Metallica: Enter Night (19 page)

With very few records out there yet to buy, the early thrash scene thrived still on tape-trading and, most important of all, live gigs. As with the music, audiences divided up pretty evenly between hardcore punks and long-haired metallers. In LA, where promoters and club owners were frankly baffled by the new scene, emerging thrashers such as Megadeth and Slayer would often get shoehorned onto punk rock bills. In the Bay Area, where the culture clash was more easily recognised, the bands themselves often insisted on playing together. The result was often chaos, with the pogoing of the punks taken to a new, more violent level by the crowd-surfing of the metallists and the birth of what later became known as the mosh pit. Recalls Robb Flynn, ‘You’d come out of the pits and, like, I broke my nose, I fuckin’ broke my arm, come out with a sprained jaw. Just from stage-diving and pittin’. You didn’t come out going, “Ouch that hurt.” You came out going, like, “Fuck! I got a war wound!” It was fuckin’ brutal. There’s this kind of myth about the thrash thing that it was all friendly violent fun, but it wasn’t. There was such an element of danger, such an element of violence. It wasn’t safe to go to.’ Flynn recalls one particularly memorable occasion during an Exodus show at Ruthie’s Inn. ‘This dude had a cow leg bone and he’s in this pit, running around, this big dude, fuckin’ clubbing people with this fuckin’ cow-bone. Or people would set up chairs at the back of the pit and run from the back of Ruthie’s and jump off the chair and launch on stage and take out the guitar player. Take out the fuckin’ singer. And this was like showing affection – like, we love you guys, you’re awesome. Dudes would take a beer bottle and break it on the table, take off their shirts and open up their chests with it, fuckin’ bleeding, like “Yeah!” You’d be watching this, going “Holy fuck!”’

In this respect, Metallica could not claim to lead the way. That honour, such that it was, fell to Kirk Hammett’s former band Exodus. Recalls guitarist Gary Holt, ‘When we played our first show together with Metallica [in 1982] it was still a lot of fist-banging audience. Once Kirk left and [vocalist] Paul Baloff came into the picture, Paul and I started crafting Exodus in our own vision, which was just brutality and violence. The audience responded in kind. Then when the infamous Ruthie’s Inn opened, the shows just got really insane. Plus we had a lot of punk rock guys who came to our shows. We definitely weren’t a crossover band but one thing I think Exodus should get more credit for was we had the first really crossover audience [of punk and metal fans].’ People were jumping off the top of PAs ‘doing full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree flips and we definitely did our best to egg it on.’ Exodus was also one of the first bands to encourage stage-diving: ‘That shit got pretty crazy.’

As with all music scenes, drugs also played their part. ‘Everybody was on speed, that was the thing,’ says Robb Flynn. ‘We called it crank. We all totally got into crank. Sit there and do crank and just go in and do the craziest things that you could think of, the craziest dives.’ That was fine for the fans. For the bands the mix was much broader. To the speed and crank was added weed, psychedelics, and, when they could afford it, coke. For Dave Mustaine and David Ellefson, heroin would also be on the menu, eventually overwhelmingly so. ‘We went down to hell together,’ says Ellefson. For others, like James Hetfield and Anthrax’s Scott Ian, drugs were to be disdained completely in favour of the arguably even more punishing regimen of alcohol. ‘I know our British counterparts drank a lot,’ said Lars, ‘but in some way it felt like we drank more. I don’t know why, maybe it was because drinking had been more a staple of European culture, so it wasn’t as big of a deal, or something like that. But around all those [thrash] camps in ’81, ’82, ’83, in America, it was all about the fucking vodka bottles, and about jumping in the vodka bottles and anything went from there, you know what I mean?’ He laughed. ‘Smirnoff and whoever else…’

Thrash audiences would also connect with the skateboard scene in LA. This was an aspect of the emerging culture which filtered across to leading lights such as Metallica, who in James Hetfield (by 1985, taking a skateboard on tour with him and riding around backstage at shows) did, after all, contain one member whose LA roots genuinely reflected that scene, and, more puzzlingly, Anthrax, from New York, whose overlapping interest in the skate scene only really came with the music and clothes, particularly the latter. Anthrax became the first thrash band in the spotlight to abandon the tight black jeans of Metallica and Slayer in favour of the baggy shorts and reversed baseball caps of lesser known but disproportionately influential bands such as Suicidal Tendencies – the first-generation punk metallists featuring future Metallica man Rob Trujillo on bass. Robb Flynn: ‘The big skate band for us was Suicidal Tendencies. They were from LA so they were genuinely from that skate culture, and we knew that. Going to Suicidal shows, that’s when I really started noticing the crossover thing happening. You’d see gang dudes with long-haired thrasher dudes and then punk rock dudes – and chicks – all under one roof.’

All of the so-called Big Four thrash bands recorded punk covers at some point. Anthrax would record ‘God Save the Queen’ for their 1985
Armed and Dangerous
EP; Megadeth would do ‘Anarchy in the UK’ (with Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones guesting) on their 1988 album,
So Far, So Good…So What!
; Slayer would eventually release a whole album’s worth of punk covers,
Undisputed Attitude
; and Metallica would intermittently record covers of songs by The Misfits, the Anti-Nowhere League, Killing Joke and others throughout their career. ‘I could relate to punk lyrics,’ Hetfield shrugged. ‘They were about me, rather than that “Look at me riding a horse, with a big sword in my hand” typical heavy metal fantasy crap.’

Certainly, thrash dress style, if it could be called that, would have more in common with the straight-legged, collar-turned-up, safety-pinned thrift-store look of punk than it did the studded wristband and spandex-trousered image of trad-metal. Increasingly taking their cue from Cliff Burton, whose moth-eaten cardigan and bell-bottom jeans were already a trademark, by 1983 Metallica wouldn’t have stuck out in any denim-bedraggled student union bar. Says Armored Saint’s John Bush, ‘Metallica were the ones who said we’re just coming out in the way we dress as we do backstage, which was refreshing at that time, because everything was about image and what people were wearing. I sometimes think that the worst aspect of heavy metal is the imagery. It’s the one thing that keeps heavy metal from maintaining a certain level of complete integrity. It’s like punk rock has always had a little bit more integrity than heavy metal because of the image. That was one thing that Metallica changed that was really important.’

Comics – another abiding Burton and Hammett obsession – became another thrash signifier. First this was as reading matter and occasional inspiration for lyrics, and then it was a pointer for turning record sleeves away from the staid sword-and-sorcery, clenched-cleavage clichés exemplified in the artwork of every metal band from the Scorpions to Whitesnake, towards the new
2000 AD
comic-consciousness of the mid-1980s. Here, as with skateboarding, Anthrax quickly climbed aboard the bandwagon, or at least went out of their way to telegraph their interest, with Scott Ian claiming in interview to consume seventy-five new comic titles a week, focusing on ‘old Marvel stuff, and anything by Frank Miller and Alan Moore’. Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante, meanwhile, was a talented penman who drew the inner sleeve cartoons for their 1985 album,
Spreading the Disease
, then imitated
2000 AD
’s original Judge Dredd artwork for their 1987 single ‘I Am the Law’.

Of course, it’s easy to arrange the pieces into a discernible pattern now. Speaking to me more than a quarter of a century after the fact, however, Lars Ulrich insisted there was very little design to this. Thrash was simply ‘something that happened sort of magically. It wasn’t something that was thought about; it wasn’t something that was planned [or] contrived. I don’t have the fucking answer more than anybody else, but to me, what thrash became musically was the Americanised version of what [Britain] experienced in ’79, ’80 and ’81 with Iron Maiden and Saxon and Samson and Girlschool and then everybody in the wake of that – the Diamond Heads, the Angel Witches, the Savages and so on. And in some way Motörhead floated around the outer fringes of that, even though Motörhead of course weren’t really a NWOBHM band, but there was a link to them. And then you could almost say that maybe the Judas Priests and the Scorpions were the bigger brothers or something like that.’ He added, ‘Nobody knew that this thing was gonna be what it became. The big bands [in 1983] were still the Scorpions and Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and AC/DC. That was a whole different level. We took our cues from all those bands. Then there was the American X-factor, whatever that was, and then it sort of became thrash.’ He went on, ‘I mean, if you sat down with [Anthrax, Megadeth, Slayer] and everybody else…It’s all the same food groups and all the same places that it came from. When we first met Slayer they were playing Deep Purple covers. When I first met Dave Mustaine, the band that he was in was…a very different thing. The Anthrax guys – a very different thing. I mean, they were heavily into Judas Priest and that type of stuff. [But] we all sat there and shared our Diamond Head records and our Motörhead records and all of a sudden Venom showed up with
Welcome to Hell
and it was, like, fuck! And then Mercyful Fate! Do you know what I mean? Then thrash came out of all that.’ The crucial common ground in the original thrash scene for Lars, he said, was ‘that it was American. Thrash metal, at least initially, had a geographical element also that people don’t really mention.’

Geoff Barton concurs. ‘It was obvious from day one that the whole thrash thing was going to explode in the coming years. But we always saw it early on, certainly on
Kerrang!
, as being associated with that whole Bay Area, West Coast thrash thing. It wasn’t until a bit later on that you had groups like Anthrax from New York, and closer to home a lot of UK thrash bands such as Onslaught or Xentrix. What we now call the Big Four, though, were all American.’ Because Xavier Russell was Metallica’s advocate at
Kerrang!
, Barton admits he deliberately latched onto Slayer, reviewing their second release on Metal Blade, the 1984 EP,
Haunting the Chapel
. ‘Thrash was something we were really quite conscious on
Kerrang!
to try and build up. It was something we were inventing, that we were roundly supporting and getting onboard the bandwagon very early on, so to speak. So not only with Metallica and Slayer but with Anthrax and Megadeth, with Possessed and Death Angel. That whole thrash genre we found really exciting and felt we really needed to embrace it.’

As soon as
Kill ’Em All
was released in July, Jonny Z had Metallica out on their first cross-country US tour, on a double bill with Raven. Dubbed the Kill ’Em All for One tour (the Raven album at the time was called
All for One
), the thirty-one-date trek began in New Brunswick, on 27 July, and finished up on 3 September back at their old haunt, the Stone, in San Francisco. Along the way they visited many cities they had never been to before as a band: Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Milwaukee, moving down through Arkansas, Texas and eventually back through northern California. By the time they returned to the Stone, Metallica was a very different proposition from the band that had last played there six months before. Kirk Hammett wasn’t the only beneficiary of Mustaine’s departure. Says Bill Hale, who caught the show, ‘Dave had the attitude. When he got canned, James had to adopt that attitude. ’Cos Dave did all the talking onstage. “Fuck you, blah, blah…this is our next song.”’ With Dave gone, ‘James had to step up a whole lot. James really had to improve his whole game.’

Still quietly harbouring doubts about his long-term place at the front of the band, but toughened up by ten weeks of non-stop touring, Hetfield also had the added confidence that having his first album released had given him. Taking his stay-the-fuck-away-from-me face with him onstage for the first time, he’d learned on tour how to hide behind that mask, how to manipulate an audience so that it only saw what he wanted it to. He became fierce, copying Mustaine’s fearless approach by swearing at the audience, almost daring them to call his bluff: ‘As a kid, intimidation was a great defence for me to not have to get close to people or communicate or express my fears and weaknesses. So, going into Metallica as the staunch statue of a frontman, that intimidation factor blossomed and was a great defensive weapon. I could keep people at bay with that, and not state what I actually needed.’

The tour had also included their first outdoor shows. Lars: ‘It was basically us and [Raven], a motor home and a truck with the equipment and some mattresses. We’d take turns sleeping in the motor home and the equipment truck. When we hit Arkansas, our manager had hooked up with some bogus guy who set up six outdoor shows in these fields, in towns you’d never heard of. We were down there a good week. It was a field, a stage, us, Raven and about twenty kids. We’d never experienced that summer thing with bugs, one-hundred-and-twenty-degree weather, a camper with no AC. That was a good time…’ The first Arkansas show was at the amusingly named Bald Knob Amphitheater – in Bald Knob. James kept the poster for that one: ‘That name is so funny. The amphitheatre was nothing but a giant field and a big cement block. But by six o’clock, they had everything set up: food, booze, catfish sandwiches.’

While every place they played, the kids were going thrash-crazy, the band was undergoing its own musical education. Lars told me, ‘The biggest thing in America was The Police,
Synchronicity
, summer of 1983. We all loved that record. We were listening to that record every day as we were driving across America on the
Kill ’Em All
tour in our camper. We were listening to Peter Gabriel, too. So there were all these other things that…great, I mean, Witchfinder General
Death Penalty
all the way, but now we’ve listened to that twice we’re going to listen to something else. So very quickly on, for us, it started getting much wider in its musical scope, and obviously the things that were inspiring us were the things that we wanted to try and fuck with, to try and explore.’ With Cliff Burton now in charge of the in-car entertainment most days, they would have little choice. ‘When Cliff came along and Kirk came along, there was such a whole other level of musical schooling there, whole other levels of inspirations. I mean, listen, of course I knew who ZZ Top were but I’d never really
heard
ZZ Top. So Cliff is sitting there playing fucking ZZ Top, he’s playing Yes. Cliff is the one that brought The Misfits to us, do you know what I mean? There was this whole other world of stuff that was not on my radar. All of a sudden it was just like, fuck, yeah, I love Angel Witch, and I’ll play my Diamond Head records till the cows come home but, you know…I remember, like, Cliff sitting there listening to that
90125
record [by Yes] and it was like, “That’s really good.”’