Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [41]
Lars also appreciated that Dave could be a useful guy to have around when things got out of hand in other ways. Getting shit-faced at a party with East LA metal newbies Armored Saint, Lars’ big mouth got him into trouble with Saint guitarist Phil Sandoval. When Sandoval shoved Ulrich to the floor, Mustaine, never backwards at coming forwards, launched a karate kick at Sandoval which poleaxed him and resulted in a broken ankle. Years later, after Mustaine finally straightened up he sought Sandoval out and apologised, bringing him a gift of a brand new ESP guitar, in order to bring what the newly sober Mustaine referred to in counselling-speak as ‘closure’ to the incident. Dave had just been watching Lars’ back, he explained. Sandoval understood. All little guys need a big guy to do that for them, right? Especially when the little guy has a big guy’s mouth. As Mustaine would later tell me, ‘I felt like I had something on everybody else. I was a bad boy. I didn’t realise I was tainting my image.’ Not even when he began dealing drugs from his apartment, which made him the odd man out in the band straight away. All of Metallica drank, but none had yet really experimented beyond smoking pot. Ron didn’t even like getting drunk; he hated the fact that it stopped him from driving and being in control. For Lars, dope was aptly named and slowed him down. Cocaine, when he could scrounge some, was more suited to his driven, megalomaniac personality. As for James, any form of drug was simply a no-no; even simple over-the-counter medication was viewed with suspicion. As a child, he had suffered from migraines, for which the only help his parents offered was prayer ‘or reading the Bible’. It wasn’t until he had lived with his elder half-brother that he first swallowed aspirin. Even then, he later told the writer Ben Mitchell, ‘I was freaking out. What’s it going to make me feel like, what’s it going to do?’ The first time Dave offered James a hit on a joint, he nearly ran from the room in terror. By then he had tried smoking pot – as a grand experiment, in the same way others would have viewed their first LSD trip – but ‘it hit me so hard, I freaked out’. From that point on, James would look down disapprovingly whenever anyone, particularly from his own band, used drugs of any description, whether viewed as ‘soft’ or ‘hard’. That Mustaine so clearly felt the opposite to James about drugs would help drive a further wedge between them that would eventually result in an irreparable fissure. Though not quite yet, not just as things were beginning to get interesting for Metallica. In fact, the first victim of the band’s steadily rising star wasn’t the hard-to-please Mustaine but the ever-dependable Ron McGovney.
According to Brian Slagel, McGovney’s difficulties in Metallica revolved around his stunted abilities on bass. ‘After Metallica had been around a while and they were getting better as musicians, the one thing they felt was that Ron, as great a guy as he was, wasn’t progressing as much as they were. So Lars came to me and said, “Hey, we’re thinking about looking for a bass player, is there anybody you think that would be good for us?”’ Brian immediately thought of Joey Vera, the bassist in Armored Saint, who had been on Metal Blade, and who were about to get signed to Chrysalis. ‘Joey was a thought,’ he says now, ‘but [on balance] I didn’t think that was gonna work.’ Joey was too committed to his own band, who were much further down the road with their own career anyway, at that stage. That was when Slagel came up with another idea. ‘I told Lars, “Look, there’s this band called Trauma…”’
Brian knew Trauma from San Francisco; they had been one of the bands he was putting onto Metal Massacre II, with a short but surprisingly sweet track titled ‘Such a Shame’. ‘Their manager had sent me a demo with three songs, which were awesome and recorded really well. So we put the band on Metal Massacre II and they came down to play in LA. The band was pretty good but