Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [159]
It wasn’t just the drinking they were up to now. ‘It was fucking great,’ Lars would later boast to Rolling Stone. ‘Girls knew we were part of the tour and wanted to fuck us, but at the same time we could blend in with the crowd…Like, “Who gives a shit? Let’s have another rum and Coke and go back in the audience and see what’s happening.”’ Which is exactly what they did in Tampa; photographer Ross Halfin and I walked to the very top tier of seats at the stadium with them, where they dropped their jeans and flashed the audience. The only one who wasn’t regularly drunk was Jason, still exulting in his outsider status, nervously smoking weed alone back in his hotel room, or in the company of groupies too young to grasp his lowly status; still counting his blessings for finding himself in such a privileged, financially settled position, still wondering if Metallica would ever really feel like his band too.
There was now a small group of what they called their ‘tough tarts’ at every show; girls waiting naked in the showers; girls in bikinis they’d given passes to the night before whose names they could no longer remember; girlfriends of boy fans offered to the band almost ritualistically. ‘I couldn’t figure out why all of a sudden I was handsome,’ said Kirk. ‘No one had ever treated me like that before in my life.’ Both Kirk and Lars were starting to use cocaine more regularly, too. Lars primarily, he said, because ‘it gave me another couple of hours’ drinking’; Kirk because it brought him out of his shell. And because he liked being out of his head; sitting there, stoned, gazing at horror movies, some on TV, some just playing out in front of him in real time in his hotel room.
The biggest drinker was still James, who would regularly polish off half a bottle of seventy-proof Jägermeister. He was also into the vodka, although his brand had improved: he now favoured Absolut. ‘That whole tour was a big fog for me,’ James later recalled. ‘It was bad coming back to some of those towns later, because there were a lot of dads and moms and husbands and boyfriends looking for me. Not good. People were hating me and I didn’t know why…’
It wasn’t just irate husbands and boyfriends that James was falling foul of. Alcohol brought out the dark, mouthy Mr Hyde to his more usual monosyllabic Dr Jekyll. On a flying visit to London that summer, he had revealed to Kerrang! designer Krusher Joule just how black his drinking could make him: ‘James and Lars had come to the office to discuss their next tour programme, which Geoff Barton was helping them with. Afterwards I took them for a friendly drink and we ended up at a pub round the corner from where I live in south London. By now of course we’re all pretty pissed but we were having a laugh. Then one of my next-door neighbours showed up, a lovely woman, a little bit older and very straight, Mrs Normal. I remember turning round to introduce her and there was Lars standing with his cock out, just looking at her. Anyway, I told him to put it away, she was a taken woman, and we went back to drinking. Later, after the pub closed, we were walking back to my flat across this park and James started going on about “people coming to our country and taking our jobs”. I said, “Hang on a minute, mate, you are descended from the people who came into that country and stole it…”’
This was not the kind of mission statement James was likely to take kindly to, especially not after an evening of hard drinking. ‘All I remember next,’ says Krusher, ‘is we were going at each other. We literally