Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘It wasn’t really working,’ says Ulrich. ‘We weren’t particularly emotional. We fired Dave at ten o’clock in the morning, by ten thirty we were halfway through our first bottle of vodka of the day. I liked Dave, I was the closest to him in the band emotionally, but he was too destructive. And he was going to take us down. At the time, relationships were second to the band, the communal good.’

  As Mustaine prepared himself for a ninety-six-hour journey on public transport, he was struck by a thought that made his already awful day just that little bit worse: he had upon his person not a single dollar. As he began a 3,000-mile journey relying on the kindness of strangers for food and fluid, his replacement as lead guitarist in Metallica was heading in the opposite direction on a direct flight from San Francisco.

  Kirk Hammett as born on November 18, 1962, at St Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco. His father, Dennis L. Hammett, was an Irish Merchant Marine while his mother, Chefea Olyao, was a government employee of Filipino descent. The Hammetts lived in the city’s Mission district, on 20th Street and South Van Ness, a neighbourhood as ethnically diverse as the family themselves. The address was also home to Richard Likong – a half-brother to Kirk on his mother’s side, eleven years his elder – and sister Jennifer. By the time Hammett was seven years old, the family had swapped the vibrancy of melting-pot America for the homogeny of the suburbs, moving from San Francisco to El Sobrante in Costa Contra County. Hammett enrolled at Juan Crespi Junior High School and, later, De Anza High School. It was at the latter establishment that the youngster discovered an appetite not just for listening to music, but also for playing it.

  In terms of rock alma maters, De Anza High School ranks as one of the most fertile breeding grounds for aspiring musicians in the United States, not least given that the population of El Sobrante at the time numbered fewer than 15,000 people. Despite this, the senior school has over the years seen its student year book feature the names and photographs of musicians such as Primus bassist Les Claypool, Possessed guitarist Larry LaLonde (who later found success as guitarist in Primus) and John Kiffmeyer, more popularly known as Al Sobrante, the original drummer with Green Day. In the clique- and status-obsessed world of the suburban American high school, the position occupied by Kirk Hammett on the totem pole was low, somewhere below the jocks and cheerleaders but above the members of the chess club. Bespectacled and dressed in a blue-down jacket, Hammett would each day ride to school listening to Jimi Hendrix on a portable tape recorder, stoned out of his mind. Other social groups at De Anza High School labelled him and his friends ‘the acid rockers’.

  Hammett obtained his first guitar as part of a trade, surrendering a copy of Kiss’s Dressed to Kill album and a ten-dollar bill in exchange for a red Montgomery Ward owned by an acquaintance named Dan Watson. But Kirk’s relationship with the instrument he would one day become famous for dominating was not quite love at first strum. Instead, his new guitar occupied its owner’s attention for just a day before being discarded in his bedroom closet. One day, Richard Likong asked if his younger half-brother was persevering with the instrument; Hammett lied and said that he was. Pleased by this answer, the elder sibling suggested the two of them venture out to a local music shop in order to buy new strings, an idea the teenager felt unable to refuse. Given that these strings cost $5 – and took literally hours to affix to his guitar – Kirk Hammett reasoned that he may as well justify the expense by actually learning to play his as yet unloved possession. In pursuit of these aims, the young student spoke to one of his neighbours, a woman who played folk guitar, and from whom he learned his initial chords. The first song the aspiring musician managed to play was ‘Calling Dr. Love’ by Kiss.

  Just weeks later Hammett began playing music with his ‘acid rock’ school friends, a union that featured Kerry Vanek on drums, Mark Lane on bass and vocals from Dan Vandenberg. The group would attempt such ambitious numbers as Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’, their rendition not at all aided by the fact that their instruments were sourly out of tune.

  By now Hammett’s musical tastes had expanded to include such groups as Aerosmith, Rush, UFO and Van Halen. He would regularly board a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train bound for Berkeley in order to visit specialist record shops such as Rather Ripped, Rasputin’s and Leopold’s. It was at such outlets that his ears and eyes would be opened to such releases as Motörhead’s towering Overkill and Iron Maiden’s pivotal self-titled debut album. As his musical tastes expanded – tastes that soon enough would include the kind of New Wave of British Heavy Metal acts that were whetting the appetites of Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield several hundred miles to the south – so too his musical capabilities grew. Such was his proficiency that Hammett was able to convince his mother to make a down payment on a blond 1978 Fender Stratocaster, by any measure a beautiful guitar. Ignorant of technical specifications, he decided to amplify his instrument through an amplifier designed for a bass guitar. Lacking the funds to buy a guitar case, he was forced to carry his precious new instrument in a black refuse sack.

  But if an adolescence spent listening to hard rock bands and playing music with friends on a tasteful guitar the down payment on which was provided by a supportive mother suggests formative years that are enviable, even idyllic, it should also be noted that Kirk Hammett’s young life came marred by activities which took place in the gloom of a darker shadow. For much of his childhood, Kirk’s seafaring father would be absent from the family home for between six and eight months of each year; the fact that his mother worked meant that the couple’s only son learned to fend for himself from a young age. Years before adolescence, Kirk would roam the streets of San Francisco, entirely comfortable with the energy and expanse of one of America’s most significant metropolitan cities. With his father at sea and his mother at work, their son would rise in the morning, make himself breakfast and then walk his younger sister to school. A front-door key dangled from a chain around his neck. The family had a dog named Tippy, and one day Kirk witnessed his next-door neighbour having sex with the animal. Elsewhere on the streets of San Francisco, when Kirk was out walking with his sister, strangers would approach the pair and offer him money for the young girl. One woman insisted that she would be the pair’s ‘new mom’ and once went so far as to physically grab Jennifer, before her brother wrestled her free.

  Despite these travails, and despite relocating fewer than twenty miles from the City by the Bay, the Hammett’s move to El Sobrante came as an unwelcome development in his life, with the young charge viewing his new home as being redolent of ‘a small-town mentality [to which he] couldn’t relate’. Denied the sense of escape offered by the city, the sedentary nature of suburbia forced Kirk to confront his often turbulent home life. When home from the high seas, the truth was that Dennis Hammett did not cut a reassuring or reliable father figure. ‘My dad was somewhat of an alcoholic,’ Kirk reveals, ‘so when he was home you were always walking on egg shells because you didn’t know what sort of mood he was in [given his] inebriated state. Sometimes he was happy; sometimes he was ragingly angry.’

  An occasion when the man of the house was in the latter mood came on November 18, 1978. ‘I’ll never forget my sixteenth birthday because my parents got into a huge, huge fight,’ recalls Kirk. ‘I remember my dad being very, very abusive when he was drunk. He got very, very physical with me and my sister and my mother, and just about anyone else who was in his path. He was a full-blooded Irishman; he had that temper and when you added alcohol it was explosive. My dad beat the hell out of my mom.’

  Elsewhere Hammett revealed, ‘I was abused as a child. My dad drank a lot. He beat the shit out of me and my mom quite a bit. I got a hold of a guitar, and from the time I was fifteen I rarely left my room.’

  As informed by cruelty and fear as this self-imposed isolationism may have been, Hammett’s decision to retreat to a place of relative safety with an instrument through which he learned to express himself soon paid dividends. His first real group went by the name
of Mesh, which in turn became Exodus. With an early line-up comprising Hammett and fellow guitarist Gary Holt – a man who would in time come to be viewed as being as skilled and ferocious a guitar player as any in modern American metal – drummer Tom Hunting, bassist Jeff Andrews and vocalist Keith Stewart, Exodus began playing cover versions of songs by Angel Witch, UFO and Judas Priest. The group truly began to mine its own seam, however, when in 1982 Stewart was replaced by firebrand vocalist Paul Baloff, a man whose charisma and strangled singing style lent the group a thuggish edge that spoke as much to hardcore punk as it did stylised and studied heavy metal. By now penning their own songs, Exodus recorded a demo tape and became not just regulars in the metal clubs of the Bay Area but also pace-setters for the emerging local thrash metal scene as a whole. To this day, those who bore witness to Exodus concerts at such clubs as the Keystone Berkeley, the Old Waldorf and Mabuhay Gardens speak in awestruck tones about the ferocious, often downright violent, nature of the audience the group attracted. But Metallica’s second visit to the Bay Area made Hammett aware that his own band still had a lot of growing to do.

  ‘I was at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco and they were opening up for Laaz Rockit,’ he recalls of the evening of October 18, 1982. ‘They came on and just blew the place apart. I was blown away by the aggressiveness, the velocity and the overall originality of their sound. By the time Laaz Rockit came to play, three-quarters of the crowd had left. After Metallica there was nothing else that could have been more interesting than that. Everyone who saw them that night was converted.’

  ‘I thought to myself, “These guys are so goddamn original, but that guitar player isn’t so hot, they should get me.” I actually thought that within the first few minutes of seeing them.’

  When Metallica returned to the Bay Area on November 29, they were billed to headline above Exodus at the Old Waldorf. The following evening, at a benefit gig held at the Mabuhay Gardens to raise money for Metal Mania fanzine, Hammett met the LA group for the first time. He spoke with both James and Lars and watched with silent unease as Ulrich changed clothes, undressing to the point of nudity in front of him. All the while, Hammett listened to the Danish immigrant as he was speaking, thinking of his accent, ‘Wow, he sure has a weird way of speaking.’

  As befits a tightly knit musical community concentrated in one area, the Bay Area underground metal scene in the early Eighties already had about it an incestuous nature, and one that would serve Hammett well. Baloff had introduced Mark Whitaker, manager of Exodus when they shared a bill with Metallica at the Old Waldorf, to Metallica. Whitaker was, of course, soon to be landlord to Hetfield and Ulrich at 3132 Carlson Boulevard and, following this, was the group’s travelling companion in the week-long journey from the Bay Area to Old Bridge, New Jersey. As feelings during this trip hardened against Mustaine, Hammett’s name began to hover into view. Prior to leaving for the East Coast, Hetfield and Ulrich had listened to Exodus’s demo tape and heard for themselves the quality of Hammett’s playing. As Ulrich himself says, ‘James and I have always been the main thing in this band, and we always looked at Dave and Ron and thought, “This is fine for now, but …” We had a vision that these guys weren’t going to last. We weren’t going to kick them out, but if we found someone who could fit in, we’d get ’em in the band. We saw Cliff and went, “Woah! This guy should be in the band!” So we concentrated on him until we got him.’ This done, in the months that followed Hetfield and Ulrich began to consider who might serve as a hypothetical replacement for Mustaine.

  ‘[Hearing Exodus’ demo tape] was the first time we’d thought about it,’ says Ulrich. ‘Then the next couple of weeks it was, like, “Kirk! Kirk! Kirk!” [But] it wasn’t as if we were going to put him in the band and get rid of Dave … until we left for the East Coast later that month.’

  Given that Metallica were only acquaintances of Kirk Hammett in the most casual sense of the term, the task of making first contact with the Exodus lead guitarist fell to Whitaker, who placed a call to Hammett’s Bay Area home. Sitting on the toilet at the time, the guitarist picked up the receiver and listened to his friend’s pitch. The voice on the phone told the listener that Metallica were having problems with Dave Mustaine. When Hammett enquired about the source of these problems, he was told, ‘He fucking sucks, man. His tone sucks, his playing … he’s a fucking drunk.’ Whitaker then told Hammett that, if he so desired, the odds on him replacing Mustaine as Metallica’s lead guitarist were so short that no bookmaker on earth would accept the bet. He was also told to expect a copy of No Life ’Til Leather to arrive at his home in short order, courtesy of Federal Express. As Hammett processed this information, a part of his mind was on guard to be told that everything he had just heard was nothing more than a joke, as the day of Whitaker’s call was April 1.

  At the end of this conversation, instead of placing the phone receiver back into its cradle, Hammett made another phone call, this time to secure for himself a copy of No Life ’Til Leather prior to the arrival of the tape being dispatched from New York City. By the time his clock struck midnight on April 1, the Exodus guitarist knew half of the songs contained within. In fact, from Kirk Hammett’s perspective, the call from Whitaker could not have come at a better time. Despite having built up a strong and swivel-eyed following, Exodus had reached a point of stasis: not only had the group not played live for a time, but its members had even failed to convene in order to practise. Hammett was feeling frustrated and was thus not at all disagreeable to what might otherwise have seemed like an entirely crazy suggestion: that he embark on a five-hour flight to New York in order to audition for the role of lead guitarist in Metallica.

  A little over a week after receiving Whitaker’s phone call, Hammett found himself aboard a domestic flight bound for America’s East Coast. In the aeroplane’s hold sat his Marshall cabinet and amplifier head, packed in boxes that featured towels for padding and duct-tape for wrapping. As the plane began to make its final descent, the passenger, who had never left California before, looked out of the window and saw snow on the ground.

  The guitarist was met at Newark International Airport in New Jersey by Whitaker and Burton. Arriving at the Music Factory, Hammett was greeted by a scene of human detritus devoid of human beings. He was told that Hetfield and Ulrich were asleep; looking at his watch, he saw that the time was seven o’clock in the evening. The guitarist took stock of his current circumstances and thought, ‘Fuck, what the fuck did I get myself into?’

  4 – SEEK & DESTROY

  On the afternoon of April 23, 1983, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich decided to call a brief time out on drilling their newly recruited lead guitarist in order to partake in a little unrest and recuperation. Their itinerary for the day was to be divided into three parts: the duo would first conduct an interview for Brian Lew’s new fanzine Whiplash before heading out onto the streets of south Brooklyn to check out the latest import releases at Zig Zag Records. Their evening would end in the company of Toronto’s Anvil at L’Amour, the self-proclaimed ‘Rock Capital of Brooklyn’ which had played host to Dave Mustaine’s final Metallica show just two weeks previously.

  On his right hand Hetfield was sporting six stitches on a freshly opened gash, the result of a drunken stumble while cradling a vodka bottle, after the new-look Metallica had opened for Venom at the Paramount. Onstage in New York’s forgotten borough, the San Franciscans had found themselves performing to an audience that, while not as indifferent as those they faced in Los Angeles, were still some way south of being exuberant. Part of the reason for this was surely nothing more than the fact that New York, like London, is a city where people are spoiled rotten by the sheer quantity of live music on offer, a fact that renders its concert-goers a difficult body to excite. In addition, it is also fair to say that the tri-state area had never before seen a band of Metallica’s kind. For while metal of a muscularity greater than that known to the mainstream did exist in New York in 1983, it did so with a sense of theatricality that bor
dered on the camp. Dressed in loin cloths and furry boots, Auburn act Manowar were scarcely less homoerotic than the Village People, while the heaviness of Staten Island’s own Twisted Sister was somewhat undermined by the fact that its members chose to apply make-up to their faces, albeit in a slapdash manner that did nothing to obscure the fact that band looked more like dockers than rock stars. In fact, despite that group’s thuggish, punk-tinged sound, Twisted Sister’s music was far enough removed from that made by Hetfield’s band that vocalist Dee Snyder found himself entirely bewildered after seeing the group perform at one of its New York concerts. Upon meeting the group Snyder opined that while they seemed like good people, he still reckoned their chances of ‘making it’ were nil. In the context of the time, it is not difficult to see why he arrived at this conclusion. In 1983 heavy metal was one of contemporary music’s most flamboyant genres, yet here came Metallica dressed as if they lived in a squat.

  But if New York was not yet entirely enamoured of the teenagers from California, the same could be said of the visitors’ attitude to the Empire State. When Whiplash writer Trace Rayfield collected Hetfield and Ulrich in the parking lot of Rock’n Roll Heaven that spring afternoon, his first enquiries centred around the duo’s impressions of the East Coast. ‘The ’bangers out here aren’t as fanatic [sic],’ answers Ulrich, as his band mate can be heard belching in the background. Although the drummer does concede that the reception his group are afforded ‘gets better with every gig’, nonetheless the inevitable comparison comes not to Metallica’s experiences in Los Angeles – ‘LA was the fucking worst’ being Hetfield’s take on his home town, in some of the few words he manages to string together amid his drummer’s dominance of the interview – but rather, San Francisco. ‘They’re not as crazy … out there in San Francisco the first ten rows are just hair and sweat and bobbing heads … almost like punk gigs. They’re just all over each other and shit.’