Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [164]
‘What have you done?’ I asked, concerned.
‘Been hanging out,’ he giggled.
‘Are you okay? Do you need help? Can you even stand?’
‘I’m fine,’ he drooled. He walked off, swaying as he went.
Fortunately, Lars’ excesses were not confined specifically to drugs and alcohol. Still the same teenage nerd at heart that had misspent his youth collecting tapes and bootlegs when he should have been practising on the tennis court, Brian Tatler – delighted that Metallica had, yet again, decided to release a recording of an old Diamond Head song, ‘The Prince’, on the B-side of their forthcoming ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ single – recalls travelling down to London to hang out with Lars at his hotel, going to Shades to buy Metallica bootlegs (Lars already had over forty in his hotel room that he’d collected on tour). When Lars suggested they return to the Midlands together for Sunday lunch with Debbie’s parents, Brian assumed he meant they take the train. ‘Fuck that,’ said Lars, and simply hailed a taxi. The bill, which Lars paid in cash: £180. Plus sizeable tip. ‘He’s always been incredibly generous like that,’ says Tatler. That was the first time, though, he felt, that Lars had demonstrated any sign of rock star excess.
The fourth Metallica album…, And Justice for All, was finally released on 5 September, just as Master of Puppets was officially certified platinum. Master had taken eighteen months to sell its first million copies in America; Justice would take just nine weeks, peaking at Number Six, their highest US chart position yet. Reviews were uniformly positive, with Kerrang! summing up the general view when it concluded that the album ‘will finally put Metallica into the big leagues where they belong’. At record company level, however, behind closed doors there were serious concerns. Although the album would eventually match its American sales in Britain and Europe, it would take much longer to do so. Dave Thorne at Phonogram, who considered the production ‘appalling…particularly the lack of bass on it’, spent the first few weeks of its release defending it to ‘large numbers of opinionated people in the record company [who] were coming knocking on my door going, “This record sounds shit, what’s the matter with it?”’
Nevertheless, the album went straight into the UK chart, reaching Number Four, an unqualified commercial success for an act that had never broken the Top Forty with an album before. The British and European legs of the Damaged Justice tour were also a sell-out, beginning in Budapest a week after the album’s release. The tour reached Britain in October, where they sold out three nights at the Hammersmith Odeon. The big surprise of the tour was the band’s new stage show, their first attempt at anything elaborate, featuring a twenty-foot replica of the album sleeve’s blindfolded and bound Statue of Liberty – nicknamed Edna after Iron Maiden’s Eddie – which collapsed melodramatically at the endless climax to ‘…And Justice for All’ each night, its head falling off as if guillotined. This was the era of the heavy metal pantomime as acceptable stage spectacle – led by Maiden’s ubiquitous Eddie figure, now brought to life for the encores each night, and Dio’s even sillier dragon (nicknamed Denzel), which singer Ronnie James Dio would ‘do battle’ with onstage – and in this context Edna’s plummet to disgrace every night was almost dignified by comparison. Nevertheless, it could have its comic, Spinal Tap-esque moments, too, on the nights when the statue simply refused to collapse or just its head would roll off the stage into the audience, or half an arm would fall off, swaying gently before toppling onto the drum riser.
These were minor concerns, however; day-to-day cares easily overcome in the bar of the hotel every night. The band was already thinking ahead. Taking a wrong turn towards a dressing room one night in Newcastle, I found Lars and Mensch huddled together over a cassette player, scrolling back and forth through the seven-minute-plus ‘One’ looking for places where they might be able to edit it down to a length suitable