Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [31]
Brian Slagel, who was at the Saxon show, remembers it well. James, still without a guitar to hide behind and wearing tight leopard-print pants was ‘interesting’, he notes kindly. ‘I mean, they played decently, which was surprising enough. But [James] was so shy and didn’t have a whole lot of stage presence. He was playing guitar before that obviously but they wanted him to be like the frontman. There definitely wasn’t an amazing amount of confidence. You could tell he was a little intimidated. But they pulled it off pretty well. It easily could have been a train wreck and it was not. But [James] felt so uncomfortable up there that I think that’s why he immediately started to play guitar [onstage] afterwards because he felt more comfortable having something else to do, other than just trying to sing.’
In keeping with the astonishingly rapid rise the band was about to experience, they also got their first mainstream review for the Saxon shows, in no lesser an organ than the LA Times, where music critic Terry Atkinson nailed them when he wrote: ‘Saxon could also use a fast, hot guitar player of the Eddie Van Halen ilk. Opening quartet Metallica had one [in Dave Mustaine], but little else. The local group needs considerable development to overcome a pervasive awkwardness.’ In his gig diary, Lars smugly noted that the band got paid a dollar more than their first gig, adding immodestly: ‘Great sound this time. Dave and me played great. Ron and James so-so. Went down pretty good. Had a good time but never met Saxon.’
‘Of course,’ says Brian Slagel, ‘John [Kornarens] and I were probably the only two people there that knew what [songs] they were playing. Everybody else just thought they were playing originals.’ Everybody, that is, with the exception of Saxon singer Biff Byford, who watched them from the side of the stage with his mouth open. ‘Apparently, Biff was like, “What? What? Why are they doing Diamond Head songs?”,’ recalls Brian Tatler. It wouldn’t be for long. By the time Metallica were ready for a return appearance at Radio City in early June, they had added two more original numbers to their set and recorded the first in a short series of what even then were considered groundbreaking demos, beginning in April with the four-track Power Metal collection: a round-up of their first four original numbers, with ‘Hit the Lights’ and ‘Jump in the Fire’ now joined by another new Mustaine-driven epic, ‘The Mechanix’ and Hetfield’s ‘Motorbreath’. Later rerecorded for the now legendary No Life ’til Leather demo, what’s interesting now about the earlier Power Metal demo is the way it captures the band before it had settled into its essential musical shape. James, in particular, sounds very different from the growling bad-ass he would soon portray himself as, holding the notes on the chorus of ‘Jump in the Fire’, for example, very much in the style of Diamond Head’s Sean Harris, though with considerably less finesse.
‘He later figured that he didn’t sound like Sean Harris so he decided to sing gruffer,’ recalled Ron McGovney, who had inadvertently given the demo its title when he took it upon himself to have some Metallica business cards made up to send to possible gig promoters. ‘The card was supposed to just have the Metallica logo and a contact number. But I thought it looked too plain and decided it should say something under the logo. I didn’t want to put “hard rock” or “heavy metal”, so I coined the term “power metal”; I thought it had a nice ring to it. No band had used that term before as far as I knew.’ When he proudly displayed the new cards for Lars, though, the drummer was aghast. ‘He said, “What did you do? What the hell is power metal? I can’t believe you did such a stupid thing! We can’t use these cards with the words power metal on them!”’ James