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songs. We did the whole house-band circuit, playing for our friends’ parties and at their houses. Occasionally we would rent out town halls or city halls, and put up a stage and charge tickets for a show. In the last, like, six or eight months of me being in the band it was starting to happen – starting to play places like the Old Waldorf and the Keystone, in Berkeley. And we landed this opening slot for this unknown band called Metallica that we had only just heard of and heard the demo like maybe two weeks prior.’ The first time he saw Metallica, he said, ‘I’ll never forget it. I thought to myself, “These guys are great but they could be so much better with me in the band.” I honestly thought that.’ Five months later he was flying to New York to join them. ‘Mark Whitaker passed an Exodus demo on to Lars and James and they listened to it and heard it and thought, okay, let’s get this guy out. And, you know, we never really looked back.’

Gary Holt now insists that the rest of Exodus took the news well. But that was only after they realised there was nothing they could do about it – and after Gary realised it would mean the band was now his, virtually. ‘We had a big party for Kirk. Had a food fight at his house, we went around the Old Waldorf drinking, and cut about fifty pictures of Kirk out of the band photos and put them all over the place, little Kirkies, as Paul [Baloff] called it. I mean, obviously it worked out great for Kirk, and I was already like starting to sew my own oats as a songwriter. I had already written a number of songs that ended up on [first Exodus album] Bonded by Blood.’ Kirk leaving, ‘kind of put me in the driver’s seat and so I relished the opportunity. There was no hard feelings. I thought it was my chance to mould the band into the image I wanted to. Tom and I gathered, just the two of us, and really started banging songs out from all of these riffs I had already.’ The bottom line, Holt admits, was ‘Metallica was in New York and on the verge of making an album – something that was still a way off for us. That was the golden carrot that [Kirk] chased.’

Taking the red-eye shuttle overnight from Frisco to New York, Kirk Hammett arrived at Jonny and Marsha’s house just a few hours after they’d driven Dave Mustaine to the Greyhound bus depot. Hammett now recalls his entry into Metallica as ‘pretty level at that point…we were all still in the beginnings of our careers as musicians. And when I joined the band we all got along famously…I literally just walked in and sat down and they said, “Okay, you’re in the band, let’s take it from here.”’ Determined, however, not to become bogged down in the same battle for leadership as the one they had just disentangled themselves from with Mustaine, Lars and James laid it out for him plain and simple – an attitude Lars later shared with the readers of Rolling Stone as, ‘Let’s not bullshit ourselves, me and James ran the show. Me and James made the records. Me and James wrote the songs.’ Kirk simply smiled his stoner smile and nodded his head. ‘I didn’t have any problem with that. It was evident that it was Lars’ and James’ band.’ Nevertheless, it was an autocratic rigidity that would make itself evident in the music more than was perhaps good for the band as the years rolled by and Lars’ and James’ grip on Metallica’s musical path tightened ever more. ‘We still made major decisions together,’ Kirk would insist. ‘But whenever I had to push for an idea, I had to assume the role of diplomat. I had to sell them the idea.’ Cliff, meanwhile, knew better than to argue. It may have been Lars’ and James’ band but they had come to him, not the other way around. As a musician, Cliff knew he was streets ahead of his new young bandmates, but he also understood band politics better than any of them. Let them do the talking in public, let them have the lion’s share of the writing credits; he was secure enough in his own talents, in his knowledge of who he really was, not to wish to compete on that level. The real tests would arrive once the first album had been completed and