Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (22 page)

‘In terms of progression [the band] were speeding along,’ remembers Flemming Rasmussen. ‘Their songwriting was just getting better and better. And they did the “Escape” song, which was supposed to be their single. Big mistake. [It was them saying] “This is how much we’re willing to suck up to get a hit.” That was them saying, “This is how much we want to progress in the music world.” But it was their own stuff that did that for them, not a song like “Escape”, which is good … I think they recorded the song to try and get some kind of commercial break. They didn’t realise that that was a total waste of time.’

The folly of ‘Escape’ is not that it attempts to locate musical ground which its authors may explore, but rather that it does so with a degree of calculation and compromise ill-suited to
Metallica’s instincts. In a just and fair world, if one song from
Ride the Lightning
were to have been regarded with suspicion and even opprobrium by the band’s growing constituency, this would have been it. Clearly this was an opinion shared by Metallica themselves, who declined to play the song in concert for twenty-eight years. In 1984, though, ‘Escape’ was shielded from injurious brickbats by ‘Fade to Black’, a song greeted by many Metallica fans with all the enthusiasm one might associate with being run over by a car.

Whether consciously or otherwise, ‘Fade To Black’ takes Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Freebird’ as its structural template. In no hurry to make its point, the song weaves its way through a current of subdued guitars and graceful melodies, before the band eventually flood the dam with layer upon layer of rhythm and lead guitars. Despite it being possessed of both grace and fluency, many of
Ride the Lightning
’s initial recipients viewed the song not as a natural progression but as an outright surrender, a sop to those whose tastes did not run to metal finished to the point of razor sharpness. This would be the first occasion when the intensity felt by some sections of Metallica’s audience would – in principle at least – prove to be a blessing that carried with it a hint of a curse. Those who disliked ‘Fade to Black’ did not react to the song with a sense of disappointment, they did so with thoughts of betrayal.

‘When they played “Fade …” for the first time in [San Francisco] on the Ride … tour, some of us waved Kleenex at the band,’ remembers Brian Lew. ‘Cliff was pissed [off]. They lost some of the original fans over it.’

But if Metallica’s artistic determination was shaking loose some members of their fan base, with
Ride the Lightning
the group also managed to attract the attentions of a new and wider audience. On Friday August 3, 1984, Metallica joined headliners Raven and opening act Anthrax at the 3,500-capacity Roseland Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan for A Midsummer Night’s Scream, the concert promoted by Johnny Zazula. Located on
West 52nd Street and Broadway, just ten blocks north of Times Square, Metallica’s first appearance on the island of Manhattan was an occasion to remember in more ways than one. Performing a ten-song set in front of a sold-out crowd, each member of whom appeared eager to eat raw meat from the palm of James Hetfield’s hand, Metallica were once again met with tangible evidence that their efforts were beginning to pay dividends. And with regard to one member of the audience in particular, the San Franciscans’ appearance at the Roseland Ballroom became the location of a landmark occasion.

In the summer of 1984 Michael Alago was an ambitious twenty-two year-old A&R man employed by Elektra Records. Alago decided that he would pursue a career in the music industry after passing the doors of the Ritz club on East 12th Street in Manhattan in the spring of 1980. At the time a college student working part-time in a nearby pharmacy, the teenager did not let the fact that the venue was closed for renovations deter him from what was by any standards an audacious hustle. Entering the Ritz, Alago announced that despite the fact that he possessed no previous experience and no CV, he desired to pursue a career in the music business. Impressed by the young man’s chutzpah, the club’s owner handed him a first job in rock ’n’ roll. Not so much living the dream as learning his trade, at first Michael Alago spent his working day making coffee and fetching sandwiches for colleagues higher up the food chain. Soon enough, though, he was dealing with the acts booked to play the 3,000-capacity venue. He spoke with the artists and liaised with promoters and agents. When the time came for a move from concert hall to record label, Alago could now claim to be in possession of both a CV and feet-on-the-ground experience. It was enough to land him a job in the A&R department of Elektra Records.

It was here that Michael Alago first met Johnny Zazula, who presented him with copies of Raven’s
All for One
and Metallica’s
Kill ’Em All
. While believing the former LP to be ‘very good’, Alago felt it was the American band’s debut album that made the deepest impression. Such was the strength of the band’s impact that in late 1983 Alago flew to San Francisco to see the quartet play at The Stone, an experience he remembers as being ‘so exciting and so confrontational [but] in a positive way’ that ‘I lost my mind’. At the culmination of the group’s set, he made his way backstage and introduced himself to Lars Ulrich, with whom he had spoken on the phone just a few days previously. The drummer took possession of the A&R man’s telephone number and learned that the visitor from New York had his ear on the band.

‘Being a young A&R person I didn’t know what to do at first,’ admits Alago of his first meeting with the drummer. ‘So we shook hands and I said, “You know, man, I love the record, this is incredible, just please keep in touch with me.”’

Possessed of an instinctive eye for opportunities, Ulrich did keep in touch with Alago, albeit on an intermittent basis. But with Metallica set to play Manhattan in 1984, the drummer was sufficiently thoughtful and politic to remember to invite the A&R man. For his part, Alago had not forgotten the impression Metallica had made on him at The Stone. But if the sight of the group in a cramped club in their adopted home town had provided the young industry insider with a frisson of excitement, not to mention a hint of commercial opportunity, the sight of thousands of New Yorkers queuing along West 52nd Street in the crushing heat of a New York summer must have brought to mind the image of an untapped oil well.

The occasion of A Midsummer’s Night Scream was nothing less than a coming-of-age party for what a number of people were beginning to describe as the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, a moniker that would be quickly eclipsed by a term already making an appearance in the pages of
Kerrang!
and
Metal Forces
: thrash metal. And while the bill at the Roseland had as
its headliners an English band – for it was Raven that closed the show – the noise that greeted the arrival of local representatives Anthrax and later Metallica showed that in the city that never sleeps a new audience was waking up to the sound of domestic, cutting-edge metal.

Despite his tender years, perhaps, even,
because
of them Alago’s instincts were given full licence by his superiors at Elektra Records. Following the band’s set, the executive headed to the band’s dressing room to discover that he was the only A&R man within hustling distance. Despite Metallica holding to their hearts a healthy and innate distrust of outsiders in general and of much of the music industry in particular, the fact that the A&R man was the same age as the band he was by now attempting to woo (not to mention the fact that the previous year he had flown five hours coast to coast on his own dime in order to watch them play) meant that Alago was afforded a warm reception. In response, Metallica were met with an invitation to a meeting at Elektra’s New York offices the following afternoon.

‘Literally that night, I told them how over the moon I was about them,’ he recalls. ‘And [then] the next day I got beer and Chinese food and the band arrived in the early afternoon. At first we sat in the conference room, which was bigger than my office … and we sat there for a long time and talked about the music. The guys loved that there was a history to Elektra … So I think that excitement, my knowledge of their music, the fact that we were the same age, and that Elektra had a reputation kinda cemented the deal then and there. I don’t remember there being any complications at all in signing them.’

In a move that speaks of a bygone age for a music industry that today finds itself in rapid decline, Metallica committed themselves to Elektra (and vice versa) in a contract that spanned eight albums. Another remarkable aspect of this union is that the courtship began without any kind of guidance from the band’s
management. In fact, Johnny Zazula learned that contact had been made between band and label
after
the fact, news he greeted with an uneven temper.

‘John was
furious
with me,’ recalls Alago today. ‘Because you know what, I had to fucking tell him, “John, I’ve been talking to Lars.” And [the manager] went off at the deep end. It was almost like I was stealing his first born. He wanted to sue Time Warner [Elektra’s parent company]. He was going to get me fired. He was going to talk to [my superiors] – you know, how dare I, and all that kind of stuff. And of course what happened in the end was that our business affairs people talked to their lawyers, we agreed that the Megaforce logo would be on the next record, and they got a nice percentage …’

Alago goes on to say that he ‘adores’ the Zazulas, observing that Johnny and Marsha ‘were such incredible people’ who ‘love music the way we all love music. So once we got past that little hiccup, the band was signed to the label.’

For Zazula, though, this was not so much a ‘little hiccup’ but rather the beginning of the end. The manager’s anger at Michael Alago was misdirected; and the man who supposedly was in charge of Metallica’s business operation could hardly have failed to appreciate that the group on whom he had staked the home in which he and his family lived had in effect taken the biggest decision of their short career without seeking his counsel. Wearily he agreed to pass over the rights to
Ride the Lightning
once sales of the Megaforce release exceeded 75,000 units.

As if this weren’t enough, over the horizon troops were beginning to marshal themselves in opposition to Johnny Z’s exhausted forces, as Metallica caught the eye of a man who was quickly emerging as one of the largest and most formidable beasts in the music industry’s feral jungle.

Then, as now, along with his business partner Cliff Burnstein, Peter Mensch was the co-owner of the management company Q
Prime. The pair met in Chicago in the Seventies, when Burnstein launched the Blank label, an imprint of Mercury Records (for whom he had worked for a number of years, signing both Rush and the Scorpions to the company) and invited Mensch to run the label on a day to day basis. The two made for an effective if unlikely couple, with Burnstein possessing the aura of a Buddhist monk adhering to a vow of semi-silence while his partner handed out first impressions of an urban hustler who did not so much suffer fools gladly as leave them filleted and twitching on the floor. When invited by Aerosmith manager David Krebs to take up the position of that band’s tour accountant, Mensch sought his friend’s advice, and was told by Burnstein to ‘take the fuckin’ job, have fun and learn a lot’. Working his way up from this starting point in the company, soon enough Mensch was handling operations for bands such as the Scorpions, Def Leppard and Michael Schenker. Asked in 1979 to take charge of an emerging Australian band called AC/DC, Mensch extricated the quintet from their long-standing deal with producers Harry Vanda and George Young and instead paired them with Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, who had recently recorded the UK no. 1 single ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ with Dublin punks the Boomtown Rats.
Highway to Hell
, the first fruit of their union, duly became AC/DC’s first million-selling album in the United States. After moving to London in order to be nearer Krebs’s European-based roster, in 1980 Mensch invited Burnstein to leave Mercury Records and move to New York in order that the pair might handle his charges’ business operations in tandem and on two continents.

Both being capable and ambitious men, it followed that the two friends would soon enough fly their employer’s coop in order to master their own destinies. This they did in 1982 with the formation of their company, Q Prime. But while it is customary music business practice that parties striking out on their own be accompanied by a number of bands with whom they already work,
in the case of Burnstein and Mensch only Def Leppard shared the courage of their managers’ conviction. This was small fry indeed. In 1982 the Sheffield quintet had to their name two uneven, commercially underwhelming albums and little about them to suggest that a brighter future lay ahead. Since the managers received only a percentage of the money earned by those they represented, the first twelve months of Q Prime’s existence offered slim pickings indeed. Reflecting on this period, Cliff Burnstein recalled that their budget at the time would afforded only a diet of ‘peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a while’.

The pair’s fortunes, however, were soon to change, and peanut butter and jelly would quickly be replaced by caviar and truffles. In 1983 Def Leppard released their third album,
Pyromania
, a set that would sell more than seven million copies in the United States alone and make the name of both its creators and the men who managed them. Produced by Mutt Lange and propelled skyward by the video clip for the song ‘Photograph’ being placed on heavy rotation by MTV, the quintet from the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire found themselves with both a smash hit album and, in Burnstein and Mensch, representatives who understood the crucial distinction between a successful record and a successful career. For their part, the men who had founded Q Prime also understood that their own fortunes depended on the longevity not only of Def Leppard, but also of other bands whose legs were built for marathons rather than sprints.

Although Q Prime harboured a suspicion of music journalists that has at times been known to cross the border into outright contempt, their initial advances to Metallica were facilitated by a bridge built by
Kerrang!
’s Xavier Russell. Having spotted a brace of youths in Shades record shop sporting Metallica T-shirts during a summer scouting mission in London, Burnstein sought out
Ride the Lightning
and heard in its eight tracks a unit with the potential to sell records to both underground and mainstream
metal audiences. In the autumn of 1984 a call was placed from New York City to Russell’s flat in London: the man on the American end of the line was Mensch, who told the Englishman that he was thinking about making an approach in Metallica’s direction. Russell’s response was both adamant and incredulous.