Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [64]
Jonny Z, who admits he was ‘scared shitless’ at the prospect of the band finding a good enough replacement for Mustaine, recalls going down to the band’s first rehearsal with Kirk ‘and he was just blistering. He had learned the songs, like, overnight. He just came and it was like, let’s go do some more gigs.’ Following a nervous debut at the Showplace in Dover, New Jersey, the new Ulrich-Hetfield-Burton-Hammett line-up of Metallica was thrown into the deep end with two back-to-back shows at the much larger Paramount Theater on Staten Island, opening for Venom. Says Jonny, ‘At the Showplace, I noticed Kirk would be blazing away but he’d be looking at his guitar all the time and he would stop and then he would go on. So I said to him, “Listen, Kirk, play the first part and let it rip, but look at the audience, and when you finish the first part just put your arms up in the air.” He was reluctant but he did it. At the very next show [with Venom] he put his arms up in the air and the audience goes, “Argh!” It was great!’ As well as ‘that little shtick’, it was Jonny Z who gave them the idea for some music to walk onstage to every night: Ennio Morricone’s evocative theme tune to the Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. As Jonny says, it worked so well, ‘It still introduces the band today. Marsha and I are big Morricone fans and I’d always thought that would be a great piece of music for some awesome metal band to walk onstage to. And it is!’
Through his connections with the underground metal scene, Jonny had persuaded the independent label, Neat, in the UK, to front enough money to send Venom to the USA for some shows under Jonny’s stewardship, on 22 and 24 of April. Venom guitarist Mantas (real name: Jeff Dunn) recalls staying at Jonny and Marsha’s house at the same time as Metallica. ‘We were upstairs and they were downstairs, and it was so fuckin’ hot it was difficult to get to sleep anyway.’ Like Metallica, Venom proved a handful for the Zazulas. ‘I remember we wrecked his kitchen one night when we were trying to cook something, and set fire to the fuckin’ place!’ The two bands got on well. James Hetfield collapsed drunk after the first show while clutching a vodka bottle, badly cutting his hand and necessitating a trip to the nearest Emergency Room, where he needed six stitches. Dunn recalls Venom bassist/vocalist Cronos – real name: Conrad Lant – passing out drunk after that first show in the same bed as Lars. ‘Absolutely pissed out of their fuckin’ heads and they just fell asleep, then woke up together in the morning and said, “What the fuck is this!” Everybody just crashed out…I could hear Lars going nuts downstairs, and I heard my roadie saying, “I’m gonna go down and knock that cunt out in a minute, I just really want to go to sleep.” Then it was quiet all of a sudden, I guess he just passed out or something.’ The following day, Venom visited Jonny and Marsha’s Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven stall to sign autographs. Dunn recalled: ‘I’ve still got the original poster which says, “Meet in person: Venom at Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven” and then in tiny writing at the bottom: “Metallica”.’
Venom’s famously over-the-top show was nearly the cause of a serious accident. Dunn recalled how at the first Paramount show, ‘we had these cast-iron bomb pots, right, about the diameter of a mug and eight inches high, and there were twenty-four of these along the front of the stage. One guy went along and filled the pots with blasting powder and put the fuses in, right? Then – because communication was so crap – another guy goes, “Fuck! The bomb pots!” half an hour before the show, gets up and fills them up again, not knowing the first guy had already done it!’ Dunn claimed the explosion when the pots went off ‘was louder than the band. One of the bomb pots – and this is no word of a lie – was found in the balcony embedded in the wall. That fucker could have killed somebody. There was a four-foot hole blown in the