Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘The band are still travelling the same hungry roads but where they used to stomp and maul the senses like a bully out of control, now they dance and fly adding an animal grace to their sheet metal aggression,’ Wall wrote, adding that, ‘Metallica should be very pleased with themselves: Master of Puppets is their finest LP to date, finer I think than any of their so-called contemporaries are likely to record this year.’

  What Wall was alluding to with his use of the phrase ‘so-called contemporaries’ were the other groups that populated the now bustling thrash metal genre. Revisiting the articles published about Metallica at the time of Master of Puppets, it is striking just how much ink was wasted not only on attempting to define ‘thrash’ as a musical form, but also to locate Metallica’s place within this form. In point of fact, Wall’s opinion that the LP under review would prove to be a work superior to anything ‘their so-called contemporaries are likely to record this year’ would prove to be inaccurate. In the autumn of 1986 Slayer would release their new LP, Reign in Blood in the United States. Produced by Rick Rubin and released on the hip hop label Def Jam, the Los Angeles quartet’s third album was a body of work of such overwhelming speed and power, not to mention (in studio terms) technical perfection, that in no time at all its ten songs were recognised as being timeless. What was less immediately apparent, however, was that with the twenty-eight minutes that comprised Reign in Blood, Slayer’s dominance of the form had effectively killed thrash metal for every band other than themselves.

  Not that Ulrich himself would have had any truck with this development. Like any artist worthy of the name, the drummer had been attempting to negotiate an exit from the pigeon-hole into which his group had been placed from the very second that they’d been placed there. With the clarity afforded by hindsight, Metallica’s place within the thrash metal movement seems so obvious that one wonders why at the time it was viewed as being a topic worthy of any kind of discussion at all. As with the Clash and punk and, later, Nirvana and grunge, Metallica came from thrash metal but were never quite of the genre. The group were desiring of the form’s intensity, but were of no mind to pay heed to its many creative restrictions.

  ‘From a musician’s point of view, I don’t really like that term,’ the drummer stated at the time. ‘It implies lack of arrangement, lack of ability, lack of songwriting, lack of any form of intelligence. There’s a lot more to our songs than just thrashing.’

  Ulrich’s efforts to place clear water between his group and the gnashing and foaming of the chasing pack, and to shake loose the thrash metal tag that had been tied to the toe of his band, were as fully understandable as they were entirely boring. To his acute frustration, distinctions that to the drummer were piercingly apparent were often overlooked by magazine journalists who saw it as their job to contextualise the kind of groups who sang songs about Satan – Slayer – and those who did not, but who possessed an adolescent fascination with death (Metallica, Anthrax and Megadeth). As ridiculous as it seems today, such divisions were at the time viewed by otherwise sensible people as being entirely crucial.

  ‘One of the reasons we’ve progressed the way we have is [is that we] realised that from working with a lot of different moods and dynamics that there are other ways of being heavy [other] than just playing fast,’ says Ulrich. ‘People always want to lock you into a little square and say, “Okay, this is what you do.” They don’t need to know if we’re thrash, speed, heavy, slow, green, black. All those categories – I hate ’em. That’s why we have a band name, so that people will know who we are. If you want to pinpoint one thing about us, the best thing you could say is that there’s always some kind of power there. As long as you have some kind of intensity, it’s fuckin’ Metallica.’

  Such was the perfect alignment of Metallica’s fortunes as heard on Master of Puppets that to this day the album is viewed by a number – perhaps even the majority – of the group’s audience as being its authors’ creative high-water mark. Even if one does not subscribe to this point of view, it is difficult to deny the praise that still rains on this album’s broadest of shoulders. From the opening acoustic strum that precedes the forensic flurry of opening number ‘Battery’ – to this day, one of Metallica’s finest compositions – to the broken-glass staccato thrust that signals the end of closing track ‘Damage, Inc.’, the overall effect of the band’s third release is to take lightning thrown from the sky of a perfect storm and capture it within the twelve-inch sleeve of a vinyl album.

  As was inevitable, much has been made of the musical progression evident throughout the release. Anchored by a riff that is not so much a signature as it is a leitmotif, the album’s title track manages to find the space to stretch its limbs from the kind of chorus that begs to be sung by an arena full of faces to an unhurried and even hushed middle section that is progressive to the point of seeming classically trained. In this vein, more impressive still is the defiantly restrained ‘Orion’, an eight-minute instrumental piece comprising an opening act that throbs like the banks of a swollen river and a middle section of such restrained and melodic beauty that its template is one that seems to have been set by Pink Floyd more than it does Black Sabbath.

  Metallica’s forward strides were not merely musical, either. In 1986 metal was a genre whose lyrical quality was rarely considered, often for good reason. But listeners minded to pay attention to the words being sung would have noticed James Hetfield’s continued emergence as a lyricist. On occasion the subject-driven nature of the Master of Puppets lyric sheet did carry with it a note of convenience, or even of contrivance. As beloved of its audience as the album’s title track quickly became, nonetheless as a lyric the portrait of an individual’s free will broken on the wheel of drug addiction is not wholly convincing, not least because at the time Metallica were a band familiar with the smell of cocaine. The line ‘chop your breakfast on a mirror’ is in fact directly inspired by their old friend Rich Burch’s morning routine on the many occasions he woke up on the floor of 3132 Carlson Boulevard. Elsewhere, themes such as the pernicious influence of TV evangelists (‘Leper Messiah’) and the futility of war (‘Disposable Heroes’) may have been shop-worn metal favourites, but at least in Hetfield’s hands such topics were examined with bite and an uncommon degree of articulation. The same could be said of the feelings of entrapment and control inherent in ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’, a song inspired by Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which revisited many of the themes explored on Ride the Lightning. On the occasions when Hetfield’s developing sense of wordplay is afforded free rein, the results are magnificent. The most impressive example of this is the lyric that accompanies ‘Battery’, an examination of a tsunami-like force the exact nature of which remains undefined. Taking as its starting point the not entirely promising premise of the sight of a Bay Area Metallica concert – the title comes from the Old Waldorf club being situated on Battery Street – the subject is given flight by words that are both powerful and poetic. ‘Smashing through the boundaries, lunacy has found me, cannot stop the battery,’ sings Hetfield, over music that sounds like life being spirited away amid rapids of foaming water. Inevitably, the song quickly becomes a matter of life and death, with its narrator unable to ‘kill the family battery is found in me’.

  Master of Puppets stands comparison not just with albums of a similar genre released during the same period of time, but with any collection of music released in the Eighties. Gauged by such exacting standards however, it would be incorrect to describe the work in a musical sense as being flawless. For example, an attentive ear will identify the grinding gears that separate the middle sections of both the title track and ‘Orion’ as belonging to a band whose technical vocabulary was not yet fully equal to their artistic vision. But such criticisms are as nothing compared to the achievements to which Metallica’s third album can lay claim. The release displays a strident forward propulsion, in its creators’ ability not merely to write songs but also to balance these songs
together in a collection that, as with all great albums, appears to be more than the sum of its parts. Alongside this, the group’s 1986 release also carries with it a willingness to fly in the face of mainstream commercial wisdom that is more strenuous and far bolder than heard on its predecessor.

  ‘Master of Puppets is definitely a more uncommercial album than Ride the Lightning,’ believes Flemming Rasmussen. ‘Definitely. Master of Puppets is Metallica celebrating that they’ve got a major label deal and that they no longer give a shit. It was them saying, “We’re just going to do the stuff we like and if the record company doesn’t like it, then fuck them.” I think that was the attitude. And it worked too. There’s not one bad song on the album, not a single one. It is just fabulous from start to finish.

  ‘They had that youthful attitude of “We’re better than everybody else in the whole world” and they were just out to kick some ass.’

  For his part, Lars Ulrich merely adopts his best what-can-I-tell-you? voice, and says that ‘Master of Puppets is a motherfucker of a record.’

  In the month that followed its release, Master of Puppets gatecrashed the US Billboard Top 200 album chart at no. 29. In a barbed dig both at radio programmers who had thus far ignored the band and also at the right-wing pro-censorship lobby, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), who were starting to demand that albums be labelled for ‘explicit material’, second pressings of the now hit LP came bearing a sticker that read ‘The only track you probably won’t want to play is “Damage, Inc.” due to multiple use of the infamous “F” word. Otherwise, there aren’t any “shits”, “fucks”, “pisses”, “c**ts”, “motherfuckers” or “cocksuckers” anywhere on this record.’ In subsequent years the ground broken by Metallica has allowed albums as uncommercially minded and even as extreme as Pantera’s 1994 release Far Beyond Driven and Lamb of God’s 2009 outing Wrath to appear not just in the US Top 30 but even in the top three, a state of affairs that attracts very little comment. But in 1986 Metallica’s appearance on the lower rungs of the American Top 40 album chart represented the crossing of a Rubicon. Without doubt Master of Puppets was the heaviest album ever to have found itself in such a setting; the fact that it did so propelled by word of mouth rather than radio or television airplay served only to make the reality of Metallica’s surroundings all the more remarkable.

  ‘With the tour bus, the girls, the room service, the big halls,’ wrote Spin magazine journalist Sue Cummings in a 1986 feature that can be remembered as being one of its subjects’ first printed profiles in a mainstream magazine, ‘it has just dawned on Metallica that they are making it in rock ’n’ roll.’

  The band’s appearance in the Billboard Top 30 coincided with the Californians embarking on the most significant heavy metal tour of the American spring and summer. Beginning on March 27 at the Kansas Coliseum in Wichita, Kansas, Ozzy Osbourne’s Ultimate Sin tour was the kind of caravan that travelled to the kind of cities to which other excursions of its size did not care to journey. Comprising no fewer than seventy-seven dates and with an itinerary that stretched into the dog days of August, as well as appearing at such established and prestigious rooms as the Long Beach Arena in Los Angeles, the Cow Palace in San Francisco and the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, the tour also spent the night in such one-horse-or-fewer towns as Chattanooga, Binghampton and Bethlehem, to name just three: proof positive that when it came to heavy metal audiences were often to be found in towns of rust rather than cities of neon and chromium steel. Managed then as now by his wife Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy was the public face of an operation that had become shrewd when it came to ensuring that its figurehead continued to appear relevant amid the churn of modern rock music. One means by which this aim was realised was by associating the former Black Sabbath singer with younger, emerging groups. Two years previously, Sharon Osbourne had invited Mötley Crüe to join her husband as the support act on the tour in support of his Bark at the Moon album. Twenty-four months on it was Metallica whose name sprang from the lips of anyone in the know asked to nominate the genre’s most vital new act. Hence the pairing of one of metal’s original architects with the form’s most strident young group seems not just logical but inevitable.

  From the headliners’ point of view, the mid-Eighties was not a golden age. Released in February 1986 The Ultimate Sin album saw its author’s thin voice stretched over many a weak chorus presented within songs that had been overproduced to the point of being rendered sterile and impersonal. Propelled by the hit single ‘Shot in the Dark’, the parent album was not so much the work of an artist once so pioneering as to have provided heavy metal with its original voice but instead the sound of a man who was attempting to catch the flavour of the age with the minimum of risk. That said, Osbourne’s less than grand design yielded a dividend: The Ultimate Sin found its way into the homes of a million listeners in the United States within two months of its release.

  But if Ozzy Osbourne had reached the point in his artistic life where risk was to be averted – as these related to his music – the same could not be said for his decision to tour with Metallica. Each night for almost five months, the support act were permitted a generous fifty-five minutes’ stage time, an allowance that exceeded the courtesy normally afforded a band whose name appears in the smallest print on a ticket stub. With the audience for the group occupying the ‘special guest’ slot multiplying like chromosomes in the womb, fans of the American band infiltrated each arena to such a degree that the tour quickly came to resemble a co-headline event. Illicit video footage shot by Metallica fans from various positions front of house – itself no mean feat when one considers that in 1986 hand-held camcorders resembled toilet cisterns with a camera lens stuck on the side – showcase a band whose efforts are greeted by the animalistic roar of an audience the energies of which seem both vibrant and raw. Such was the extent of this adoration that in numerous cities Metallica found themselves summoned back to the stage by an audience demanding not one but two encores.

  ‘That’s when it kicked in in terms of exposure,’ remembers Lars Ulrich of his band’s five months on tour with Ozzy Osbourne. ‘It was the funnest [time] of my life. We only had [fifty-five] minutes a night – not like the two-plus hours we play as headliners today. That was the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll tour – we were only twenty-two back then and drank a bottle of vodka a day. We’ve never hidden the fact that we like to indulge. We have this nickname “Alcoholica”. But we can all control what we do.’

  The same could not always be said for members of Metallica’s audience. On April 21 at the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the crowd in the two-tier arena found themselves sufficiently lost in the moment to cause $125,000 worth of damage to the venue’s inner bowl, a level of destruction described by the room’s president of operations, Bob Karney, as being ‘entirely without precedent’. Worse yet, when Metallica arrived in Corpus Christi, Texas, on June 4, they were met by the camera lenses and questions of a local television news crew, on hand to revisit a grisly incident to which Metallica were unwittingly aligned. In 1984 eighteen-year-old Troy Albert Kunkle and three companions drove from San Antonio, Texas, to Corpus Christi. En route, the party offered a lift to Stephen Horton, a stranger the party encountered as he walked along the side of the road. Daylight soon fell on this apparent act of kindness when Kunkle demanded Horton’s wallet; when he refused, Kunkle placed a gun to his victim’s head and told him, ‘We’re going to take you back here and blow your brains out.’ The car was driven behind an ice-skating rink, at which point Kunkle shot Horton in the back of the head. The dead man’s wallet was stolen and his body pushed out of one of the car’s doors. Subsequently arrested for this crime – a crime for which he would be executed by lethal injection some twenty-one years later – Kunkle quoted James Hetfield’s nihilistic refrain from the song ‘No Remorse’, ‘another day, another death, another sorrow, another breath’. For those naive enough to attempt to make narrative sense of just one of America’s numerous rand
om acts of senseless violence – as well as those seeking to demonise heavy metal – Metallica were judged guilty by association.

  ‘We pulled into Corpus Christ, Texas, and woke up with a call from our manager who said, “There’s some shit going on,”’ remembers Lars Ulrich, with a not wholly reassuring handle on the facts of the story. ‘[We were told that] The local TV station is making a big deal because this kid apparently took some acid or other fucked-up drugs and went on a killing rampage, and the one thing that stuck in this witness’s mind when he shot someone at point blank range was that he was quoting one of our lyrics – “No Remorse”. He got sentenced to death and there was this big yahoo when he stood up in the courtroom and quoted the lyrics again.’

  ‘On the news the next day they had the headlines that this guy got convicted while singing a Metallica song,’ added Hetfield. ‘They showed our Kill ’Em All album cover and they even interviewed me. It was weird. We do write about some sick stuff, but we’re not trying to promote violence. It did give us some publicity, but the wrong kind.’

  On tour with a man himself no stranger to being drawn into a dark drama over which he had no control – in Ozzy Osbourne’s case, the 1985 suicide of John McCollum, an act allegedly informed by the lyrics to the song ‘Suicide Solution’ – Metallica found themselves unsure as to how to conduct themselves when in the presence of the tour’s headline name. The quartet had been warned that the Englishman could be prone to bouts of unpredictable ill-temper, especially if the singer had been drinking and was out of sight of the watchful eye of his wife and manager. To this day Ozzy Osbourne divides his time between the roles of the world’s most likeable man and its most overgrown and spoiled infant. He is the kind of person who has long since become accustomed to being asked questions, while at the same time has neglected to remember that conversation requires that questions be asked of the person to whom one is speaking. Possessed of a keen sense of humour, Osbourne is also a man known to be haunted by uncertainty; upon hearing Metallica playing the riffs to old Black Sabbath songs during sound checks, Osbourne’s first instinct was to lunge toward the conclusion that the American group were viewing him as an object of mockery, rather than the correct inference that what he was hearing was a token of respect. Another potentially calamitous miscommunication occurred when Lars Ulrich presented the headliner with the impossibly banal question as to whether or not he washed his hair after performing in concert. With both men drunk, for reasons unknown the Englishman took sufficient offence to this line of enquiry that Metallica’s continued presence on the Ultimate Sin tour was placed in jeopardy.