• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 521 0

’re just doing something that’s going over people’s heads. But as we went on that Ozzy tour we converted a lot of people, night by night. And it gave us a lot of hope just to carry on. Suddenly we were selling albums and a lot of it had to do with just going out there and playing our asses off, putting on a great show, just bringing the music to the people in that way. Because radio just wasn’t having us.’ Kirk recalled a meeting on the back of the tour bus when Cliff Burnstein informed them they were about to have their first gold album. ‘He said something really profound. He said, “You guys will be able to put down payments on houses and I’m just really proud of you.” And the first thing that Cliff said was, “I wanna house where I can shoot my gun that shoots knives!” That was like a typical Cliff Burton thing to say…’

Not everybody was impressed, of course. A Newsweek reporter covering the tour described Metallica, variously, as, ‘ugly’, ‘smelly’ and ‘obnoxious’, concluding, ‘I hate them. But you can’t deny their success.’ Perhaps he was just thinking of Lars, who had taken to announcing proudly to anyone that would listen: ‘I haven’t had a shower for three days, man.’ His theory for this: ‘I think it’s got something to do with success; the more successful you are the less you feel like washing.’ Only James was able to remind Lars he had always been like that. But then those days suddenly seemed very far off indeed, with Lars now complaining in the UK press of the ‘four thousand [fans] surrounding the tour bus’ each night on tour. ‘The demand on your time increases enormously,’ he observed earnestly. It was everything he had dreamed of since he was a nine-year-old kid listening to Fireball by Deep Purple. Metallica also now felt the need to check into hotels under pseudonyms. As Lars pointed out, ‘If the fans have access to you all the time then you’ll be constantly disturbed at any hour by people.’ He certainly hoped so anyway.

Fortunately, Cliff was there to stop Lars – and everyone else – from going too far up their own arses, constantly asking: ‘What’s real to you?’ Kirk recalled how ‘Cliff had a lot of integrity, and his way of expressing that integrity was in one stock sentence which I still use to this day, and it was: “I don’t give a fuck.” He really just cared about the music and the integrity behind the music. He was just very, very real. I don’t know if he knew somehow that his time was limited but he really lived it like it was his last day, because he just wouldn’t settle for anything other than what he believed in. And that taught me a lot. To this day there are things…situations that I’m going through…I can just picture Cliff saying, “What’s real to you? What’s real to us in this situation? What really matters?” And he would go through a bunch of points that didn’t really matter. He would name them off and at the end of each one he’d say: “I don’t give a fuck!” He was a very, very strong guy. Stubborn at times, and because of that he and I would clash sometimes. But we really were just bros and he was a big influence on all of us.’

The only real blot on the horizon occurred when James badly broke his left wrist in a skateboarding accident, backstage before a show in Adamsville on 26 June. The show had to be cancelled and for the rest of the tour James was forced to perform without a guitar, his arm in a sling. Fortunately, Kirk’s guitar roadie for the tour was John Marshall of Seattle band Metal Church, who agreed to stand in on rhythm guitar until Hetfield’s wrist healed enough for him to play again. Nevertheless, when they arrived back in London during the first week of September, to get ready for the start of what would be their first full-scale British tour, they did so in incredibly high spirits. James’ wrist was still in plaster when the tour began on 10 September at St David’s Hall in Cardiff but the band knew this was their time. Master of Puppets had sold as many copies for MFN in Europe as it had in the USA, reaching Number Forty-One in the UK charts, and not even an inspired performance from