn, reserved and conservative, a broad-shouldered Nebraska-born grafter whose sole indulgence of frippery came in the form of his meticulously maintained goatee beard. But the couple shared an adherence to the Christian Science belief system, a curious blend of olde worlde Puritanism and superstitious mumbo-jumbo relying heavily upon faith in the healing power of Christ. They viewed their union as being part of God’s preordained plan.

  Situated fifteen miles south-east of Hollywood, Downey at the dawn of the 1960s was, as now, a wholly unremarkable little town, devoid of glamour or intrigue, which suited Virgil and Cynthia just fine. But in the year of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, with civil unrest spreading from state to state as the nascent civil rights movement gathered momentum, few American citizens were immune to escalating national tensions. From the moment baby James left hospital, then, his doting parents sought to cocoon him in cotton wool, as if their blue-eyed angel was made of fine bone china and Downey’s quiet suburban streets were under threat of invasion by barbarians wielding hammers. Where other truck drivers took their offspring on drives across state lines, bonding over AM radio songs as the asphalt rolled beneath their wheels, Virgil Hetfield determined that his son’s world should be safe, sheltered and snow-globe small. Each morning Cynthia clutched James to her side for the three-minute walk to Rio San Gabriel Elementary School; each afternoon she would be in place at its gates as classes discharged, shepherding her boy away from his classmates for the short walk home, lest a single misdirected strand of school yard badinage might despoil her child’s innocence.