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orchestrator of his destiny. And whether that came from the fact that his dad was a tennis star and he always wanted to be looked at by his dad with high regard, or what, I don’t know. But he just was always, “I’m gonna get there. I’m gonna do this and we’re gonna do that.” He really did, for a very young man, have a very succinct plan in his mind as to how he envisioned Metallica and how he heard the music. It was really quite interesting.’ At the stall where they had ‘umpteen albums’, Lars would commandeer the turntable. ‘“Oh, listen to this, listen to that. See how they do this, see how they do that.” He was always involved. It wasn’t like he said, okay, well, this is my music and I’m gonna do it this way. He was very aware of his predecessors in the music business, musician-wise, and always watching what was happening.’ It was that fiercely competitive aspect of Ulrich’s character, says Marsha, that drove Metallica. ‘He just always wanted to be at the top of the heap. They were creative, as far as how they presented themselves. They came to us with their logo and it was brilliant. Then it was, “How do we work off our logo?” [Lars] was a forerunner, he really was. I don’t think they would have succeeded without that competitive side of him, and being aware of everything that was going on around him…’

Jonny didn’t really have what he calls his ‘Brian Epstein moment’, though, until he saw the band play live for the first time: two shows over the weekend of 8 and 9 April; the first, opening for Swedish rock darlings Vandenberg at the Paramount Theater in Staten Island; the second, supporting US metal up-and-comers The Rods at L’Amours in Brooklyn. ‘It was intense, whoosh.’ However, ‘Every show they played had an edge. You didn’t know where the fuck-up was gonna come. They were making mistakes in those days.’ For Metallica this was a baptism of fire. ‘These were big shows in big venues,’ says Jonny. ‘Marsha and I had kind of taken over the Staten Island, New York area rock shows…venues that held up to two thousand. They didn’t come in and start in little clubs, like The Beatles. We put them in front of a lot of people.’ Dee Snider, frontman for Twisted Sister – a New York band then making waves in the UK – came up to Jonny during one of the shows Metallica played and asked: ‘What is that, Jonny?’

The only real problem that Jonny and Marsha could see was Dave Mustaine. ‘You didn’t know with his drinking what you were gonna get,’ says Jonny. ‘You were either gonna get the friendly Dave, or you were gonna get the monster Dave. He was so drunk you just didn’t know how he could play those notes. Everybody [in the band] was heavy into the booze but Dave was over the top.’ Privately, Lars and James had already told Jonny they, too, were sick of Mustaine’s loutish behaviour, his drunken antics and his confrontational attitude, that they were, as Lars put it, ‘just gonna hang on until someone [else] came along’. Jonny’s concern was that without Mustaine the band wouldn’t be nearly as good. ‘I was worried because even though Mustaine was so out of control, he was a real big part of the band. Some of the best songs were written with Dave Mustaine. [To replace him] it was gonna be really weird.’ According to Lars, the band had already decided to replace Mustaine before their U-Haul had even reached the East Coast. ‘It all kind of spilled over [then],’ he said. ‘There were a few things happening that became too much.’ Not least the time a drunken Mustaine insisted on taking his turn driving the truck and allegedly nearly crashed it into a jeep during a snowstorm near Wyoming. ‘We could have all been killed,’ said James. ‘We knew it couldn’t go on like that, so we started looking at other stuff.’

Mark Whitaker, who also managed fellow San Franciscan metallists Exodus, suggested poaching their lead guitarist, a curly-haired whiz-kid named Kirk Hammett. Unlike Dave Mustaine, who was big and brash and utterly unpredictable, twenty-year-old Kirk Hammett was short, like Lars, and nerdy. Unlike Lars, he was quiet; a cool number, though already