Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [167]
They didn’t have time to stew on it, the US tour resuming just three days later. Along for the ride as support act was another up-and-coming Q Prime act, Queensrÿche, who had just released their own break-out album, Operation: Mindcrime. Although the two bands got on well as people – ‘We drank a lot,’ laughs singer Geoff Tate – musically, Queensrÿche saw themselves as occupying higher intellectual ground than the likes of Metallica, and while they were appreciative of the boost being offered such a high-profile tour would give them, having to win over Metallica’s hardcore crowd each night was an exceptionally difficult proving ground. ‘We were playing to a predominantly male audience,’ says Tate, ‘usually people of lower income, not a lot of education, heavy drinking, you know, heavy drug use…go to the show and get violent and rage against society, kind of thing, you know? My world is not good and so I’m gonna take it out on the guy standing next to me, kind of person…we met with a very violent resistance at first…every night it was like going out to battle. There were bottles flying and projectiles. I still have many scars from that tour. I think everybody in the band does, yeah.’ He laughs again. ‘You’re talking about a bunch of idiots as an audience. I mean, really people that are uneducated. The way they react to anything new, of course, is with fear. That’s a very typical human reaction but again as our forty-five-minute show progressed I think we won over a lot of people.’
There were other concerns, too; two occasions where young Metallica fans had committed suicide; in one instance, leaving a note requesting ‘Fade to Black’ be played at their funeral; in another, leaving a suicide note in which the lyrics to the same song were quoted. ‘It’s not something that brightens your day, but what can you do?’ said Lars, pointing out that they had also received ‘thousands of letters from kids telling us how that song gave them the will to live’. Then, on arriving for a show at the Memorial Coliseum in Corpus Christi, Texas, they awoke to a call from Mensch ‘who said there’s some shit going on – the local TV station is making a big deal because this kid apparently took some acid or other fucked-up drugs and went on a killing rampage, and the one thing that stuck in this witness’s mind when he shot someone at point-blank range was that he was quoting one of our lyrics – “No Remorse”.’ Lars shook his head, disbelievingly. ‘He got sentenced to death and there was this big yahoo when he stood up in the courtroom and quoted the lyrics again. But believe me,’ he added nonchalantly, ‘it’s not something I have a day-to-day interest in.’
Having a ‘day-to-day interest’ in anything outside of the tour’s own dizzying momentum was becoming impossible. After this leg of the US tour ended in April, it was off to New Zealand and Australia for the first time: the start of the biggest and most exhausting leg of the entire Damaged Justice tour, six months that would take them to Japan, then on to Hawaii, Brazil, Argentina, and back for another swing through North America. Support on most of these shows came from The Cult, another band with a substantial back catalogue now on the cusp of multi-platinum success, thanks to the elevated production work on their latest album, Sonic Temple, by producer of the moment, Bob Rock – a fact not lost on Lars Ulrich, in his never-ending quest to keep up with the rock Joneses.
I caught up with the band again during their May 1989 five-date tour of Japan, where I saw them play two shows at the Yoyogi Olympic Pool arena in Tokyo. They had been on the road for the best part of a year by that point but apart from James’ stomach problems,