Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [27]
James did, however, consider Lloyd good enough to take a few guitar lessons from him. Just hours before Lars was to take in the cassette of ‘Hit the Lights’ to Brian Slagel, James decided the track could use a little oomph in the shape of a typically blistering Lloyd Grant guitar break. As they only had a four-track recorder – one track each for guitar, bass, drums and vocals – there was no room for overdubs. However, with the end of the song tailing off into nothingness, James suggested they ‘punch a lead [guitar solo] in on the vocal track’. And so they stopped off at Lloyd’s house on their way to Bijou Studio and ‘hooked up some little fuckin’ amp [through which Lloyd] just ripped through a solo. It was the first take.’ As James says, ‘It’s a fuckin’ great solo!’ So much so it would survive subsequent re-recordings of the track right up to the first Metallica album a year later.
According to Grant, he already knew the song from his failed audition with the band. ‘“Hit the Lights” was composed by James and one of his friends. I remember the day I went over to Lars’ house, he said, “Check out this song” and he played me “Hit the Lights”. We were both into that heavy kind of shit.’ When Lars later called Lloyd with the idea of him adding a guitar solo to the recording, Grant agreed, but told him he didn’t have time to ‘make it over to Ron McGovney’s house to do the recording so James and Lars brought the four-track over to my apartment and I did the solo on a little Montgomery Ward amp.’ Lars, he added, though ‘very easy to get along with’, was always ‘one hundred per cent intense with the music. He had very strong ideas and opinions.’ James, on the other hand, ‘was very quiet’.
Although it would be some time before initial pressings of Metal Massacre finally became available, in June 1982, now they had a tape to play people, even if it was only of a notional band, Lars and James became re-energised in their pursuit of making Metallica a flesh-and-bones reality. As Brian Slagel says, ‘The Metal Massacre album made them a band and gave them something to do.’ Unlike now, where something like that would have first seen the light of day on a MySpace page, ‘At that point, for what it was worth, being on an album meant something to people.’ Still unable to persuade Ron McGovney to play the bass, for a short time they recruited ‘a dude with black hair’ whose name, they say, none of them can now remember, and who didn’t really fit the bill but was deemed better than nothing – although only just, apparently, as they ousted him soon afterwards. At this point, James finally wore Ron down. ‘My musical contribution to Metallica was very limited,’ McGovney says now. Unlike Leather Charm, where Ron had ‘felt more of a team vibe with James’, in Metallica he simply ‘played what James wanted me to play. Sometimes he would take my bass and play the song, and I would just copy what he did.’ From the word go, Metallica was always, he says, ‘James and Lars’ band’. To begin with, he says, ‘We played a lot of cover songs, so both of us were just copying others’ work.’ Even ‘Hit the Lights’ ‘was a Leather Charm song’ that James had ‘brought with him to Metallica’. Practising in the garage he shared with James, he insists that Metallica was ‘just a hobby for me just like dirt bike riding