Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘I think about Cliff all the time,’ says Ulrich. ‘It’s not something that goes away, and it’s not something that I want to go away. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t look at a glass and see it as being half-empty or half-full, I see it as being overflowing. So when I think of Cliff, I think of the three albums we were able to make together, and the friend I was able to have in him. You could hear his influence on the band in songs like “Orion”, and I suppose there is always the question of how that influence would have continued had we been able to make more music together, but I suppose that’s something we’ll never be sure of.’

  A largely unheard response to the question ‘What would Cliff do?’, however, is, ‘Conspire with James Hetfield to remove Lars Ulrich from Metallica’s ranks.’ In the years since the bass player’s death, it has become something of a badge of honour for those associated with Metallica at the time to have been privy to the rumour that the group’s Danish member was keeping a beat to borrowed time. The whisperers have it that Hetfield and Burton were tired of playing with the drummer, and that it was believed by both men that their colleague’s uneven technical abilities were holding back their band. Offstage this still smouldering rumour asserts that front man and bass player had grown weary of their drummer’s relentless energies with regard to the business aspects of Metallica’s operation and had come to view their colleague’s drive for matters other than the music itself as being characteristic of a calculating and career-minded rock star. As the story goes, such was the tinnitus-like insistence of the Dane’s shtick that it had been decided that following the conclusion of the group’s bookings for 1986 – the final date of which was originally scheduled to take place at Selina’s in Sydney on November 27 – Ulrich’s position as a member of Metallica would be terminated.

  Reviewed today such a plan seems fanciful, and for reasons that go beyond the simple truth that Ulrich owns the legal rights to the very name ‘Metallica’. It may have been that prior to Burton’s death both the bassist and Hetfield – and to an unspecified degree, presumably Hammett as well – were foolhardy enough to believe that the attentions of their audience could be attracted to a similar-sounding group with a different name, but had this folly been realised the musicians would quickly have had cause to consider their absent drummer with fondness. Ulrich had taken charge of Metallica’s offstage operation to such a formidable degree not only because his temperament and outlook were suited to this role, but also because his band mates had allowed him to do so; in many cases Ulrich’s partners could not be bothered to sully their hands with matters more routine than the writing, playing and recording of music. Such was the level of Hetfield’s inattentiveness to such exterior details that the front man would often fall asleep during business meetings; this it was safe to do because elsewhere in the room sat another man possessed of such attention to detail that it is difficult to imagine him falling asleep at any point in his life.

  Nonetheless this rumour had sufficient currency that it has been addressed publicly on more than one occasion (the first time by Xavier Russell in Metallica: A Visual Documentary, a 1992 band biography co-authored with his Kerrang! colleague Mark Putterford). Writing on the website for the magazine Classic Rock, former Kerrang! editor Geoff Barton recalls how ‘in pre-Classic Rock days a few of us from Kerrang! went out for a drink with Scott Ian and [Anthrax drummer] Charlie Benante, circa 1986’, an occasion where the author ‘distinctly remembers Ian pretty much telling us that Metallica were thinking of changing drummers, although not blatantly’.

  There is perhaps something of the dark art regarding the circulation of this rumour at the time. Whether the group’s stated aims were a plan of action, the details of which had been laid with meticulous attention to detail, or else a tactic driven by political intentions is at best unclear. But such careless talk was untypical of the Metallica operation. In 1983 such was the secrecy that surrounded the removal of Dave Mustaine that even those in close proximity to the group’s corridors of power were astonished to learn that the errant guitarist had been dispatched home to San Francisco on a Greyhound bus from New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. That three LPs and somewhere in the region of a million album sales later, discussions to unseat a founder member were being spoken of by lips so loose that the story had made its way to a pub full of English journalists seems unlikely. It should, then, at least be considered that the plan to sack Ulrich from Metallica amounted to little more than an indirect means of drawing the drummer’s attention to the degree to which his behaviour was grating on the nerves of his band mates.

  ‘I think that theory makes sense,’ is the view of Malcolm Dome, a man who at the time was, of course, privy to this gossip. ‘At that point Metallica were really on the rise, and you’d have to think they would have asked themselves, “Do we really want to go to the trouble of getting a new drummer?” But it would make more sense that [the rumour] was more the form of a wake-up call and a warning shot to Lars than it was a case of them being serious about getting rid of him.

  ‘Because at the time,’ he adds, ‘Lars was a bit, shall we say, out of control.’

  In a subject whose clarity is informed only by conjecture, just one thing can be said with any certainty: that the notion that Metallica might replace their drummer died at exactly the same moment as Cliff Burton. In the time it took for a bus to fall on its side, both the group’s priorities and the dynamic between the surviving members changed. In the vacuum created by a dead friend, Hetfield and Ulrich’s complicated relationship entered a period of unification. It would be a generation before the union between the two men would once more be threatened.

  As was the case with AC/DC following the death of vocalist Bon Scott in 1980, Metallica wasted little time in finding a replacement for their fallen friend. Those who remarked that the group acted with undue haste in this pursuit were usually sufficiently bereft of sensitivity to understand that this was not their place to say. Predictably it was Ulrich who led the charm offensive in the search for Metallica’s newest member. The first person the drummer telephoned was Joey Vera, who was offered the job sight unseen. This approach was the second time that Metallica had attempted to plunder the ranks of Armored Saint, and the second time such an entreaty had failed.

  ‘Of course, I thought about it,’ recalls Vera today. In 1986 the LA quintet were signed to a major label, Chrysalis, and despite their career having not experienced the same kind of vertical elevation as enjoyed by Metallica, were still a band the best days of which were perceived to stand before them. On receiving the telephone call from Ulrich, Vera addressed the drummer’s request with the words, ‘Let me think about this and I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  ‘So I slept on it,’ he says, ‘and, of course, I thought about it overnight. I had conversations with my girlfriend at the time, and I even spoke with my mom about it; and, of course, I spoke with the guys in the band. But mostly I think that my mind was pretty much made up in the first five minutes. I knew what it meant right away. It meant uprooting and making such a big change in my life; and at the time, I had to think about if this was something that I was really looking for. Was I looking for doing something completely different? And my answer was, “No.” I just wasn’t ready for it.’

  Elsewhere Kirk Hammett suggested to his school friend Les Claypool that he audition for the job, a request the musician was happy to grant. Hearing Claypool play, Hetfield remarked that the candidate was ‘too good’ and should instead concentrate on ‘doing his own thing’. The bassist followed Hetfield’s advice and formed the group Primus, a trio that to this day remain one of the most berserk acts ever to gatecrash the Billboard Top 10 album chart. Hetfield’s own candidate of choice was Willy Lange from the by now floundering Laaz Rockit; this nomination, however, found little traction with either Ulrich or Hammett. Another name positioned briefly in the frame but quickly forgotten was Mike Dean, bassist with South Carolina hardcore punks Corrosion of Conformity.

  In order to cas
t the net properly over the full range of candidates that had applied to succeed Cliff Burton in the ranks of Metallica, the band held auditions in the Castro Valley neighbourhood of Hayward, with an open-house policy that attracted visitors from all over the United States. Over a period of three days up to forty-five musicians introduced themselves to the still-grieving trio, a number of whom were patently unsuited for the position to which they aspired. One hopeless hopeful arrived at the audition carrying a instrument upon which could be read the signature of Quiet Riot bass player Rudy Sarzo.

  Metallica, however, did have their eyes on one musician scheduled to audition in October 1986. Following Burton’s funeral earlier in the month, back at home in New York City Michael Alago received a phone call from Ulrich. The drummer told his friend, ‘We are moving forward … We’re going to need a bass player: can you help us out?’ Three time zones west, in Los Angeles, Brian Slagel received a similar call, with the owner of Metal Blade at first nominating Joey Vera’s as the name for the frame. Having learned of Vera’s declination, the second name in Slagel’s mental Rolodex concurred with the first in Alago’s: Jason Newsted, then both bassist and bandleader for the Phoenix speed metal quintet Flotsam and Jetsam. Alago had witnessed a sufficient number of this group’s live shows to recognise that their bass player ‘was this wild young character with lots of charm and personality’. With Flotsam and Jetsam signed to Metal Blade Records, however, Slagel knew Newsted not just as an onstage presence but as a human being. Equipped with this knowledge, the impresario was able to calculate in his mind how the young bass player’s talents and character might be of a size and quality sufficient for the members of Metallica to begin to piece their professional lives into some kind of order. After mentioning the name, Slagel informed Ulrich that he would place a call to Newsted ‘just to make sure that he’s into [the idea]’, a conversation which led to the bassist ‘almost having a heart attack because Metallica were his favourite band’. Slagel himself ‘had the feeling that Jason Newsted was the perfect match because he was a really smart guy’ who was ‘just the perfect guy for that band. He was a younger guy, he was totally into the music, could play really well – he’s a phenomenal bass player – and a really smart guy too, which I think was really important. All those guys in [Metallica] are really intelligent. So it seemed like he would fit the bill …’

  Jason Curtis Newsted was born on March 4, 1963, in Battle Creek, Michigan, to parents Bob and Jo Newsted. The third in a family of four children, the youngest son was raised on the family’s horse farm in nearby Niles, Michigan. ‘My parents were very hard workers,’ recalls Newsted. ‘They always set a real good example – you know, “go-getedness”. My dad would always say, “Take the incentive and don’t sit around waiting for something to come around. You gotta get to it and take advantage.”’

  When Jason was fourteen, the family home relocated from Niles to Kalamazoo, a medium-sized town at the southernmost tip of Michigan known by the unpromising sobriquet the ‘Mall City’. To the outside eye the Newsted home appears to be the embodiment not just of the American dream but of also of this dream’s unspoken corollaries of self-sufficiency and independence of spirit, not to mention faith. The Newsteds were sufficiently tethered to the notion of living as citizens of One Nation Under God to send the teenage Jason on a church field-trip to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry in the neighbouring state of Illinois. This occasion proved to be an epiphanic experience for him. For a moment detached from the other members of his church group, the visitor found himself wandering the downtown streets stretching east and west from the Windy City’s ‘Miracle Mile’. As he did so, his ears were alerted to the sound of a bass guitar, and of one note being played repeatedly with a hypnotic rhythm. The muscle-swaying frequency was emanating from a record shop called Laurie’s Planet of Sound, to whose entrance Jason was led like a child to water on the streets of Hamelin. In the shop’s window was a small stand positioned beneath the words ‘Now Playing’. On the stand rested the sleeve to Van Halen’s self-titled 1978 debut album; the track that had attracted Newsted’s attentions was this album’s toweringly influential opening number, ‘Running with the Devil’.

  ‘It was like, “Oh my God, what the hell is happening?”’ recalls Newsted. ‘It changed everything, everything was different from that day on.’

  As with most American teenage rock fans, Newsted was also obsessed with Kiss, an affiliation that informed his decision to learn to play the bass guitar. As would be the case with many musicians that would emerge in the Eighties playing a more muscular brand of rock and metal, Kiss served as a gateway through which Newsted found heavier treasures such as Rush, Blue Oyster Cult and Black Sabbath. At this point in his musical pilgrimage, the bassist recalls being ‘sucked in completely’.

  Newsted planted his feet on the boards of a stage for the first time as a member of Diamond, a group both long forgotten and entirely typical of the kind of union formed in small towns all over America. At the time his aspiration amounted to little more than playing cover versions of popular songs at local house parties and small town halls. The bassist’s second band, Gangster, also performed numbers made famous by other musicians and as such would have also been unremarkable aside from the fact that the group’s line-up featured guitarist Tim Hamlin, a man who can be said to have fulfilled the role of Newsted’s first mentor. Such was the respect the bass player had for his colleague that when Hamlin decided to move to Los Angeles in order to pursue a life dedicated solely to rock ’n’ roll, Newsted opted to move with him.

  While the experience of many young men who travel to Hollywood in search of musical stardom results in a retreat from streets where, as Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott once noted, ‘nobody gives a damn when you’re down on your luck’, this could not be said for Hamlin and Newsted, who never made it as far as California. Instead the pair turned off the engine of their U-Haul truck on the streets of Phoenix, Arizona, and decided to call the desert city – a place crawling with snakes literal rather than figurative – home. The date was Hallowe’en, 1981; Jason Newsted was just eighteen years old.

  As with many teenage promises sworn to be remembered, soon enough the new arrivals would drift apart. In the months that followed, Newsted moved from Phoenix to the exurban city of Scottsdale, Arizona. There he formed the band DOGZ, a union in which the bass player also assumed the duties of lead vocalist. Along with second guitarist Mark Vasquez, it was with this group that Newsted composed his first pieces of original music, in the form of the songs ‘Dogs of War’ and ‘Screams in the Night’.

  ‘We thought we were pretty big shit,’ remembers the quartet’s short-lived front man.

  As with many bands without a record deal, DOGZ existed in a form of sufficient liquidity that Newsted was able to step away from the microphone stand in order to concentrate on playing bass guitar. In doing this he handed over the responsibility of singing and communicating to audiences to new recruit Eric A. Knutson, then known as Eric A. K. The band changed its name to Flotsam and Jetsam and recorded a four-song demo tape that appeared under the entirely unpromising title ‘Metalshock’. By this point the Arizonian quintet – the line-up of which was completed by guitarists Edward Carlson and Michael Gilbert and drummer Kelly David-Smith – had become a regular presence in the clubs and halls of Phoenix and Scottsdale, and had tuned up the audiences of bands such as Armored Saint and Megadeth. As the group’s confidence grew so too did their reputations, to the extent that soon enough the quintet’s profile had spread across state lines to the offices of Metal Blade Records in Southern California. Sufficiently impressed by the group, Brian Slagel not only included the song ‘I Live You Die’ on the seventh instalment of his Metal Massacre series but he also signed them to a recording contract. The band’s debut album, Doomsday for the Deceiver, was released by Metal Blade Records on July 4, American Independence Day.

  Considered more than two decades later, the Arizonian band’s full-length bow is remarkable for two
reasons. The first is its cover artwork, which ranks among the worst, if not the worst, in the history of contemporary music. With quasi-religious implications, the image that appears beneath the band’s name features a green lizard-cum-monster squatting atop a boiled-lobster-red Satan. This cack-handed concept is handicapped yet further by a stylistic execution so rudimentary as to make Metallica’s idea for the original front of cover of ‘Metal Up Your Ass’ appear sophisticated. The music contained within was, however, superior to that suggested by the album’s packaging. Doomsday for the Deceiver is a solid set of second-generation speed metal informed more by the hint of potential than by any particular mastery of execution. Despite this, Kerrang! writer ‘Harry Headbanger’ – the pseudonym of contributor Mark Putterford, a journalist who on the subject of thrash metal knew not a thing – afforded the album a review of such praise that for the first time the publication permitted a rating of six Ks, one more than the maximum usually allowed. With a tone that rang as hollow as the arguments upon which the review was based, Headbanger’s notice served only to remind Kerrang!’s more discerning readers that a number of its journalists were no more aware of the difference between thrash metal and white noise than was the office cleaning lady, that and the fact that some of the title’s commissioning editors could sometimes be heard snoring on the job.

  For Newsted, however, Flotsam and Jetsam were about to live up to their name. Following Slagel’s telephone call, the bassist focused his considerable energies on not just mastering Metallica’s songbook but doing so to professional specifications. In the seven days that elapsed between first contact from Slagel and an audition at Castro Valley, Jason claims that he did not sleep once.