Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [61]
Gary Holt, who understudied to Kirk in Exodus, before taking over as main guitarist after he split for Metallica, recalls ‘this skinny kid with Coke-bottle-bottom glasses’. It was meeting Kirk at sixteen and seeing him play that sparked Holt’s own interest in learning guitar. ‘He taught me some Rolling Stones song. I don’t remember what it was. But I picked up guitar really fast.’ The first time either of them met Metallica was when they opened for them at the Old Waldorf. ‘We were just two separate bands of complete fuck-ups. We got really drunk and we dug each other’s music and we wrecked shit and broke everything and had zero respect for anything or anybody, and I think a lot of that’s that punk rock attitude that we both shared.’ When Lars, James and Dave moved into Mark Whitaker’s El Cerrito abode, various members of Exodus would also stay over. ‘We felt like it was our house, too. We had some insane parties at that place. We only played with Metallica five or six times but when they moved to the Bay Area we hung out constantly. We’d just get really drunk and get really ripped. I remember one night at the Metallica house not having any mixer and drinking vodka and maple syrup. Fucking awful! But it worked, you know?’ They had also begun to experiment with drugs. Recalls Holt, ‘Hell, before Kirk left for Metallica, him and I spent a whole summer just taking acid two or three times a week.’ He adds, ‘Methamphetamine was [also] a drug of choice in Exodus, which decades later spiralled out of control. But James just drank, Lars I remember getting gacked out, doing blow [cocaine] with him more than once, and Cliff just liked to get high [on pot].’ In Exodus, ‘if it wasn’t nailed down we’d snort or swallow it. We were all motorheads, you know?’
Despite the stoner mien, Kirk was serious about his music. In common with James Hetfield, it was more than just a creative outlet for the teenager; it was a shield against a home life that had now turned sour as his parents’ relationship began to splinter, resulting in his father walking out when he was seventeen. ‘I was abused as a child,’ he revealed in a 2001 Playboy interview. ‘My dad drank a lot. He beat the shit out of me and my mom quite a bit. I got a-hold of a guitar, and from the time I was fifteen, I rarely left my room. I remember having to pull my dad off my mom when he attacked her one time, during my sixteenth birthday – he turned on me and started slapping me around. Then my dad just left one day. My mom was struggling to support me and my sister. I’ve definitely channelled a lot of anger into the music.’ He added that he had also been abused by a neighbour ‘when I was like nine or ten’, adding: ‘The guy was a sick fuck. He had sex with my dog, Tippy. I can laugh about it now…’ Heavy metal, he added dolefully, had the power to bring outsiders in from the cold. ‘Heavy metal seems to attract all sorts of scruffy, lost animals, strays no one wants.’
Having graduated from the inexpensive Montgomery Ward catalogue special that he’d started out on, with a four-inch speaker for an amp, to a 1978 Fender Stratocaster by the time he was gigging with Gary and Exodus, he was now wielding a customised 1974 Gibson Flying V, which he took a part-time job at Burger King to save money to buy a Marshall amp for. Having graduated in 1980 from De Anaza High School, he was also now studying English and psychiatry at college when he got the call inviting him