Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (11 page)

As with many first bands, EZ Street did not so much disband as dissolve. The group, though, did afford Burton his first public appearances at such estimable gatherings as a church gala, local talent contests and, inevitably, numerous backyard parties beloved of Californian teenagers. The band could even lay claim to one performance for which they were paid, this being an appearance
at the International Café in Berkeley, an establishment run by Greek Americans who were quite happy to have the band play and their friends arrive to watch and to drink the bar dry.

From the ashes of EZ Street Burton and Martin formed Agents of Misfortune, another short-lived, free-form, experimental trio, inspired by Rush, the Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath. Interviewed in 1980, after a local Battle of the Bands competition, the bassist was asked to outline his group’s future ambitions: his answer was both succinct and lyrical: ‘To show [people] what’s on the other side of the fence.’

By the spring of 1980 music had positioned itself as the key component in the life of Cliff Burton. This was the season that he graduated from Castro Valley High School, and after he secured his High School Diploma he decided to continue his studies at Chabot College, a community institution in Hayward, California, which features among its alumni such figures as actor Tom Hanks, author Bruce Henderson, as well as Major League Baseball players such as Mark Davis and Ned Yost. Yet as Burton’s first semester at the college approached, the prospective student was already certain in his own mind that the vocation he desired for his life was that of a professional musician. But while the back stories of many young people who desire to embark upon a musical path they hope will lead to a destination of fame and glory – or even merely a living – come replete with a chorus from unhappy parents urging their offspring to concentrate on activities that loosely correlate under the banner of ‘proper jobs’, in the case of the Burton family the response to their son’s declaration was more supportive. Both Ray and Jan Burton had noted not only their son’s love of music, but also his willingness to apply himself to the business of
playing
music. In light of this, the parents struck a deal with their youngest child.

As Jan recalled, ‘We said, “Okay, we’ll give you four years. We’ll pay for your rent and your food. But after that four years
is over, if we don’t see some slow progress or moderate progress, if you’re just not going any place and it’s obvious that you’re not going to make a living from it, then you’re going to have to get a job and do something else. That’s as far as we’re going to support you. It should be known by then whether or not you’re going to make it.” So he said, “Fine.”’

In order to begin making good on his end of this bargain, the next group Burton joined was Trauma. Then a regular presence on the Bay Area’s live club circuit, at the time of Burton’s arrival the group were propelled by singer Donny Hillier and guitarist Mike Overton and played a rather odd combination of
straight-ahead
power metal combined with the kind of glam-metal stylings that had begun to dominate the boulevards of West Hollywood. The band, though, did possess a solid work ethic, something that was no doubt attractive to a bass player whose own work ethic had afforded him the support of his mother and father. The insertion into Trauma’s ranks of a new member dressed in flared jeans and denim jacket – an ensemble often derided as ‘a Canadian tuxedo’ – only added to the band’s sense of musical and stylistic uncertainty. Critical opinion among those who covered the underground metal scene of both Northern and Southern California was mixed. By combining a traditional power rock sensibility with the whiff of a glam rock aesthetic – without fully committing to either – the group’s appeal stood some way behind the teeth of those chomping at metal’s increasingly jagged cutting edge. After witnessing a performance at The Stone club, writing in
Metal Mania
Ron Quintana observed, ‘The guitarists had funny matching outfits, so they stood out more – whereas Cliff looked more like a regular guy.’ Hardly the kind of fulsome soundbite a band might choose to place on flyers and posters advertising future live performances.

A more positive recollection is held by Steve ‘Zetro’ Souza, the one-time singer with early day San Francisco thrashers the
Legacy – who later became Testament – and after that front man for local heroes Exodus. Souza recalls seeing Trauma play when he was a high-school student, and hearing voices in the Northern Californian metal scene declaring, ‘Those guys are [gonna be] the next big thing.’ Asked to identify an outstanding feature of Trauma’s sound, Souza is quick to nominate the playing of Cliff Burton. ‘His style was just so awesome,’ he says, ‘so radical … I think people thought he was just too much for [that band] maybe.’

Despite this, Burton did realise a number of achievements with Trauma. In March 1982 the band supported Saxon at the Keystone Club in Palo Alto, the final date of the English group’s US tour in support of their defiantly dodgy
Denim & Leather
album. The San Francisco band also contributed the track ‘Such a Shame’ to Brian Slagel’s
Metal Massacre II
– with the group’s management desiring as well that the group sign to Slagel’s Metal Blade label, despite an acute lack of funds on the part of company. In the same year, Trauma travelled south on Interstate 5 in order to play three concerts in Los Angeles.

It has often been reported that James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich first encountered Cliff Burton at the Troubadour, at the third of the band’s three LA showcases. In truth, they already met and spoken to the man who would soon enough come to be known as ‘the Windmill’, at both that earlier appearance at the Whisky, as well as at a video shoot for the Trauma song ‘I Am the Warlock’, where they were introduced by Ulrich’s friend Patrick Scott.

‘Trauma’s manager – his name was Tony [Van Lit] – had contacted me through K. J. Doughton to come and watch them shoot a video,’ Scott recalls. ‘So they came down to Santa Ana, which is by Los Angeles, to shoot a video in a professional studio. I didn’t know much about the band other than hearing a tape of them, and I knew I’d be sitting there all day long by myself, so I called Lars just as a friendly thing to come and watch. He was
excited about it and I wasn’t sure why, and he brought James with him, which I didn’t think much about then – it was something to do – and Lars and James were talking to Cliff a lot, the whole time. I didn’t really know where they were going with it at that time, but soon after that Lars told me, “Remember that guy, that bass player?” and I said, “Of course,” and he told me the whole thing about them trying to get him.’

Dave Mustaine recalls Burton being what he describes as a ‘star bass player’, before adding ‘that term alone – “star bass player” – should tell you something, because bass players are typically the bottom of the rock ’n’ roll food chain. Guitar players and singers are at the top, drummers in the middle, bass players at the bottom. I was once quoted as saying, “Playing bass is one step up from playing the kazoo,” which certainly pissed off a lot of bass players, but it’s essentially true. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and Cliff was certainly not a glorified kazoo player. He was brilliant. The first time I saw him play, I knew he was something special, and so did Lars and James, which is why they began surreptitiously courting Cliff while Ron McGovney was still in the band.’

While history has tended to portray the union between Cliff Burton and the Metallica camp as being one weighted heavily in favour of the Bay Area bassist, the truth is that Ulrich’s entreaties came at a time when Burton was beginning to feel in need of some kind of exit strategy from Trauma. Mike Overton also confirmed the presence of Ulrich and Hetfield at his band’s video shoot, describing the pair as being ‘cool to talk to’. Rather touchingly the guitarist also adds that he ‘did at the time wonder why they talked to Cliff for [so] long’. Overton admits that ‘Cliff was frustrated, Don Hillier and I both knew this. Cliff had always wanted to be a little heavier in sound and so did I … [Other members] wanted to be a lot more commercial. I was always an Iron Maiden and Judas Priest fan myself. So there was some infighting going on
among Trauma as to what direction we needed to head …’

But whichever direction that was, it would be without their bass player. Following his meeting with Cliff Burton, and after seeing the musician onstage again with Trauma at the Troubadour, Lars Ulrich, that little engine that could, and did, marched up to Brian Slagel and delivered a direct injunction.

‘That guy’s gonna be in my band.’

After Metallica’s appearance at the Old Waldorf on November 29, the touring party and friends retired to a motel on Lombard Street to celebrate their first headline show in the city.

‘It was then,’ Lars Ulrich recalled, ‘that we began to fuck girls who came to the concerts. I remember me and Dave Mustaine scored a few chicks together. It was the first time I was in a pile of bodies, there was someone on the bed, someone on the other bed, someone in the corner and someone in the closet. It was one of those times we would have only one motel room, then woke up the next morning with twenty people sleeping on the floor. But it was just like a dream … it was just so cool. It was everything we’ve ever dreamed of and more.’

Adrift in this drunken, ecstatic state, however, Ulrich failed to realise that he had shown his hand when it came to his plot to unseat Ron McGovney as his partner in Metallica’s rhythm section.

‘At the second Waldorf show Lars was already talking about replacing McGovney,’ reveals Bill Hale, then a photographer for the
Metal Rendezvous
fanzine. ‘I remember being back at the hotel with Cliff and a bunch of friends and Lars was drunk and saying, “When we get back to LA we’re getting rid of Ron,” … and Ron was right there in the room …’

‘After I heard them talk about Cliff, I had some idea [I was going to be replaced],’ admits McGovney. ‘I remember after that
show it was raining like a motherfucker and I saw Cliff, all in denim, just standing there in the rain. And I said to him, “Hey dude, do you want a ride home?” I kind of felt sorry for the guy. I kind of saw the writing on the wall … We played at the Mabuhay Gardens the next day, it was a little hole in the wall. That was the last gig I did with Metallica.

‘On the way home we stopped at the liquor store, I was driving, and they got a whole gallon of whisky. James, Lars and Dave were completely smashed out of their minds. They would constantly bang on the window for me to pull over so they could take a piss, and all the sudden I look over and see Lars lying in the middle of Interstate 5 on the double yellow line. It was just unbelievable! And I just said, “Fuck this shit!” Then one of my friends told me that they witnessed Dave pour a beer right into the pickups of my Washburn bass as he said, “I fuckin’ hate Ron.” The next day my bass didn’t work. My girlfriend at the time also told me that she overheard that they wanted to bring Cliff in the band.

‘I never, ever heard them tell me, “You’re out of the band.” After Dave fucked my bass up, I confronted the band when they came over for practice and said, “Get the fuck out of my house!” I turned to James and said, “I’m sorry, James, but you have to go too.” And they were gone within the next couple of days.’

‘What bothered me the most was that James just kind of sat there and let it happen. He just kind of turned a blind eye to it.’

On December 10, 1982, Ron McGovney officially quit as Metallica’s bass player. While Hetfield moved down to Huntington Beach to crash on Mustaine’s couch, Ulrich redoubled his efforts to cajole Burton into joining his band. Shortly after his nineteenth birthday, he finally secured the present he had been coveting for the past two months, when Burton agreed to be in his band. His consent, however, came with one condition. If Metallica wanted Cliff Burton to be their bass player, the group would have to come to him.

3 – JUMP IN THE FIRE

As the winter of 1982 surrendered to the spring of 1983, a rash of xeroxed yellow-and-black posters began appearing on the lamp posts casting long shadows outside the strip clubs and shebeens of San Francisco’s Broadway district. The posters served notice of a forthcoming show on March 5 at The Stone, a three-band
line-up
unified under the billing ‘The Night of the Banging Head’. In truth, the promoters could have saved themselves the effort of manufacturing hype. For the members of the Bay Area’s metal fraternity, this event had long since been pencilled into their diaries as the occasion of Cliff Burton’s keenly awaited debut outing as a member of Metallica.

As arcs of bucking feedback brought Metallica’s traditional set-opener, ‘Hit the Lights’, to its conclusion on that warm spring evening, James Hetfield peered through a fug of smoke and dry ice into a club packed tight with familiar faces. Brian Lew and Bill Hale stood stage front with their cameras, Ron Quintana held court at the bar, while Rich Burch, Toby Rage and Exodus’s faithful ‘Slay Team’ prowled the periphery of the pit cracking heads with impunity.

‘How you doing?’ enquired Hetfield with a smile. ‘We’re ready to fucking kill!’

Indifferent to the ways of the music scene of Los Angeles, onstage at an intimate club the logic behind Cliff Burton’s insistence on joining Metallica only if the group came to him rather than vice versa was clear for all to see, and at the closest quarters at that. Burton looked like a man not just born to appear onstage, but born to appear onstage as a member of Metallica;
the bass player’s charismatic authority, even regality, beggaring belief that this was the first time he had stepped onstage with his new band mates. This sight was met with equal emphasis by the few hundred people gathered to see the band perform. As with the animalistic roar that greets the end of ‘Ace of Spades’ on
No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith
, the sound from the people gathered in The Stone that March evening was informed not so much by adulation as by an energy that was reckless and emphatic. In 1982 Lars Ulrich would tell interviewers that, in Los Angeles, Metallica were ‘the right band in the wrong city’: now ensconced in the City by the Bay this, evidently, was no longer the case.

Writing in
Metal Mania
, issue ten, Lew was barely able to contain himself in his attempts to describe both the evening in question and, in a larger sense, the significance of the group whose name appeared as headliners on the ticket stub. ‘Metallica, those Supreme Metal Gods, those Purveyors of Raging Sonic Decapitation, those Rabid Vodka-Powered Maniacs, blew our faces off as they stormed onstage,’ came the writer’s sentiment, delivered with a flurry of youthful energy not dissimilar to that summoned by the subject of his prose. ‘As is their style,’ he continued, ‘the band went from power to power … leaving the headbanging horde thrashed and raging and it was only three songs into the set!’ Before concluding this most effusive of notices, the author had volunteered the opinion that ‘with the addition of Cliff Burton, Metallica now have the fastest and heaviest line-up ever assembled’, and that ‘their live show is now complete and is the most effective of any club band [the author had] seen!’

‘The thing about Metallica is that they were
our
band,’ says Doug Goodman, an original observer of the Bay Area metal scene. Goodman would in time come work as tour manager for such groups as Green Day and Smashing Pumpkins. His first job in this field was touring with Slayer, in front man Tom Araya’s Camaro car. ‘It didn’t matter that they came over from Los
Angeles. As soon as they played here, even before they’d moved up to San Francisco, they were immediately
our
band. The people in the scene identified with them in the strongest way right from the start. Of course, in time they’d come to represent the whole area, but even before that it was obvious that there was a real connection between what they represented and what we wanted to hear.’

‘There was this immediate intense connection,’ agrees Doug Piercy, one-time guitarist in Anvil Chorus and Heathen. ‘A lot of the bands in the Bay Area were more into the glammy,
make-up
, LA-influenced kind of thing, but there was a lot of fans that were interested in seeing some form of the British heavy metal scene without having to wait forever for Motörhead or Maiden or Saxon to come. There was a really diehard scene that was small, with kids who’d go to keg parties blasting New Wave of British Heavy Metal music on our ghetto blasters, but unfortunately there wasn’t a band at all that the scene could support. So when Metallica came on the scene, it just clicked. Here was a real genuine American band that played all the shit that we understood: we’d all been tape-trading looking for the new noisy thing and suddenly here was a band of our own.’

Considering that Los Angeles and San Francisco are cities that reside in the same state – and are in a geographic sense relatively close neighbours – the differences between the two are marked. Despite its easy-going, languorous exterior, Los Angeles is a city of high achievement, a place that attracts people from all over the country hoping to ‘make it’. As such, competition is fierce, while camaraderie is often merely a façade that goes no deeper than the sweat on each hustler’s skin. Tales abound from the Hollywood metal and ‘hair-metal’ scene of the Eighties that would see band members roaming Sunset Boulevard and taping to lamp posts and walls flyers advertising their group’s upcoming shows
over
those announcing appearances by competitors.

By comparison, for a band such as Metallica, San Francisco was day to Los Angeles’ neon-polluted night. As Janis Joplin once observed, ‘The first thing that defines the music scene in San Francisco is the freedom. For some reason people gravitate here and feel free to make any kind of music they feel like making.’ Artists seeking a location that allows them to ‘make any kind of music they feel like making’ stands in marked contrast to people relocating to a city in order to play the kind of music they feel will enable them to
make it
. Metallica, though, made music that while feral was also finessed, and the band themselves were more than animals out on the loose and looking for trouble. In today’s parlance people who claim to have ‘a vision’ are implying that they themselves are visionaries, but in the case of Lars Ulrich this could already be said to be true. Metallica may have worn their integrity like a patch on the sleeve of a denim jacket, but even in the group’s earliest days Ulrich appeared not only to have had his eyes fixed on a larger prize but also to be possessed of the wit to appreciate the incremental steps required in order that he and his band mates might realise this achievement. Relocating to San Francisco may not have been the drummer’s idea, but he was quick to realise the potential gain of such a move. The group’s arrival on the streets of the Bay Area, though, was less a tale of two cities, and more the story of one implacable musician. That Cliff Burton was able to spirit virtual strangers away from the city in which they lived serves to signify the power of an enigmatic presence that seemed to be comprised of little more than human hair and flared denim.

As Dave Mustaine himself recalls: ‘If there was any
hand-wringing
over this decision [to relocate to Northern California], I don’t recall it. We all knew that Cliff was talented enough to present what would ordinarily be considered an outrageous bargaining chip:
Relocate the whole band? For a bass player!
He was that good. And we were that driven; we were willing to do
anything to be successful. I think that we all recognised that by adding Cliff, we would become the greatest band in the world.’

Metallica’s first rehearsal with Burton took place in the dead hours that separate Christmas Day from New Year’s Eve. Although the move from Los Angeles to the Bay Area – the term ‘San Francisco’ is here misused, as the three émigrés actually lived outside the seven square miles that comprise that city’s limits – took almost two months to complete, as soon as Hetfield, Ulrich and Mustaine arrived in their new zip code on February 12, 1983, the young men required a place to stay. In this pursuit, Hetfield and Ulrich were accommodated by Exodus manager Mark Whitaker, who allowed the teenagers house room at his two-bedroom home at 3132 Carlson Boulevard, in the small East Bay city of El Cerrito. Presumably drawing the shortest straw, or perhaps as evidence of a division in the camp, Mustaine found himself in the bizarre position of lodging with Whitaker’s grandmother, an hour away from Ulrich and Hetfield.

It was in the living room of the house on Carlson Boulevard that Metallica first practised with Burton on December 28, 1982. Ulrich set up his drum kit in front of the couch while Hetfield’s Marshall stack stood wedged by the kitchen door. Such was Ulrich’s confidence in Burton’s ability to fit seamlessly into the unit, that he invited Ron Quintana, Ian Kallen and Brian Lew and a handful of other ‘Trues’ along to document the day. Following the rehearsal, Lew conducted the new look quartet’s first photo session. This was just one of many gatherings at 3132 Carlson Boulevard, an address that would quickly come to be known as the ‘Metallica Mansion’, a phrase used in jest given the dwelling’s ‘compact and bijou’ one-storey appearance. At the time, Hetfield and Ulrich’s new home on the working-class side of ‘the Bay’ – the East Bay, to be precise – was perceived as being
in a less than desirable neighbourhood. This may have been the case, but today the home is a sedate-looking apple-green coloured bungalow positioned next to a petrol station on a thoroughfare that seems as unthreatening and unremarkable as any address in the Bay Area.

Unremarkable, that is, except for the young men who once lived there. Even allowing for the group’s liking of their new environment, and that environment’s love of the group, that Metallica would relocate themselves from Los Angeles to Northern California at the asking of a man with whom they had yet to play a single note of music displays either a level of faith that borders on the fervorous or else a sense of naivety that is not far shy of being reckless – and is possibly both. But as dysfunctional as the backgrounds of Hetfield and Mustaine may have been (and as short-lived as Ulrich’s tenure in the City of Angels may itself have been), in this action the band’s willingness to separate themselves from streets known to unknown, and to divorce themselves from family and friends, speaks of a single-mindedness that would serve them well. In plotting their course to Northern California, Metallica turned their cheek not only to a safety net of any kind but also to the notion that theirs was a union that merely ‘played’ at being a band. As immature and foolish as Hetfield, Ulrich and Mustaine were capable of being, in this regard at least their actions were those of men rather than boys.

‘We knew that there was something about [Metallica] that was beyond all the rest [of the bands populating the Bay Area],’ recalls Steve Souza. ‘Exodus shows back in the day, even when I was not in the band, with [original vocalist] Paul [Baloff], were probably some of the most violent and brutal shows you’ve ever seen, way more violent than Metallica. But Metallica had the flair and the sound.’

‘We started being more comfortable with ourselves, more confident,’ is Ulrich’s recollection. ‘We started feeling that we
were belonging to something that was happening, and that was bigger than ourselves, that we
belonged
instead of being on the outer fringes.’

That it was San Francisco and other cities in and around the Bay Area that provided the germ of an idea for thrash metal, as well as being the setting for its most fertile and violent breeding ground, at first appears to be an incongruous truth. Despite the vibrations caused by groups such as Exodus and Testament as well as a host of other frenetic and precise local metal acts, it was only Metallica whose appeal possessed sufficient force to break through thrash metal’s ghetto walls and secure real estate in the mainstream. As such, the cultural movement that is still most closely associated with the area – then, as now – is that of the hippie and flower-power movement of the Sixties, where the sounds of bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane could be heard along the drug-enriched thoroughfares surrounding the ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ bohemian enclave of Haight Ashbury. Elsewhere, the 1967 song which took the city as its title found singer Scott McKenzie requesting, ‘If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.’