Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [19]
It would be many years, however, precipitated by lengthy and still ongoing counselling sessions, before James Hetfield was ready to give any ground on these particular points. After his father left in 1977, ‘I just said to my mom: “I’m not going to Sunday school any more. Make me.” That was it.’ Instead, music – one of the few forms of expression open to him as a kid that could be enjoyed alone – would become first a solace, then a guard and, eventually, an inspiration. Long before he became interested in rock, though, there was the classical piano, which Cynthia – whose hobbies included amateur operatics, painting and some graphic design – first encouraged him to study when he was nine. James told me: ‘What it was, my mom had seen me over at a friend’s house just kind of start bashing on the piano. I was more or less playing drums on the piano and she thought, “Oh, he’s gonna be a musician, okay, we’ll sign him up for piano.” I did that for a couple of years and it was really a bit of a turn-off because it was learning classical pieces, stuff that I wasn’t listening to on the radio, you know? I remember it was an older woman’s house and the cookies at the end was the big deal, so something was cool about it. But I remember she had some music that she put out that we were gonna learn, and it was called “Joy to the World” [the Christmas carol adapted from an old English hymn]. I thought it was [starts singing] “Joy to the world!”, you know [the 1971 pop hit by Three Dog Night], but it was not. I got a little excited, like, “I heard my brother play that song before!” But it was theory.’ Discouraged at the time, he is now ‘so glad it was somewhat forced upon me because the act of left and right hand doing different things, and also singing at the same time, it gave me some inkling of what I do now. It gave me an idea of that, that’s natural to do. So singing and playing are somewhat easier than it probably could have been if I hadn’t [studied] piano.’
He discovered rock via his older brothers’ record collection. ‘I was always looking for something different, something other people didn’t always dig. When I was into Black Sabbath, all my friends would go, “Oh, my mom won’t let me have that album. It’s scary and I’ll have nightmares.” I thought that was funny, so I had to go out and get it.’ Groups like The Beatles ‘and shit like that’, he said, ‘I never dug so much’. It was around now that he also tried his hand at playing his brother David’s drums, but couldn’t get it going. He was fourteen, he told me, before he remembers ‘picking up a guitar for the first time and going, “How do they make all these noises?”’ He couldn’t ‘remember learning’ to actually play one. ‘I started off with an acoustic then started fiddling around, and then learning the chords, and it just kind of went on from there, I guess. But it seemed to go pretty quickly and I was playing in a band pretty soon, like within a year or two: playing cover songs, which is certainly the way to learn guitar.’ He would also ‘slow down LPs, trying to learn stuff’. Listening; copying; repeating; always alone. ‘I liked being alone,’ he later told writer Ben Mitchell. ‘I liked being able to close off the world. And music helped with that a lot.’ He would put the headphones on and just drift away, digging Kiss and Aerosmith, Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper: all-American hard rock; irony-free, kick-ass music for straight-shooting dudes that didn’t dance but liked to party. ‘I didn’t get into other stuff until being introduced to Lars.’ The first concert he went to was in July 1978, just before his sixteenth birthday: Aerosmith supported by AC/DC at the Long Beach Arena. Aerosmith’s 1976 album Rocks ‘was one of the albums I could play over and over; it was filled with good stuff’. The same summer he also bought a ticket for the two-day California World Music Festival, also featuring Aerosmith, alongside Ted Nugent and Van Halen. ‘I