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By Root 387 0

was something to do with skateboarders, something to do with classic Marvel comic books, something to do with smoking pot, with taking speed, with hellacious beer drinking, something to do with tattoos and piercings and dirty white sneakers – but originally it had nothing to do with any of those things. It was simply about the obsession of a failed teenage tennis protégé with the early 1980s new wave of British metal, and the fact that Metallica was quintessentially American. Ten years earlier Lars would have been just as happy drumming in a Deep Purple-style band. Ten years later he’d have been in his element in a Soundgarden or an Alice In Chains. It just so happened that in 1982, when he formed his first – and last – band, the music they set out to play was still so unheard of, so unlikely, he ended up inventing a whole new genre on his own. As he later told me, ‘We didn’t call it thrash; we’d never even heard the term till we started reading about it in British magazines like Kerrang!. It was like, we’re thrash metal? Okay, it sounded cool…’

The term ‘thrash metal’ was still some way off from entering the lingua franca of international rock just yet, though. In the meantime, Metallica continued to plough a lonely furrow. ‘Played like shit!’ Lars would note in his gig diary after another half-empty show at Radio City in June, ‘Went down so-so.’ At the Troubadour in July they went on so late ‘everybody had gone home’, he recalled, while a show at the Whisky in August, where they ‘started at 9.15 with no one around’ was commemorated with one word in block caps: ‘SHIT!’ Looking back on those days nearly twenty years later in an interview for Playboy, James would recall how he and Lars simply ‘liked a kind of music that was not accepted, especially in Los Angeles. We were fast and heavy. Everything about LA was short, catchy songs: Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Van Halen. And you had to have the look. The only look we had was ugly.’ In fact, photos of the band in its earliest guise show them demonstrably trying to fit in with the prevailing trends while reaching out for something of their own true identity. As the writer Xavier Russell, an early champion of the band in the UK rock press, puts it, ‘It was Ratt and Mötley Crüe from the waist down, black spandex and bullet belts. Then on top they’d wear Motörhead T-shirts or Saxon.’ Their very first line-up shot has James dressed in billowing white shirt and tight jeans, a Motörhead-style bullet belt around his hips; Dave and Ron in much the same get up, although Dave also sports a waistcoat over his white shirt, while Ron favours a Motörhead T-shirt; and Lars, most wince-inducing of all, in what appears to be an early Metallica T-shirt but with an overshirt tied, girly-fashion, around his ribs. They all have long, blow-dried hair. At many of their earliest shows both James and Dave wore white, striped spandex pants – a look inspired by Biff Byford of Saxon. ‘We had our battles with spandex,’ James grudgingly admitted in Playboy. ‘You could show off your package. “Wear spandex, dude. It gets you chicks!”’

It wasn’t until halfway through the first Metallica US tour a year later, in fact, that James finally ditched the spandex, after his one and only pair of pants caught fire while he was drying them next to a heater. ‘A hole melted right in the crotch. It was like, “They’re not real pants, are they? They’re like pantyhose.”’ After that, he stuck to jeans. Even their occasional good gigs left a bitter taste. The first time they got an encore, James recalled, ‘It was a Monday night at two in the morning at the Troubadour and there were about ten people there.’ Then, having decided what they were going to do for their first encore – ‘Let it Loose’ by Savage – Lars arbitrarily struck up the beat to an entirely different number, ‘Killing Time’ by Sweet Savage, ‘because it started with drums’. James, who had forgotten the lyrics, was so furious that when the number finally came to its calamitous conclusion he walked over and screamed, ‘You fucker!’ at Lars, then punched him hard in the stomach.