Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [149]
Equally impressive, from their new record company’s standpoint, was the band’s willingness to help promote the record. They may not have been the usual type of singles-orientated artists Phonogram was used to dealing with but they more than made up for that by being down-to-earth and ready to roll up their sleeves. For most major artists, ‘coming into the country doing promo meant a handful of major interviews’, says Thorne. ‘Possibly a bit of TV and radio if it was available. Then you might get other members of the band to do some secondary interview type stuff. But Lars didn’t just want to talk to [the major music press], he wanted to talk to every bloody fanzine you’ve ever heard of and a load that you haven’t. Lars would come in and spend four or five days in our office. He’d do literally sixty, seventy, eighty fanzines. You couldn’t get him off the phone.’
Thorne cites this readiness to always meet the media halfway as one of the major contributing factors in Metallica’s later popularity with such temperamentally metal-hostile magazines as the NME, Time Out, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and so on, up to the present day and their current elevated status among the broadsheet newspapers. ‘It was a combination of Lars’ willingness to always go the extra mile for the media,’ says Thorn, ‘and also something else. It all comes down to the “c”-word: credibility. Every conversation I had with Peter Mensch, every meeting we had, every major decision we made, that was the word that was at the forefront: credibility. They would not do anything that would upset that applecart. They weren’t gonna sell out because they were a band of the people. They came up through the tape-trading scene and that’s where they wanted to stay. They didn’t want to upset those people.’
Maybe so but Lars, they discovered, was also Dave and the rest of Phonogram’s ‘go-to guy’ for both promotional issues and all relevant business decisions. ‘I would talk to Mensch and he would then say to me, “Okay, now you’ve got to talk to Lars and persuade him.”’ Peter, he says, ‘was obviously a guy who had a natural aversion to saying yes, especially to record labels. [So in the beginning] he got me to talk to Lars all the time. Lars was totally, totally immersed in the business side of things…he was the guy who had to be persuaded. He would then go to the guy who was the real decision-maker in the band, and that was Hetfield – on the big things.’
Another added bonus in the label’s attempts to garner maximum publicity for their first Metallica release was the band’s decision to play – billed as ‘Damage, Inc.’ – an unannounced warm-up show for Donington at the 100 Club in Oxford Street, the legendary venue where The Clash and the Sex Pistols had performed in the late 1970s. When, near the end of the hour-long set, Jason’s bass dropped out of the mix due to a technical glitch, word passed through the crowd that he’d passed out from the heat. The place was so unbearably hot and overcrowded it was impossible to verify this and when Jason’s momentary ‘collapse’ was later misreported in Kerrang! it only added to the gathering list of grievances and personal slights against him that Jason was now mentally compiling. He even suspected the band of planting the story to their cronies on the mag as another wind-up. As Dave Thorne says, ‘It was an insane night. My lasting memory was seeing Scott Ian being surfed around the whole crowd in front of the band…a crazy night.’
Two days later the band