Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [20]
Already a well-established loner at high school, like Lars Ulrich it was music that would finally bring James Hetfield into contact with other similarly obsessed classroom loners such as Ron McGovney, who later become the first bass player in Metallica. A fellow pupil at East Middle School, McGovney recalls meeting Hetfield in music class, drawn to him as ‘the only guy in the class who could play guitar’. Like James, Ron didn’t belong to any of the established school cliques. ‘There was the cheerleaders, the jocks, the marching band people.’ James and Ron ended up with other ‘laggers’ like their buddies Dave Marrs and Jim Keshil, ‘hanging around without any real social group’. Ron wasn’t solely into rock like James. He was ‘an Elvis freak’ who was ‘devastated’ when Presley died. Instead, he and James found common ground in the music of Led Zeppelin and ZZ Top, Foreigner and Boston. Dave and Jim were more like James; they were heavily into Kiss and Aerosmith. The odd man out, Ron eventually came round to the others’ way of thinking, bonding with them over British proto-metal acts such as UFO. As a result, Ron started having lessons on the acoustic guitar. ‘I knew nothing about bass,’ he recalls. He just wanted to learn how to play ‘Stairway to Heaven’. When, later that high school year, Hetfield started hanging out with two brothers named Ron and Rich Valoz, who played bass and drums respectively, and who then teamed up with another guitar-playing pupil named Jim Arnold, McGovney offered to roadie for them. The band called itself Obsession and like all high school bands they concentrated on cover versions of songs by their favourite artists. In this instance, that meant the easiest-to-play material by Black Sabbath (‘Never Say Die’), Led Zeppelin (‘Rock and Roll’), UFO (‘Lights Out’) and Deep Purple (‘Highway Star’). All three frontline members would take turns singing, Jim Arnold on the Zeppelin stuff, Ron Valoz on ‘Purple Haze’. James would be the UFO guy, tackling hard-line anthems like ‘Doctor, Doctor’ and ‘Lights Out’.
After a prolonged period rehearsing at the Valoz brothers’ parents’ house in nearby Downey, the new outfit eventually did the occasional gig: backyard ‘keg parties’, playing for free beer and the chance to show off. Mainly, though, they played every Friday and Saturday night at the Valoz brothers’ place. McGovney remembers the brothers as ‘electrical geniuses’ who had ‘wired up lights’ in the loft they built in their parents’ garage: ‘Dave Marrs and I would sit up there and work the control panel doing the lights, strobes and stuff.’ It was ‘this whole show in a tiny garage’. ‘We’d do Thin Lizzy,’ James told me. ‘We’d do like some Robin Trower…bands of the time that were somewhat heavy.’ James finally bailed out on Obsession, he said, when ‘I had brought an original song to play and none of them liked it so that’s when I basically kind of said goodbye to them. Because I wanted to start writing some songs and they weren’t interested in that.’ With James went Jim Arnold, joined by his brother Chris, to form another short-lived outfit called Syrinx. ‘All they played was Rush covers,’ McGovney recalled. ‘That didn’t last long.’
All the music came to an abrupt end, though, when James’ mother died agonisingly slowly of cancer, in 1980, after refusing treatment and even painkillers until right at the very end, when it was already too late. With James and Deanna forced to move in with their stepbrother, David – ten years older than James and now married and living in his own house twenty miles away in Brea, where he worked as an accountant – to begin with