Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  One of the striking things about the interview is the certainty with which Ulrich speaks of the future plans set in place for his group. He confirms that, while Metallica are ‘a San Francisco-based band’, it would be unlikely that the quartet would perform in the Bay Area until the autumn (which they did, on September 1 at the Key Club in Palo Alto). He also states that his band are set to enter a recording studio on May 10 in order to record their debut album, the sessions for which would last two and a half weeks. So definitive and authoritative are the drummer’s answers that the resemblance between the Lars Ulrich of 1983 and the drummer thirty years on is not so much striking as it is unsettling.

  Ulrich also revealed that Metallica’s choice of producer for their debut album – at the time, set to be titled ‘Metal Up Your Ass’ – was Chris Tsangarides, a man known at the time for his collaborations with Judas Priest and Thin Lizzy. For his services, though, Tsangarides reportedly requested a fee of $40,000, blue-chip currency indeed for a band who at the time dealt only in red cents. ‘We just have to be patient with our first album and make the best of it,’ confessed Ulrich in a tone of voice that suggested that even then compromise was to him fast becoming anathema. ‘Every song we have we feel is good enough to put on [the] album – we don’t have any filler songs,’ he said, in a statement that at that time at least was true.

  Despite the fact that one half of the band had been among its number for less than six months, as Metallica readied themselves to record their first vinyl LP they were by musical measure a professional group. The same, however, could hardly be said of the business operation established to support them. Johnny and Marsha Zazula worked hard, even selflessly, on behalf of their charges, but the cloth they were able to cut came woven from cheap materials. All expenses were spared, from the fact that the group recorded their first album not in New York City, or even in New Jersey, but at Music America Studios situated in Rochester, a minor American city some six hours’ drive upstate from the five boroughs. Despite the fact that the studio costs reflected the location in which Music America found itself – that and the fact that the facility itself housed only the most basic of professional recording equipment – Johnny Z still lacked the funds to pay to record Metallica. Ever resourceful, instead he negotiated with Music America’s owner and in-house producer Paul Curcio that the costs be spread over a period of time and paid in instalments.

  From a professional point of view, the band that arrived at Music America in the second week of May 1983 were equipped with everything required to make a sound for sore ears. Recording music that will, for better or worse, last forever, is a job of work vastly different from the blink-of-an-eye business of playing live. While Metallica had mastered the latter task, when it came to making music in the studio the band were not up to scratch. The group showed up at the studio carting equipment that looked as if it had been in a mosh pit. Cliff Burton’s Rickenbacker bass guitar was battered almost beyond repair, as was his amplifier; Lars Ulrich’s drum skins were pock-marked and out of tune, with none of the band having the slightest clue as to how to go about re-tuning them. It was not an auspicious beginning.

  ‘Metallica were obviously a very young band that didn’t have a lot of money,’ recalls Chris Bubacz, the man whose job it was to engineer the album the quartet had convened to record. ‘They came into the studio with pretty poor equipment … Truthfully, I was quite concerned. I was concerned because they weren’t real knowledgeable about the recording process and I wasn’t really knowledgeable about what their real idea was, what it was they were trying to capture.’

  At least in a creative sense, the union between Metallica on the one hand and Curcio and Bubacz on the other seemed like a match made in hell. The group’s producer was not himself greatly enamoured by, or even particularly understanding of, the music the group were aspiring to record – with Bubacz recalling, ‘Paul really didn’t have any idea of what kind of sounds we should go for’ – and it was left to the membership of Metallica to ‘work together’ in order to make decisions regarding the sounds they were recording. Bubacz was himself not a fan of heavy metal music, preferring artists such as Chick Corea and Blood, Sweat & Tears. But the engineer did at least attempt to locate common ground between what he as a technician hoped to record and what Metallica might desire to create. Upon learning that he was to be working with a metal group, Bubacz made it his business to research a number of albums current to that genre. That year’s most successful hard rock album was Pyromania, the third LP from Sheffield’s Def Leppard, a set recorded with a painstaking attention to detail by producer and notorious perfectionist Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange. Both engineer and artists were in agreement that in a sonic sense this was the album to which their own recordings should aspire. Speaking almost thirty years after the fact, it is with a philosophical smile that Bubacz delivers his verdict that in pursuit of this aspiration both he and Metallica ‘failed miserably’. This, though, is an unforgiving point of view, one delivered by someone equipped to hear things as they might have been rather than as they exist.

  As unassuming as Bubacz’s recollections of his part in the recording of Metallica’s debut offering may be, his role was nonetheless pivotal. For when critics and audiences refer to a album’s production, often they are confusing the term with the sound of its engineering. In studio terms, there are two kinds of producers: those who dirty their hands with the business of sound levels that have as much to do with mathematical theory as art, and those who assume the loftier position of plotting the musical course of a project as a whole. In many cases the person responsible for how a piece of music actually sounds is the engineer. In numerous instances, the term ‘producer’ is a misnomer – ‘director’ is a more fitting description. Having previously spent mere hours inside a recording studio, Metallica by definition required assistance in translating their music as it existed in the confines of a small club or rehearsal space onto the permanent grooves of a twelve-inch record. And in 1983 it seems as if Curcio was more jobbing hack than visionary director. At the same time as both producer and engineer were recording Metallica – sessions which took place from early evening until one o’clock in the morning – they were also, by day, producing a local group whose music would be best defined as ‘easy listening’.

  The project was beset by the kind of problems that nagged rather than overwhelmed. Early in the proceedings the producer halted a Hetfield guitar take to complain that the noise being committed to tape didn’t sound normal. ‘It’s not meant to sound normal,’ Hetfield muttered. The front man’s relationship with Curcio did not recover from this miscommunication.

  ‘Our so-called producer was sitting there checking songs off a notepad and saying, “Well, we can go to a club tonight when we’re through recording. Is the coffee ready?”’ Hetfield recalled. ‘He had nothing to say about any of the songs. I don’t think he’d dare say anyway, because we’d have said, “Fuck you, that’s our song.”’

  To someone who earned a living from recording musicians, a glance at the stock provided by Johnny and Marsha Zazula could not have filled Curcio with confidence. Here was a group playing music of a kind the producer had probably never before heard, a sound both raucous and extreme. Such was the poverty of the group’s circumstances that the relatively modest costs of recording at Music America could only be met by payment on the never-never. Metallica themselves had no real studio experience, and one of their number, Hammett, was of a tenure so short that he had not yet seen a single rainy day. Despite his undoubted technical proficiency, the parts the lead guitarist desired to contribute to his new group’s first album were not yet up to the specifications set by his colleagues, to the point where Johnny Z ordered him to simply replicate Dave Mustaine’s parts. When Hammett protested, his manager offered a compromise, whereby the guitarist would open every solo with Mustaine’s phrasing and then take them somewhere new.

  ‘As a twenty-year-old kid, put in a position like that, you don’t want to rock t
he boat too much, especially being the new kid in town,’ Hammett admitted. ‘So I said, “Sure.” I took the first four bars of most of the solos and changed them. When I changed them it was always for the better and everyone liked it.’

  In an age before Pro-Tools, Hammett’s guitar solos had to be compiled from numerous different takes and then dropped in atop the drums, bass and rhythm guitar from tape literally cut by hand and laid above the music at the allotted place in any given song. This was both a time-consuming and tiresome procedure. This process was not aided by the fact that the equipment Metallica had to hand, both instruments and amplification, to lay down this most precious of things, their debut album, was less than high end.

  ‘It was really all done on a shoestring budget, to be honest with you,’ says Bubacz. ‘You could see that these guys were struggling to make something of themselves.’ The engineer, of course, quickly came to understand that the music Metallica desired to record was both darker and wilder than was at the time the norm, but even allowing for this the engineer was still of the mind that ‘proper recording techniques and playing techniques will help improve the sound. [Such techniques] certainly improved over the years and [today] you can record that type of music really well and still keep the same impact. But, yes, it was very raw and extremely distorted, and when you had a lot of the equipment not really working properly it lends itself to a pretty harsh sound, to say the least.’ Despite this, Bubacz recalls the members of Metallica as being ‘great’, young men who were ‘eager to be in the studio and do the recording’.

  As was normal for the time, the mixing of Metallica’s first professional recordings was overseen by Curcio and Bubacz. But when Johnny Zazula heard the initial mix of an album the costs of which had yet to be paid, he was displeased. To his ear, Metallica’s sound as captured in Music America studios was unbalanced: the guitars were too low in the mix while the drums were too loud. Producer and engineer were instructed to return to the mixing desk and reset the sound in order that Hetfield’s already forensic multi-layered guitars feature with greater prominence. ‘So that’s what we did,’ recalls the engineer, adding that this direction ‘wasn’t positive [and] wasn’t negative’, rather it was merely a case of ‘the guitars aren’t loud enough’.

  Thirty years after the fact, Bubacz says that the songs that comprise Metallica’s debut album do not amount to ‘one of his best recording efforts. In fact,’ he says, ‘I’m always a little bit disappointed when I hear it years later.’ Despite this, the engineer surmises his experiences in the spring of 1983 as being ‘a good experience’, a thing that ‘worked out fine’.

  From the point of view of Metallica themselves, however, the recording of their debut album might have given the appearance of being a process where compromise came stacked on compromise. The group’s members found themselves ignominiously excluded from the process of remixing their own songs, a state of affairs that must have been jarring for a union that even in 1983 was unyielding with regard its own creative defiance. Famously, the group had wanted their first album to be titled ‘Metal Up Your Ass’, a decision that was vetoed by US distributors who were fearful that record shops in many states of what was then, and in many cases still is, a conservative nation would refuse to stock such an item. Upon hearing this news, Cliff Burton damned the purveyors of this compromise with the words ‘Fuck those fuckers’ and surmised that the group, or at least someone, should just ‘kill ’em all’. With these three words the bass player provided the band with an alternative title for their first record. This much is known by Metallica fans the world over. What is less often considered is the worth of the group’s original idea. To accompany the album as it was originally to be titled, its creators envisioned a front cover featuring an image of a man sat on a toilet, with a metal spike emerging from the bowl and penetrating his anus. The group’s creative vision may have been neutered by people interested in money rather than art, but this does not mean that in being censored in this way Metallica were not saved from the very people from whom in this instance they required protection: themselves.

  Metallica were formally introduced to the world at large when Kill ’Em All was released on July 25, 1983, just shy of two months after the completion of its recording sessions. In place of the group’s awful original idea for their cover artwork, instead record store browsers were met with a stark image of a lump-hammer strewn carelessly on a ceramic floor, a pool of blood gathering around this bluntest of instruments. While adhering to the metal clichés of cruelty and physical threat, the cover artwork that accompanies Kill ’Em All is effective in its starkness and simplicity, and stands in contrast to the more over-the-top covers favoured by metal bands of the day.

  On the reverse side of the sleeve, the group photo finds the quartet of young musicians attempting to present themselves as street thugs. In this they fall some way short of their marker. For while it is possible to imagine a figure such as, say, Lemmy emerging from the womb dressed entirely in black, smoking a Marlboro red, his first actions on this earth being the act of slapping the doctor in the delivery room, as pictured on their first album Metallica resemble lion cubs more than kings of the jungle. Particularly unconvincing is Lars Ulrich’s bum-fluff moustache and Hetfield’s teenage acne. But despite the hesitant impression given by a group trying too hard to appear like the kind of men they desire, or imagine, themselves to be, in one sense the photograph of Metallica chosen to represent the group on Kill ’Em All is both resolute and striking. From the shining leather of Judas Priest to the spandex of Iron Maiden, at a time when even the most unreconstructed of heavy metal bands – the kind of groups who were not afforded the attentions of MTV and FM radio – tended to present themselves in a stylised and considered way, here Metallica stand in what appear not only to be the clothes they woke up in that morning, but also the same clothes they went to bed in the night before (if indeed they went to bed at all). In this sense, the group are portrayed in a manner as unvarnished as the music they made.

  It is also to its authors’ credit that Metallica’s debut album has about it a rather counter-intuitive quality. With regard to the relationship that exists between songs as originally submitted in demo form and then as refashioned on a debut album, it is the norm that, come the second visitation, the tracks are given polish and shine, their rough edges sanded down with studio trickery and an abundance of professional sleights of hand. With Kill ’Em All, though, this process was placed on its head.

  As with No Life ’Til Leather, Kill ’Em All begins with the track ‘Hit the Lights’, and immediately the difference between Metallica as heard on demo and the group as represented on vinyl becomes apparent. A telling quality with young groups is not so much how these acts handle their strengths, but rather how they deal with what they perceive to be their weaknesses. There is no doubt that the one aspect of the group’s music about which Metallica (and Hetfield especially) was most sensitive and unsure were the vocals. Evidence of this can be heard with particular emphasis on ‘Hit the Lights’ as represented on No Life ’Til Leather, where Hetfield’s voice comes shrouded to the point of obfuscation by reverb. On the same song on Kill ’Em All, the voice that announces the questionable opening couplet, ‘No life ’til leather, we are gonna kick some ass tonight’, is not only prominent in the mix but is also unadorned by anything that resembles studio trickery. In later years Hetfield would dismiss his vocal contributions to Metallica’s first four albums as amounting to nothing more than ‘yelling in key’, and while this may in essence be true his evaluation serves to undermine the effectiveness of such a strategy as it related to his band’s music at this time. With regard to Kill ’Em All there is no doubt that, despite his own internal misgivings, the front man’s voice resonates with both clarity and authority. Much of this authority is derived from the sincerity of many of the words that are being sung. On ‘Whiplash’, after describing a Metallica concert as being a site populated by people ‘gathered here to maim and kill’, the singer r
eveals to the listener that the reason for this is because ‘this is what we choose.’ Even as early as 1983, the notion that Hetfield viewed life as something to be lived either with liberty or not at all was already finding some form of expression.

  Despite its descriptions of feral gatherings of young men who ‘bang [their] heads against the stage like [they] never did before’, by the standards of today Kill ’Em All is not a particularly heavy album. Part of the reason for this is that in setting the standard for what would soon enough come to be termed ‘thrash metal’, Metallica punched holes in walls through which other groups would follow with perhaps a more determined singularity of purpose (Slayer being the prime example). But while the band’s debut album does not, as metal parlance would have it, shift much air, what it does do is announce its presence with a level of precision and clarity that is at times forensic. Metallica may have disdained Paul Curcio’s role as producer, but to the outside ear at least the stridency and immediacy of Metallica’s sound as represented on their first album serves the band well. For their own part, no small part of this credit should go to the musicians themselves. For while the production and engineering of the tracks might cause a lesser band to sound brittle and one-dimensional, Metallica’s innate sense of musicality and melody means that their compositions actually benefit from the rather stark manner in which they are presented. Yet another by-product of the album’s sound is that the production enhances rather than obscures the group’s wild and compelling energy. Even in the short time that had elapsed since the ejection of Dave Mustaine, there were noticeable signs of progression. ‘The Mechanix’, with its double-entendre-laden lyric, was reworked as ‘The Four Horsemen’. The new lyric – a fairly stock account of the coming of the four horsemen of the apocalypse that somehow manages to wrongly identify one of the riders (‘Time’ being nominated as one of the quartet, in place of ‘War’) – is not particularly impressive or even greatly superior to its predecessor; its subject matter is more fitting for a band whose energy at this time equated more to anger and intensity than it did to anything related to sex. Elsewhere the sheer chutzpah displayed by the decision to include on the album a bass solo in the form of Burton’s much discussed ‘Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth)’ showed that when it came to displaying a taste for the unusual Metallica had chops to spare. However, the rarely spoken truth about this inclusion is that aside from what might rather harshly be described as the song’s ‘novelty value’, an innovative bass solo is not as interesting as a good song. But when Kill ’Em All does take flight, it does so in soaring fashion. Even thirty years on, listening to the crisp-as-lightning pneumatic drill riff that precedes the opening lines of ‘Whiplash’ is exhilarating.