• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 350 0

which was a division of an Orange County record company. He said he would put up the money to have us do an EP.’ But after hearing the seven tracks they came up with – comprised, essentially, of every original tune the four-man line-up had so far bolted together – he claimed to be appalled that the band had duped him into thinking they were a punk outfit and refused to release any of it. Ever resourceful, Lars suggested the band simply take the tracks and distribute them as a ‘limited edition’ cassette tape entitled No Life ’til Leather (taken from the opening line of ‘Hit the Lights’, and inspired by Motörhead’s live album No Sleep ’til Hammersmith, which had been Number One in the UK charts the summer Lars was there). Along with its own makeshift sleeve with liner notes written by Lars, plus tracklisting and band logo, you wouldn’t be able to buy it in the stores, in the way you could buy Metal Massacre, but it would burn a hole in the tape-trading scene, Lars rightly reasoned, which is exactly what it did. In fact, the seven tracks on No Life ’til Leather – ‘The Mechanix’, ‘Phantom Lord’, ‘Jump in the Fire’ and ‘Metal Militia’, all of which would be credited to Hetfield, Ulrich and Mustaine, but which Mustaine would later claim he had essentially written the bulk of alone, plus ‘Motorbreath’, another arrangement left over from Hetfield’s days working with Hugh Tanner but which would now be credited solely to James, ‘Seek and Destroy’, by James and Lars, and in no small measure ‘inspired’ by Diamond Head’s ‘Dead Reckoning’ (a track released earlier that year), plus a new version of ‘Hit the Lights’, this time featuring both Mustaine and McGovney (although they cannily over-dubbed onto it the original Lloyd Grant solo, too) – did everything for the band an official EP might have done, except garner reviews in the mainstream rock press. But it made up for that by the sheer force of its word-of-mouth following, something Lars understood only too well through his own avidness for obscure, hard-to-find NWOBHM releases.

Patrick Scott was enlisted to help send out copies of No Life. ‘I was actually really the only person mailing them out,’ he says now. ‘It was a little bit selfish [of Lars] but it was helping a friend, too. I had these pen-pals like Metal Mike from Aardshok, and Bernard Doe [at Metal Forces], and some other pen-pals…I would just send them demos and T-shirts then they’d send me stuff back…But they were just going nuts over Metallica, even in countries where we thought the cool bands were, they thought Metallica was the coolest band. Not in LA but everywhere else, from other states in the US, to Japan and Sweden and England…it was a fun time, running to the mailbox every day. Lars just kept giving me stuff to send out. He knew what he was doing.’ Lars would never claim to have masterminded any particular strategy, at least not at this stage, but he understood how getting their music out this way fitted Metallica’s developing profile in all sorts of useful ways. Although they would grow with the years into a much more inclusive club, the original music and mien of Metallica was quintessentially the sound of outsiders, positioned so far beyond the borders of the mainstream that they wouldn’t even bother trying to force their way in; an approach so utterly at odds with the prevailing crowd-pleasing LA attitude that it appeared to make no sense at all to most of the people they performed to at the various Hollywood clubs they were now beginning to play on a semi-frequent basis.

Soon, cassettes of No Life ’til Leather were circulating all over Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, London, Birmingham and Copenhagen. Band operations still centred on Ron’s parents’ bungalow – with Ron more often than not personally funding those activities, as he was the only one with an active credit card – but it was the start of Lars taking over the business side of the operation in terms of band profile and promotion. As he boasted to Rolling Stone years later, conveniently omitting the role played by Scott and others, ‘I was the