Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [55]
With Jonny still finishing his time in the halfway house, though, the brunt of the band’s bad behaviour was born by Marsha. ‘I had an infant, a husband in a halfway house and a band that was screwing everybody in the neighbourhood in my basement.’ She says she wondered if she was doing the right thing ‘every day. This was very far afield from anything I had ever done before. We put our entire lives on the line for them because we lived in a little suburban community, which wasn’t all that impressed with the guys. And because we poured every ounce, every penny we had into them, we had to not pay our mortgage. We had [situations] where we couldn’t pay electric bills and lost our electricity.’ Her father, who would buy them groceries, ‘to keep us fed, and in turn was then feeding the band’. Marsha adds, ‘They were young teens who had all kinds of things going on in their own lives. They drank too much. They partied a little too hearty. You kind of looked at it and said, “Oh my god! Is this what I’m investing my life in? How is this all gonna play out?” But at the core of it [was] their talent, their incredible talent made you just say I’ve gotta keep doing this. These guys are great, these guys are different. They have that – whatever that is – that can propel them, and so you just kept going, even when some days you weren’t quite sure why.’
The only member of the band who possessed any decorum, says Marsha, was Cliff Burton. ‘If I have to say who was I closest to in those days, who did I bond with the most, it was Cliff. He was a treasure to have in my home. He was great, he was respectful. He was warm. He would help me out with Rikki, because she was so little and I would be busy doing something. It would be time for her to go to bed and so he’d read her a story or sing her a song. He was quite the human. James and Lars were just, like, diabolically different,’ she chuckles. ‘’Cos at night James [and Dave] would want to get drunk, party and Lars of course would be out [chasing] the women.’ Lars, she adds, ‘really was quite the man, in his own mind…he was a small man in white spandex pants, so you had to kind of give him a break’. Cliff, though, ‘was really a hippy in a heavy metal band, with his bell-bottoms and his whole persona, just a beautiful, beautiful human being’. She adds, ‘Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough of a voice in the band. In terms of the decisions that were made, Lars was the ringleader and he said it and that was it, they moved in that motion. Cliff wasn’t involved in that aspect of the band. He was a musician, pure.’
Blasting out the No Life demo from the market stall every day, says Jonny, ‘Everybody was coming round from everywhere going “What the fuck is that?” Before you know it, the siege of Metallica started.’ For the rest of the band’s stay, ‘we only played No Life ’til Leather in our store’. Jonny would sit in his living room with Mark Whitaker, who had come up with the band from San Francisco as their live sound engineer and all round ‘guy Friday’, making more cassette copies of No Life to sell at the store at a knock-down price of $4.99. ‘As many as we can every day, one at a time, so they had some money to eat and live while they were here. And we sold tons of them. It still wasn’t enough, you know, but we sold a lot compared to any other band.’
Lars would hang out at the stall every day, watching, taking it all in. Lars, says Marsha, was ‘always the one. He was the master,