Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [106]
The band was becoming road-hardened. Even James was starting to lighten up – onstage and off. He boasted to Xavier Russell, who joined the tour for a few days, about some of the adventures he was now having. Having spent ‘hours and hours in the bar’ they had decided to really ‘booze it up’ in Armored Saint bassist Joey Vera’s room. ‘We were all getting really ripped and started throwing bottles out the window. They were smashing and it sounded really neat. But that soon got boring, so I threw Joey’s black-and-red leather jacket out and it landed in the pool, which luckily had its cover on. We went down to get it and on the way back up to the tenth floor I decided to open the elevator doors between floors…we then got stuck for half an hour and everyone is like freaking out and I started shouting, “Get us the fuck out of here!” We finally get up to the tenth floor and by now I’m pretty [mad] so I see this fire extinguisher hanging on the wall. So I kinda took it down and started squirting people with it – all this CO2 or some kinda shit was comin’ out of it.’
Not coincidentally, it was around this time the band picked up the nickname, first gleefully reported in Kerrang!, of Alcoholica. James was going through his schnapps phase. That and beer and vodka, ‘embracing alcohol at a different level from the rest of us’, as Lars later put it. Lars had ‘more of the binge mentality. I’d go every night for three days. Then I wouldn’t touch a drop for the next four.’ For James it was different. Drinking was becoming another mask he could hide behind. ‘I think drinking made me forget a lot of stuff at home,’ he later reflected. ‘Then it became fun.’ It was a fan who’d come up with the name Alcoholica, designing a T-shirt based on the Kill ’Em All album cover, the title recast as Drank ’Em All and the Metallica logo supplanted by that of Alcoholica, the ghoulish hammer and blood pool replaced by an overturned vodka bottle, its contents spilling out. ‘We thought it was pretty cool,’ said James. ‘We had shirts like that made up for ourselves.’
The booze provided a lift in other, more tangible ways too. Most significantly, Hetfield was now finding his voice – real and imagined – as the frontman. Megadeth bassist David Ellefson recalls being ‘totally blown away’ when he caught the Metallica/Armored Saint show at the Hollywood Palladium in March. ‘I’d seen them play on Kill ’Em All at the Country Club [in Reseda, in August, 1983] and it was good [but] they hadn’t quite settled into the pocket yet, as all bands do once you’ve been on the road for a few years. But when I walked in [at the Palladium in ’85] I remember James coming out with his shirt off and it was just ferocious. Like, holy smokes, man! This band has arrived! There’s nobody like this doing this.’ Recalls Joey Vera, who watched Metallica from the side of the stage most nights of that tour: ‘It was a fire that was beginning to burn. That’s where I first saw it on a daily basis, in every small town. It’s one thing to see something in a magazine, or one show in a big city, but when we were on tour together we played every shithole across the US and that’s where you got to see, like, wow, this is having the same effect in front of two hundred people or in front of six hundred people.’
Hanging out on tour, they would take turns sharing buses between cities, recalls Vera: ‘They were just…very crazy. A lot of partying. They had already been to Europe. So we