Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [28]
Where Ron’s motivations lay was his business; as far as Lars and James were concerned, as long as he turned up for rehearsals it didn’t matter. With an actual track about to be released on an actual album, this was no longer a time for seeking out the perfect musical partner and far more a case of ‘getting the show on the fuckin’ road’, as Lars put it. Indeed, even James had yet to settle on what he felt would be his long-term role in the band, vacillating between wanting to be a straightforward frontman in the Steven Tyler and Sean Harris mould, and deciding his best bet was actually off to one side, head down, playing rhythm guitar.
Meanwhile, after yet another ad was placed in the Recycler, they finally found someone who they decided just might be the answer to their prayers. His name was Dave Mustaine and he was about to help Metallica become a legend, although not entirely in ways any of them could have foretold. ‘I answered the phone one day,’ McGovney remembered, ‘and this guy Dave was on the other end, and he was just spieling this baloney like I could not believe.’ Lars: ‘I got a call from this guy and he was just so OTT: “I got all this equipment; my own photographer, my own this, my own that.” He didn’t have a clue what we were talking about musically, but he had enthusiasm. He was pretty quickly turned on, which was cool because everybody else in LA had this career thing – Quiet Riot, Ratt and Mötley Crüe were big bands, and everyone else in Hollywood was doing imitations.’ Dave Mustaine had no desire to imitate anybody. He was already his own biggest hero.
Born, as he would tell me, ‘at the witching hour’ – meaning midnight or ‘two minutes after’, as he put it – on 13 September 1961, in La Mesa, California, David Scott Mustaine was the classic product of a broken home. The disgruntled son of an alcoholic father, John, and mistreated mother, Emily, Mustaine had grown up messed-up and furious across several different locations in Southern California, with Emily forced to keep moving to escape the abusive attentions of her only son’s estranged father. By the time Dave answered the ad in The Recycler he lived alone in his own dishevelled apartment in Huntington Beach, from which he routinely sold weed, pot – nothing too heavy but enough of it to keep both himself and his regular customers high. A tall, good-looking guy with a lot of reddish-blonde hair and a lot more attitude, some said he was an asshole. Actually, a lot of people said he was an asshole – and often they were right. But the hard, confrontational exterior masked a highly intelligent young man with an exceptional gift as a guitarist and songwriter. Indeed it might be argued that it was Mustaine’s belligerence that supplied his artistic edge: compelling, outspoken, and in his own way, supremely honest. And consequently more than a little bit scary…If the contrived profanities and vulgar machismo were doomed to overshadow much of the brilliant music he would make throughout his rarely dull career, Mustaine was also responsible for making some of the most innovative heavy metal recordings of his time. And what a time he was destined to have.
James Hetfield, whose own shattered background meant he could relate to any embittered boy from a broken home, felt an immediate connection with his brash new acquaintance. Dave Mustaine felt it, too: ‘I think that James and I are very much the same man,’ he later reflected. ‘I think that we grabbed an angel, split him in half, and both of us are possessing that power.’ As time would go on, however, James began to see Dave less as a brother and more as an evil twin. As well as being more adept on guitar than James, he wasn’t averse to usurping him onstage, too, sensing James’ insecurity and seizing on it to become the frontman, announcing the names of songs, rapping with the audience, even on occasion seemingly trying to outdo James’ singing. Until he joined Metallica, Dave had been in a group of unknowns named Panic, with whom he had assembled an impressive array of