Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [136]
‘I like the drums,’ I said loudly over the top of it. ‘No echo…’
‘Reverb,’ he yelled. ‘No reverb. None of that shit…’
I took another gulp of beer and sat there trying to take it in. On and on it went.
‘What’s this one called?’ I shouted.
No reply. I looked around, he wasn’t there. I waited for him to come back. He didn’t come back. I got up to look for him and found him sitting on the crapper, his black jeans around his ankles, the door to the bathroom wide open.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘sorry.’
‘What’s up?’ he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, taking a shit with the door open, me standing there talking to him.
‘Um, this one,’ I said, retreating, ‘what’s it called?’
‘“And Justice for All”!’ he yelled as I found my way back into the noise of the other room.
‘“And” what?’ I yelled back.
‘“Justice…for All…”’
Hmmm. Sounded…black. As in deep-down-at-the-bottom-of-the-well black. They definitely seemed to be going for something, though. A kind of anti-rock, I thought, idly.
I kept waiting for it to end, for him to finish doing his business, close the door and come back in. But it just wouldn’t.
‘Is it deliberate?’ I yelled again.
‘What?’
‘Like…anti-rock!’
He nodded, coming through the door, doing up his belt, but I knew he hadn’t heard me.
It finally finished. ‘Kind of like sort of avant-garde…jazz…thrash…’
He looked at me. ‘You’re stoned.’
‘No. Yeah. But it does sound…sort of…doesn’t it?’
‘I guess,’ he said. But I had the feeling he knew what I was on about. ‘It’s deliberate,’ he said.
Deliberate? I knew it!
‘I like it,’ I said. ‘I really like it. You’ve really gone for something…different.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
He wound it forward-backward to another track. Click, click went the drums, drone, drone went the guitars. Bottom-of-the-well shit, you know? I liked it. I really, really liked it. I really did.
I just couldn’t keep my eyes open any more…
Although it would be years before they were able to acknowledge the fact, the hasty, seemingly perfunctory way in which Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield dealt with the death of Cliff Burton would have lasting ramifications that would go far beyond the story of Metallica. The decision to simply bring in a new bass player and continue on with their plans as quickly as possible may have looked like the right one on paper, but the role Burton played in Metallica was only partly to do with playing the bass. Even with that taken care of, Cliff’s violent wrenching from the group had fatally holed the ship below the waterline. The remaining three hadn’t just lost a member. They had lost their mentor, their older soul-brother; they had lost Metallica’s best friend. The one who would never lie to them; never let them down, the only one who could save them from themselves.
As Malcolm Dome says, ‘Cliff was a great character. Had he lived he may have taken Metallica into some very interesting directions because he was the one with the open mind and he was the one the others looked up to, because he was slightly older, and more mature and commanding. In his own way, he was the leader of the band. Even though it was James and Lars’ band, it was clear they looked up to Cliff as being someone they could go to for advice. He would be the guy saying, “I don’t think we should be doing this, we should do that.” He didn’t look like he belonged in a thrash band and that was the key – he didn’t feel he had to conform.’
Instead, Lars and James – so vocal always about doing things their own way, according to their own personal feelings – now found themselves scurrying to do the right thing professionally to save their careers. In this they had the always-reliable advice of Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein at Q Prime, who counselled a swift regrouping, a smoothing over of the cracks, a united