Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [40]
Dave was the one who dealt pot, stole beer and did all the talking onstage, acting like he was the leader of the band, not the newbie. That also made Ron ‘pissed as shit’. There had already been several flashpoints between the two before the trip to San Francisco, like the Sunday afternoon James actually fired Dave from the band – before allowing the contrite guitar player to talk his way back in. Mustaine had turned up at the bungalow Ron shared with James with ‘his two pit bull puppies’. Ron, who’d been taking a shower when Dave arrived, was aghast to discover when he came out that the dogs were ‘jumping all over my car’ – a reconfigured 1972 Pontiac LeMans – ‘scratching the shit out of it’. Ron recalls James running outside and yelling, ‘Hey, Dave, get those fuckin’ dogs off of Ron’s car!’ According to Ron, Dave yelled back: ‘What the fuck did you say? Don’t you talk that way about my dogs!’ The two men flew at each other and a nasty brawl ensued. According to Ron, ‘They started fighting and it spilled into the house. I see Dave punch James right across the mouth and he flies across the room, so I jumped on Dave’s back and he flipped me over onto the coffee table.’ At which point James got to his feet and told Dave, ‘You’re out of the fuckin’ band! Get the fuck out of here!’ Says Ron, ‘Dave loaded all his shit up and left all pissed off. The next day he comes back crying, pleading, “Please let me back in the band,”’ which, to Ron’s chagrin, James and Lars, not thrilled at the prospect of having to find yet another guitar player, eventually – after more from Mustaine – agreed to do.
Speaking with writer Joel McIver, in 1999, Mustaine recalled the incident with some regret, regarding it as the first nail in the coffin of his career in Metallica. ‘If I had to do it all again,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have brought the dog[s]. I was dealing drugs to keep myself afloat, so I had these dogs to protect my merchandise. I took them up to rehearsal one day and [one of] the dog[s] put her paws on the bass player’s car. I don’t know if it scratched it or left paw prints on it, or put a fuckin’ dent in the car, I don’t know. Whatever happened, James kicked it, we started arguing, push led to shove and I hit him. And I regret it…’ Only Lars, who was equally outgoing, for different reasons, really enjoyed Dave’s company. It might be argued, in fact, that Dave Mustaine was the missing link between Lars Ulrich’s ultra-confident, says-me personality and James Hetfield’s stone-faced, emotionally fragile character. In common with the latter, Mustaine was a young Los Angelino who had come from a badly broken home. But where James had erected an impenetrable, monosyllabic façade to shield him from the world, Mustaine met everything head-on, ready to out-gun all comers with his fast guitar and even faster mouth and fists. Like James, Dave had an inordinate fondness for Clint Eastwood movies, particularly The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Unlike James, he had an absurdist streak that meant he also loved the Pink Panther films. Meanwhile, like Lars, Dave’s musical influences were broad-shouldered enough to encompass both The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, before similarly falling for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, although in Dave’s case as much as a reactionary fuck-you to the existing LA scene as for any musical merit; his tastes veering more towards the less boxed-in, more technically able end of the spectrum where Diamond Head and Judas Priest existed than the purely heavy-legged likes of Saxon or Samson. ‘Motörhead, Mercyful Fate, Budgie and AC/DC’ had ‘all