Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [147]
He recalls Mensch coming to London for a summit meeting with Simone, Watson, Thorne, and all the various heads of department, including marketing director John Waller and his boss Tony Powell. The thrust of Mensch’s presentation was: ‘This is not an A&R opportunity, the A&R on this band takes care of itself. This is a marketing opportunity…’ Says Thorne, ‘Mensch said, “Guys, don’t get yourselves excited. We’re not looking for you to be creatively involved in this. None of you except maybe that bloke” – pointing at me – “knows anything about this band. We want your sales, distribution and marketing.”’
Mensch won them over but, as he’d already conceded, very little of this had to do with the music. Says Thorne, ‘I suspect some of the powers that be thought, hey, this could be the new Def Leppard. I don’t think there was any real analysis of whether that was feasible. What we were talking about was building a stronger bridge with a big management company who we already had a relationship with.’ MFN had ‘great ears, great attitude; great tenacity in delivering what they’d done [but] were literally at the limit of their capability’. To get Metallica where they needed to go next, career-wise, it would take ‘serious old-fashioned marketing clout, delivering big campaigns, big discount deals, et cetera. Polygram, who were the distribution arm of the company, at the time, was pretty much the biggest distribution operation in Europe. So that’s what [Q Prime] were looking for.’
The first Metallica release on Phonogram would be a four-track twelve-inch: The $5.98 EP: Garage Days Re-Revisited – the title a reference to the subtitle of the B-side of the ‘Creeping Death’ single of three years before; an indicator that this was a collection of covers. It’s long been assumed that this was conceived as a handy way of breaking Newsted into Metallica before embarking on a full-blown album. In fact, the record was made at the suggestion of Dave Thorne, who saw their forthcoming return appearance at that year’s Donington Monsters of Rock festival as a perfect marketing opportunity for a new British release: ‘I said, “Look, this is an amazing sales opportunity. I know you’re not gonna have an album but we’ve got to put something out.” They said okay, we’ll go away and think about it.’ Thorne’s initial idea had been a straightforward single but Mensch told him, ‘We don’t do singles.’ Thorne responded, ‘Well, record something that will qualify for the singles chart but isn’t a single. They came back and said, “We’re gonna do The $5.98 EP: Garage Days Re-Revisited.” Even now, Lars still credits me with this idea, which is very nice of him. But I hadn’t conceptualised it.’
In fact, the idea – blasting out as-live versions of covers of underground metal and punk gems such as ‘Helpless’ by Diamond Head, ‘The Small Hours’ by fellow NWOBHM outfit Holocaust, ‘Crash Course in Brain Surgery’ by old-wave British metallists Budgie, and back-to-back versions of two songs by Cliff’s beloved Misfits, ‘Last Caress’ and ‘Green Hell’ – was simple but brilliant. Rehearsed, as the title suggests, in the garage – although not at their former El Cerrito bolthole but across the street in Lars’ newly soundproofed two-car garage at his very own house, bought with the extra money now coming in – then recorded in just six days at Conway studios in LA, ‘about the same time it took to load in the gear on the last album’, as James noted on the sleeve, the Garage Days EP was a riot from start