Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [69]
When finally he left me to the couch, the bottle of Old Granddad empty, my head was still buzzing with it. ‘They’re gonna be huge,’ he’d told me, over and over. I didn’t believe it for a second; they might be amazing, a sort of teenage Godzilla, but that didn’t mean anyone besides lunatics like me and Xavier would ever buy them. Still, it had been mental while it lasted. When I awoke the next day I was really very ill…
Freed at last from the hellish Halfway House but still on his best behaviour, Jonny Z worked his indefatigable magic on behalf of Metallica once more and somehow found them a studio to record their first album in. Acting on a tip-off from Joey DeMaio, whose band Manowar had also just recorded there, Jonny fast-talked Paul Curcio, owner of Music America Studios, near Rochester in Upstate New York, into accepting an instalment plan with which to make payments. ‘This was mortgage money I’m spending,’ Jonny says now, ‘not something I’ve got put by I’m gonna invest.’ The band would have to work quickly, ‘Quick enough for an eight-thousand-dollar album.’ In fact, the album would end up costing nearer $15,000, pushing the Zazulas to the brink of bankruptcy.
Part of the deal was that Curcio would produce the sessions, with Jonny acting as executive producer. Meaning: ‘I was in the studio for most of the time. If I didn’t like it, it was changed.’ Later the band would complain they’d been locked out of the control room. But Jonny wasn’t fooling around. ‘They may think I was a control freak; I have no idea what the band’s take on me was because I was definitely a strange man. Just some fuckin’ oddball. I had to be!’ Recorded in under three weeks, most of the band’s later disaffection was directed towards the production, such as it was. Hetfield recalled: ‘Our so-called producer was sitting there checking the songs off a notepad and saying, “Well, we can go to a club tonight when we’re through recording. Is the coffee ready?” So right away we had a bad reflection of what a producer was.’ James would complain to Jonny: ‘I didn’t put in my heaviness yet.’ Jonny cites the track, ‘The Four Horsemen’ – the band’s refurbished version of Mustaine’s ‘The Mechanix’ – as a prime example. Or rather, he sings it, his voice alternating from weedy-sounding tic-tac chords to the more full-on punch of the power chords Hetfield was eventually able to get onto the recording. Jonny says that Curcio, who’d worked back in the early 1970s with the Doobie Brothers and Santana, ‘flipped out ’cos he thought Kirk Hammett was this son of Santana. So he made the entire [album] like a band doing rhythm tracks under Kirk Hammett’s brilliant guitar playing.’ Jonny had to sit the producer down and explain. ‘Then James went in and heavied-up the tracks and Paul [Curcio] was never happy with me again after that.’ As far as Jonny was concerned, ‘The first thing we had to beat was the vibe on No Life ’til Leather. That really displayed the power and force of the band. This album couldn’t come out sounding like tin. It had to sound like thunder.’
Jonny would get his wish. Although he and the band would have to wait until their next album to fully capture the thunderstorm of a full-on live performance, the first Metallica album – which they had decided would be called Metal up Your Ass, a title Lars had been saving since his days cruising around with Brian, Bob, Patrick and the guys looking for rare NWOBHM imports – would sound like nothing else out there when it finally appeared in the summer of 1983. All ten tracks came from their existing live set and, as such, represented a musical manifesto of sorts; self-referential, self-eulogising, utterly self-absorbed. From the opener – an up-to-date version of ‘Hit the Lights’, its gargantuan intro now faded in and Hetfield’s vocals overdosed