Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  RAT SKATES: The night Dave knew that he was kicked out, he came up to me when they opened for Venom, and he was holding, like, twelve beer bottles and was pretty wasted. He said, “Hey man, I’m Dave.” We kind of already knew each other from the flea market, but he said, “I’m looking for other musicians because we feel it’s really important to know other guys, especially out here in New York, that are into the heavy stuff like we are.” But what he was actually trying to do was get another band together.

  SCOTT IAN: I show up at the Music Building at two in the afternoon. Cliff’s standing outside having a smoke, and I’m like, “What’s up, buddy?” And he says, “Eh, not much. . . . We fired Mustaine.” I’m like, “Yeah, right,” ’cause Cliff was a ball-buster. He goes, “No, for real, dude. He’s on a Greyhound bus right now back to California.” I’m like, “Get the fuck out of here. We’re playing gigs together next week in Jersey.” He goes, “I’m totally serious, dude. We’ve been planning it for a month. We just didn’t want to say anything to anybody ’cause we didn’t want him to find out.” Then he says, “Go upstairs and ask James.” It’s funny to think that Mustaine was too drunk to be in Metallica because they were all big drinkers. But the difference was Dave was a troublemaker when he was drunk. So we’re sitting there in the room and they’re telling me, “Yeah, we want to be a professional band and that was never gonna happen with that guy because he’s just always gonna get us in trouble.”

  DAVE MUSTAINE: I’m gonna assume full responsibility for my part in the whole Metallica thing. I talked a lot of shit, but I was really hurt because I got fired. I didn’t really believe that I got a chance. At that time, if someone would have sat me down and said, “You know, Dave, you’ve got a fucking problem. . . .” But no one said that to me. I didn’t hear from anyone’s lips that I had a problem until probably 1988. I knew I did. I had a problem with everything. I just think being a loose cannon and not having anybody to answer to since I was fifteen, you get on autopilot, and you don’t really care. In a nutshell, I was a violent drunk, and I was more drunk than sober, and I jeopardized Metallica’s safety. Looking back, I would have asked me to leave, too.

  KIRK HAMMETT: I distinctly remember getting the phone call to come to New York to audition for the band. Exodus’s manager called me and said, “Hey man, Dave Mustaine is on his way out and Lars and James are interested in auditioning you.” It was very peculiar, because prior to that I knew I had some sort of connection with the band. I had some sort of feeling before that I would be involved with Metallica in some way, but I didn’t know it would be as a member. So when I got that call it made sense to me in a very strange way, like it was fulfilling a destiny.

  GARY HOLT: Kirk [Hammett] was the principal songwriter for Exodus through all the early years. Then he told us he was gonna join Metallica. When he told us, we had a big party for him. There was no bad blood anywhere, partly because when I joined the band, it was basically his band. So when he left to join Metallica, that’s when I started sowing my own creative oats. Not to say his stuff wasn’t good, but the Bonded by Blood Exodus was my thing, and when Kirk left, it put me in the driver’s seat. I was able to point the band in the direction Paul and I wanted, which was much more violent and brutal and faster.

  KIRK HAMMETT: The first time I ever saw James and Lars and Metallica was in 1983 at the Stone in San Fran. I was totally blown away. They were the fastest band I had ever seen up to that point. I went up to the front of the stage in between songs. Dave Mustaine was talking and I screamed out, “Sweet Savage!” which was a New Wave of British Heavy Metal band, and Dave heard me and said, “Fuck you!” into the mic. Fast forward six months later: I was sitting around with Lars listening to a tape of that very show and I heard myself scream out while Dave was talking. I said to Lars, “Hey, that was me!”

  SCOTT IAN: At the same time as Metallica told me they’d fired Dave, they said they had this guy named Kirk from Exodus flying in and asked if I could pick him up at the airport. I’m like, “Sure, of course.” The next day I picked Kirk up and he goes, “So, where are we staying?” I’m like, “Uhh, they didn’t tell you?” He had no idea they were in this shithole at the Music Building. Not long after that, Kirk came down with this terrible eye infection, probably from sleeping on the floor of this fucking hovel. So I take him to Long Island Jewish Hospital emergency room to get checked out, and after having us wait around forever, they give him some cream. So we’re in my car back to the Music Building, and he starts putting this cream in his eye, and he’s like, “What the fuck? My eye’s burning. My eye’s burning!” We drove all the way back to the emergency room and we wait again and they finally take us in and it’s the same doctor and he goes, “Whoops, I gave you the wrong stuff.” That’s where Kirk and I bonded.

  JOHN GALLAGHER: Jonny Z calls me up and says, “We want you to come over from England. The biggest band out of San Francisco is going to open up for you.” We were like, “Who, Y&T?” He says, “No, Metallica.” We’re like, “Who?” He gave us this demo tape, No Life Til Leather. I put it on and it was like 400 miles an hour Motörhead on 78 [rpm]. We were like, “All right, I guess these guys will do.” It was a no-frills tour—seventeen people in a six-berth Winnebago. The only one who was an old soul and had a good head on his shoulders was Cliff. Lars was a shyster, a mover and shaker—always looking for an angle. James didn’t say very much at all, always had a permanent smile on his face, always drinking. Kirk was so young and quiet. We played two days in a row in Boston at a place called the Rathskeller, a real hole-in-the-wall. We had been on the road for three days—they hadn’t given us a hotel. So, we get to the Rat, we play this gig, and the woman who ran the club said, “Here’s my apartment key. Go and crash.” So, we get to this apartment and the place is absolutely skeevy and disgusting. It was filthy. Of course, the guys in Metallica came in and made themselves right at home in all this rot and dirty bed linens, and we went, “Oh god, get us back to the dirty Winnebago.”

  Metallica recorded its full-length debut, Kill ’Em All, at Music America Studios in Rochester, New York, between May 10 and May 27, 1983. The album was coproduced by Jonny Z and Paul Curcio, who later worked with the Doobie Brothers and Carlos Santana. Some immediately adored the album; others didn’t know what to make of it.

  JONNY ZAZULA: Cliff Burton was the originator of the title Kill ’Em All. It was basically a disparaging comment about our distributor, Important. We wanted to call the album Metal Up Your Ass! and they wouldn’t allow that. There was a fellow at the company named Barry Kobrin, and after Megaforce was successful, he started his own label, Combat. But at the time he felt that I didn’t have a chance of getting this record anywhere past some small independent stores with the name Metal Up Your Ass! The cover was supposed to be a picture of a sword coming up through a toilet bowl. Cliff Burton was sitting there with the whole band when they got the news that they couldn’t call the album Metal Up Your Ass!, and out of frustration he just said, “Kill ’em all, man. Just kill ’em all!” I think James and Lars said that should be the name of the album.

  SCOTT IAN: You can’t say enough about that record. It was definitely influenced by bands like Anvil, Raven, and Motörhead, but Metallica took all that and turned it into the new wave of American thrash metal. They broke the door wide open. They didn’t get big off of Kill ’Em All, but it definitely got the ball rolling.

  DIMEBAG DARRELL: Kill ’Em All was the first really consistent thrash album where every song was just a razor blade and the whole record was one direction. James’s fuckin’ rhythm playing is unbelievable, especially for his first record. They wrote fantabulous songs and it made me motivated. It made me want to tear something up.

  EDDIE TRUNK: In 1983 I was one of the first people doing a heavy metal specialty show on commercial radio. I used to go to Jonny Z’s flea market store, and one day Jonny showed up at the radio station while I was on the air. He walked in and said, “I need a favor. I’ve got this band, they’re going to be hug
e, I can’t get anyone to even consider playing it on the radio. No one understands what this is. Will you please give this an opportunity?” He pulls out an early pressing of Kill ’Em All. That night I played “Seek and Destroy” or “Jump into the Fire.” I’m not going to lie and say, “I heard the future.” I was more, “I don’t know what I just heard.”

  JOHN GALLAGHER: When we toured with Metallica, Lars didn’t know one end of the drum kit from another. Once, he broke the skin on the bottom of his snare drum and didn’t know how to get at it, so he got wire cutters and cut the snares off rather than unscrewing them and releasing the skins. Another time, Lars was in the middle of a show and he turned to our drummer Rob [“Wacko” Hunter] and said, “Can you tune my drums for me?” Rob was like, “What? Now? In front of the crowd? Now? No! You couldn’t pay me enough [laughs].” Also Lars was always like, “LA sucks, it’s for posers. LA sucks, LA sucks.” Then we get to LA and he unwraps his brand new cymbals to use for the show. I went, “Oh, you’ve been holding them all tour and you bring them out now?” He says, “Well, you got to look good in LA.”

  JONNY ZAZULA: I mortgaged my house twice to put out Kill ’Em All. Plus, I didn’t pay my record distributor $18,000 I owed him. I already had to pay everybody else, so I would mortgage something or use a credit card. I thought I was gonna get the record done on spec and we would pay for it as we were getting royalties, but the guy thought spec was two weeks. So I had to go get the money for that, plus I was feeding everybody and giving per diems. Marsha and I weren’t making any money. We had just gotten into our first house and all of this was happening as our children were being born. One time, the Old Bridge Militia boys [a group of diehard working-class fans from Old Bridge, New Jersey] came to feed Metallica, Raven, and Anthrax. Everyone was at the house. So they came in with some fresh-killed venison, and without asking permission they cooked it on my stove. Well, they didn’t know what they were doing and they ended up burning down my kitchen. There were flames everywhere, and by the time they put it out it was charcoal black. The house was spared, but my kitchen was destroyed.

  DEE SNIDER: Metallica opened for Twisted Sister for a while. Then, there was one show in Holland where we arrived and the audience was clearly there for them. The bill said “Twisted Sister” in the smallest letters “AND METALLICA” with their logo. I went to them and said, “Guys, you’re headlining tonight.” It gave me a chance to finally see the band live. I stood on the side of the stage with my bass player, Mark “the Animal” Mendoza, and I watched them do “Whiplash” and “Seek and Destroy,” and I turned to Mark and said, “These guys have a lot of heart, but they’re never going to go anywhere.” It wasn’t that I didn’t think they were good, it’s just I thought they were so heavy—who knew that people would eventually become desensitized, like horror movies, they’re able to handle heavier and heavier stuff.

  It didn’t take Dave Mustaine long to get back on his feet after being kicked out of Metallica. Back in LA, he formed Megadeth with bassist David Ellefson and worked with a bunch of other players before hiring guitarist Chris Poland and drummer Gary “Gar” Samuelson.

  DAVE MUSTAINE: When I left Metallica, I was on the bus and I was looking for paper to write lyrics on because I was trying to keep myself from going insane on a four-day ride [from New York back to California]. I was writing lyrics on the back of anything I could get my hands on, and one of the things I was writing on was on the back of a handbill from Senator Alan Cranston that was talking about nuclear armament, and it said “The arsenal of megadeath can’t be rid.” I thought, “What a fantastic song title.” That song later became “Set the World on Fire.” So, in the midst of having a problem naming the band, it was suggested that we call ourselves Megadeth instead of the song. With extreme lack of foresight, I decided to go with that, not knowing what a professional setback the name would be for us. No one imagined this band would become this successful at the level where the name would affect us. When you’re thinking about ruling the club circuit and playing the arenas, and unsafe sex and drugs and alcohol and parties and fighting and speeding down the roads, the thought of someone not liking your band because the name’s “Megadeth”—it’s like, “Fuck you, it’s your loss.” But when you’re trying to get on the radio that’s something else entirely.

  DAVE ELLEFSON: I met Dave in the apartment complex we both lived in. I had just moved to Los Angeles from Minnesota, where I grew up. I knocked on his door and said, “Hey, where can you buy a pack of cigarettes?” He slammed the door in my face like I was some annoying vermin. I knocked again, and I said, “Hey, where can you buy some beer?” and then he let me in. I was only eighteen, and he was twenty-one. Once we settled on a case of Heineken, he started telling me about Metallica and played me some songs. Then he started playing some new songs he was working on, “Devil’s Island” and “Set the World on Fire.” I was blown away. I was like, “I have to be a part of this.”

  KERRY KING: I did the first five shows with Megadeth after Dave left Metallica. Basically, we both played B. C. Rich and we had the same guitar contact, and somebody suggested we should play together. I had seen him play with Metallica when they were still doing clubs. I was flattered that he would even consider my dumb ass, because, fuck, I was, like, nineteen then. I also thought it was a good way to promote my own band while helping him out and maybe learn something on the way. After five shows I went, “All right, it’s time for you to find somebody that you’re gonna keep ’cause that ain’t me.” It would have flown fine if I had stayed in Megadeth, but I had way more evil ideas to get out.

  TOM ARAYA: It weirded us out when Kerry played with Megadeth. Me, Jeff, and [drummer] Dave [Lombardo] were like, “What the fuck?” But we didn’t talk to him about it at all. We just waited to see what he was going to do. And whatever he decided, it wasn’t going to affect what we were going to do.

  DAVE MUSTAINE: When I first met Kerry he was making that fabulous spiked pentagram belt and he was putting on that nail gauntlet. I was watching him do that stuff in his front room, and his dad is a sheriff, so his dad was sitting there watching TV and Kerry’s assembling this fucking evil belt. Who would ever think that Kerry would come from a really normal family with a sheriff for a dad? One of the funniest things Kerry King has ever said to me was when we were driving up the freeway and I was rolling a joint. I said, “Would you hold this?” So Kerry put his hand out and I put a couple of skunk buds in it and then rolled the joint. Then he smelled his hand and said, “Wow, this smells neat.” We were just kids at the time. As far as I could tell, he really respected his parents because he waited until he was in his twenties til he started doing any [partying]. He wasn’t even drinking back then. It was really funny because we’d all be drunk, [ex-Megadeth drummer] Gar Samuelson’s doing heroin, and there’s Kerry over there blazing away on guitar—sober. I remember thinking, “How can you get up there and play like that without having some kind of stimulant?”

  BRIAN SLAGEL: When Megadeth started, Dave [Mustaine] wrote me a three-page letter about what Megadeth wanted to do. He wanted Metal Blade to sign them. It was between us and Combat. They offered him nine thousand dollars and we offered them eight thousand. So they went with Combat.

  SCOTT IAN: Dave played me the demos to Megadeth’s first album, Killing Is My Business . . . and Business Is Good. We were on tour with Raven, and we were playing the Country Club in LA. We were sitting in someone’s car and he was playing me “Skull Beneath the Skin,” and we were just like, “Holy shit,” banging our heads. That record still absolutely holds up. To be able to get kicked out of Metallica after having written a lot of Kill ’Em All, and then come back with Killing Is My Business . . . and Business Is Good, churn out all those great riffs and songs, is no small accomplishment.

  Megadeth recorded Killing Is My Business . . . and Business Is Good at Indigo Ranch Studios in Malibu, California, between December 1984 and January 1985. The record is universally regarded as groundbreaking for jazzy, technica
l thrash, despite its poor audio quality, which was largely the result of the band spending most of its recording budget on drugs and therefore being unable to keep producer Karat Faye on to finish the album.

  DAVE MUSTAINE: Even after we were signed, we were so broke. I was selling dope to try to finance the band, and then I became one of my customers, and then I became my best customer, and then I became my only customer. I went from girl’s house to girl’s house to live. When we couldn’t find some tart that would feed us, we would take turns living in a car. At one point we lived in a studio with no windows, no toilet. The only time we could shower was when our manager would take us to the gym. We’d go there high on whatever we could find in order to not feel the pain and misery of starving to death, or acknowledge the lifestyle we were living, as shaming as it was.

  DAVE ELLEFSON: I was flat broke and I knew I couldn’t get any dope. So out of boredom one day I went down to the mailbox and checked my mail, and MasterCard saw fit to send me a brand new credit card with an $8,000 limit, of which $3,000 was available at ATMs. So I went right to the ATM and just watched $20 bills fly out of that thing, so I could go cop dope.

  DAVE MUSTAINE: We had [guitarist] Chris [Poland] and Gar in the band, and every time we turned around they would pawn some of our equipment for heroin. We had nowhere to turn. So, yeah, we would get high whenever we could.

  DAVE ELLEFSON: During the Killing Is My Business era I was a raving maniac, drinking moonshine when I couldn’t score dope. One night I had sex with some girl on a sidewalk outside of a gig in Austin, Texas, and she even had to pull her tampon out before we could do it.

  DAVE MUSTAINE: I was into black magic and witchcraft when I was a teenager. I put two hexes on people and the result was what I was asking for. It took forever to get that Satanic depression off of me because it’s just like playing with a Ouija board. You open the doorway to the dark side, spirits come through. It took almost twenty years to get rid of it. You ask yourself, “How is it possible that all this bad stuff is happening to me?” Well, because you flirted with the devil and you owe him. That’s what the lyrics to “The Conjuring” was about. That’s why I have a problem playing that song today. Fortunately, I’m saved now so I don’t have to deal with that, but God, man, I was going through so much turmoil from what I had done.