Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [51]
Four
Nightfall at the Halfway House
Time was getting on and we were only halfway through the show. I looked up at the big studio clock.
‘Where are the guests?’ I asked the floor manager.
‘In the toilet,’ he grimaced.
‘Still?’
‘Yeah. I think they’re…you know…’
Because we recorded the show so early in the morning it didn’t happen often that one of the bands actually turned up drunk or stoned. But just occasionally, you got one or two, usually from one of the younger bands, who felt the need to vanish into the loos and lock the door behind them before sauntering onto the set ready for their close-up.
Then here they came, strutting, frowning, faking. The two Daves from…I checked my crib sheet…Megadeth. Right. I took a guess and held my hand out to the one in front with the long curly hair and the painted-on sneer.
‘Dave Mustaine,’ I said, acting pleased to see him. ‘Welcome to the Monsters of Rock show.’
He held out his paw and allowed me to grasp it. One of the production assistants showed him to his seat while I said hello to the other Dave – Ellefson. Dave Junior, as he was fast becoming known. Junior was the band’s bassist, and although he was just as fucked-up on drugs as his leader, he came without a sneer and minus the ton of attitude. They were the yin and yang of Megadeth, good cop, bad cop.
I settled myself down and watched as they sniffed loudly and leered at the production assistant’s cleavage. They wanted us to know they were bad boys and we dutifully played along.
Then the interview began. Cameras rolling, sound and…the floor manager made the funny hand signals for action.
I began by mentioning Mustaine’s past in Metallica but he cut me short. ‘That was then,’ he sneered. ‘This is now and I really don’t think I have much to say about it. I don’t speak ill of the dead…’
Oh, but he did. Every chance he got. As soon as we took a break for the first video he got into it. How he’d written all the songs on the first Metallica album but never received the credit. How the band had been nothing until he came along. How they were hypocrites for tossing him out when they were all drinking and getting fucked up just as much as he did. How Lars couldn’t play the drums and Kirk had just ripped him off. How James was scared of him.
Dave Junior, who’d obviously heard it all before and could look forward to many years more of hearing it over again, shifted in his seat and cleared his throat and tried to change the subject. But Mustaine just ignored him. This wasn’t about Dave Junior or even about Megadeth. It certainly wasn’t about trying to tell me anything, whoever I was, some asshole with a cable show and an Iron Maiden T-shirt.
This was all about Dave Mustaine. Always had been, always would be. God bless his broken black heart…
In many ways, relocating to San Francisco at the start of 1983 is the real start of the Metallica story. It certainly felt that way for Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield. Speaking to me in 2009, Lars put it like this: ‘What happened were two things. Number one, we started being more comfortable with ourselves, more confident. We started feeling that we were belonging to something that was happening, and that was bigger than ourselves, that we belonged instead of being on the outer fringes. And number two was…Cliff. At that time, me and James were basically self-taught. Most of what we knew we’d learned from [listening to] records and so on. But Cliff had been to college, had studied music at school; was educated in music, so there was a whole different level of expertise that came in there…a sense of melody and a whole other scope of understanding music.’ San Francisco also provided a more cultural mêlée that reminded the brash young drummer of his European roots. ‘I felt the kinship there right away…You took the train around, you took the tram…It was a bunch of kids from the city instead of a bunch of kids from the suburbs. It was big city living and