Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [101]
That said, there are many who worked closely with Q Prime – former employees and record company executives – who have nothing but good to say about them. When one of the record company people who worked with Def Leppard in the 1980s became seriously ill, she awoke one morning to find her hospital room filled with flowers – courtesy of Peter Mensch. Another former employee at Q Prime’s New York office from that time who left under difficult personal circumstances in the 1990s still insists they would go back to work there ‘in a second’, and that, despite the unhappy way they left, it was still ‘the best job I ever had’, pointing out the enormous pressure Mensch and Burnstein were always under. ‘Faxes and phone calls at three in the morning, I don’t know how someone deals with that kind of pressure.’ Certainly there was no mistaking Mensch and Burnstein’s abilities as managers. They didn’t win every time – Armored Saint might arguably have had a bigger career had they ignored Q Prime’s advice and gotten themselves over to Britain and Europe to capitalise on their early popularity there, just as Metallica had in the days before they had come under Q Prime’s raven-like wing; Warrior Soul and Dan Reed Network were other Q Prime acts that arrived with a bang, media-wise, in the Eighties and left with a whimper, comparatively speaking, sales-wise. But those that did flourish under their tutelage did so spectacularly and by the end of the decade Q Prime would boast multi-platinum acts such as Def Leppard, Metallica, Queensrÿche, Dokken, Tesla and Cameo. In 1989 they were hired to oversee the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels comeback world tour.
It had actually been Xavier Russell who effected introductions between Q Prime and Metallica. ‘Mensch phoned asking me for their number,’ he recalls now. ‘This was pre-mobile phone days and they were pretty hard to track down. I remember I had to phone Kirk’s mother in San Francisco. I said, “I need to track down Lars urgently.” She said, “Well, we can get him to a pay phone,” because they weren’t on the phone at the El Cerrito house. This is how archaic it was. I then remember Lars phoning me up from a phone box in America, reversing the charges. I said, “Look, Mensch needs to talk to you. He’s serious about wanting to sign you.”’ The next thing Xavier heard, the deal was done. He points out that Mensch and Burnstein could hardly have been the only ones sniffing around Metallica at that time. He believes Iron Maiden manager Rod Smallwood may also have been interested: ‘Lars always worshipped the way Maiden was managed – their artwork, the sleeves, the tours. He always wanted to be represented by somebody like Smallwood. But I don’t think Smallwood was really into that sort of music. Mensch knew something was gonna happen.’
Says Jonny, ‘I got to tell you something; it shattered me to lose them, for years. Because I thought we would have proved to everybody that we could have taken it all the way. It would have happened with us as well. It was on fire when we gave up the band! Absolutely blazing! It was in the middle of everything going on.’ The deal eventually struck with Elektra allowed Megaforce to continue with the US release of Ride the Lightning up to the first 75,000 sales. But then, says Jonny, ‘The first seventy-five for any band that’s brand new is [the main part of the job]. After that it’s just taking orders.’ He claims Howard Thompson, then a main player at Elektra, later ‘came up to me and said that Marsha and I did a million-dollar