Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [48]
What finally made up his mind to make the jump was the fact that, as he told Harald O, ‘eventually Trauma started to…annoy me’. Specifically, the band was ‘starting to get a little commercial’. ‘Commercial’ was Cliff’s polite word for embarrassing. What the rest of Trauma saw as their inherent theatricality, Cliff saw as trying too hard to attract a wider audience. Metallica seemed to have found a way of attracting a fanatical following in the Bay Area by simply turning up as themselves. There was, however, one condition Cliff made to the band, and it was a deal-breaker: they would have to come to him. No way was he leaving home for LA – not even for the hottest new band in the Bay. He told them: ‘I like it up here. So they said, “Yeah, well, we were thinking about doing that anyway.” So that worked out just right. So, they came up and we got together in this room that we’re sitting in now, set up the gear and blasted it out for a couple of days. It was pretty obvious straight away that it was a good thing to do, so we did it!’
Lars, who had already seen it coming, reasoned that with Ron out of the picture now anyway, and the band left with nowhere to rehearse, it was time to say, ‘Okay, fuck it. LA is pretty shitty for us anyway.’ According to Jan, Cliff ‘was a very loyal person’ who ‘didn’t want to leave Trauma. But Trauma wanted him to go plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk. He wanted to play lead bass and they said, “No way.” He really became so frustrated at wanting to express himself musically. Metallica kept calling every week. They’d call him from LA and he’d say, “No, no.” When they finally got together he’d say, “I wanna play lead bass. I want some spot in here where I can go off.” And they said, “You can play anything you want, just come with us.”’
It was a bold move for both sides, but most especially for the three-man Metallica line-up who agreed to relocate from LA to San Francisco. As Brian Slagel says now, ‘It was a very big deal.’ Los Angeles and San Francisco are ‘polar-opposite cities’. Regarding Lars, however, Slagel states, ‘I don’t think it really mattered that much, ’cos he was used to kind of moving around anyway.’ For James, ‘a guy that grew up in LA, and for that matter Mustaine, that’s kind of a big move. But the timing of it was good, too. None of them had any really strong ties to LA. They felt much more at home in San Francisco. It really was day and night…And Cliff was clearly the right guy. I mean, he was just an unbelievable bass player. So they felt it would definitely be a big upgrade for them to get a guy like that, even to consider it.’ Unlike Ron, none of them had girlfriends at this stage either. Says Slagel: ‘They didn’t have those ties. I guess there was a certain family tie with Lars. But I know James didn’t have a great relationship with his family and the same was true of Dave. But Lars’ family was so supportive, it was like, hey, if that’s what you need to do to make you happy we’ll be completely supportive of that. So why not move to San Francisco?’
Certainly it was something the band felt they had to do. As Lars would tell me, in San Francisco, Metallica simply ‘connected to a whole different level of energy and vibe [than in LA] and there was much more passion…there was much more of a scene. People were passionate about music, people were curious, people were open. I think in LA we had always felt like outcasts, like we never belonged. It seemed like the music was secondary