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By Root 433 0

when his wife and manager Sharon first informed him who his new tour mates would be. ‘I used to walk by their trailer backstage and think they were taking the piss,’ he said, ‘’cos all you could hear was Black Sabbath blasting out of the windows. That and all the dope smoke.’ Far from trying to get a rise out of the star of the show, the band – especially Lars and Cliff, both long-term Ozzy-era Sabbath fans – simply could not believe their luck. ‘We were definitely in awe of him,’ said Lars. ‘Ozzy was a fucking legend…but by the end of it we’d had some good times with him.’ And so they had. Despite a recent much-publicised spell drying out at the Betty Ford Clinic, these were still very much Ozzy’s wild years and the Metallica trailer became a more frequent stopover for him as the tour progressed and he realised it was often a good place to get a drink and a smoke – and anything else he fancied – away from the disapproving gaze of Sharon.

Ozzy’s audience also quickly took to the band. ‘That was really the tell-tale,’ says Bobby Schneider. ‘I mean, I saw it, I guess, when I was in Europe. I saw the fanatic reaction and they were selling tickets but they were still two-thousand-seaters. But when they opened for Ozzy, that’s when the writing really was on the wall.’ He says that at some shows Metallica were now starting to sell almost as much merchandising as Ozzy – an indication of rising success in the American music business often more significant than record sales. As Sharon Osbourne once told me, ‘You can have a hit record in America and it won’t mean shit when you go out on the road, especially in the rock market. The crowd that buys tickets for the show won’t like you unless you really deliver, and a really good sign of that is how many of them want to buy or wear your T-shirt.’ According to Schneider, by tour’s end there were almost as many people in the crowd wearing Metallica shirts as Ozzy shirts. Crowd reaction ‘was just phenomenal. Yet it was still a little bit underground. I don’t even think they realised. And that was part of the beauty of it, actually. They were just kids out there banging it. I think they’d have been happy playing a club in front of five hundred people as they were in an arena playing in front of fifteen thousand people. Heads had not grown at all, whatsoever. There were very few demands, no rock stars. Everybody was close.’

Along with the success of the tour came increased album sales. By tour’s end in August – more than fifty shows opening for Ozzy, discovering what it meant to perform to tens of thousands of people in hockey arenas, convention centres, outdoor ‘sheds’ and coliseums, interspersed with a dozen or so smaller theatre and fairground shows headlining in their own right – Master of Puppets had sold over 500,000 copies, giving the band their first gold record, and taking Metallica into the US Top Thirty for the first time, peaking at Number Twenty-Nine. It would eventually spend seventy-two weeks on the chart. A quarter of a century later, it has now sold almost seven million copies in America, and almost as many more around the rest of the world. The Ozzy/Metallica tour had been the second-biggest ticket-selling draw on the US circuit that summer (only the Aerosmith/Ted Nugent tour out-grossed them). Once again, although it may not have been so obvious to the thrash fans, Metallica were leaving behind a trail for others to follow, helping to establish a new pecking order in mainstream American rock; a sea change that would result, over the next couple of years, in Slayer opening for Judas Priest, Anthrax supporting Kiss, and Megadeth doing the honours for Iron Maiden. All of them were hoping for the same knock-on effect on their careers the Ozzy slot had given Metallica.

‘I never expected it to be the success it turned out to be,’ said Kirk. Compared to what else was going on in the American album charts, Master ‘was a huge orange among the bunch of apples’. He said he was ‘stunned’ when it went gold. Until then he had thought: ‘Maybe people just don’t understand us. Maybe we