Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘We never had these huge group meetings planning just how we should come across or look, you know?’ says Ulrich. ‘It’s just the way we are that people see, and the EP wasn’t any major planned thing … We did it all in six days down in LA, which was very quick for us. We usually like to take our time on stuff, but we wanted this to be as spontaneous as possible … The time it took us to record the EP … was the [same] time it took us to set up the gear in the studio for the last album!’

  But just as at the outset of their career Metallica neglected to point out to LA audiences that the songs they were hearing were New Wave of British Heavy Metal cover versions rather original tracks, so here Ulrich omitted to mention the fact that the original impetus behind his band’s decision to record in this distinctly punk rock manner came out of conversations with a major international corporation.

  In spring 1987 Q Prime negotiated a new European home for Metallica. Master of Puppets had marked the end of the quartet’s licensing deal with Music For Nations and so, without waiting for MFN boss Martin Hooker to prepare an improved contract, Peter Mensch offered his group to Phonogram, the British record company which released Def Leppard’s recordings. When Hooker approached Mensch with the offer of a new one-million-pound contract for the band, he was brusquely informed that their Phonogram deal was a fait accompli.

  ‘The band actually wanted to stay at MFN,’ maintains Hooker, ‘but Q Prime wanted them to go to Phonogram so that they’d have all their eggs in the one basket and have more clout. And I could understand that at the time. But they ended up signing with Phonogram at a time when nobody at Phonogram liked heavy metal in the slightest. People at the label didn’t get it, they just didn’t understand the music. I remember talking to people at the label at the time and they admitted that they’d never even heard of [Metallica], despite the fact that they’d already got three gold albums.’

  If Phonogram, whose roster in the mid-Eighties included Dire Straits, Soft Cell and Swing Out Sister, thought they were landing themselves the new Def Leppard they were swiftly disabused of the notion by Mensch, who with some bluntness told the label’s departmental heads that he fully understood that they knew nothing of his band, and therefore would play no role in their creative development. Nonetheless the shrewd New Yorker listened calmly as the cowed executives timidly enquired if perhaps they might be allowed to deliver a hit single for his band. Senior product manager Dave Thorne pointed out that with Metallica already booked to return to the United Kingdom that summer, their visit would provide an excellent marketing opportunity to sell the band afresh to British metal fans. The sole problem, as Thorne saw it, was that Master of Puppets was now almost eighteen months old, and the band had no spare material in their vaults. He politely enquired as to whether a solution might be found. At which point the idea of an EP of cover versions was first raised.

  Despite its title, then, … Garage Days Re-Revisited was recorded at studios the specifications of which resided at the highest end of professional music making. While its creators never claimed that the five tracks they committed to what was at the time still tape were rough and ready to the extent of actually being recorded in a garage, nonetheless as regards the making of the $5.98 E.P …, while speed was of the essence the same could hardly be said for the cost. For a release that took less than a week to complete, Metallica utilised the services of two top-line recording facilities: A&M Studios in Santa Monica and Conway Studios in West Hollywood. At the latter establishment, Metallica were gifted recording time by Ted Nugent, where the ‘Motor City Madman’ had finished work early on his If You Can’t Lick ’Em … Lick ’Em solo album, a set which would flop the following year on Atlantic Records.

  Amid the hospital-white walls and small but verdant gardens of Conway Studios, Metallica attacked the task at hand like workmen on a makeover television programme. Recording at a rate that equated to a song a day, in less than a week the quartet had placed in the can the tracks ‘Helpless’ by Diamond Head, ‘The Small Hours’ by New Wave of British Heavy Metal tadpoles Holocaust, the exquisitely titled ‘Crash Course in Brain Surgery’ by Welsh rock act Budgie, a rendition of ‘The Wait’ by English post-punk cult Killing Joke, plus a cut ’n’ shut melding of ‘Last Caress’ and ‘Green Hell’, two chalk-and-cheese selections from the Misfits (who, despite having disbanded four years earlier, were fast becoming the punk rock group most beloved of metal fans, owing mainly to the fact that Metallica wore the band’s T-shirts with almost perfect ubiquity).

  The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited sees Metallica showcased with a naked clarity that borders on the blinding. From the front cover showing four young men and three guitars framed in a communal shower stall – this at a time when it was most uncommon for metal releases to feature a photograph of the artists as a front sleeve – and represented by a logo that appears to have been written by the tip of a rollerball pen, to Hetfield’s handwritten expositionary notes on the back sleeve, even before the listener had removed the twelve-inch single from its cover the effect was to present the image of a band that were clinking together beer bottles on a cloudless summer’s day. For a group positioned at the high table of a genre most other representatives of which were photographed with facial expressions that appeared to betray the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome – the high-water mark of which had been attained by a gurning Slayer as seen on the back cover of Reign in Blood – this change of approach was as appealing as it was refreshing.

  Oddly, of all of Metallica’s releases from the Eighties, it is this slight and carefree offering that has best weathered the passing of time. It may be that a collection as unvarnished as this has little to lose by way of lustre, but the urgency with which Ulrich’s drumbeat propels itself from the speakers on ‘Helpless’ is as startling for listeners today as it was more than a quarter of a century earlier. Embedded by rhythm guitar parts that are drawn tighter than a high wire – the barely audible shriek that accompanies Hetfield’s fingers as they adjust their position on the wholly unforgiving ‘Green Hell’ is a moment of intensity equal to anything in modern metal – underpinned by Newsted’s relentless bass lines and resplendent from the attention of Hammett’s dazzling yet rarely gratuitous guitar solos, with a panache that seems entirely effortless in just five tracks Metallica pummel home the point that it was by design rather than accident that theirs was the name first on the lips of metal’s emergent fan base.

  Not for the last time, with the release of The $5.98 E.P: Garage Days Re-Revisited Metallica desired not only to be successful but also to be seen to be successful. In pursuit of this end, in order to be deemed eligible for certification on the UK singles chart, The $5.98 EP … (which on CD was re-titled The $9.98 CD …, this despite the fact that compact discs are cheaper to produce than vinyl records), Metallica’s debut single for Phonogram, emerged on British shores shorn of ‘The Wait’. Six days on from its release on August 21, 1987, the band’s name was duly heard on the official singles chart as announced each Sunday on BBC Radio 1 for the first time, as their late summer release gatecrashed the pop party at no. 27. And while Metallica could not lay claim to being the first group of their type to be rewarded with a British hit single – in this they were beaten by Anthrax’s ‘I Am the Law’, released earlier that year – the quartet could with some certainty be sure of the fact that they had deposited the most offensive lyric in the then forty-seven-year history of the British singles chart. A decade after Johnny Rotten had excited and appalled the nation with his observation that the Queen ‘ain’t no human being’ in ‘God Save the Queen’, virtually no one seemed even to notice Hetfield’s announcement in ‘Last Caress’ that he had ‘something to say’, that he ‘raped your mother today’ and that ‘it doesn’t matter much to [him] as long as she spreads’.

  The release of The $5.98 E.P …. coincided with its creators arriving on British soil for their second appearance at Donington Park’s Monsters of Rock festival, held that year on Saturday August 22. Positioned
two slots from the top of the bill, Metallica were joined at the racetrack by headliners Bon Jovi, classic rockers Dio, old touring partners Anthrax and W.A.S.P. and raspy-voiced Philadelphian troubadours Cinderella.

  For once that most unreliable of entities, the British summer, was playing against type. In the days that led up to August 22, much of the United Kingdom was basking in sunshine. As Metallica worked the jet lag from their eyes in the comfort of Peter Mensch’s London flat, elsewhere preparations were being made so that the group might be fully prepared to face the largest audience yet to meet their eyes. As if the pressure associated with an appearance onstage in front of an audience of 97,000 people – at least 40,000 more than witnessed the San Franciscan group’s first appearance at Donington Park – weren’t quite enough, Metallica’s appearance in the East Midlands was the quartet’s first scheduled live engagement for more than six months.

  For professional musicians there is a difference between being able to play and being able to perform live. Metallica needed to reawaken the muscle-memory required for the latter task. In pursuit of this aim, on a stifling Thursday afternoon customers browsing the epicurean selection of import metal and punk albums in the racks of the specialist Soho record shop Shades would have seen on the wall a handwritten poster that announced that later that evening a group by the name of ‘Damage Inc.’ would be performing in concert at the 100 Club on 100 Oxford Street, just half a mile away.

  August 20, 1987, was the first occasion that Metallica appeared live under an assumed name, albeit one that even the dimmest member of their audience could decode. (For the record, one of this book’s authors was in Shades that very afternoon and failed to place the pieces of the puzzle together.) Years before the advent of instant worldwide communication, the prospect of Metallica appearing onstage at a venue for which they were absurdly unsuited was a prospect sufficient to draw an expectant crowd.

  ‘To be honest with you, I wasn’t really that into Metallica at the time,’ recalls Scarlet Borg, who on that Thursday afternoon queued at the doors of the subterranean club inside which eleven years previously Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols had assaulted music journalist Nick Kent with a bicycle chain. At the time Borg worked as the receptionist for an advertising agency based in nearby Mayfair; today she is the photo editor of Kerrang!, and someone who might reasonably be described as the conscience of the magazine.

  ‘At that time I preferred the bands with big hair, groups like Mötley Crüe and other more unmentionable “Hair Metal” acts. But one of my friends had talked me into going to see Metallica at Hammersmith on the [‘Damage Inc.’] tour, and I’d loved it. So the prospect of seeing them perform a tiny gig just before Donington – and I wasn’t able to attend the Monsters of Rock that year – seemed like a great idea.’

  Phoning in sick at work – ‘I was terrified that someone would see me,’ she remembers – Scarlet positioned herself on the concrete of Oxford Street and passed the hours until the doors of the 100 Club opened by drinking cans of warm lager. As the minutes passed, so the crowd grew; soon enough this already congested street was pulsing with the energy of hundreds of people dressed in black T-shirts and white basketball boots. In order to avoid a scene, an executive decision was taken by the operators of the venue to open the doors of the 100 Club earlier than was usual, and so it was that at least 350 people descended two flights of stairs into a club the temperature of which would quickly rise to a level sufficient to glaze pottery.

  ‘It was rammed to the rafters in there,’ recalls Scarlet. ‘By the time the band came on the walls and the ceiling were literally dripping with condensation. It really wasn’t a scene for the faint-hearted. I spent quite a lot of the gig with my face squashed against one of the [support] pillars, which totally blocked my view, and I remember that at least twice the sound from the PA just gave out. Apart from that it was just a case of trying to stay on my feet in the sea of colliding bodies and stage-divers. It was so hot in there that even Jason Newsted fainted [although this is disputed by the bassist himself, who maintains that he merely had his guitar cable pulled out in the mêlée]. Scott Ian was also there, stage-diving. It was an amazing occasion, the kind of thing you remember in detail for years and years to come.’

  Unfortunately, for both the musicians and their audience, Metallica’s triumph at a club with the worst sight lines in the country was not to be repeated at Donington Park. For their flying visit to the United Kingdom, the visitors from the Bay Area saved the worst for last. While the occasion of the eighth Monsters of Rock festival can be said to have announced the changing tastes of audiences partial to hard rock and heavier metal, in practice it did so without particular reference to Metallica. It might have been the case that by playing a racetrack in the bellybutton of nowhere for the second time, the quartet had already made the point that theirs was a name on which eyes should be placed. But the most striking image from Donington Park in daylight hours that afternoon was provided by Scott Ian onstage wearing not just skateboard shorts – this at a time when performers were more likely to appear in a tutu – but also a Public Enemy T-shirt (an allegiance that led to the band being honoured by name on the lyrics to the Public Enemy song ‘Bring the Noise’ from the 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back). As Anthrax opened their set with ‘Among the Living’, an exodus began from the front of the crowd of teenage girls in Bon Jovi T-shirts, tears streaming down their faces, repelled by the crop-circle-sized mosh pits opening up across the uneven viewing area in front of the stage.

  Much more than this, though, the 1987 Monsters of Rock festival belonged to its headliners. While Metallica had propelled themselves into the limelight by dint of talent and force of will alone, Bon Jovi had secured for themselves a stratospheric level of success by utilising and even mastering every trick available to modern music marketing of the time. In harnessing the choruses and melodies of pop music together with the heft of stadium rock, the New Jersey quintet’s third album, Slippery When Wet, released the previous year, had pushed its creators to the highest positions of the world’s charts, with singles and videos for the tracks ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ and ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ appearing on radio and television with a ubiquity to rival that of Madonna.

  Three hours before Bon Jovi bombarded 97,000 people at an East Midlands racetrack with Rat Pack showmanship and blinding smiles, Metallica were struggling to manoeuvre their own vehicle out of the garage. It is a seldom discussed matter, but the truth is that on occasion the union of Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett and (at the time) Newsted was one well capable of delivering live sets the standards of which were some way beneath code; occasions where Hetfield’s vocals droned flat, where Ulrich’s timekeeping was (at best) flexible and where Hammett’s inability to harmonise with the rhythm guitars on a song such as ‘Master of Puppets’ was more pronounced than usual. As a light summer breeze wafted the sound from the Donington Park PA on to the runway of the neighbouring East Midlands Airport, Metallica huffed and puffed their way through an eleven-song set that seemed to excite only one person, a member of the audience who had somehow evaded security and was busy climbing the rope ladder that led from the side of the stage to the lighting rig above (all the while banging his head as if attempting to free it from a beehive).

  ‘We played “Phantom Lord” and “Leper Messiah” which we hadn’t played in ages,’ recalled Lars Ulrich. ‘I remember looking over at Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris on the side of the stage. He winced. I realised we shouldn’t have played those songs.’

  At the end of a performance which even at the time was dismissed with a shrug of disappointment, Ulrich was met in the wings of the stage by a member of the road crew who proceeded to wrap the drummer in the kind of heat-retaining foil used by endurance athletes at the end of a triathlon. For a band that had just delivered a set that possessed all the bite of a de-fanged grass snake, such a sight appeared ridiculous.

  The abiding image of Metallica’s afternoon, however, was one gatecr
ashed by Bon Jovi themselves. As Metallica failed in their attempts to project themselves to an audience that stretched as far as the eye could see – at the time, the organisers of the festival did not see fit to supply big screens – above their scalps circled a helicopter containing the band that would appear last on the Castle Donington stage. Rather than make a beeline directly to the landing pad close to the backstage area, instead the helicopter circled overhead as if taking its time to regard both the audience below and the little band that were presently attempting to entertain them. As the sound from the speakers darted around like a table-tennis ball caught in the draught of a hairdryer, the loudest sound heard by those thousands of people was the thumping whir of helicopter blades.

  In photo shoots that followed Metallica’s second appearance at the Monsters of Rock festival, the body of Hetfield’s white Explorer guitar would feature the words ‘Kill Bon Jovi’.

  1987 can be seen as being the first of Metallica’s many stopgap years, periods where decks were cleared and curiosities unveiled. In November, in the United Kingdom the group released their first retail video compilation. ‘Cliff ’Em All’ was both a visual epitaph for a dead friend and also yet another marker in the stylistic distinctions that could be drawn between this band and others with whom they shared concert and festival stages. Comprised mostly of bootleg footage shot by fans, the eighty-six-minute VHS tape offered the viewer various concert clips of Metallica from the time Cliff Burton was still alive, spanning a period from the bassist’s second appearance with the group at The Stone, all the way to a clip filmed at Denmark’s four-day Roskilde festival less than three months before the bus crash that would end the musician’s life.