Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [52]
As Lars suggests, things began to move much faster after Cliff Burton joined Metallica. Within days of his first show with them in San Francisco at the Stone, on 5 March 1983, there was already talk of making an album. So excited were they by the possibilities of the line-up now Burton was aboard, they arranged for his second gig with them, again at the Stone, on 19 March, to be videotaped, capturing on tape his classic windmill style of bass playing, swinging his beloved 1973 Rickenbacker like an axe, wringing angry distorted tones from it one moment, loud sensuous moans the next, all the while using all ten fingers to dig out the continually propulsive rhythm. Lars, whose drumming was still rudimentary at best, struggled to keep up. Cliff even had his own showpiece within the set, an extended bass solo that would later be immortalised on the first Metallica album, already even at this early stage a highlight of the new Metallica show. ‘We do what we want,’ Cliff was captured on video saying. ‘We don’t care what anyone else thinks.’ There had also been two new tracks demoed at the Metallimansion on 16 March, the first Metallica recordings to feature Cliff Burton: ‘Whiplash’ and ‘No Remorse’. Once again, the band was quick to ensure cassette copies were shared around the fanzine and foreign magazine guys as well as their network of regular tape-traders. They also pulled off a minor coup when they persuaded a DJ at radio station KUSF FM to play both tracks on air, on the basis that Metallica was now, technically speaking at least, a local San Francisco band.
Brian Slagel had been ready to put out a Metallica record of some description since the first time John Kornarens played him the No Life ’til Leather tape and asked him to guess who it was. Slagel assumed it must be some bright new European band: ‘It sounded awesome.’ When John told him it was Lars Ulrich’s group, he couldn’t believe it. ‘This is Metallica? This thing is incredible!’ The problem was Slagel’s fledgling Metal Blade label simply didn’t have the money for the kind of project Lars had in mind. The widespread circulation of No Life ’til Leather and, the latest cassette on the tape-trading scene, an audience recording – from a boom box placed in front of the speaker stacks – of Ron McGovney’s last show with them at the Old Waldorf at the end of November, dubbed the Live Metal up Your Ass demo, had done a certain job. What Metallica needed now, Lars felt strongly, was a more accomplished studio recording; something that demonstrated there was more to them than home-made demos and live tapes. As a stopgap, Slagel suggested simply releasing the seven-track No Life demo as an EP. ‘But good as they liked it they wanted something a little bit better, if they were actually going to put together a real recording.’
One studio in LA offered to let them come in and record an album for a flat fee of $10,000. They asked Brian for the ten grand but he told them: ‘I don’t have ten thousand dollars! Are you kidding me?’ He offered instead to try and find someone willing to invest the ten thousand. ‘But back then that was a lot of money and it just never really happened. By the time they got to San Francisco, I think they were more focused on getting Cliff into the band and integrating him in and playing some shows. We had some other loose discussions about stuff but again nobody had any money and there was just no way to make a quality recording.’ Nobody Brian Slagel or Metallica knew out on the West Coast, anyway. Three thousand miles away on America’s East Coast, however, somebody they