Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (24 page)

In spite of their prolonged absence from North America, Metallica’s status on domestic soil was beginning to elevate. Re-released on Elektra Records on November 19, 1984,
Ride the Lightning
(despite an almost total media blackout), loitered for weeks at the lower end of the
Billboard
Top 200 album chart, much to the delight of both band and producer. As the LP sat atop the turntables of an ever increasing audience, in Oregon K. J. Doughton was taking receipt of up to 300 letters addressed to the authors’ fan club each week. A number of these correspondents were female fans who wrote that their attachment to Metallica sprang from a love of the song ‘Fade to Black’. Other communiqués, however, said quite the reverse, and chastised the group for having ‘sold out’, at the time the gravest assertion in the musical underground’s uncodified constitution. Other
contributors, however, were rather more unhinged in the lengths to which they would go in order to display their commitment to Metallica’s cause. One such individual was a Texan gentleman rejoicing in the sobriquet ‘the Green Slime’, who wrote requesting that he be employed as the band’s official photographer. Enclosed with the letter were examples of his work, in the form of pictures of mutilated animals. Among these was a Polaroid of a rat that only seconds before had been the Green Slime’s pet, until it was decapitated. The photograph showed it lying next to an axe and the image was accompanied by the words ‘Goodbye Scooter’.

Metallica began their second tour of North America at the Concert Hall in Toronto on January 19, 1985. The excursion would occupy the band’s time for the next two and a half months and would see their tour bus park at the stage door of no fewer than forty-five venues, ranging in size from the spacious Aragon Ballroom in Chicago – known locally as ‘the Aragon Brawlroom’, due to the often unruly nature of its patrons – to the rather more intimate Headliners pub in Madison, Wisconsin. Alongside Metallica, ticket holders were promised an evening’s entertainment from Armored Saint, a Los Angeles quintet with a growing reputation as an impactful power-metal outfit who would open the gig, and the headliners were W.A.S.P. (‘We are Sexual Perverts’), from the same city, a theatrical schlock rock turn with an act that comprised stage blood, fireworks, female nudity and songs so knowingly stupid as to have surely been written with a glint in the eye (‘Fuck Like a Beast’ being just one example). Led by bandleader Blackie Lawless – cruelly dubbed ‘Bluey Clueless’ by the wags at
Kerrang!
– W.A.S.P. were equipped with a muscular sound and a good ear for a chorus; for their part, Armored Saint were a group whose music was of a quality that spoke of both a commitment to musicianship and a love of the genre in which they operated. Despite this, and unbeknownst to either party at the time, Metallica were beginning to drag metal
into heavier waters in which both bands would eventually drown.

Recalling the tour, Lawless remembers looking out into the audience on any given night and seeing division.

‘[It was] like an invisible line [had been] drawn down the middle of the room,’ he noted, ‘and half was theirs and half was ours. It didn’t matter what we were doing onstage. It looked like two opposing armies. Sometimes we just stopped what we were doing and watched.’

‘It was’, he remembers, ‘a war.’

This image is striking, and is perhaps the first manifestation – and a physical one, at that – of Metallica as a polarising force operating within the parameters of a genre that in itself polarised opinions.

Compared to the travelling horror show that was their first North American tour, the caravan with W.A.S.P. and Armored Saint offered proof that the San Franciscan group’s station had risen. The venues in which they appeared were larger than before, the crowds more vociferous; transport came in the form of a chromium steel tour bus rather than a pock-marked Winnebago; hangovers from the night before began under cover of hotel linen. Things were looking up.

As was the case with Raven, Metallica got on well with the other bands on their 1985 tour of the United States and Canada, especially with Armored Saint, who apparently did not hold a grudge about the fact that their new friends had once attempted to steal their singer.

‘Right away we felt like [both groups] had a lot in common with each other,’ remembers Joey Vera, Armored Saint’s bass player, ‘and that’s probably what sparked the friendship to begin with. We had way more in common with them than, say, the guys in Ratt, for instance. We became quite close, especially on that tour. We would ride on each other’s buses and have nights drinking and hanging out.’

Life on the road can equate to a prolonged, sometimes perpetual, adolescence, and in the case of Metallica this proved to be true. The band’s tour bus was christened ‘The Edna Express’, ‘Edna’ being the name given to the kind of young woman willing to spend the night with drunken, long-haired strangers.

‘Girls would come on the bus and just blow the whole bus,’ Lars Ulrich recalls ungraciously. ‘Like, “OK, here’s two girls, everybody get in line.” People would say, “Eww, she just blew that other guy …” “So? You don’t have to put your tongue down her throat.”’

‘They enjoyed what they did,’ says James Hetfield. ‘And,
heh-heh
, they were good at it. Back then, we all shared stuff. “I did her. Dude, here! Have my chick.” Lars would charm them, talk his way into their pants. Kirk had a baby face that was appealing to the girls. And Cliff – he had a big dick. Word got around about that, I guess.’

‘We all had pretty good pulling power, but some of us got a little more desperate than others,’ laughs Ulrich. ‘There were certainly times where it was about quantity rather than quality.’

With their night’s work done, the group would behave in a manner befitting their new nickname of ‘Alcoholica’. Lars Ulrich would claim that he knew that Metallica were being viewed with a measure of success by the fact that promoters would comply with their booking’s request for vodka by supplying bottles of premium Absolut rather than common-or-garden Smirnoff. With the band lit like fuses, the settings in which they found themselves were often ripe for misadventure.

Following a performance at the Rainbow Club in Denver on March 5, Hetfield found himself bending the elbow in the company of Joey Vera in the Armored Saint bassist’s hotel room. Hung over the back of one of the room’s chairs was Vera’s leather jacket, which the visitor regarded with an appreciative eye. Asking if he might try on the garment, Hetfield was told by Vera
to be his guest. Placing his arms inside the sleeves, the guitarist walked over to the window of the room as if to inspect himself in the reflection afforded by a dark sky. Vera nodded in agreement when told that his possession was a fine piece of apparel. His head ceased this motion, however, when he learned that his guest intended to throw the jacket out of this window, in order to see if it were capable of flight.

Vera’s leather jacket caught the cold night wind and glided towards earth like a raven. Its owner watched in bewilderment; in a manner good-natured rather than confrontational he chided Hetfield for being ‘an asshole’. The bassist did, however, insist that his friend accompany him down to the hotel’s swimming pool, beside which this most beloved and essential component of the metal fan’s wardrobe now lay. This done, the pair rode back to Vera’s room, eight floors removed from the terra firma of the Mile High City. As the carriage ascended, Hetfield thought it a capital idea to hit the red emergency button and stall the lift on its pulleys, a course of action that heralded the loud attentions of a ringing alarm. Their minds focused by the insistence of this cacophony, the occupants stared at one another and wondered, ‘Holy shit, what is going on?’ Within minutes, they could hear the voices of hotel security workers shouting on the other side of the lift’s closed entrance. The employees then proceeded to bang on the elevator’s steel doors in an attempt to prise open a space through which the trapped guests might escape. To the sound of screeching steel, Hetfield and Vera were met by the sight of black shoes at eye level and realised they were trapped between floors. A member of the staff crouched down, looked the men in the face and asked, ‘What the fuck are you guys doing?’

‘So we’re looking up at this guy from the hotel and thinking and saying, “Oh shit, man, sorry,”’ remembers Joey Vera. The bassist was told to wait where he was, and that the workmen were going to descend to the floor below in order to better secure his
release. Rather than viewing this news as being just one example of the kindness of strangers, instead the two men saw their chance to escape. As the employees made their way to the hotel’s concrete stairwell, Hetfield and Vera eased themselves out of the bottom of the lift, dropped on to the carpet of the lower floor and ran in the opposite direction from the men headed down to set them free. While a more sensible man might have viewed this incident as amounting to enough foolishness for one night, Hetfield decided that his work in Denver was not yet done. Pulling a fire extinguisher from the one of the walls in the hallway, the guitarist began spraying water all over Vera, chasing him through the hotel’s corridors and ‘squirting this shit everywhere’. As he did this, some of the liquid found its way into the sensors of the building’s sprinkler system, immediately activating not only the sprinklers but also the piercing sound of a fire alarm. Suddenly, the wacky high jinks at the hands of a travelling rock musician had become a matter of emergency protocol, not to mention a security risk. The author of songs about fighting to death and refusing to live by the rules laid down by mainstream society, Hetfield responded to this escalation of events by scurrying to his room in order to hide. Meanwhile Vera entered his own room, switched off the lights and lay, fully clothed, beneath the covers of his bed, feigning sleep.

‘I’m just laid there pretending I’m oblivious to all this commotion going on,’ remembers the bassist. ‘In the meantime the fire department shows up and evacuates the entire hotel. So there are, like, 250 or 300 people in their pyjamas and underwear sprawled out in the parking lot and I’m still in my room looking out of my eighth-floor window going, “Holy shit! What the fuck just happened?” We got into a lot of trouble for that; I remember we had to pay some fines and James and I got a good talking to. I would say that Denver was the most memorably stupid night of the entire tour.’

Five days later, with W.A.S.P. having left the caravan in order to support Iron Maiden on the English band’s World Slavery tour, the two bands arrived in Los Angeles for a sold-out performance at the 4,000-capacity Hollywood Palladium. Situated at the east end of the much eulogised Sunset Boulevard, the Palladium is a rather drab-looking, sun-bleached art deco structure that from the street at least gives the appearance of being more a forgotten picture house than a venue with a storied and glittering past. Inside, however, the room resonates with the memory of feet gliding atop a vast circular dance floor and of cocktails sipped by patrons seated at tables positioned on either of the venue’s twin balconies. Opened in 1940 (and re-opened following an extensive renovation in 2008), the Hollywood Palladium has hosted events ranging from concerts by the Grateful Dead and hometown punks Bad Religion, to performances by Richard Pryor, to political events featuring John F. Kennedy and Doctor Martin Luther King Junior (the appearance of whom in 1965 led to the LAPD discovering 1,400 lb of explosives in a nearby apartment).

Alongside occasions such as these, the arrival of Metallica in their ‘Edna Express’ may have been viewed as amounting to very small beer indeed. But the performance that evening qualified as a triumph not only in the sense of being the best and most successful appearance in the city in which the group formed – admittedly, not a high bar to clear – but also in its significance with regard to the battle lines that were being drawn in the world of music played with distorted guitars by young men in need of a haircut. On the same street as the Palladium, two miles west the musical mindset of bands hustling on the Sunset Strip saw them smearing yet more gloss both over the music they were writing and on to the lips through which they mimed these songs on music television. As successful as this strategy may have been – at least in the shorter term – authentic it was not. After years of rejection by many of Hollywood’s musical taste-makers, down
at the Palladium Metallica were finally finding an audience in the market for music powerful enough to slap the bitter taste of hairspray from the back of their throats. A jubilant James Hetfield duly celebrated the occasion by back-flipping into a sea of outstretched hands at the climax of set closer ‘Motorbreath’.

As gratifying as all this must have been for Metallica, without question, their two most significant live appearances of the year took place in the warmer months of 1985. The first of these saw the band fly once more to England in order to honour a booking on the bill at the Monsters of Rock festival held at Donington Park, a motor racing circuit just outside Nottingham in the East Midlands. The brainchild of promoters Paul Loasby and Maurice Jones, the then annual, then day-long, event had been born in 1980 as an outdoor concert, the line-up for which had been designed to appeal solely to fans of hard rock and heavy metal. The first Monsters of Rock bill was headlined by Rainbow, atop a docket that also featured Scorpions and Saxon. Other groups that appeared at the muddiest festival site of the English summer in the early to mid-Eighties included AC/DC, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, Whitesnake and Twisted Sister.