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By Root 450 0

well schooled in the Metallica way, having opened for them with Exodus at the Stone and hung out at the Metallimansion. Like Cliff, he was another easygoing San Franciscan, born into a time and place famous for the flowers it wore in its extremely long hair. The kind of stoner dude you’d see walking round the Haight with buds in his beard – once he’d started to shave, which he still looked like he hadn’t at the time he met Metallica. Best of all, Hammett was technically one of the best guitar players on the scene. Behind the amiable façade was an extremely determined young gun who still took lessons and practised for hours each day, no matter how wasted on weed. Not an innovator like Mustaine, certainly not such a monster personality, but with a much broader musical palette and a much steadier emotional hand – the kind of talented kid who would do what he was told. They told Mark to keep it dark but to call Kirk, check it out.

It was 1 April and Kirk was ‘sitting on the can’ when Whitaker made the phone call. Hammett assumed it was an April Fool’s gag, said, ‘Yeah, sure’, and hung up, barely giving it another thought. He only knew it was for real when Whitaker called him back the following morning and told him he was Fed-Exing a tape of Metallica songs for him to learn. ‘Then I started to get more calls from Whitaker: “The band wants you to come to New York to audition with them.” I thought about it for like two seconds and said, “Sure, I’ll check it out.”’ The tape arrived just four days before Metallica’s first gig – with Mustaine still in place – for Jonny Z. By the time the band was onstage at the Paramount and ready to launch into ‘The Mechanix’ – the song Dave Mustaine wrote for them and the number Jonny still loved best – Kirk was already saying goodbye to his bandmates in Exodus and getting ready to board a plane for New York, to start his new life in Metallica, first thing Monday morning.

Nervous about how Dave would react to the news, the others decided to tell him while he was in bed, still half asleep, having been woken first thing Monday morning by Lars, who drew the short straw and was the one who actually broke the news. Lars would later joke that Dave had asked what time his flight left, to which the band replied that they’d booked him on the first Greyhound bus out of town. ‘Not only was he out of the band but he had to sit on a bus for four days and think about it!’ Lars laughed. Mustaine would remember it a little differently. ‘Basically, when they told me to leave I packed in about twenty seconds and I was gone. I wasn’t upset at all as I wanted to start a solo project during the middle of Metallica anyway.’ In fact, Mustaine was devastated, becoming more furious as each hour passed on the four-day bus ride back to San Francisco, at what he would increasingly come to see as the band’s betrayal of him. Specifically, what he saw as Lars’ role in his sacking. ‘I like James more than Lars, I think everybody does,’ Mustaine was still telling people in 2008. Interviewed by Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro for his internet-based Spread TV talk show, he added, bitchily, ‘I don’t really like Kirk ’cos he got my job but I nailed his girlfriend before I left.’ Mustaine also claimed he and Hetfield ‘had planned to fire Lars so many times’. All of this may contain different degrees of truth, yet to find Mustaine still talking about it a quarter of a century later arguably says more about his own unresolved issues.

Giving his first interview since being fired from Metallica, to Bob Nalbandian, in January 1984, Mustaine gave a slightly more balanced view. ‘The truth of the matter was that things just didn’t click,’ he said. ‘I was a different person back then. I was a brash person that was always drunk and having fun and James and Lars were withdrawn little boys. James hardly ever talked to people. [James] was singing but it was I who talked in between songs. The whole thing was that I had too much to drink. But I fuck up one time and it costs me the band and they fuck up a hundred times…’ He paused. ‘There