Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [33]
This, I know, is a lie, or an untruth. Everybody knows that whenever Lars is in London these days he stays at his new manager’s posh house. But he wants something and I can already guess what it is.
‘Listen, I was thinking, maybe I could come over to your place, maybe crash on the couch?’
Shit, no. Not tonight. I’ve only just pulled up the drawbridge. But it’s hard to get a word in edgeways…
‘…we could get some beers, maybe, hang out…whaddayasay?’
I look over at the girlie but she mouths the word ‘no’. She has made the mistake of shrugging and saying ‘yes’ too many times before.
‘…or maybe we could catch a gig. What’s on tonight, do you know? I could meet you in Wardour Street, at The Ship. As a matter of fact, I’m there now…’
Finally – finally – I spot an opening and dive in with some half-hearted bit of spiel about needing to get a story finished and maybe next week or some other time perhaps, ’cos let’s face it there will always be another time for someone like Lars.
‘What?’ he says, not buying any of it. ‘You don’t want me to come over?’
‘No,’ I say, ‘of course I want you to come over. That would be great. It’s just…’
‘Oh, man! But I don’t have anywhere to stay.’
‘I thought you were staying at Peter’s,’ I say.
‘Well, yeah,’ he says, ‘but it’s so fucking boring. I need to get out, have some beers, tear it up. Come on, whaddayasay?’
The pips start to go again and so he goes to throw some more money in. But I get there first. ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I really can’t tonight. Good hearing from you though, man. Next time…’
‘Okay,’ he says, utterly unconvinced. And then the line goes dead. Phew. That was close. I mean, nice kid, means well, never shuts the fuck up though. I flop back down on the couch, roll one and try to forget about it…
Released in June 1982, the arrival of the first limited-edition copies of Brian Slagel’s epochal Metal Massacre album changed everything for Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield. Before it, they were two teenagers with the bare bones of an idea for a rock group. After it, they were this entity, something to be reckoned with, something called Metallica – or, rather, ‘Mettallica’, as they appeared on the original album sleeve and label. Lars and James didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. A dream come true, yet somehow just a little bit spoiled. Lars bit his lip and accepted Brian’s apologies. James said nothing, just fumed. ‘They understood,’ Slagel insists now. ‘They were not happy about it, for sure. [But] everything they delivered was late and the typesetter made the mistake. There was no way to check it before it went to press. I was furious! We changed it of course on all other versions [and] I apologised over and over to the band. As I said they were pretty cool about it, all things considered. I think it all worked out in the end for them,’ he adds dryly.
At least the existence of Metal Massacre gave the nascent Metallica line-up impetus. Moreover, it demonstrated something to Lars and James they had not known before: that they were actually good. It was as if the fact that they didn’t yet exist outside the fevered imaginations of Ulrich and Hetfield had enabled them somehow to be more than the meagre sum of their parts. Yet to be discouraged by poorly attended gigs or a string of rejection slips from disinterested music-biz figures, they just blast it out, as sure-footed as two guys virtually miming in front of their bedroom mirrors can be. Three weeks after the release of Metal Massacre, the band thought they had really cracked it when they went in to an eight-track studio in Tustin called Chateau East, where they recorded what they were convinced would actually become their first stand-alone release, following another typically brusque Lars Ulrich challenge to a more established local independent label owner. Unlike Brian Slagel, though, the owner was a punk aficionado – a genre still then diametrically opposed to heavy metal – and this time Lars’ bluff appeared to backfire.
‘[The guy] was a real snake in the grass,’ Ron McGovney would later recall. ‘He had this punk label,