Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [110]
Continued Kirk, ‘I remember when I first heard the riff to “Damage, Inc.”, I thought, wow, how simple but how effective. And I have to say, that one line – “Honesty is my only excuse” – that’s a great line, but it’s influenced by Thin Lizzy and a track from Shades of a Blue Orphanage.’ Again, however, Kirk has got it slightly wrong, the track he referred to, ‘Honesty is No Excuse’, is not from Orphanage but the eponymously titled debut album from Thin Lizzy, in which singer Phil Lynott ends verses with the line, ‘Honesty is my only excuse’. Kirk was absolutely spot-on, though, when he said that Master of Puppets was characterised by ‘all sorts of strange influences like that’, including a short guitar passage at the end of the verse on ‘Disposable Heroes’ that was the guitarist’s attempt at a military march. ‘Like bagpipes or something. I watched a lot of war movies, trying to find something that was like a call to arms. Like something a bagpipe player would play as they were going into battle. I didn’t really find anything but that’s what I came up with.’ He laughed. Some influences were more familiar, as with the acoustic intro to the track that would open the album, ‘Battery’ – another deliberate attempt at ‘an Ennio Morricone thing’, while still retaining some of the actual chords from the subsequent track.
With the songs all but complete, the band set about finding a studio to record them in. With Flemming Rasmussen back onboard as co-producer, Lars would have been happy to return to Sweet Silence in Copenhagen but none of the others wanted that. Enough of the cold and snow already, protested the Californian boys, let’s make the album somewhere warm and sunny, even if it meant doing it in much-loathed LA. So Flemming flew into LA and he and Lars spent two weeks in July being chauffeured around in a Lincoln town car, paid for by Elektra, checking out studios. ‘It’s what the record company rented,’ a red-faced Lars protested when one journalist bumped into him and asked jokingly if he was now a rock star. ‘We didn’t order it!’ But rock stars are what Lars Ulrich and Metallica were fast becoming – much to their drummer’s secret delight.
The problem, as Rasmussen recalls, was trying to find a studio in LA that provided a comparable set-up for the drums. ‘We had like a huge storage room in the back of [Sweet Silence] with a really big, wooden room with a lot of ambience in it. That’s where we ended up putting the drums [on RTL]. We needed a [similarly] huge live room to record the drums for [Master of Puppets] so we drove around checking out studios.’ Unable to find what they were looking for, Lars went back to the rest of the band and again put the case to them for returning to Sweet Silence. What ultimately swung it, recalled Kirk, was that the dollar rate was such that it made recording the album in Denmark much cheaper than it would have been in America, allowing them for the first time to really take their time in the studio. ‘We’d also had great results in the past with Ride the Lightning and knew the studio and all the people there. The familiarity of it all made sense to us. And we really wanted to be somewhere where there wasn’t a whole bunch of distractions. At least, for the three of us – Lars was out all the time!’
With sessions not due to begin in Copenhagen until September, Q Prime took the opportunity to squeeze the band onto the bills