Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  Metallica’s managers duly shipped the snare drum from America to Sweet Silence Studios (it can be heard on each of the eight tracks on Master of Puppets). They need not have bothered, though, as Ulrich managed to locate not only the same model in a Copenhagen music shop, but also one which had attached to it a price tag which had not been altered since 1979. ‘That was just typical of the kind of luck Lars has,’ believes Rasmussen.

  Of course, there is a school of thought that believes you make your own luck. As this relates to the business of making of music, no location offers fewer places to hide than a recording studio, where art is nothing without effort. Many are the musicians who dread the process of making albums, as distinct from the spontaneous joy of playing live before an audience. For their part, even from their earliest days, Metallica appeared to understand by instinct that not only were the two disciplines polar opposites, but that it was their recorded work that would go furthest towards securing their legacy, and which they had to work hard at.

  ‘They had made such massive strides,’ remembers Rasmussen. ‘Technically, as musicians it was very obvious that they’d spent most of the time since we’d recorded Ride the Lightning on tour. It was very obvious that their technical abilities had really improved, especially Lars who was just miles better than he was before.’

  Albums are not so much made as constructed, with effects and touches often almost imperceptible to the outside ear being recorded and layered subtly beneath louder instruments as a means of adding depth to the textural whole. On Master of Puppets, band and producer experimented with volume-control and echo. As well as this, sounds were recorded on to tape that was then played backwards, the results of which can be heard in the shimmering and ominous swell that forms the beginning of ‘Damage, Inc.’. Elsewhere, the natural talents of Hetfield as a rhythm guitarist helped propel the band’s third album into focus, albeit at a pace that often seemed incremental. None of the eight original compositions the band recorded at Sweet Silence in the darkening months of 1985 featured fewer than six rhythm guitar parts; and as with Ride the Lightning Hetfield played each track live rather than adhering to the more conventional practice of merely overdubbing one take atop itself as many times as was required to attain the desired tonal depth. Hetfield’s approach amounted to a technique that Rasmussen remembers ‘took forever’, even if the talents of the man being recorded were justified in being described as ‘phenomenal and unbelievable’. Interviewed twenty-seven years and three days after the recording of Master of Puppets began, today it seems as if its producer’s abiding memory of the entire process is that of watching James Hetfield track one devilishly precise rhythm guitar part on top of another.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like that since,’ he says. ‘And neither do I expect to.’

  ‘I’m always saying, “It’s not tight enough,”’ Hetfield laughs. ‘People think I’m nuts. It’s something that absolutely haunts me. After we recorded “Hit the Lights”, which appeared on the Metal Massacre compilation [in 1982] … this guy heard the song and told me, “Oh, the rhythms aren’t very tight, are they?” Man. That was it! That started my lifelong quest. That was the Holy Grail for me – being tight.’

  Slowly Metallica’s new work began to take form. Inside the studio walls the alpha male personalities of James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich battled for territory, their sometimes discordant creative visions coalescing to the point where no aspect of the music being made was left unexamined or unsubjected to alternative methods of interpretation. The pair were learning that in order that an instrument in a song be emphasised, by definition another instrument must be de-emphasised, thus beginning a battle between guitarist and drummer, the energy from which would fuel the group for years to come.

  Realising that Metallica’s engine was quite combustible enough, Cliff Burton and Kirk Hammett took up positions as first mates. As keen as their colleagues in the desire that their union’s third album be completed to the highest possible specifications, the pair nonetheless accepted that almost all groups are hierarchical in nature and often for good reason. Not just room-mates at the Scandinavia Hotel, while Hetfield and Ulrich combined to lock horns Burton and Hammett also united to bend the elbow. After many a recording session, having been awake for up to twenty-four hours the pair would then play poker for another eight hours, or would head out in search of a seafood restaurant at which they would eat raw oysters, drink cold beer and shout heated words at bewildered Scandinavians. These times, recalls Hammett, ‘are some of my best memories of [Burton]’.

  This fun, though, would not last. Short of funds, low on humour and without an appetite for the plummeting temperatures of the changing seasons, Burton stayed in Copenhagen only long enough to record his own contribution to Metallica’s emerging album, before absenting himself with leave and boarding a plane home to the Bay Area. Lars Ulrich recalls that the band’s bass player ‘was the biggest home boy of the four of us’ and that ‘after he did his bass parts he was, like, “Fuck this, I’m off home.”’

  For his part Burton was of the opinion that the recording of Master of Puppets ‘took too long’, observing that while ‘the songs were real good’ the band ‘could have managed [its] time a lot better’.

  In the years that have elapsed since the recording and release of Master of Puppets, a proportion of Metallica’s audience have ascribed to the bassist not just the mantle of being the group’s artistic conscience but also that of being its silent and authoritative leader. This assertion is one that has been made without recourse to anything that might qualify as even the most circumstantial of evidence. Burton’s decision to down tools early might well have resulted from the belief that his continued presence in Copenhagen would have made little material difference to the shape and sound of Master of Puppets (as opposed to the musician placing a premium on his own material comforts and thus caring not a jot either way) and thus realising that his work at Sweet Silence was done. As understandable – as justifiable, even – as this position is, it is certainly not one that would be taken by someone who believed themselves, or was seen by others as being, a leader. Given the group dynamic of the time, it is inconceivable that either Hetfield or Ulrich would have abandoned their post in this fashion.

  As events would have it, it was Ulrich himself who was the last member of Metallica left standing in the sound room of Sweet Silence Studios, but only by a matter of days. On December 23, 1985, Hetfield and Hammett flew home to San Francisco, while their drummer spent the holiday with family in Denmark. Following Christmas Day, however, the Dane was back in the studio, working with Rasmussen to position the final overdubs that would complete the recording process of Master of Puppets. On December 27, one week shy of three months after entering the facility, the hardcore pornography Metallica had sellotaped to the walls of Sweet Silence Studios was removed and the levels of the sound desk were reset to their original starting points ready for the next set of musicians to enter its doors.

  For the group, the final days of 1985 saw them shift focus from the recording studio to the demands of a paying audience. With just three days to prepare themselves, Metallica were to headline a New Year’s Eve bill that also included Exodus, Seattle power-metal quintet Metal Church and an opening slot for Megadeth (an invitation that can be viewed as being informed by kindness but which might have been seen by Dave Mustaine as a reminder of an enforced inferiority). It was to be the most prestigious headline booking of the group’s career to date.

  If Metallica sought a portent that 1986 might be their year, the sight of both the exterior and interior of the San Francisco Civic Auditorium would surely have sufficed. Built in 1915 and with a capacity of 7,000, ‘the Civic’ –a building that in 1992 was renamed the ‘Bill Graham Civic Auditorium’ following the promoter’s death in a helicopter crash – stands proud as one of the Bay Area’s loveliest structures. Constructed from snow-white stone and standing in sight of the equally magnificent City Hall, the venue features wide carpeted stairca
ses and a balcony lined with crushed velvet. With a sense of architectural majesty akin to London’s Alexandra Palace, the San Francisco Civic Auditorium is many miles removed from venues such as The Stone or Ruthie’s Inn in every sense, save for the geographical.

  As with the Day on the Green festival just four months previously, Metallica’s appearance at the Civic quickly became the kind of event about which fans would ask one another, ‘were you there?’ Despite the band being under-rehearsed, the success of both the headline act and of the evening as a whole provided yet further evidence that a musical movement born in the Bay Area had transcended its roots.

  Backstage the musicians celebrated their fortunes in their usual way, by getting drunk. As ever, this tactic worked better for some than it did for others. Steve ‘Zetro’ Souza, a man who within two years would become the singer in Exodus, remembers Dave Mustaine being ‘very mean’, so much so that the tour manager for his future band mates ‘turned round and just slapped him in the face and made him cry’. Onstage his old band tore through ‘The Four Horsemen’, while offstage the song’s co-author continued to display the kind of behaviour that had forced his ejection from the group in the first place. But while Mustaine found himself wrestling with a cause for regret that would occupy him for years to come, onstage his former band mates rewarded the 7,000 people who had gathered in their name with the first public airing of the song ‘Master of Puppets’. For both band and audience, the song promised a glorious future.

  7 – DAMAGE, INC.

  James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich had not been planning a big night out. The pair were in Los Angeles during the first month of 1986 in order that they might argue over the smallest details regarding the sound levels of Master of Puppets with Michael Wagener, the German-born studio technician charged with mixing their band’s third album. Their work at Amigo Studios on Compton Avenue in North Hollywood had been temporarily stalled, however, by an intervention by the US Customs Office, who had impounded the master tapes of the track ‘Battery’, the next song on which the trio were set to begin work, en route to California from Copenhagen. Unexpectedly, the two musicians found themselves on shore leave.

  With Hollywood as their playground, Hetfield and Ulrich were spoiled for choice as to locations at which they might share a drink. But with Master of Puppets still a work in progress, the pair eschewed the temptations offered by iconic rock ’n’ roll drinking sheds such as the Rainbow Bar & Grill and the Roxy, opting instead to place their orders at the Cat & Fiddle, a British-style pub favoured by expat Englishmen, located on a section of Sunset Boulevard on which the magic dust of ‘the Strip’ did not sparkle. By Metallica’s standards at least, such a setting would provide the perfect backdrop for a quiet night out.

  Or so it seemed. Unbeknownst to Hetfield and Ulrich, also gathered around one of the many wooden tables inside the Cat & Fiddle that evening were Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler, Judas Priest guitarists K. K. Downing and Glen Tipton and Rod Smallwood, the likeable yet blunt West Yorkshire-born manager of Iron Maiden. This quartet did not merely represent the high table of the British heavy metal industry, but also the English working class and its desire to get pissed. This the party duly did, with Hetfield and Ulrich playing the roles of kids in a liquor store.

  The momentum of the evening was such that when the bar staff at the Cat & Fiddle called time on their customers at 2 a.m., the party decamped to Rod Smallwood’s home just above the Rainbow. Had the hour not been so late, and had he been less drunk, Lars Ulrich might have been rather more reticent regarding his decision to place into the tape deck of Smallwood’s stereo a cassette featuring rough mixes of a selection of the songs that would in just a few a weeks’ time be unveiled to the public under the banner Master of Puppets. Ulrich, however, was very drunk indeed, and caution had been damned.

  For a man with a home in the Hollywood Hills, Smallwood could hardly have appeared less typical of a Tinseltown music industry insider. With a Huddersfield accent as hard as granite and directness of manner typical of one from the north of England, had Smallwood disliked the music he was hearing for the first time, he would have had no qualms about saying so. Having thrown discretion to the wind by commandeering Smallwood’s stereo in the first instance, Lars Ulrich decided that if he were going to be hung it may as well be for stealing a sheep as a lamb: he turned the stereo’s volume fully to the right. As Iron Maiden’s manager took in the sounds being played for him, Metallica’s front man and drummer found themselves exchanging smiles as both noticed their host nodding his head in appreciation for the music.

  ‘We could be kind of obnoxious, but in a silly, drunken, cynical kind of a way,’ remembers Ulrich. ‘We never thought we were particularly hot shit. But this was the first time that I felt this album might connect on a different level than before. When “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” came on, Rod was, like, “Can you play that again? That’s a really good song.” And I started thinking, ‘Hmm, maybe there’s hope for us here …’

  As a form of music, metal often takes as its subject matter notions of dominance and supremacy, of overpowering an enemy, or else of rebelliousness in the face of an oppressive force, whether this be ‘The Man’ – to whom Dee Snyder of Twisted Sister announced, ‘We’re not gonna take it’ – or, as is the case with ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’, the allegorical setting of an insane asylum. For their part, Iron Maiden had made their name with songs such as ‘Run to the Hills’, a romp through the Wild West of nineteenth-century United States cavalry and Cree Indians that offers numerous lyrical perspectives of the story being told and is thus more complex and nuanced than it is usually given credit for being. That said, throughout the familiar themes of heavy metal remain strong, with the frontiersmen arriving on the shores of an indigenous population and ‘selling them whisky and taking their gold, enslaving the young and destroying the old’. In 1986 Maiden’s most recent studio album was titled Powerslave, released two years previously; the eleven-month tour that supported the release was dubbed the ‘World Slavery tour’. In Darwinian terms beloved of so many metal groups of the time, by inviting Hetfield and Ulrich and their cassette tape of their soon-to-be-finished new album, Smallwood had taken the enemy from the gates and invited it in for a cold beer. In the middle of the Eighties Iron Maiden were at their commercial zenith in the United States, a point to which they would not return until well into the following century. This decline might have found itself under way even without the attentions of a younger, emerging audience being held in sway by the arrival of a younger, more thuggish-looking, sharper-edged and musically more ambitious group, not least because in the late Eighties and Nineties Iron Maiden released a succession of albums that lacked the quality and energy of their earlier work. But with their third album Metallica would light a fuse that would burn a slow but determined path towards a charge of such force that it would change the sound and nature of metal’s mainstream forever.

  Master of Puppets was released in the United States through Elektra on February 26, 1986, and on Music For Nations in the United Kingdom on March 7. The eight-track album was preceded by no seven- or twelve-inch single and no video clip was filmed for use on MTV or the music programmes of terrestrial television. In Britain the fifty-four-minute forty-six-second album entered the Gallup album chart at no. 41. At the time heavy metal albums followed a strict sales trajectory: the first week of release saw the largest number of copies sold, followed by a decrease in subsequent weeks that was often precipitous. It seems odd to reflect that an LP that has come to be viewed as one of the greatest – occasionally as the greatest – of the genre actually failed to secure a position in the Top 40 albums not only on its first week of release but at any point over the next twenty-seven years.

  But while the response to Master of Puppets was hardly remarkable in terms of its width, in depth the reaction to the album was noteworthy. Writing in Sounds magazine, journalist Neil Perry was of the opinion that the LP constituted nothing less than ‘a landmark i
n the history of recorded music’, a statement that seems startling even by comparison with the kind of hyperbole that was fast becoming associated with the Metallica name. Among the group’s older constituents, opinions were not quite so effusive. Despite having beaten a drum for the group for more than three years, Xavier Russell found that this wasn’t sufficient to prevent his opinions falling foul of the censors at Kerrang! Although he recognised Master of Puppets as being ‘a great album’, Russell’s commissioned review of the release found its way only to the spike and not the shelves of the country’s newsagents. This would not be the last time that the magazine would take editorial decisions based on political calculations.

  ‘Maybe Kerrang! thought, “We need to keep on the side of the band …”,’ reflects Russell. ‘I was generally positive about it, but I think I gave it four Ks [out of a possible five], and Dante [Bonutto, then the magazine’s deputy editor] was, like, “We can’t run this, this is just too silly.”’

  The review of Master of Puppets was instead recommissioned in the direction of Mick Wall, who gladly accepted the chance not just to review the most significant release of that year so far but also to ease himself into the position of Metallica’s British cheerleader-in-residence, a post he would occupy for the next several years. His first act on the job was to write a full five-K review of the release, which proclaimed that, with Master of Puppets, ‘Metallica have grown up’ and now ‘stand taller than ever before’.