Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [162]
Drawing a great deal of his inspiration at that time from better-known 1980s comic book artists such as Kevin O’Neil, famous for his Torquemada series in the same groundbreaking British weekly, 2000AD, that gave the world Judge Dredd, Pushead was also indebted, he confessed, to psychedelic Sixties poster legend, Rick Griffin, although he bridled at any suggestion that his own lurid designs may have been similarly drug-induced. ‘I’ve never taken drugs and drawn,’ he frowningly told me. ‘I’ve been straight since I was in high school. I don’t even drink coffee.’ Human skulls were what ‘inspire me the most’, he said. The only commission still missing from his portfolio, he noted somewhat sulkily, was for a full-bore Metallica album cover. ‘I’d love to, obviously,’ he said, ‘But they haven’t asked me yet.’ It would be another fifteen years before they did, his outlandish pictures considered simply too cartoonish for the increasingly serious-minded way Metallica came to view their albums, until, finally, in 2003, they came up with an album – St. Anger – so clearly trauma-induced that a Pushead design was actually deemed a palatable corrective. In the meantime, so cool was Metallica’s new Pushead-designed merch considered, that he quickly became the designer of choice for other huge rock names of the era such as Aerosmith and Mötley Crüe (his skulls-in-straightjacket T-shirt became the second most popular item of merchandise on the Crüe’s wildly successful 1989 Dr Feelgood tour).
It was in New York at the end of June that Lars says he first realised how far the band had come since their previous American summer tour, with Ozzy, two years before. Hanging out after lunch with Cliff Burnstein, the manager had a treat in store for him. Suggesting they take a swing by the office of their booking agent, Marsha Vlasic at ICM, Lars was astounded when Marsha pulled out a tour schedule of dates provisionally booked for the band’s own arena-headlining tour later that year. ‘I look down at the first two weeks, and Indianapolis is there. Now, Indianapolis was always this joke between me and Cliff, about how in Indianapolis they just don’t get it. That was the barometer. Lo and be-fucking-hold, we go to Indianapolis, and there are nine thousand people there. I remember thinking, “Wow, maybe all those people in Middle America will get it.”’
There was a break in August, between the end of the Monsters of Rock tour and the start of Metallica’s own headline world tour. Lars flew with his wife Debbie to London where they stayed at Peter Mensch’s house, between brief visits to Debbie’s parents’ place in the Midlands. Lars also took the opportunity to do some hanging out backstage at that year’s British Monsters of Rock show at Donington, headlined by his old favourites Iron Maiden. Also on the bill were his new favourites Guns N’ Roses, who he would actually spend most of his time with, sharing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s with Slash – whose trademark top hat Lars was famously pictured wearing at various drunk intervals – and swapping war stories with their notoriously troubled singer Axl, whose white leather jacket with the Guns N’ Roses logo emblazoned across its back Lars was so taken with he later order a similar one for himself. (This was made to order by Brockum, the US merchandising company both bands shared, and the subject of much piss-taking from James and the others when it arrived.)
There was also one other