Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  Writing in Metal Mania, issue ten, Lew was barely able to contain himself in his attempts to describe both the evening in question and, in a larger sense, the significance of the group whose name appeared as headliners on the ticket stub. ‘Metallica, those Supreme Metal Gods, those Purveyors of Raging Sonic Decapitation, those Rabid Vodka-Powered Maniacs, blew our faces off as they stormed onstage,’ came the writer’s sentiment, delivered with a flurry of youthful energy not dissimilar to that summoned by the subject of his prose. ‘As is their style,’ he continued, ‘the band went from power to power … leaving the headbanging horde thrashed and raging and it was only three songs into the set!’ Before concluding this most effusive of notices, the author had volunteered the opinion that ‘with the addition of Cliff Burton, Metallica now have the fastest and heaviest line-up ever assembled’, and that ‘their live show is now complete and is the most effective of any club band [the author had] seen!’

  ‘The thing about Metallica is that they were our band,’ says Doug Goodman, an original observer of the Bay Area metal scene. Goodman would in time come work as tour manager for such groups as Green Day and Smashing Pumpkins. His first job in this field was touring with Slayer, in front man Tom Araya’s Camaro car. ‘It didn’t matter that they came over from Los Angeles. As soon as they played here, even before they’d moved up to San Francisco, they were immediately our band. The people in the scene identified with them in the strongest way right from the start. Of course, in time they’d come to represent the whole area, but even before that it was obvious that there was a real connection between what they represented and what we wanted to hear.’

  ‘There was this immediate intense connection,’ agrees Doug Piercy, one-time guitarist in Anvil Chorus and Heathen. ‘A lot of the bands in the Bay Area were more into the glammy, make-up, LA-influenced kind of thing, but there was a lot of fans that were interested in seeing some form of the British heavy metal scene without having to wait forever for Motörhead or Maiden or Saxon to come. There was a really diehard scene that was small, with kids who’d go to keg parties blasting New Wave of British Heavy Metal music on our ghetto blasters, but unfortunately there wasn’t a band at all that the scene could support. So when Metallica came on the scene, it just clicked. Here was a real genuine American band that played all the shit that we understood: we’d all been tape-trading looking for the new noisy thing and suddenly here was a band of our own.’

  Considering that Los Angeles and San Francisco are cities that reside in the same state – and are in a geographic sense relatively close neighbours – the differences between the two are marked. Despite its easy-going, languorous exterior, Los Angeles is a city of high achievement, a place that attracts people from all over the country hoping to ‘make it’. As such, competition is fierce, while camaraderie is often merely a façade that goes no deeper than the sweat on each hustler’s skin. Tales abound from the Hollywood metal and ‘hair-metal’ scene of the Eighties that would see band members roaming Sunset Boulevard and taping to lamp posts and walls flyers advertising their group’s upcoming shows over those announcing appearances by competitors.

  By comparison, for a band such as Metallica, San Francisco was day to Los Angeles’ neon-polluted night. As Janis Joplin once observed, ‘The first thing that defines the music scene in San Francisco is the freedom. For some reason people gravitate here and feel free to make any kind of music they feel like making.’ Artists seeking a location that allows them to ‘make any kind of music they feel like making’ stands in marked contrast to people relocating to a city in order to play the kind of music they feel will enable them to make it. Metallica, though, made music that while feral was also finessed, and the band themselves were more than animals out on the loose and looking for trouble. In today’s parlance people who claim to have ‘a vision’ are implying that they themselves are visionaries, but in the case of Lars Ulrich this could already be said to be true. Metallica may have worn their integrity like a patch on the sleeve of a denim jacket, but even in the group’s earliest days Ulrich appeared not only to have had his eyes fixed on a larger prize but also to be possessed of the wit to appreciate the incremental steps required in order that he and his band mates might realise this achievement. Relocating to San Francisco may not have been the drummer’s idea, but he was quick to realise the potential gain of such a move. The group’s arrival on the streets of the Bay Area, though, was less a tale of two cities, and more the story of one implacable musician. That Cliff Burton was able to spirit virtual strangers away from the city in which they lived serves to signify the power of an enigmatic presence that seemed to be comprised of little more than human hair and flared denim.

  As Dave Mustaine himself recalls: ‘If there was any hand-wringing over this decision [to relocate to Northern California], I don’t recall it. We all knew that Cliff was talented enough to present what would ordinarily be considered an outrageous bargaining chip: Relocate the whole band? For a bass player! He was that good. And we were that driven; we were willing to do anything to be successful. I think that we all recognised that by adding Cliff, we would become the greatest band in the world.’

  Metallica’s first rehearsal with Burton took place in the dead hours that separate Christmas Day from New Year’s Eve. Although the move from Los Angeles to the Bay Area – the term ‘San Francisco’ is here misused, as the three émigrés actually lived outside the seven square miles that comprise that city’s limits – took almost two months to complete, as soon as Hetfield, Ulrich and Mustaine arrived in their new zip code on February 12, 1983, the young men required a place to stay. In this pursuit, Hetfield and Ulrich were accommodated by Exodus manager Mark Whitaker, who allowed the teenagers house room at his two-bedroom home at 3132 Carlson Boulevard, in the small East Bay city of El Cerrito. Presumably drawing the shortest straw, or perhaps as evidence of a division in the camp, Mustaine found himself in the bizarre position of lodging with Whitaker’s grandmother, an hour away from Ulrich and Hetfield.

  It was in the living room of the house on Carlson Boulevard that Metallica first practised with Burton on December 28, 1982. Ulrich set up his drum kit in front of the couch while Hetfield’s Marshall stack stood wedged by the kitchen door. Such was Ulrich’s confidence in Burton’s ability to fit seamlessly into the unit, that he invited Ron Quintana, Ian Kallen and Brian Lew and a handful of other ‘Trues’ along to document the day. Following the rehearsal, Lew conducted the new look quartet’s first photo session. This was just one of many gatherings at 3132 Carlson Boulevard, an address that would quickly come to be known as the ‘Metallica Mansion’, a phrase used in jest given the dwelling’s ‘compact and bijou’ one-storey appearance. At the time, Hetfield and Ulrich’s new home on the working-class side of ‘the Bay’ – the East Bay, to be precise – was perceived as being in a less than desirable neighbourhood. This may have been the case, but today the home is a sedate-looking apple-green coloured bungalow positioned next to a petrol station on a thoroughfare that seems as unthreatening and unremarkable as any address in the Bay Area.

  Unremarkable, that is, except for the young men who once lived there. Even allowing for the group’s liking of their new environment, and that environment’s love of the group, that Metallica would relocate themselves from Los Angeles to Northern California at the asking of a man with whom they had yet to play a single note of music displays either a level of faith that borders on the fervorous or else a sense of naivety that is not far shy of being reckless – and is possibly both. But as dysfunctional as the backgrounds of Hetfield and Mustaine may have been (and as short-lived as Ulrich’s tenure in the City of Angels may itself have been), in this action the band’s willingness to separate themselves from streets known to unknown, and to divorce themselves from family and friends, speaks of a single-mindedness that would serve them well. In plotting their course to Northern California, Metallica turned their cheek not only to a safety net of any kind but also to the notion that theirs was a union that me
rely ‘played’ at being a band. As immature and foolish as Hetfield, Ulrich and Mustaine were capable of being, in this regard at least their actions were those of men rather than boys.

  ‘We knew that there was something about [Metallica] that was beyond all the rest [of the bands populating the Bay Area],’ recalls Steve Souza. ‘Exodus shows back in the day, even when I was not in the band, with [original vocalist] Paul [Baloff], were probably some of the most violent and brutal shows you’ve ever seen, way more violent than Metallica. But Metallica had the flair and the sound.’

  ‘We started being more comfortable with ourselves, more confident,’ is Ulrich’s recollection. ‘We started feeling that we were belonging to something that was happening, and that was bigger than ourselves, that we belonged instead of being on the outer fringes.’

  That it was San Francisco and other cities in and around the Bay Area that provided the germ of an idea for thrash metal, as well as being the setting for its most fertile and violent breeding ground, at first appears to be an incongruous truth. Despite the vibrations caused by groups such as Exodus and Testament as well as a host of other frenetic and precise local metal acts, it was only Metallica whose appeal possessed sufficient force to break through thrash metal’s ghetto walls and secure real estate in the mainstream. As such, the cultural movement that is still most closely associated with the area – then, as now – is that of the hippie and flower-power movement of the Sixties, where the sounds of bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane could be heard along the drug-enriched thoroughfares surrounding the ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ bohemian enclave of Haight Ashbury. Elsewhere, the 1967 song which took the city as its title found singer Scott McKenzie requesting, ‘If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.’

  Audience members gathered to see Exodus at The Stone or at Ruthie’s Inn in Berkeley – a club located next door to the Covenant Worship Center, a church on the steps of which, according to Ron Quintana, concert-goers would do ‘many, many bad things’ – wearing flowers in their hair could be certain of being the recipients of much unwelcome attention. The notion that the Bay Area, with San Francisco acting as shorthand for its varied and numerous streets and avenues, is a location that lacks teeth or knuckles is itself one that is short on attention to detail. Shipping, freight, railroad and canning industries provided work for thousands of employees on both sides of the bay, with working people represented by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union, to name just three. Oakland was also the birthplace of the militant African-American Black Panther party, formed in the city in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Less political but attracting scarcely less infamy were the Oakland Raiders American football team, and their legion of often unruly fans. Owned by Al Davis, a man capable of filing a lawsuit in an empty courtroom, and who often played to Oaklanders’ sense of underdog grievance, the Raiders are the team beloved of James Hetfield, this despite the organisation moving from Oakland to Los Angeles just three months before Hetfield headed in the opposite direction (unlike Metallica, the franchise was to return from whence it came in 1994). But perhaps the most symbolic example of the Bay Area being a place other than a haven for the Free Love generation came on December 6, 1969, at the Rolling Stones’ notorious free concert at Altamont Speedway in Alameda County. ‘Just be cool down there, don’t push around,’ Mick Jagger implored of the crowd moments before eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by Hell’s Angels

  Fourteen years later, the notion of not pushing people around at Bay Area thrash metal shows was as ridiculous as arriving wearing flowers in one’s hair.

  On the part of Metallica, or at least on the parts of James Hetfield and Dave Mustaine, such physical aggression was not confined to the dance floors of spit ’n’ sawdust clubs filled with angry adolescents, but often spilled out on to the streets of the Bay Area itself.

  ‘When Metallica first came to San Francisco I thought Lars’s guitarists were either going to get him killed or else land him in jail,’ is the recollection of Ron Quintana. ‘Hetfield and Mustaine were just out of control. For a time it seemed like Dave would get in a fight every single night on Broadway. He wasn’t always the instigator; he didn’t always start the fights, but he usually finished them. He was a tough guy and was always drunk. I didn’t expect him to last the Eighties. James was kind of quiet back then, and he’d only come out of his shell when drunk. But Dave was always out of his shell – and always out of his head!

  ‘He was,’ concludes Quintana, grasping for a suitable euphemism, ‘a real character.’

  As well as its obvious obnoxiousness, the picture painted by Quintana is not without its attendant humour. The image of the irrepressible and voluble Ulrich charging through the streets of San Francisco, in tow of two band mates, boiling with energy but of a kind different from Hetfield and Mustaine is, at the very least, striking. Lars, the born conciliator and natural diplomat, in company with a lead guitarist capable of starting a fight with a Salvation Army Santa Claus and a front man so shy that his hidden character only reveals itself under cover of darkness, and under influence of alcohol; and a drummer with an appetite for construction being undone by the opposing instincts of his band mates. Quintana is right when he says that Hetfield and Mustaine could well have succeeded in getting a drummer five inches shorter than themselves killed; what he also might have added is that it was surprising that none of the party ended up in rehab even sooner than they eventually did. This intemperance was not confined merely to nights out. On the rare occasions that the new kids on the block were not running wild through the streets of San Francisco, back in El Cerrito the ‘Metallica Mansion’ drew faces from the scene into which its tenants had recently parachuted, like filings to a magnet.

  ‘We all hung out because they had their house,’ recalls Steve Souza, ‘… and everybody would go there. I remember there was one night where we were drinking and we didn’t have any chaser, so James pulls out fucking log-cabin syrup. We were drinking vodka and log-cabin syrup! But it was just like that, everyone was close knit and everyone went to each other’s shows and hung out. It was a great scene. It was strong. It wasn’t anyone saying, “Oh, that band sucks!”, not like in the glam scene in LA. We were together. We had the unity … But that house was a free-for-all. It was 24/7. Shit was going on constantly there, till three or four in the morning. It was infamous.’

  Three thousand miles east of 3132 Carlson Boulevard, in New Jersey, Johnny Zazula (a man known to his friends as Johnny Z) and his wife Marsha were at work staffing Rock’n Roll Heaven, the rock record and tape stall the couple ran in a flea-market at the Route 18 International Indoor Market in East Brunswick, a small town in the centre of the Garden State. Despite its suburban location, the epicurean selection of rock and metal – particularly releases imported from Europe – available at the couple’s stall qualified Rock’n Roll Heaven as a popular spot for informed metalheads from as far afield as the furthest boroughs of New York City, a two-hour commute. On a spring afternoon in 1983, a customer from San Francisco approached Johnny Z and handed him a cassette tape.

  Ironically, given what was about to happen, Rock’n Roll Heaven had at the time a policy that it did not play demo tapes. The unnamed customer, however, was adamant that the stall’s proprietor would love the music contained within. Zazula looked down at the object in his hand, and read the name on the inlay card – ‘Metallica’. By deciding to lift the needle on the record that was playing on the stereo – an album by Angel Witch – and to begin playing a cassette tape by a band he had never before heard, Johnny Z made a decision that would change his life.

  Occasionally music strikes with such a force that it seems as if a bolt of lightning has served to split the sky in two. When the Sex Pistols unveiled ‘Anarchy in the UK’ on an astonished United Kingdom in 1976, music writer Greil Marcus obse
rved that Johnny Rotten’s assertion that he was ‘an antichrist’ ‘for a few minutes made it seem as if the rage issuing from his mouth could level London’. Fifteen years later, Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ took mainstream rock’s play book and cast its pages to the hurricane they themselves had created. In terms of widespread amplification, in the first half of 1983 Metallica had nothing like this kind of impact. But as has been seen, many of those who heard the group on the tape-trading vines became not so much fans of the group as adherents to, even participants in, the cause. The trouble was, of this number few were in any position to do anything to further the group’s cause other than nod, or bang, their head in appreciation.

  That the proprietor of a stall in a flea-market in a small town in America’s most widely derided state quickly became the most pivotal figure in their story so far shows the paucity of options open to Metallica as the days began to lengthen in 1983. Aside from running Rock’n Roll Heaven, Johnny and Marsha also operated the company Crazed Management, the live promotion arm of which saw UK proto-thrashers Venom and Canadian journeymen Anvil perform in the United States for the first time. But this operation was a labour of love rather than a business run for profit; its aim was to bring underground metal to an underground audience solely for its own sake. Such noble intentions go some way to explaining the course of action pursued by Zazula immediately after he first heard Metallica. Remarkably, the tape that so impressed the impresario was not No Life ’Til Leather, but rather its successor, the Live Metal Up Your Ass concert tape (a recording of the band’s set at the Old Waldorf on November 29, 1982), a collection notable for its execrable sound quality. Asking his wife to mind the store, Zazula made his excuses and made his way to the nearest public pay phone. Inserting a fistful of metal into the coin slot, he placed a call to K. J. Doughton, the man who was soon to become administrator of Metallica’s fan club, and whose number and address – actually, the number and address of his parents’ home in the state of Oregon – featured as the contact detail on the demo’s inlay card. The fact that Zazula recalled reading an article Doughton had written about Metallica fortified his decision to attempt to contact the band. It was to be the beginning of a fortuitous and fast-moving chain of events.