Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [71]
The album’s only weak track was, almost inevitably, its most obviously commercial: a nauseous bit of old-fashioned heavy metal nonsense – co-credited to Hetfield, Ulrich and Mustaine but actually based on one of the first songs Mustaine had ever written as a teenager – called ‘Jump in the Fire’. Replete with shout-out chorus and a tediously telegraphed attempt at a catchy riff, ‘Jump in the Fire’ was so wince-inducingly rote it could have come from any of the chart-fixated LA glam-metal bands Metallica professed to loathe so much. To give them credit, they later recognised it as such – Lars jokingly suggesting it was, in fact, based on Metallica’s half-witted attempt to emulate Iron Maiden’s 1982 UK hit ‘Run to the Hills’ – but not before it was released as their own first UK single, though not, tellingly, their first hit. Equally straightforward but far more successful was ‘Seek and Destroy’, another song which would became a cornerstone of the live Metallica show for years to come, its audience sing-along on the simple, one-line chorus of ‘Searching…seek and destroy!’ providing the crowd with the opportunity to roar along, encouraged by James.
The only other places where the album would remain less than convincing came somewhat embarrassingly from the band’s principal members. Burton and Hammett shine throughout – the latter, despite being asked to reproduce guitar riffs, breaks and solos entirely conceived by someone else, a fact Mustaine would crow about for many years; the former in more subtle ways, and most directly in the shape of his own instrumental track, ‘(Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth’, an attention-grabbing, avant-rock fusion of classical triads, wah-wah pedal washes and pure distortion tethered to the ground by some fairly pedestrian drumming from Lars, and based on Cliff’s live show solo, introduced perfunctorily by studio engineer Chris Bubacz. Hetfield’s lead vocals, however, are still woefully undeveloped, caught somewhere between the screeching, chest-beating of a Judas Priest or Iron Maiden and the richer, more intimidating vocal burr he would grow into over subsequent releases. Lars’ drums – recorded in a large ballroom on the building’s second floor – are scattered comically over everything, endlessly rolling crescendos that sound like what they are: the work of an overenthusiastic amateur who doesn’t know when to stop.
‘The first album,’ Hetfield would later tell Rolling Stone, was simply ‘what we knew – bang your head, seek and destroy, get drunk, smash shit up.’ For all its instant underground cred, while many of the earlier demos of the songs had sounded like Motörhead meets Diamond Head, the finished album seemed aimed more towards the classic finesse of an early Iron Maiden or Black Sabbath. At this stage of their story, though, the first Metallica album was never going to just be about music. Its real achievement was to simultaneously define a new sensibility – the previously thought incompatible yet strangely thrilling, now it was here, melding of punk and heavy metal into something surprisingly far-reaching called thrash – and to reclaim credibility for a genre of music, heavy rock, which had become the provenance of those cultural illiterates left behind by the ground-zero arrival of punk.
First, though, Jonny and Marsha Z had to find a way to get the album released. No longer hopeful of landing a record deal once the album was recorded, with the band still sleeping on the floor at Metal Joe’s and the finished recordings in a box of tapes in the corner of their living room, Jonny and Marsha took their boldest decision yet: to effectively put out the record themselves. Says Jonny, ‘I figured, if we can buy [records] from a distributor, as we did as a record store, we