Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [44]
That final show with Ron on bass had been at the Mabuhay Gardens, on 30 November – a bitter-sweet occasion, as it was also one of the best shows Ron had played with the band. ‘Of course, the more popular we became the more I liked playing in the band,’ says Ron now. Although he admits, ‘We had to get liquored up to get on stage so obviously we could have been better,’ the fact is, ‘People who saw us in the clubs, especially in San Francisco, probably say the line-up with Dave and me in the band was fantastic.’ The setlist that night – again, built almost entirely around the seven-song No Life ’til Leather cassette, plus ‘No Remorse’ and Diamond Head’s ‘Am I Evil?’ – also contained one of the first truly authentic new numbers the band had worked up as a four-piece: ‘Whiplash’ – punk-fast but with added bones stuck in the throat of the melody. Ron would later look back on the writing and performing of that particular number as among his happiest memories from Metallica, rightly describing it as ‘the most ultimate headbanging song. Every time we played that song it totally kicked ass.’ Loading up the gear after the show, Ron McGovney espied Cliff Burton, the man who would soon replace him, standing outside in the rain. Ron, ever the practical one, went over and introduced himself, then offered the sodden bassist a lift home. After that, the drive back to LA was hellish, the others forcing him to stop at a liquor store where, according to Ron, ‘they got a whole gallon of whisky. James, Lars and Dave were completely smashed out of their minds. They would constantly bang on the window for me to pull over so they could take a piss, and all of a sudden I look over and see Lars lying in the middle of Interstate 5 on the double yellow line. It was just unbelievable! And I just said fuck this shit!’
When Ron discovered the next day that Dave had contemptuously poured beer onto the pickups of his Washburn bass, while loudly disclaiming, ‘I fuckin’ hate Ron,’ it was the final straw. ‘I confronted the band when they came over for practice and said, “Get the fuck out of my house!” I turned to James and said, “I’m sorry, James, but you have to go too.” And they were gone within the next couple of days. They packed all their gear and moved to San Francisco.’ Ron was ‘so disgusted’, he sold his equipment soon after, including his amps, guitar cases, even his beloved Les Paul guitar. ‘I was just so pissed with the whole thing.’ By now he had also discovered the others had been talking behind his back about getting Cliff Burton into the band to replace him. These days, he claims to be sanguine about the situation. But at the time he felt ‘double-crossed’. Others from the Metallica camp also felt Ron was treated badly. Says Bob Nalbandian, ‘Ron got a raw deal, no doubt. Okay, he wasn’t as great a bass player as Cliff Burton but he was a really nice guy who did a lot for that band and he deserved better, for sure. I mean, you look at where they went musically with Cliff in the band and you say, well, okay, you know? But they kinda used Ron and it wasn’t nice.’
Perhaps the most telling judgement, however, on how well or badly Ron McGovney was treated in Metallica lies in the fact that he never felt compelled to resume his career either by forming his own band, or joining someone else’s. It could be argued he was lucky to have been in the band at all. His one and only foray back into the world of rockdom came four years later when he was momentarily persuaded to give it another go with a new outfit he had more of a say in called Phantasm – which he now describes as ‘progressive punk’ – with singer Katon De Pena. But despite investing in a new Fender P bass and a Marshall half-stack bass amp, it never went anywhere. ‘I just kept getting bombarded with the Metallica thing and the band got sick of it,’ he later told Bob Nalbandian. ‘A lot of kids came to our gigs just because I had been in Metallica. When we went to play Phoenix all the guys from Flotsam and Jetsam were jumping