Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (35 page)

The release of
The $5.98 E.P
…. coincided with its creators arriving on British soil for their second appearance at Donington
Park’s Monsters of Rock festival, held that year on Saturday August 22. Positioned two slots from the top of the bill, Metallica were joined at the racetrack by headliners Bon Jovi, classic rockers Dio, old touring partners Anthrax and W.A.S.P. and raspy-voiced Philadelphian troubadours Cinderella.

For once that most unreliable of entities, the British summer, was playing against type. In the days that led up to August 22, much of the United Kingdom was basking in sunshine. As Metallica worked the jet lag from their eyes in the comfort of Peter Mensch’s London flat, elsewhere preparations were being made so that the group might be fully prepared to face the largest audience yet to meet their eyes. As if the pressure associated with an appearance onstage in front of an audience of 97,000 people – at least 40,000 more than witnessed the San Franciscan group’s first appearance at Donington Park – weren’t quite enough, Metallica’s appearance in the East Midlands was the quartet’s first scheduled live engagement for more than six months.

For professional musicians there is a difference between being able to play and being able to perform live. Metallica needed to reawaken the muscle-memory required for the latter task. In pursuit of this aim, on a stifling Thursday afternoon customers browsing the epicurean selection of import metal and punk albums in the racks of the specialist Soho record shop Shades would have seen on the wall a handwritten poster that announced that later that evening a group by the name of ‘Damage Inc.’ would be performing in concert at the 100 Club on 100 Oxford Street, just half a mile away.

August 20, 1987, was the first occasion that Metallica appeared live under an assumed name, albeit one that even the dimmest member of their audience could decode. (For the record, one of this book’s authors was in Shades that very afternoon and failed to place the pieces of the puzzle together.) Years before the advent of instant worldwide communication, the prospect
of Metallica appearing onstage at a venue for which they were absurdly unsuited was a prospect sufficient to draw an expectant crowd.

‘To be honest with you, I wasn’t really that into Metallica at the time,’ recalls Scarlet Borg, who on that Thursday afternoon queued at the doors of the subterranean club inside which eleven years previously Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols had assaulted music journalist Nick Kent with a bicycle chain. At the time Borg worked as the receptionist for an advertising agency based in nearby Mayfair; today she is the photo editor of
Kerrang!
, and someone who might reasonably be described as the conscience of the magazine.

‘At that time I preferred the bands with big hair, groups like Mötley Crüe and other more unmentionable “Hair Metal” acts. But one of my friends had talked me into going to see Metallica at Hammersmith on the [‘Damage Inc.’] tour, and I’d loved it. So the prospect of seeing them perform a tiny gig just before Donington – and I wasn’t able to attend the Monsters of Rock that year – seemed like a great idea.’

Phoning in sick at work – ‘I was terrified that someone would see me,’ she remembers – Scarlet positioned herself on the concrete of Oxford Street and passed the hours until the doors of the 100 Club opened by drinking cans of warm lager. As the minutes passed, so the crowd grew; soon enough this already congested street was pulsing with the energy of hundreds of people dressed in black T-shirts and white basketball boots. In order to avoid a scene, an executive decision was taken by the operators of the venue to open the doors of the 100 Club earlier than was usual, and so it was that at least 350 people descended two flights of stairs into a club the temperature of which would quickly rise to a level sufficient to glaze pottery.

‘It was rammed to the rafters in there,’ recalls Scarlet. ‘By the time the band came on the walls and the ceiling were literally
dripping with condensation. It really wasn’t a scene for the
faint-hearted
. I spent quite a lot of the gig with my face squashed against one of the [support] pillars, which totally blocked my view, and I remember that at least twice the sound from the PA just gave out. Apart from that it was just a case of trying to stay on my feet in the sea of colliding bodies and stage-divers. It was so hot in there that even Jason Newsted fainted [although this is disputed by the bassist himself, who maintains that he merely had his guitar cable pulled out in the mêlée]. Scott Ian was also there, stage-diving. It was an amazing occasion, the kind of thing you remember in detail for years and years to come.’

Unfortunately, for both the musicians and their audience, Metallica’s triumph at a club with the worst sight lines in the country was not to be repeated at Donington Park. For their flying visit to the United Kingdom, the visitors from the Bay Area saved the worst for last. While the occasion of the eighth Monsters of Rock festival can be said to have announced the changing tastes of audiences partial to hard rock and heavier metal, in practice it did so without particular reference to Metallica. It might have been the case that by playing a racetrack in the bellybutton of nowhere for the second time, the quartet had already made the point that theirs was a name on which eyes should be placed. But the most striking image from Donington Park in daylight hours that afternoon was provided by Scott Ian onstage wearing not just skateboard shorts – this at a time when performers were more likely to appear in a tutu – but also a Public Enemy T-shirt (an allegiance that led to the band being honoured by name on the lyrics to the Public Enemy song ‘Bring the Noise’ from the 1988 album
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
). As Anthrax opened their set with ‘Among the Living’, an exodus began from the front of the crowd of teenage girls in Bon Jovi T-shirts, tears streaming down their faces, repelled by the crop-circle-sized mosh pits opening up across the uneven viewing area in front of the stage.

Much more than this, though, the 1987 Monsters of Rock festival belonged to its headliners. While Metallica had propelled themselves into the limelight by dint of talent and force of will alone, Bon Jovi had secured for themselves a stratospheric level of success by utilising and even mastering every trick available to modern music marketing of the time. In harnessing the choruses and melodies of pop music together with the heft of stadium rock, the New Jersey quintet’s third album,
Slippery When Wet
, released the previous year, had pushed its creators to the highest positions of the world’s charts, with singles and videos for the tracks ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ and ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ appearing on radio and television with a ubiquity to rival that of Madonna.

Three hours before Bon Jovi bombarded 97,000 people at an East Midlands racetrack with Rat Pack showmanship and blinding smiles, Metallica were struggling to manoeuvre their own vehicle out of the garage. It is a seldom discussed matter, but the truth is that on occasion the union of Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett and (at the time) Newsted was one well capable of delivering live sets the standards of which were some way beneath code; occasions where Hetfield’s vocals droned flat, where Ulrich’s timekeeping was (at best) flexible and where Hammett’s inability to harmonise with the rhythm guitars on a song such as ‘Master of Puppets’ was more pronounced than usual. As a light summer breeze wafted the sound from the Donington Park PA on to the runway of the neighbouring East Midlands Airport, Metallica huffed and puffed their way through an eleven-song set that seemed to excite only one person, a member of the audience who had somehow evaded security and was busy climbing the rope ladder that led from the side of the stage to the lighting rig above (all the while banging his head as if attempting to free it from a beehive).

‘We played “Phantom Lord” and “Leper Messiah” which we hadn’t played in ages,’ recalled Lars Ulrich. ‘I remember looking
over at Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris on the side of the stage. He
winced
. I realised we shouldn’t have played those songs.’

At the end of a performance which even at the time was dismissed with a shrug of disappointment, Ulrich was met in the wings of the stage by a member of the road crew who proceeded to wrap the drummer in the kind of heat-retaining foil used by endurance athletes at the end of a triathlon. For a band that had just delivered a set that possessed all the bite of a de-fanged grass snake, such a sight appeared ridiculous.

The abiding image of Metallica’s afternoon, however, was one gatecrashed by Bon Jovi themselves. As Metallica failed in their attempts to project themselves to an audience that stretched as far as the eye could see – at the time, the organisers of the festival did not see fit to supply big screens – above their scalps circled a helicopter containing the band that would appear last on the Castle Donington stage. Rather than make a beeline directly to the landing pad close to the backstage area, instead the helicopter circled overhead as if taking its time to regard both the audience below and the little band that were presently attempting to entertain them. As the sound from the speakers darted around like a table-tennis ball caught in the draught of a hairdryer, the loudest sound heard by those thousands of people was the thumping whir of helicopter blades.

In photo shoots that followed Metallica’s second appearance at the Monsters of Rock festival, the body of Hetfield’s white Explorer guitar would feature the words ‘Kill Bon Jovi’.

1987 can be seen as being the first of Metallica’s many stopgap years, periods where decks were cleared and curiosities unveiled. In November, in the United Kingdom the group released their first retail video compilation. ‘Cliff ’Em All’ was both a visual epitaph for a dead friend and also yet another marker in the
stylistic distinctions that could be drawn between this band and others with whom they shared concert and festival stages. Comprised mostly of bootleg footage shot by fans, the
eighty-six
-minute VHS tape offered the viewer various concert clips of Metallica from the time Cliff Burton was still alive, spanning a period from the bassist’s second appearance with the group at The Stone, all the way to a clip filmed at Denmark’s four-day Roskilde festival less than three months before the bus crash that would end the musician’s life.

As ever Lars Ulrich was on hand to drum up business for ‘Cliff ’Em All’. That the release was an innovative idea was a notion seized upon by the drummer, while the nagging corollary that the reason such an idea had so far been untried could be explained by the fact that no other band would ask their fan base to pay money – and the video tape was not released at any kind of discounted price – for footage of such inferior specifications went unacknowledged. ‘To be honest, I don’t think the quality of the footage is going to affect us adversely,’ Ulrich reported, not the least concerned as to how this footage might affect the viewer. ‘It’s not as if this video is going to act as an introduction [to] Metallica to a kid in Stoke or Derby. It won’t be the first time he’s seen us so he’ll know what the score is. He might well find some of the shit amusing though, like seeing James in ’83 on the Kill ’Em All for One tour wearing a pair of spandex trousers.’ (This from a drummer who in 1987 was still wearing spandex trousers.)

But if viewers sat before their television screens at home might have had cause to wonder quite what it was that Metallica were up to with ‘Cliff ’Em All’, greater cause for concern might have been harboured by Newsted. The group’s current bassist had been stationed in his post for longer than a year, yet here came his predecessor, back from the dead as if it to remind him that his current circumstances came at the expense of another
man’s misfortune. For all its sensitivity to the group’s newest member, ‘Cliff ’Em All’ may as well have been titled ‘We Wish Jason Newsted Didn’t Exist’. When this point was raised with Ulrich, the drummer’s startled response spoke of a power base that was more suited to issuing diktats than it was to asking questions.

‘Well, to be perfectly honest we haven’t really talked about the video with Jason very much,’ was the drummer’s answer. ‘Obviously he wasn’t there when the pieces were filmed and he’s not really said much about it. I’m not actually sure that I want to get into all this, but basically however Jason feels about the video is how he feels. What I do know is that Jason has always had a lot of respect for Cliff, both as a bass player and as a human being [this despite the fact that the two men had never met], and you can’t ask for more than that!’

In a just and fair world Jason Newsted would have asked for more than that; the fact that he did not, and felt that he could not, offers further evidence that Metallica’s centre of gravity was beginning to calcify around the duopoly of James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich. Occasionally, however, the careless cruelties visited upon the band’s bass player were replaced with something resembling a more humane face. In autumn 1987 Metallica returned to the Bay Area in order to begin writing their fourth album. Unlike the preparations for
Master of Puppets
, the group began piecing together new material from individual riffs secreted on numerous demo cassette tapes rather than from pieces of music already structured in a manner that might be recognised as songs in even an embryonic sense of the word. As Hetfield and Ulrich started to construct the often creaking structures of the compositions that would comprise their next album, the pair held the equivalent of ‘open mic’ auditions where contributions from all members were considered with an open-mindedness and air, even, of democratic debate.