Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (28 page)

On tour with a man himself no stranger to being drawn into a dark drama over which he had no control – in Ozzy Osbourne’s case, the 1985 suicide of John McCollum, an act allegedly informed by the lyrics to the song ‘Suicide Solution’ – Metallica found themselves unsure as to how to conduct themselves when in the presence of the tour’s headline name. The quartet had been warned that the Englishman could be prone to bouts of unpredictable ill-temper, especially if the singer had been drinking and was out of sight of the watchful eye of his wife and manager. To this day Ozzy Osbourne divides his time between the roles of the world’s most likeable man and its most overgrown and spoiled infant. He is the kind of person who has long since become accustomed to being asked questions, while at the same time has neglected to remember that conversation requires that questions be asked of the person to whom one is speaking. Possessed of a keen sense of humour, Osbourne is
also a man known to be haunted by uncertainty; upon hearing Metallica playing the riffs to old Black Sabbath songs during sound checks, Osbourne’s first instinct was to lunge toward the conclusion that the American group were viewing him as an object of mockery, rather than the correct inference that what he was hearing was a token of respect. Another potentially calamitous miscommunication occurred when Lars Ulrich presented the headliner with the impossibly banal question as to whether or not he washed his hair after performing in concert. With both men drunk, for reasons unknown the Englishman took sufficient offence to this line of enquiry that Metallica’s continued presence on the Ultimate Sin tour was placed in jeopardy.

The San Franciscan band meanwhile devoured the food proffered by Ozzy’s hand, all the while desiring to tear and taste the flesh that fed them. In 1986 the headliner was a man en route to becoming a brand that would be pinned beneath glass rather than an artist in the present tense, a transformation that was anathema to the younger band. In one revealing exchange Ulrich commented to a visiting journalist that she should be grateful to be backstage with Metallica rather than front of house watching Osbourne. The reason for this, the drummer explained with a roll of his eyes, was that the headliner ‘has got his back to the audience [and is] humping the drum riser’. Suddenly alarmed by the unguarded nature of his words, Ulrich retracted this statement and replaced it with party-line boilerplate.

‘We think Ozzy is great,’ came the on-message message. ‘He’s been really good to us on this tour. We’re honoured to play with him. He’s one of the people who started this whole thing. Say that [in print].’

While on tour with Ozzy, each member of Metallica was allowed a per diem – the daily pocket money handed out by tour managers to the travelling musicians, yet another example of the state of perpetual adolescence in which musicians find themselves
while on tour – of $30. Hammett spent this money on sushi when he could find it and on comic books. Hetfield meanwhile considered the idea of saving his stipend in order to finance the building of a half-pipe for skateboarding in the garden of 3132 Carlson Boulevard, a flight of fancy that would come to naught. Metallica, however, did ask their managers for the company line on the prospect of the band using skateboards on the summer afternoons of the Ultimate Sin tour, and received a reply from Q Prime that was some distance removed from the kind of
passive-aggressive
corporate double-speak typical of those that walk the American music industry’s more powerful corridors.

‘We told the management, “Hey, look, we’re thinking about taking boards out on tour,” recalls Hetfield. “I thought [Peter Mensch] was going to go, “Oh shit, no way, you can’t.” [Instead] he just said, “Well, you break something, you still play.”’

‘Yeah,’ harmonises Hammett, adopting the voice of the man to whom the band devoted a percentage of its pay. ‘You break a leg on your skateboard, you play onstage with a broken leg.’ On the Ultimate Sin tour no member of Metallica played onstage with a broken leg – though someone did with a broken arm.

On July 26, in the hours that preceded Metallica’s performance at the Mesker Theater, Hetfield was riding his Zorlac skateboard on the concrete terra firma of Evansville, Indiana, when his wheels slipped from beneath his feet. Extending his left arm to break his fall, the guitarist hit the ground with a force sufficient to fracture bone. That evening, with Hetfield being attended to by medical staff, his three band mates took the rather noble decision to inform the audience in person that their band would not be performing for them, and to offer their apologies. This news was not universally well received by the hardcore, to the extent that even during Ozzy Osbourne’s set sections of the audience could be heard chanting the name ‘Metallica’. For the remainder of the the Ultimate Sin tour the support act performed as a five-piece
unit, with Hetfield singing onstage with his arm in a cast while his rhythm guitar parts were played by John Marshall. (The job had originally been offered to Anthrax’s Scott Ian, a commission he reluctantly declined as his own band were due to commence
pre-production
on their third album with producer Eddie Kramer within weeks.) Mensch’s warning that should a member of the group break a limb as a result of their skateboarding activities they would be compelled to perform onstage in this condition proved correct. For the benefit of the paying customers, James Hetfield wrote the phonetic insult ‘Pha-Q’ in black letters on his white plaster-cast.

Metallica would play a further six dates as support to Ozzy Osbourne. Following the final show – an appearance at the Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia, on August 3, James Hetfield’s twenty-third birthday – the group were addressed in their dressing room by Cliff Burnstein. The band’s co-manager had for his charges some good news, which he delivered in simple terms: Metallica had earned money in sufficient quantities that its members could now each afford to buy a house.

As the days began to cool in the summer of 1986, to outside eyes at least Metallica were beginning to take on the form of the year’s unlikeliest success story. This was a role in which they excelled and revelled. As the group embarked upon their first headline tour of the United Kingdom in September that year, audience members in possession of a £6 programme were confronted with a headline splashed in bold yellow type across page three that read, baldly:

Beneath this quote – a sentiment attributed to journalist Dave Roberts from the now defunct US magazine
Faces
– is a picture of Metallica, each member dressed in a T-shirt and either jeans, black canvas trousers or else sweat pants. As journalist Sue Cummings had noted, with not quite perfect equanimity earlier in the summer, this was a union in which ‘no one [wears] platform shoes, spandex pants, designer leather, hairspray or make-up. Metallica are too proud to dress up; their uniform is the uniform of their average fan, the teenage American slob: sneakers, ripped jeans, T-shirts.’

It is difficult for fans of Metallica who do not adhere to a stereotype not so much crudely drawn as finger-painted to view Cummings’s words with anything other than irritation. That said, a glimpse at the group photograph that appeared on the inner sleeve of
Master of Puppets
showcases four men who not only fit the profile of the ‘American slob’ but do so with sufficient relish that such an appearance is rendered not as a mark of shame but rather a badge of honour. Photographed by Ross Halfin in the living room of 3132 Carlson Boulevard on July 25, 1985, Metallica are seated on a sofa beside a coffee table atop which are strewn bottles of beer and that day’s edition of the San Francisco
Examiner
, the headline of which announces to its readers that [film actor Rock] ‘Hudson Has AIDS’. A copy of the Misfits’ twelve-inch single ‘Die Die My Darling’ and
Penthouse
publisher Bob Guccione’s latest skin trade magazine
New Look
also lie in shot. The subjects of the image greet the watching eyes at the other side of the lens with outstretched middle fingers and looks of off-duty disdain.

Here Metallica resemble a gang at least as much as a band. More than this, they resemble a gang that has just been in a fight, and who hope that it will not be too long until they find themselves in another fight. Not only was such an image unusual when compared to the gloss lips and tinted highlights
of the ‘hard rock’ community of 1986, it was also some distance removed from even the kind of bands who at the time proudly represented heavy metal in all its blokeish glory. Few bands were as unreconstructed in their devotion to the ‘full-
English-breakfast
’ school of mainstream yet still (relatively) heavy metal as Iron Maiden, a band on whom a long-haired devotee could not only depend but even set his watch by. But a glimpse at the English quintet as pictured on the inner sleeve of their 1986 album
Somewhere in Time
offers a vision of a heavy metal band as imagined by the curators of London Fashion Week. Despite being no more attractive than a mouthful of cockles, the five pale men nonetheless stand stock-still in poses of studied neutrality, their hair cleansed to a shine, their sleeveless T-shirts and blue jeans crisp and box fresh. Even for those who believed that the advent of thrash metal meant that heavy music was going to the dogs, by comparison Iron Maiden had gone to a stylist. Set against Halfin’s El Cerrito portrait, the result was the difference between five men who looked like brand-new waxworks on display at Madame Tussauds and a quartet that gave the appearance of rats in T-shirts living out their days in the squalor of an apocalyptic nightmare.

Such visual and sonic defiance was not to everyone’s taste. Although readers of
Kerrang!
who took the trouble to nominate their choices in the magazine’s end-of-year poll for 1986 were sufficiently swayed by the San Franciscans’ charm to elect them to the position of the year’s third-best group (behind Iron Maiden and Bon Jovi), a minority were sufficiently unimpressed to secure for the group the tenth rung in the category of Worst Band. More tellingly, thrash metal – the genre to which Metallica were at the time still inextricably linked – was decreed by the readership as being the year’s second most boring subject.

But for the thousands of exclusively young people who bought tickets for Metallica’s ten-date tour of the United
Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, the emergence of a new breed of American metal played by bands who looked exactly the same as their audience was a cause for jubilation. Dispensing with Oscar Wilde’s maxim that no good deed goes unpunished, the headliners returned the kindness shown by Anthrax in the borough of Queens three and a half years earlier by gifting the New York quintet the tour’s support slot.

By the habits of today’s emerging American rock bands, Metallica’s 1986 tour of the United Kingdom is notable for two reasons. The first is that in the twenty-first century it is inconceivable that a group of an appeal sufficient to earn them a silver disc – as had been presented to Metallica almost two years earlier at the Lyceum – would wait until the advent of their third album before undertaking a full British tour. That said, when Metallica did finally decide to visit the parts of the British Isles often referred to by the London-based music industry as ‘the regions’, they did so with the kind of attention rarely seen from the overseas visitors of today. As well as performing to audiences in larger cities such as London, Birmingham and Manchester, the Damage Inc. tour also pulled up at the loading bays of venues situated in the rather more out of the way towns of Bradford and Newcastle. The group also performed in Belfast at a time when many American groups declined to visit this then conflicted city. But regardless of whether Metallica were working up a sweat in the megacity that is London or else in an historic and these days overlooked West Yorkshire mill town, night after night the words ‘Sold Out’ could be read on the frontage of venues and in letters placed upon the slates of front-of-house marquees.

For metal fans of advancing years, the tour was without question the event of season, if not the year. Within weeks of the Damage, Inc. tour having left British shores, Iron Maiden and Saxon would also tour the island; to younger adolescent eyes, both bands would suddenly appear part of an older and stuffier
order. And while Metallica’s position as the ringleaders of metal’s new cutting edge was accepted by all, the presence of Anthrax on the Damage, Inc. tour’s undercard lent the excursion an even greater sense of occasion. Such was the momentum now gathering behind the thrash metal movement that within seven months of Metallica’s first UK tour, Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer would each headline London’ s 3,300-capacity Hammersmith Odeon.

Writing of the pairing of San Franciscan headliners and New York support act, in a review of the tour’s appearance at Dublin’s SFX Hall on September 14,
Kerrang!
’s Paul O’Mahoney observed that ‘this one had all the makings of a First Division football league top of the table clash’, a contest between ‘two of the meanest, most hellraisin’ rock ’n’ roll bands on planet Earth’. Having filed his entry for the most cliché-sodden opening paragraph in the history of music journalism, O’Mahoney then reviewed against type by asserting that while Anthrax ‘looked and sounded like a truly
great
band should’, for their part Metallica ‘didn’t quite click into gear as their mighty reputation suggested’.