• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 511 0

while using the loft to sleep in. ‘Imagine a gutted building,’ says Jonny, ‘old chairs and dirt and crap thrown around in this one big giant space. They cleared a little space in the rubble for them to lay down and sleep. It was really horrible. Marsha and I had no idea. We were hearing complaints, complaints, complaints…But to me I wasn’t really listening because I had enough to complain about myself. My place was ripped to shreds. It was like sixty people every fuckin’ night walking in and out of my place. It was crazy.’ For several weeks, the band lived on ‘white bread and baloney’. Kirk Hammett recalled how he ‘found a piece of foam on the ground, and I used that as my mattress to put my sleeping bag on’. There was no hot water, so the band was forced to bathe in cold: ‘It was brutal.’ Some mornings, badly hungover, having only crashed out a few hours before, they would be woken early by the piercing sounds of an opera singer going through her rehearsal routine. Anthrax leader Scott Ian recalls, ‘They had no money, they had nowhere to go, so we pretty much went out of our way to help them out in any way we could. We brought them to our houses to shower, and we gave them a refrigerator and a toaster oven so they could cook the hot dogs that they were eating cold. We just hung out as much as possible.’

Eventually another pal of Jonny’s named Metal Joe agreed to let the band sleep at his place, nicknamed the Fun House. Along with his best friend Rockin’ Ray, Metal Joe was one of the best customers at Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven. Ray ‘would spend his entire paycheque on metal albums. He would take home eleven or twelve albums at a time. Then that night everybody would go to his house – I’d say about forty people – and get stoned and crazy and put it on full blast. Metal Joe left a PA’s worth of speakers in Ray’s house. So we would blow everybody’s mind and they really got sucked into the metal.’ Another supporter from the same circle was Mark Mari, who would show up at the shows wearing a World War I army helmet with the word ‘metal’ written on it. ‘There were different gangs of metal mongers through the north-east. I would give each posse fifty tickets and say, hey, sell the tickets for the shows. These were guys your parents would run from! Scary, scary people.’ But they never let Jonny down or cheated him. They would come to his house and hand over the cash when all the tickets had been sold. As a reward, ‘I would give them first row. So they would be there in pride and everybody else would be behind them, you know? We’d do shows [where] we knew everybody’s name in the venue. We didn’t need security. That’s the world that I lived in from day one, and Ray and Joe were a real big part of it, in terms of keeping the band’s minds occupied and partying and hanging out and going crazy.’

By now Jonny Z had effectively taken over the day-to-day management of Metallica from Mark Whitaker. ‘I’d never managed before,’ he says, ‘but the adrenalin was so intense.’ Within weeks he had gone as far as announcing the formation of his own company, CraZed Management, in which Marsha was his fifty/fifty partner. In time they would also take on management responsibilities for Anthrax and Raven. Initially, though, ‘It was all about Metallica. Everything. Every day.’ Jonny adds, ‘It was like someone threw us a football and we just ran all the way down the field. And everyone was coming to get us, believe me. But we scored touchdowns.’

As acting manager, Jonny’s main priority now was to get a Metallica album recorded. He had his sights set higher, though, than merely getting a piece of plastic out on something like Brian Slagel’s fledgling Metal Blade imprint. But despite packing the crowds in at their gigs regularly, there were no major record labels in America in 1983 interested in a band like Metallica. The biggest-selling album that year was Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Six months after its release in November ’82, it was still selling more than a million copies a month in the USA and was only halfway through a run at Number One that would last