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drum tech on David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour prior to receiving the invitation to join up with this, for Bobby, unknown new band. ‘I had never heard of Metallica,’ explains Schneider now, ‘nor had I ever worked for any metal bands at all. So this was a complete new world for me.’ He had been working locally in Boston when he got a call from the band’s temporary new tour manager, regular Rush man, Howard Ungerleider, who Bobby had previously worked for on a Rush tour as a lighting engineer. Recalls Bobby: ‘Lars’ drum tech had destroyed a hotel the day before so they’d fired him. So they were looking for someone right away and pretty much offered me the job [over the phone] and I flew out [to the W.A.S.P. tour]. I remember sitting in a room with Lars when he was trying to explain to me [what he needed]. He used to switch sticks in the middle of the set, a different stick in his right hand and a couple other things. In typical Lars fashion – and I don’t know the guy yet – he’s explained this same thing to me fifteen times. And I look at him and go, “I got it.” He goes, “Wow, you’re pretty confident, aren’t you?”’

When Ungerleider had to leave to return to Rush, he recommended that Schneider take over as tour manager. Bobby had already been tour-managing for smaller bands and handling production but this was something new: ‘Howard said to Mensch, “You know they love Bobby – you should just make him the tour manager.” So that’s where we started. I finished out that tour and they brought me back for a couple more. In the end, we had a six-year relationship. I definitely saw some changes in that time. I saw them grow up.’

Schneider characterises the W.A.S.P. tour now as ‘a breakthrough moment’ – for both himself and Metallica. ‘They were blowing everybody away. I wasn’t really into the metal world. I hadn’t lived in that world. The W.A.S.P. guys, all being six foot six tall, were very intimidating, and they were the ones who had most equipment. But the kids weren’t coming to see them. They were doing their best to be the headliner. But there was no question that Metallica [had] the vibe.’ Going from working for Bowie’s supremely accomplished drummer Tony Thompson to working for Lars Ulrich was also something of a leap of faith. ‘James used to spit on him all the time, when Lars would really get out of time, which was often. He’d be so off sometimes James would just turn around and glare at him.’ The spitting ‘was James’ way of telling him, “Dude, you’re really fucking bad tonight.”’ Searching for the positive, Bobby likens Lars’ drumming back then to being ‘almost like a guitarist. You know, he’s playing all kinds of triplets and fills…It never seemed that Lars fucked up the intricate parts. It was sort of the ongoing feel for it’ that so enraged James it caused him to spit. And while Lars may have been the business leader of the group, as far as Schneider could tell it was Cliff Burton the band relied on for the right words in their private moments, as human beings. ‘Cliff was the backbone. Cliff was the guy that everybody looked to. If there was a big decision to be made it was [done] in the inner workings. But it seemed to me, if there was something Cliff wasn’t gonna like, it wasn’t gonna happen. Cliff was the Keith Richards of the band. No one fucked with Cliff.’

The early weeks of the summer of 1985 found Metallica back in San Francisco, off the road but getting ready to go back into the studio and record their next album. The Metallica fire, as Joey Vera says, may have begun to burn more fiercely, but the biggest-selling album that year was the newly muscled and suddenly clean-cut Bruce Springsteen’s flag-waving Born in the U.S.A. (no matter the counter-intuitive message of the title track being largely misconstrued by a significant number of the fifteen million Americans who eventually bought the album). Looming on the horizon was the global feel-good event of the decade, Live Aid. What place then in this larger, strictly white-hat scheme of bigger and better things for the angry bombast of a bunch of heavy-metal-worshipping