Metallica: Enter Night
Read Metallica: Enter Night Online
Authors: Mick Wall
Tags: #Music, #History & Criticism, #General, #Literary Collections, #Biography & Autobiography, #Entertainment & Performing Arts
For Vanessa Lampert
This book could not have been written without the invaluable aid of the following people, to all of whom I owe the utmost thanks.
First and foremost, my wife Linda Wall, who journeyed with me there and back. Also my agent and good friend Robert Kirby of United Agents and Malcolm Edwards at Orion, in whom resides the true spirit of gentleman publishing. Sincere gratitude also to Elizabeth Beier at Saint Martin’s Press. Also Charlotte Knee, Ian Preece and Stephen Fall. Class acts. As, too, are Michelle Richter, Katy Hershberger, Brendan Fredericks, Gemma Finlay and Angela McMahon.
Heartfelt thanks also to two people whose researches on my behalf went beyond the call of duty: Joel McIver and Malcolm Dome. Then there are those whose input was less specific but who, again, were there for me, often just in the nick of time. They are: Diana and Colin Cartwright, Damian McGee, Bob Prior, Chris Ingham, Scott Rowley, Sian Llewellyn, Ian Fergusson, Russ Collington, Alexander Milas, Megan and Dave Lavender, and Yvonne and Kevin Shepherd. Most especially, though, Evie, Mollie, Michael, Tad and Ruby, who always helped as best they could, bless them.
And finally, of course, Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett, for the memories and the music…
Just Before The Dawn
It was cold that rotten dark morning, the temperature dropping to just below freezing as the dirty-white tour bus trundled along the old single-lane highway. Still only late September but in Sweden, where in summer the sun never sleeps, the nights were now growing long again. Soon the heavy snows would come and there would be twenty-four-hour darkness, that bleak mid-winter period when the national suicide rates went up, along with the consumption of drugs and alcohol. For now, though, the road ahead lay clear. It was cold and dark out there all right, but there hadn’t been rain for days, the ground beneath the spinning wheels of the vehicle dry as old bones.
Only the driver was awake – so he later said. Everyone else – the four-man band, their tour manager, three-man backline crew – were all sleeping in the thin wooden bunks bolted into the sides of the bus at the back, cardboard placed over the windows to keep out the draught. The bus, an English model with the usual right-hand drive, was not ideal for long night journeys across non-English roads where traffic drove on the right, not the left. But both it and the driver were experienced. Unlike the young band they were carrying, they had travelled these roads many times before. Nothing had ever gone wrong; nothing would go wrong now, either.
And then it did.
They argued about it afterwards. They argue about it still, a quarter of a century later. Was there ice on the road? It was certainly cold enough, and yet there had been no rain – no snow or ice particles – in any of the days leading up to it. Had the driver fallen asleep then? Or was he drunk, perhaps, or stoned? If so, why did the police, who arrested him at the scene, later let him go, free of all charges? Could there have been something wrong with the bus? Again, forensics said no. Mechanically, when they came to examine the wreckage, everything checked out fine. All anyone knew for sure afterwards was that the bus got into trouble when the road took a slight left bend. The first the driver, seated on the right, knew about it was when he realised the bus had slipped over the hard shoulder and was headed onto the hard gravel along the side of the motorway, its right-side wheels careering over the dirt.
Fully alert now, eyes wide open, the driver swung the steering wheel hard to the left, willing the bus back onto the road. For a moment, he thought he had it. But the back end of the bus skidded to its right, the huge back wheels unable to gain purchase as they now also left the road and began bumping along in the dirt. The panicking driver fought to control the situation.
No good. People were beginning to wake at the back, falling from their bunks, crying out. The bus continued its lurching, backwards skid. Within seconds it had turned itself fully around, facing back the way it had come, its wheels finally stopping as they thumped sickeningly into the kerb on the opposite side of the road. There was the sound of breaking glass, more shouts and cries and then the most terrifying moment as it keeled over onto its side and hit the ground with a thunderous crash.
Of the nine people onboard, two lay trapped beneath the bunks, which had collapsed on top of each other, left to right, as the bus turned over. Five sustained minor injuries – a broken toe, something else – and one lay dead beneath the stricken bus, his legs poking out from under its side. The driver was lucky. He would jump free with only minor cuts and bruises.
Dawn lay just across the horizon but the hour was still dark, still freezing cold. One of the first to leap from the wreckage had been the drummer, a short skinny kid with long tea-coloured hair who now took off, sprinting down the road, not knowing where he was going, just that he was fucking gone, so freaked out he couldn’t even feel the pain of his broken toe, the smart young schemer so used to seeing round corners yet never seeing this. No way.
Behind him came the guitar tech, a six-foot seven-inch giant of a man who had crawled from where he’d been thrown out of his collapsing bunk towards the front left exit, now a hatch in the ceiling through which he climbed, clothed only in his underwear, his giant’s back in agony where he had thumped it against the lip of his bunk as the crash of the bus had thrown him sideways and down.
From the rear emergency exit came the singer, tall, deranged, also just in his underpants and socks, yelling and screaming, bloody of mind, followed by the guitarist, another short skinny-arsed figure, coughing and crying, his large dark eyes brimful of night sky and ashes. Everyone was shouting and screaming, no one knew what was going on, what to do, what was happening. It was still dark, freezing cold, and no one was prepared for it, for this, whatever this was. All they knew was that it was bad, fucked-up bad. Big time fucked-up bad…
By the time the second tour bus carrying the rest of the crew turned up over an hour later, the first of seven ambulances had also arrived but only the tour manager seemed to know what had actually gone down, and he was in such shock he had no idea how to convey it to the rest of them. That, as they climbed aboard the ambulances and headed for the hospital, they would be leaving behind one of their own. Not just anyone, either, but the one they all felt carried with him most of the luck. The one they all cherished above the rest, above each other, that they always looked up to, even as they made fun of him, or chose to disregard his advice, his sense of integrity and of right and wrong, always that little bit too much for the rest, just young fucks not always into what was right but what was fun right now.
The darkness lifting, grey dawn sky blurring over their heads, they climbed into the ambulances and drove off, not knowing yet that they were leaving behind not just their past but their future. The one they had all dreamed of and shared with each other, spoken and unspoken, right up to the moment the bus hit that invisible patch of ice, the fucking driver if not asleep then not awake enough to follow the bending road; the map to the treasure they all knew was theirs to share right up till the moment the devil took a hand in things and changed their lives for ever.
Right up to the moment Cliff Burton, bass player, left before them, taking with him the soul of the band with the dumbest heavy metal name ever: Metallica.
Born To Die
‘Fuck it all and fucking no regrets!’
– James Hetfield, ‘Damage, Inc.’, 1986
The Prince
It was such a bizarre, unexpected moment that for years afterwards I wondered if it had really happened, or whether it was some sort of trauma-induced false memory. Yet the vision of Lars hopping on crutches towards me down the steps of the Hammersmith Odeon still remains now, despite all the days and years and lifetimes that have since passed between us.
I don’t remember the gig – who it was or what it was – just that moment as he lurched down the steps at speed towards me, calling my name.
‘Hey, Mick, you fuck! What’s happening?’
Its front doors bolted, the fans having long since left, I could only assume he had been malingering at the same after-show drinks thing I had, idling at the upstairs bar backstage into the early hours, now in search of a taxi home. Yet I had not seen him. But then the frame of mind I was in, my field of vision had been limited, tunnelled down to some wincingly sharp needlepoint within. It was my first outing since my mother had died a couple of weeks before. Younger than I am now, she had been struck down by cancer of the brain and the ending, although relatively sudden, had been preceded by extremely unkind circumstances, excruciating for her, godless to those of us in attendance.
He was down the steps in an instant, his face close to mine. ‘Hey,’ he said. There was a brief bit of banter in which I motioned questioningly towards the crutches. ‘My toe,’ he said, as though it was such ancient news it barely rated a mention. I must have looked baffled. ‘I broke it.’ I stared at him. ‘In the crash,’ he added, impatiently.
I was used to rock stars, even the ones who weren’t really famous yet like Lars, expecting you to know every minute detail of their working lives and to be suitably fascinated by them. But still…broken toe? Crash? What crash?
But that wasn’t what he was interested in. What he wanted to know was: ‘So were you here for us too?’
Again, I was baffled. He read it instantly. ‘When we played here, you dork!’ Oh…now I got it. Metallica had also played the Hammersmith Odeon recently. As their latest champion in the British rock press, it was not unreasonable for Lars to have expected me to be there for the band’s first headline appearance at a prestige venue like that. But of course I hadn’t. Instead I had either been at the hospital or coming home from the hospital or getting ready to go to the hospital. Either that or I had just been in hell.
I didn’t know then, though, how to put something like that into words. I barely knew how to say it to myself, let alone someone else. I was twenty-eight and my world had simultaneously shrunk and expanded in ways I was struggling to grasp. He was twenty-two and not remotely interested anyway. All that mattered was Metallica, you fuck!
‘No,’ I said, too exhausted even to lie about it. ‘Was it good?’
‘What?’ he exploded. ‘Was it good? You weren’t there?’ He looked at me, disappointment flecked with anger and shock. ‘Yeah, it was fuckin’ good! You really missed a great fuckin’ gig! The place was sold out and the fans went crazy!’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘that’s great. Sorry I missed it, man.’
His outraged eyes studied mine. A precocious child growing rapidly into a full-on fuck of a man, Lars may have been too in love with Metallica and what it gave him when he looked in the mirror to see past it long enough to think seriously about almost anything else, but he was not a stupid person, and in that instant he must have gotten an inkling of something else going on in my face – not what exactly, just enough of something to forgive this transgression, although not enough to forget, not for the foreseeable anyway – because he changed the subject and after a bit more inconsequential banter he hobbled off again, still unhappy with me but not quite so offended, or so I feebly hoped. Him and his broken toe…
I watched his back disappear into the night, accompanied by his minder, looking for their ride home or wherever they were going next.
Crash, I thought, what crash?
The first time James Hetfield met Lars Ulrich he had him pegged. ‘Rich kid,’ he said to himself. You know the type: got everything; an only child who didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘no’. And so he was. Born into a house as big as a castle, in the elegant town of Hellerup, the most fashionable part of the municipality of Gentofte, in eastern Denmark, Lars Ulrich arrived on Boxing Day, 1963. A late Christmas present for a childless couple in their mid-thirties – old, in those days, for having babies – Lars was regarded as special from the day he was born. It was a view he would quickly grow to share.
His father, Torben, was a tennis-playing veteran of over a hundred Davis Cup matches – during which time he led the team to several finals – and a fully paid-up member of the emerging post-war jet set; his mother, Lone, a bohemian ‘den mother’ who would spend her days keeping her perpetually moving husband’s feet on the ground; or trying to. A star of the amateur tennis era who was already forty yet still winning Grand Slam matches when he belatedly turned professional in the late 1960s, Torben’s interests were not confined, however, merely to sport. With the umbrella Danish sports authority in that amateur era limiting participation in tournaments abroad to just fifty-six days per year, he had time – just – to also become a skilled writer for Denmark’s
Politiken
newspaper, a regular horn player in various jazz ensembles, and later artist, film-maker and practising Buddhist. A long-haired, splendidly whiskered Gandalf-like figure whose obsession with physical and mental fitness continued long after his professional sports career ended, as he recalled in a 2005 interview: ‘Maybe I played tennis in the afternoons, and then I would go play music at night, and then after that I had to go up to the newspaper and write reviews, and after that maybe I would go meet some of my friends in the morning and have breakfast, and then I had to go to band practice at noon and play tennis at 3.00. All of a sudden I hadn’t slept for three or four days.’
His only son would also grow up bristling with round-the-clock energy; his earliest childhood memories enmeshed with his father’s ongoing obsessions and hyperactive lifestyle.
‘Up until when I started school when I was seven we would travel all over,’ Lars told me in 2009. ‘America, Europe, we went to Australia a couple times…We spent a winter in South Africa, I think, in ’66 or ’67.’ His father ‘would go out to the Australian Open in January every year. And this was back in the days when you didn’t just jump on [a plane]. It was like a real journey to get there…and we spent a lot of time in Paris and London and all these places.’ Tennis, though, was just ‘the day job, really’. At home, ‘we had art all over the house’: art and music. A lover of jazz at a time when Copenhagen was a hotbed for contemporary jazz musicians, Torben played both clarinet and saxophone, and as a child Lars grew up in a household that rang to the sounds of, as he recalls, ‘Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon’, all of whom ‘spent considerable amounts of time in Denmark. So it was a very healthy scene and [my father] wrote a lot about it.’
Lars’ bedroom at home was opposite the music room where Torben kept his record collection, from which a continuous stream of music flowed. Neneh Cherry, daughter of sax legend Don and, later, a singing star in her own right, grew up in the same neighbourhood and was a childhood friend. ‘There was also like tons of people hanging out and there was like a lot of like late-night activity – listening to a lot of jazz records and a lot of Hendrix and Stones and The Doors and Janis Joplin…So there was a lot of musicians and writers and artists and stuff like that, that were circulating through the house as I was growing up.’ As well as rock and jazz, said Torben, Lars would have been exposed to ‘Indian music, all kinds of Asian music, Buddhist chants, classical music. His room was right next to the room where I played all this music all night long, and sometimes maybe he would have heard them even while he was sleeping, so he could have picked up a lot of this stuff even without being conscious of it.’
Torben’s close ties to the nascent jazz scene in Denmark led to the late Dexter Gordon becoming Lars’ godfather. Indeed, the first appearance Lars made on a professional stage was at the age of nine, bounding on and yelling into the mike during a Gordon appearance at a nightclub in Rome, where his parents had gone during a night off at the Italian Open. ‘Like some dog who runs amok for a moment,’ his father would later recall. The globe-trotting also gave Lars a facility for languages, able to converse from an early age in Danish, English, German and ‘little bits of other stuff’. It was an itinerant lifestyle that would mean he was ‘always comfortable on the road. I’d been places with my father we’ve never gotten to in Metallica.’ It also gave the boy a supreme sense of entitlement; a super self-confidence that meant no door would remain closed to him for long, the very idea that he might not be welcome somewhere never entering his head.
Although Lars would also inherit his father’s love of music and art, it was his mother, Lone, who gifted him the managerial abilities he would later bring to his career with Metallica. As well as taking good care of the two men in her life, ‘My mum was definitely the organiser and kind of the business head,’ he told me when last we spoke in 2009, our umpteenth interview in a relationship that now goes back more than a quarter of a century. ‘I mean, my dad didn’t know what time of day it was, what month it was, you know, what year it was. He didn’t know what country he was in. He was one of these guys that was just beautifully lost in the moment all the time. I mean that in a very positive sense [and] my mum was sort of full-time care-taking all the practical elements of his life. So it’s definitely from my mum’s side that I’ve inherited some of my sort of anal organisational skills.’
First and foremost, in those earlier days, there was tennis. Torben’s own father had also been a tennis star. For over twenty years he had been an advertising executive who participated in seventy-four Davis Cup matches before becoming president of the Danish Lawn Tennis Association. Almost inevitably, although there was no overt pressure exerted on him to do so, Lars grew up expecting to follow in what had practically become the family business. For Lars, though, tennis and a love of music would eventually dovetail in an even more significant way. In 1969, during the family’s by now annual six-week stay in London – built around Wimbledon and satellite tournaments in East-bourne and at Queen’s – the five-year-old Lars was taken to his first rock concert: the famous free concert by the Rolling Stones, given to over 250,000 people in Hyde Park. He still has pictures his parents took of him there. ‘I think that I’d been dragged along to some jazz events, you know, at some of the local jazz clubs in Denmark up through the years,’ Lars told me. Most often, he said, at a favourite haunt of the Ulrichs called Montmartre, which Torben helped run. ‘But in terms of rock concerts the ’69 Stones’ gig was the first one, yeah.’ His first genuine musical love, though, was for heavy rock stars of the early 1970s such as Uriah Heep, Status Quo and, most especially, Deep Purple, who he saw perform live for the first time when he was just nine. Torben’s friend, South African tennis player Ray Moore, had been given passes for the show, which was being held in the same arena as one of his tennis tournaments. When a friend dropped out at the last minute, he offered the spare ticket to Torben’s son instead. It quite literally, Lars said, ‘blew my mind!’ He couldn’t get it out of his head ‘for days, weeks!’ He immediately nagged his father into buying him Purple’s
Fireball
album. In this, though, Torben, for once, was not entirely supportive. ‘He’d say it was square and the drummer was too white,’ Lars recalled. But the son was not listening to the father. ‘I have an obsessive personality,’ he would later recall. ‘When I was nine years old, it was all about Deep Purple.’ As he got older, he would stake out the band. ‘I would spend all my time sitting outside their hotel in Copenhagen, waiting for Ritchie Blackmore to come out so I could follow him down the street.’ When, nearly thirty years later, I asked the now grown-up, father-of-three what his favourite album was he had no hesitation. ‘My all-time favourite is still
Made in Japan
,’ the double live Purple collection from 1972. The first show he ever had front-row tickets for, though, was Status Quo, at the Tivoli Koncertsal in Copenhagen, in 1975, which he later described for me as ‘a bit of a mind-fuck’. He was eleven and all he could think of was how he had gotten there. ‘How did I get so close? Were any of the drunks that had come over from Sweden gonna beat me up, or even worse puke on me?’ So close to the stage Lars could barely see up to where the band was standing mere feet away, Quo frontman Francis Rossi ‘looked like a rock god, over ten feet tall, with five feet of long hair and a Telecaster that looked like a kick-your-ass weapon’.
He began hanging out at Copenhagen’s best-known album-oriented record shop, the Holy Grail, where ‘the guy who worked there was my hero’, introducing him to then less well-known rock artists such as Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy and UFO. He would fantasise about being in his own rock band, write down names of songs and album titles in old school exercise books, living in his own make-believe world of rock stardom. Rock music became the one thing the increasingly independent youngster didn’t feel required to share with his parents. It also provided company for a solitary child growing up on the road, surrounded by kindly tennis ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’ and accustomed at home to plenty of arty elders who let him do as he pleased. As Lars later told the writer David Fricke, ‘From that point of view it was a pretty open upbringing.’ It meant, though, that he was expected to fend for himself in this bohemian atmosphere. ‘I always had to wake myself up in the morning and bike myself to school. I’d wake up at 7.30, go downstairs, and the front door would be open – six hundred beers in the kitchen and living room and nobody in the house. Candles would be burning. So I’d close the doors, make breakfast and go to school. I’d come home and have to wake my parents up…’ While this made him ‘very independent’ it often left him quite lonely. ‘As far as my parents were concerned, I could go see Black Sabbath twelve times a day. But I had to find my own means, carrying the paper or whatever, to get the money to buy the tickets. And I had to find my own way to the concert and back.’ The passion for loud, heavy rock – music that more than matched his outgoing, room-filling personality – continued throughout his early teens, and although his future was still bound to the same tennis courts his father had become famous on, that dedication slowly began to ebb. This process speeded up when, aged thirteen, his grandmother bought him his first drum kit – not just any beginner’s kit, either, but a Ludwig: drummer gold in rock circles.