Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [148]
Opening with the sound of James humming while other voices in the background titter, before Lars’ monstrous-sounding drums kick in and the whole thing takes off like a runaway train, just as the Cliff ’Em All video anticipated aspects of reality TV, so Garage Days massively predated the taste for lo-fi recordings of a decade later, emphasised by rule-breaking moments such as the fade-out of ‘Helpless’ fading back in again to the sound of guitar chords being wrenched from amps and Lars barking instructions from behind his kit. The speed and ferocity continue through the next track, Jason’s bass erupting over the improvised intro and turning the ostensibly vintage rock anthem ‘Crash Course in Brain Surgery’ into a wild punk-metal powerhouse. The opening track on side two – ‘The Small Hours’ – is given an even more brutal treatment, lumbering towards you over the horizon like some mutant one-eyed alien monster from Kirk’s growing collection of vintage sci-fi comics, smothered in nuclear dust clouds and the blood of puny humans. The real kiss-off, though, is the climax, two long-dead Misfits songs – ‘Last Caress’ and ‘Green Hell’ – bolted, Frankenstein-like, into one. Despite its defiantly wrongheaded lyrics (‘I got something to say, I raped your mother today…’), ‘Last Caress’ was one of Metallica’s catchiest tracks, its counter-intuitive sweetness wonderfully superseded by ‘Green Hell’, one of their fastest tracks since ‘Whiplash’, the whole medley lasting barely over three minutes; the joke compounded when the EP ends with an amusingly tuneless few seconds of the intro to Iron Maiden’s ‘Run to the Hills’. Ironically, the most Metallica-like track recorded at these sessions was actually left off the UK version of the EP, in order to qualify it for the singles chart – their commanding version of Killing Joke’s ‘The Wait’, any traces of humour once more suspended as the band do the seemingly impossible and all but make the song their own.
For a band that would increasingly make superior production the foundation upon which their albums would stand or fall, the hastily recorded, ‘not very produced’ – as they wittily credited it on the sleeve – Garage Days EP arguably did more for Metallica’s reputation at that precise juncture in their career than the most momentous album release might have. It made Metallica seem fun and accessible, qualities that had eluded them since their first album. And, yes, it was a good way of introducing Jason Newkid, as he’s listed on the artfully ‘makeshift’ sleeve, to those fans waiting with folded arms to compare him to Cliff. It also gave Jason one of his first really good Metallica experiences, using his background as a carpenter and odd-job man to help Lars soundproof his new garage after the band decided they didn’t feel comfortable working out of a plush Marin County rehearsal studio shared by Night Ranger and Starship. Jason brought in strips of carpeting to soundproof the walls, with the help of Lars’ old pal from LA, John Kornarens (who still hadn’t got his fifty bucks back). As Jason recalled, ‘That was a fucking blast, man. You walked into the room, set up your amp the way you would live, put a microphone in front of it and you play the song. James was standing next to me…just doing his stuff. We recorded it there and then, mistakes and all. To me that’s one of the best-sounding Metallica records because of its rawness.’
The plan, explains Thorne, was for Phonogram to use its clout to ‘blast it straight into the charts. To make a massive statement about the band, and that’s of course exactly what it did.’ In fact, the EP went in at Number Twenty-Seven – good, not great, by contemporary chart singles’ standards but regarded as a significant success at Phonogram as the record had been released in only one format: a twelve-inch vinyl record. No CD, no cassette, no seven-inch formats. When Thorne had played a snippet of ‘Helpless’ at the weekly strategy meeting, ‘I kid you not, within thirty seconds, the press girls and virtually everybody else in the bloody room was going, “Oh,