Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (14 page)

‘Don’t use any of my music …’ spat Mustaine in return.

‘It was a pretty sad time,’ the guitarist later reflected. ‘I remember James crying as he was driving me to the bus stop but Lars didn’t care. I think that’s when he started to blacken his heart and stopped being sensitive to people.’

‘It wasn’t really working,’ says Ulrich. ‘We weren’t particularly emotional. We fired Dave at ten o’clock in the morning, by ten thirty we were halfway through our first bottle of vodka of the day. I liked Dave, I was the closest to him in the band emotionally, but he was too destructive. And he was going to take us down. At the time, relationships were second to the band, the communal good.’

As Mustaine prepared himself for a ninety-six-hour journey on public transport, he was struck by a thought that made his already awful day just that little bit worse: he had upon his person not a single dollar. As he began a 3,000-mile journey relying on the kindness of strangers for food and fluid, his replacement as lead guitarist in Metallica was heading in the opposite direction on a direct flight from San Francisco.

Kirk Hammett as born on November 18, 1962, at St Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco. His father, Dennis L. Hammett, was an Irish Merchant Marine while his mother, Chefea Olyao, was a government employee of Filipino descent. The Hammetts lived in the city’s Mission district, on 20th Street and South Van Ness, a neighbourhood as ethnically diverse as the family themselves.
The address was also home to Richard Likong – a half-brother to Kirk on his mother’s side, eleven years his elder – and sister Jennifer. By the time Hammett was seven years old, the family had swapped the vibrancy of melting-pot America for the homogeny of the suburbs, moving from San Francisco to El Sobrante in Costa Contra County. Hammett enrolled at Juan Crespi Junior High School and, later, De Anza High School. It was at the latter establishment that the youngster discovered an appetite not just for listening to music, but also for playing it.

In terms of rock alma maters, De Anza High School ranks as one of the most fertile breeding grounds for aspiring musicians in the United States, not least given that the population of El Sobrante at the time numbered fewer than 15,000 people. Despite this, the senior school has over the years seen its student year book feature the names and photographs of musicians such as Primus bassist Les Claypool, Possessed guitarist Larry LaLonde (who later found success as guitarist in Primus) and John Kiffmeyer, more popularly known as Al Sobrante, the original drummer with Green Day. In the clique- and status-obsessed world of the suburban American high school, the position occupied by Kirk Hammett on the totem pole was low, somewhere below the jocks and cheerleaders but above the members of the chess club. Bespectacled and dressed in a blue-down jacket, Hammett would each day ride to school listening to Jimi Hendrix on a portable tape recorder, stoned out of his mind. Other social groups at De Anza High School labelled him and his friends ‘the acid rockers’.

Hammett obtained his first guitar as part of a trade, surrendering a copy of Kiss’s
Dressed to Kill
album and a
ten-dollar
bill in exchange for a red Montgomery Ward owned by an acquaintance named Dan Watson. But Kirk’s relationship with the instrument he would one day become famous for dominating was not quite love at first strum. Instead, his new guitar occupied its owner’s attention for just a day before being discarded in his
bedroom closet. One day, Richard Likong asked if his younger half-brother was persevering with the instrument; Hammett lied and said that he was. Pleased by this answer, the elder sibling suggested the two of them venture out to a local music shop in order to buy new strings, an idea the teenager felt unable to refuse. Given that these strings cost $5 – and took literally hours to affix to his guitar – Kirk Hammett reasoned that he may as well justify the expense by actually learning to play his as yet unloved possession. In pursuit of these aims, the young student spoke to one of his neighbours, a woman who played folk guitar, and from whom he learned his initial chords. The first song the aspiring musician managed to play was ‘Calling Dr. Love’ by Kiss.

Just weeks later Hammett began playing music with his ‘acid rock’ school friends, a union that featured Kerry Vanek on drums, Mark Lane on bass and vocals from Dan Vandenberg. The group would attempt such ambitious numbers as Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’, their rendition not at all aided by the fact that their instruments were sourly out of tune.

By now Hammett’s musical tastes had expanded to include such groups as Aerosmith, Rush, UFO and Van Halen. He would regularly board a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train bound for Berkeley in order to visit specialist record shops such as Rather Ripped, Rasputin’s and Leopold’s. It was at such outlets that his ears and eyes would be opened to such releases as Motörhead’s towering
Overkill
and Iron Maiden’s pivotal self-titled debut album. As his musical tastes expanded – tastes that soon enough would include the kind of New Wave of British Heavy Metal acts that were whetting the appetites of Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield several hundred miles to the south – so too his musical capabilities grew. Such was his proficiency that Hammett was able to convince his mother to make a down payment on a blond 1978 Fender Stratocaster, by any measure a beautiful guitar. Ignorant of technical specifications, he decided to amplify his instrument
through an amplifier designed for a bass guitar. Lacking the funds to buy a guitar case, he was forced to carry his precious new instrument in a black refuse sack.

But if an adolescence spent listening to hard rock bands and playing music with friends on a tasteful guitar the down payment on which was provided by a supportive mother suggests formative years that are enviable, even idyllic, it should also be noted that Kirk Hammett’s young life came marred by activities which took place in the gloom of a darker shadow. For much of his childhood, Kirk’s seafaring father would be absent from the family home for between six and eight months of each year; the fact that his mother worked meant that the couple’s only son learned to fend for himself from a young age. Years before adolescence, Kirk would roam the streets of San Francisco, entirely comfortable with the energy and expanse of one of America’s most significant metropolitan cities. With his father at sea and his mother at work, their son would rise in the morning, make himself breakfast and then walk his younger sister to school. A front-door key dangled from a chain around his neck. The family had a dog named Tippy, and one day Kirk witnessed his next-door neighbour having sex with the animal. Elsewhere on the streets of San Francisco, when Kirk was out walking with his sister, strangers would approach the pair and offer him money for the young girl. One woman insisted that she would be the pair’s ‘new mom’ and once went so far as to physically grab Jennifer, before her brother wrestled her free.

Despite these travails, and despite relocating fewer than twenty miles from the City by the Bay, the Hammett’s move to El Sobrante came as an unwelcome development in his life, with the young charge viewing his new home as being redolent of ‘a
small-town
mentality [to which he] couldn’t relate’. Denied the sense of escape offered by the city, the sedentary nature of suburbia forced Kirk to confront his often turbulent home life. When home from
the high seas, the truth was that Dennis Hammett did not cut a reassuring or reliable father figure. ‘My dad was somewhat of an alcoholic,’ Kirk reveals, ‘so when he was home you were always walking on egg shells because you didn’t know what sort of mood he was in [given his] inebriated state. Sometimes he was happy; sometimes he was ragingly angry.’

An occasion when the man of the house was in the latter mood came on November 18, 1978. ‘I’ll never forget my sixteenth birthday because my parents got into a huge, huge fight,’ recalls Kirk. ‘I remember my dad being very, very abusive when he was drunk. He got very, very physical with me and my sister and my mother, and just about anyone else who was in his path. He was a full-blooded Irishman; he had that temper and when you added alcohol it was explosive. My dad beat the hell out of my mom.’

Elsewhere Hammett revealed, ‘I was abused as a child. My dad drank a lot. He beat the shit out of me and my mom quite a bit. I got a hold of a guitar, and from the time I was fifteen I rarely left my room.’

As informed by cruelty and fear as this self-imposed
isolationism
may have been, Hammett’s decision to retreat to a place of relative safety with an instrument through which he learned to express himself soon paid dividends. His first real group went by the name of Mesh, which in turn became Exodus. With an early line-up comprising Hammett and fellow guitarist Gary Holt – a man who would in time come to be viewed as being as skilled and ferocious a guitar player as any in modern American metal – drummer Tom Hunting, bassist Jeff Andrews and vocalist Keith Stewart, Exodus began playing cover versions of songs by Angel Witch, UFO and Judas Priest. The group truly began to mine its own seam, however, when in 1982 Stewart was replaced by firebrand vocalist Paul Baloff, a man whose charisma and strangled singing style lent the group a thuggish edge that spoke as much to hardcore punk as it did stylised and studied heavy metal. By
now penning their own songs, Exodus recorded a demo tape and became not just regulars in the metal clubs of the Bay Area but also pace-setters for the emerging local thrash metal scene as a whole. To this day, those who bore witness to Exodus concerts at such clubs as the Keystone Berkeley, the Old Waldorf and Mabuhay Gardens speak in awestruck tones about the ferocious, often downright violent, nature of the audience the group attracted. But Metallica’s second visit to the Bay Area made Hammett aware that his own band still had a lot of growing to do.

‘I was at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco and they were opening up for Laaz Rockit,’ he recalls of the evening of October 18, 1982. ‘They came on and just blew the place apart. I was blown away by the aggressiveness, the velocity and the overall originality of their sound. By the time Laaz Rockit came to play, three-quarters of the crowd had left. After Metallica there was nothing else that could have been more interesting than that. Everyone who saw them that night was converted.’

‘I thought to myself, “These guys are so goddamn original, but that guitar player isn’t so hot, they should get me.” I actually thought that within the first few minutes of seeing them.’

When Metallica returned to the Bay Area on November 29, they were billed to headline above Exodus at the Old Waldorf. The following evening, at a benefit gig held at the Mabuhay Gardens to raise money for
Metal Mania
fanzine, Hammett met the LA group for the first time. He spoke with both James and Lars and watched with silent unease as Ulrich changed clothes, undressing to the point of nudity in front of him. All the while, Hammett listened to the Danish immigrant as he was speaking, thinking of his accent, ‘Wow, he sure has a weird way of speaking.’

As befits a tightly knit musical community concentrated in one area, the Bay Area underground metal scene in the early Eighties already had about it an incestuous nature, and one that would serve Hammett well. Baloff had introduced Mark Whitaker,
manager of Exodus when they shared a bill with Metallica at the Old Waldorf, to Metallica. Whitaker was, of course, soon to be landlord to Hetfield and Ulrich at 3132 Carlson Boulevard and, following this, was the group’s travelling companion in the
week-long
journey from the Bay Area to Old Bridge, New Jersey. As feelings during this trip hardened against Mustaine, Hammett’s name began to hover into view. Prior to leaving for the East Coast, Hetfield and Ulrich had listened to Exodus’s demo tape and heard for themselves the quality of Hammett’s playing. As Ulrich himself says, ‘James and I have always been the main thing in this band, and we always looked at Dave and Ron and thought, “This is fine for now, but …” We had a vision that these guys weren’t going to last. We weren’t going to kick them out, but if we found someone who could fit in, we’d get ’em in the band. We saw Cliff and went, “Woah! This guy should be in the band!” So we concentrated on him until we got him.’ This done, in the months that followed Hetfield and Ulrich began to consider who might serve as a hypothetical replacement for Mustaine.

‘[Hearing Exodus’ demo tape] was the first time we’d thought about it,’ says Ulrich. ‘Then the next couple of weeks it was, like, “Kirk! Kirk! Kirk!” [But] it wasn’t as if we were going to put him in the band and get rid of Dave … until we left for the East Coast later that month.’

Given that Metallica were only acquaintances of Kirk Hammett in the most casual sense of the term, the task of making first contact with the Exodus lead guitarist fell to Whitaker, who placed a call to Hammett’s Bay Area home. Sitting on the toilet at the time, the guitarist picked up the receiver and listened to his friend’s pitch. The voice on the phone told the listener that Metallica were having problems with Dave Mustaine. When Hammett enquired about the source of these problems, he was told, ‘He fucking sucks, man. His tone sucks, his playing … he’s a fucking drunk.’ Whitaker then told Hammett that, if he so
desired, the odds on him replacing Mustaine as Metallica’s lead guitarist were so short that no bookmaker on earth would accept the bet. He was also told to expect a copy of
No Life ’Til Leather
to arrive at his home in short order, courtesy of Federal Express. As Hammett processed this information, a part of his mind was on guard to be told that everything he had just heard was nothing more than a joke, as the day of Whitaker’s call was April 1.