Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [144]
Above all, there was simply the enormous anger and resentment still growing inside all of them, James in particular. ‘There was a lot of grief that turned into spite towards Jason,’ admitted James in 2005. ‘That is…pretty human, I would say.’ Or as Lars put it, speaking with me in 2009, ‘It was difficult. I think certainly one could argue that maybe we didn’t give [Jason] a fair shot. But we also weren’t capable because we were twenty-two years old and we didn’t know how to deal with this type of stuff. We didn’t know how to get through those types of situations other than jump to the bottom of a vodka bottle and stay there for years…we weren’t particularly embrasive [sic] and welcoming, you know.’ He gave a small self-deprecating chuckle. ‘So I think, certainly, you know, most of the fault lies with us.’
Lars, in fact, grew to dislike Jason so much during that Japanese tour that he went to Mensch and insisted they fire him, and that the whole thing was a big mistake. ‘I know for a fact,’ said Halfin, ‘Lars wanted to fire him. He wanted to replace him. But Peter Mensch said to him, “You’ve made your choice, now live with it.”’ He added, ‘He just didn’t get on with him as a person. It wasn’t because of Jason’s playing skills; it was purely because he didn’t get on with his personality.’ This was a view corroborated by Bobby Schneider: ‘I remember Mensch sitting down with them in some bar in Japan and saying, “You guys gotta fucking stop this. He’s in your band. You’ve made him a band member. So just get on with it. He’s the right choice.”’
The trouble was Metallica hadn’t just hired a bassist, they’d hired a fan. Where they had schemed and plotted to persuade Cliff to join their band, Jason had given up everything to be with them. They had replaced the one guy they all looked up to with the one guy they all looked down on – Jason Newkid, as they tauntingly nicknamed him. No wonder they felt so uncomfortable having him around all the time. He wasn’t one of them and never would be. They resented him – anyone – parachuting into their story. Fuck his bass. Turn it down.
Speaking just a couple of years after Jason had been hired, Lars was still staunchly repeating the party line although he was already starting to sound like he was trying more to convince himself. ‘Look, when Cliff died, we could have taken our time before deciding what to do,’ he conceded. ‘But we didn’t, and that felt like the right thing to do.’ Just a few nights after the funeral, ‘I sat and drank some beer and listened to the Master of Puppets album – all of it. And then it hit me. The next couple of weeks would have been shit but we started setting up auditions, spending hours on the phone, and then we got Jason Newsted and started jamming, and then we initiated Jason with some club gigs…It was good for us, the right thing for us to do. No time to dwell. From the accident to doing a gig was five weeks. The reason I talk about this is that what was right for us might not have been right for other bands…’ When the writer Ben Mitchell asked James in 2009 whether he thought they had toured again too quickly after Cliff died, the singer replied: ‘I think we did everything too quickly after that. Getting a bass player, touring. We went straight back out. That was management’s way of dealing with the grief: “Just play it out through your music.” Now it feels like there wasn’t enough grieving or enough respect paid, and enough of just dealing with each other and helping each other through. We went out on the road and took a lot of it out on Jason once he joined. It was more like: “Yeah, we have a bass player but he’s not Cliff.”’
There was no time for looking back in 1986, though; the Japanese dates were immediately