Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (15 page)

At the end of this conversation, instead of placing the phone receiver back into its cradle, Hammett made another phone call, this time to secure for himself a copy of
No Life ’Til Leather
prior to the arrival of the tape being dispatched from New York City. By the time his clock struck midnight on April 1, the Exodus guitarist knew half of the songs contained within. In fact, from Kirk Hammett’s perspective, the call from Whitaker could not have come at a better time. Despite having built up a strong and swivel-eyed following, Exodus had reached a point of stasis: not only had the group not played live for a time, but its members had even failed to convene in order to practise. Hammett was feeling frustrated and was thus not at all disagreeable to what might otherwise have seemed like an entirely crazy suggestion: that he embark on a five-hour flight to New York in order to audition for the role of lead guitarist in Metallica.

A little over a week after receiving Whitaker’s phone call, Hammett found himself aboard a domestic flight bound for America’s East Coast. In the aeroplane’s hold sat his Marshall cabinet and amplifier head, packed in boxes that featured towels for padding and duct-tape for wrapping. As the plane began to make its final descent, the passenger, who had never left California before, looked out of the window and saw snow on the ground.

The guitarist was met at Newark International Airport in New Jersey by Whitaker and Burton. Arriving at the Music Factory, Hammett was greeted by a scene of human detritus devoid of
human beings. He was told that Hetfield and Ulrich were asleep; looking at his watch, he saw that the time was seven o’clock in the evening. The guitarist took stock of his current circumstances and thought, ‘Fuck, what the fuck did I get myself into?’

4 – SEEK & DESTROY

On the afternoon of April 23, 1983, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich decided to call a brief time out on drilling their newly recruited lead guitarist in order to partake in a little unrest and recuperation. Their itinerary for the day was to be divided into three parts: the duo would first conduct an interview for Brian Lew’s new fanzine
Whiplash
before heading out onto the streets of south Brooklyn to check out the latest import releases at Zig Zag Records. Their evening would end in the company of Toronto’s Anvil at L’Amour, the self-proclaimed ‘Rock Capital of Brooklyn’ which had played host to Dave Mustaine’s final Metallica show just two weeks previously.

On his right hand Hetfield was sporting six stitches on a freshly opened gash, the result of a drunken stumble while cradling a vodka bottle, after the new-look Metallica had opened for Venom at the Paramount. Onstage in New York’s forgotten borough, the San Franciscans had found themselves performing to an audience that, while not as indifferent as those they faced in Los Angeles, were still some way south of being exuberant. Part of the reason for this was surely nothing more than the fact that New York, like London, is a city where people are spoiled rotten by the sheer quantity of live music on offer, a fact that renders its concert-goers a difficult body to excite. In addition, it is also fair to say that the tri-state area had never before seen a band of Metallica’s kind. For while metal of a muscularity greater than that known to the mainstream did exist in New York in 1983, it did so with a sense of theatricality that bordered on the camp. Dressed in loin cloths and furry boots, Auburn act Manowar
were scarcely less homoerotic than the Village People, while the heaviness of Staten Island’s own Twisted Sister was somewhat undermined by the fact that its members chose to apply
make-up
to their faces, albeit in a slapdash manner that did nothing to obscure the fact that band looked more like dockers than rock stars. In fact, despite that group’s thuggish, punk-tinged sound, Twisted Sister’s music was far enough removed from that made by Hetfield’s band that vocalist Dee Snyder found himself entirely bewildered after seeing the group perform at one of its New York concerts. Upon meeting the group Snyder opined that while they seemed like good people, he still reckoned their chances of ‘making it’ were nil. In the context of the time, it is not difficult to see why he arrived at this conclusion. In 1983 heavy metal was one of contemporary music’s most flamboyant genres, yet here came Metallica dressed as if they lived in a squat.

But if New York was not yet entirely enamoured of the teenagers from California, the same could be said of the visitors’ attitude to the Empire State. When
Whiplash
writer Trace Rayfield collected Hetfield and Ulrich in the parking lot of Rock’n Roll Heaven that spring afternoon, his first enquiries centred around the duo’s impressions of the East Coast. ‘The ’bangers out here aren’t as fanatic [
sic
],’ answers Ulrich, as his band mate can be heard belching in the background. Although the drummer does concede that the reception his group are afforded ‘gets better with every gig’, nonetheless the inevitable comparison comes not to Metallica’s experiences in Los Angeles – ‘LA was the fucking worst’ being Hetfield’s take on his home town, in some of the few words he manages to string together amid his drummer’s dominance of the interview – but rather, San Francisco. ‘They’re not as crazy … out there in San Francisco the first ten rows are just hair and sweat and bobbing heads … almost like punk gigs. They’re just all over each other and shit.’

One of the striking things about the interview is the certainty
with which Ulrich speaks of the future plans set in place for his group. He confirms that, while Metallica are ‘a San
Francisco-based
band’, it would be unlikely that the quartet would perform in the Bay Area until the autumn (which they did, on September 1 at the Key Club in Palo Alto). He also states that his band are set to enter a recording studio on May 10 in order to record their debut album, the sessions for which would last two and a half weeks. So definitive and authoritative are the drummer’s answers that the resemblance between the Lars Ulrich of 1983 and the drummer thirty years on is not so much striking as it is unsettling.

Ulrich also revealed that Metallica’s choice of producer for their debut album – at the time, set to be titled ‘Metal Up Your Ass’ – was Chris Tsangarides, a man known at the time for his collaborations with Judas Priest and Thin Lizzy. For his services, though, Tsangarides reportedly requested a fee of $40,000,
blue-chip
currency indeed for a band who at the time dealt only in red cents. ‘We just have to be patient with our first album and make the best of it,’ confessed Ulrich in a tone of voice that suggested that even then compromise was to him fast becoming anathema. ‘Every song we have we feel is good enough to put on [the] album – we don’t have any filler songs,’ he said, in a statement that at that time at least was true.

Despite the fact that one half of the band had been among its number for less than six months, as Metallica readied themselves to record their first vinyl LP they were by musical measure a professional group. The same, however, could hardly be said of the business operation established to support them. Johnny and Marsha Zazula worked hard, even selflessly, on behalf of their charges, but the cloth they were able to cut came woven from cheap materials. All expenses were spared, from the fact that the group recorded their first album not in New York City, or even in New Jersey, but at Music America Studios situated in Rochester, a minor American city some six hours’ drive upstate from the
five boroughs. Despite the fact that the studio costs reflected the location in which Music America found itself – that and the fact that the facility itself housed only the most basic of professional recording equipment – Johnny Z still lacked the funds to pay to record Metallica. Ever resourceful, instead he negotiated with Music America’s owner and in-house producer Paul Curcio that the costs be spread over a period of time and paid in instalments.

From a professional point of view, the band that arrived at Music America in the second week of May 1983 were equipped with everything required to make a sound for sore ears. Recording music that will, for better or worse, last forever, is a job of work vastly different from the blink-of-an-eye business of playing live. While Metallica had mastered the latter task, when it came to making music in the studio the band were not up to scratch. The group showed up at the studio carting equipment that looked as if it had been in a mosh pit. Cliff Burton’s Rickenbacker bass guitar was battered almost beyond repair, as was his amplifier; Lars Ulrich’s drum skins were pock-marked and out of tune, with none of the band having the slightest clue as to how to go about
re
-tuning them. It was not an auspicious beginning.

‘Metallica were obviously a very young band that didn’t have a lot of money,’ recalls Chris Bubacz, the man whose job it was to engineer the album the quartet had convened to record. ‘They came into the studio with pretty poor equipment … Truthfully, I was quite concerned. I was concerned because they weren’t real knowledgeable about the recording process and I wasn’t really knowledgeable about what their real idea was, what it was they were trying to capture.’

At least in a creative sense, the union between Metallica on the one hand and Curcio and Bubacz on the other seemed like a match made in hell. The group’s producer was not himself greatly enamoured by, or even particularly understanding of, the music the group were aspiring to record – with Bubacz recalling, ‘Paul
really didn’t have any idea of what kind of sounds we should go for’ – and it was left to the membership of Metallica to ‘work together’ in order to make decisions regarding the sounds they were recording. Bubacz was himself not a fan of heavy metal music, preferring artists such as Chick Corea and Blood, Sweat & Tears. But the engineer did at least attempt to locate common ground between what he as a technician hoped to record and what Metallica might desire to create. Upon learning that he was to be working with a metal group, Bubacz made it his business to research a number of albums current to that genre. That year’s most successful hard rock album was
Pyromania
, the third LP from Sheffield’s Def Leppard, a set recorded with a painstaking attention to detail by producer and notorious perfectionist Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange. Both engineer and artists were in agreement that in a sonic sense this was the album to which their own recordings should aspire. Speaking almost thirty years after the fact, it is with a philosophical smile that Bubacz delivers his verdict that in pursuit of this aspiration both he and Metallica ‘failed miserably’. This, though, is an unforgiving point of view, one delivered by someone equipped to hear things as they might have been rather than as they exist.

As unassuming as Bubacz’s recollections of his part in the recording of Metallica’s debut offering may be, his role was nonetheless pivotal. For when critics and audiences refer to a album’s production, often they are confusing the term with the sound of its engineering. In studio terms, there are two kinds of producers: those who dirty their hands with the business of sound levels that have as much to do with mathematical theory as art, and those who assume the loftier position of plotting the musical course of a project as a whole. In many cases the person responsible for how a piece of music actually
sounds
is the engineer. In numerous instances, the term ‘producer’ is a misnomer – ‘director’ is a more fitting description. Having
previously spent mere hours inside a recording studio, Metallica by definition required assistance in translating their music as it existed in the confines of a small club or rehearsal space onto the permanent grooves of a twelve-inch record. And in 1983 it seems as if Curcio was more jobbing hack than visionary director. At the same time as both producer and engineer were recording Metallica – sessions which took place from early evening until one o’clock in the morning – they were also, by day, producing a local group whose music would be best defined as ‘easy listening’.

The project was beset by the kind of problems that nagged rather than overwhelmed. Early in the proceedings the producer halted a Hetfield guitar take to complain that the noise being committed to tape didn’t sound normal. ‘It’s not
meant
to sound normal,’ Hetfield muttered. The front man’s relationship with Curcio did not recover from this miscommunication.

‘Our so-called producer was sitting there checking songs off a notepad and saying, “Well, we can go to a club tonight when we’re through recording. Is the coffee ready?”’ Hetfield recalled. ‘He had nothing to say about any of the songs. I don’t think he’d dare say anyway, because we’d have said, “Fuck you, that’s
our
song.”’

To someone who earned a living from recording musicians, a glance at the stock provided by Johnny and Marsha Zazula could not have filled Curcio with confidence. Here was a group playing music of a kind the producer had probably never before heard, a sound both raucous and extreme. Such was the poverty of the group’s circumstances that the relatively modest costs of recording at Music America could only be met by payment on the
never-never
. Metallica themselves had no real studio experience, and one of their number, Hammett, was of a tenure so short that he had not yet seen a single rainy day. Despite his undoubted technical proficiency, the parts the lead guitarist desired to contribute to his new group’s first album were not yet up to the specifications set by his colleagues, to the point where Johnny Z
ordered him to simply replicate Dave Mustaine’s parts. When Hammett protested, his manager offered a compromise, whereby the guitarist would open every solo with Mustaine’s phrasing and then take them somewhere new.

‘As a twenty-year-old kid, put in a position like that, you don’t want to rock the boat too much, especially being the new kid in town,’ Hammett admitted. ‘So I said, “Sure.” I took the first four bars of most of the solos and changed them. When I changed them it was always for the better and everyone liked it.’

In an age before Pro-Tools, Hammett’s guitar solos had to be compiled from numerous different takes and then dropped in atop the drums, bass and rhythm guitar from tape literally cut by hand and laid above the music at the allotted place in any given song. This was both a time-consuming and tiresome procedure. This process was not aided by the fact that the equipment Metallica had to hand, both instruments and amplification, to lay down this most precious of things, their debut album, was less than high end.

‘It was really all done on a shoestring budget, to be honest with you,’ says Bubacz. ‘You could see that these guys were struggling to make something of themselves.’ The engineer, of course, quickly came to understand that the music Metallica desired to record was both darker and wilder than was at the time the norm, but even allowing for this the engineer was still of the mind that ‘proper recording techniques and playing techniques will help improve the sound. [Such techniques] certainly improved over the years and [today] you can record that type of music really well and still keep the same impact. But, yes, it was very raw and extremely distorted, and when you had a lot of the equipment not really working properly it lends itself to a pretty harsh sound, to say the least.’ Despite this, Bubacz recalls the members of Metallica as being ‘great’, young men who were ‘eager to be in the studio and do the recording’.