Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [72]
Jonny and Marsha had decided to call the label Vigilante, then changed their minds after Cliff Burton came up with a better suggestion: Megaforce, the title of a low-rent sci-fi action adventure flick released in the USA the previous summer. Tagline: ‘When the force was with them, NO ONE stood a chance!’ As a mission statement, it was certainly apt. In reality, it meant taking out a second mortgage on the Zazula family home. ‘Some of those days were the worst days of my life,’ Jonny later recalled. ‘My neck was in a noose.’ But with Anthrax, Raven and now even Manowar, who’d been dropped by the EMI-backed Liberty label, all knocking on their door, promising to sign to their new notional label, Jonny and Marsha pressed on. They were encouraged by Lars, who suggested taking a leaf from Motörhead’s book: Motörhead’s records were ostensibly released on a small UK independent label – Bronze Records – but distributed through the auspices of Polydor Records, part of the Polygram conglomerate.
Formed in London in 1971, Bronze was started by Gerry Bron, then best known for his production work on albums for heavy rock groups of the era such as Uriah Heep, Juicy Lucy and Colosseum. When Heep’s deal with Vertigo ended, Bron persuaded them to let him set up their own independent, with all manufacturing and distribution of their records going through Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, then the UK’s most successful independent. Later releases went through EMI and by the mid-1980s they were putting their roster – which now featured NWOBHM stalwarts (Motörhead, Girlschool), punk (The Damned) and early 1970s rock goliaths (Hawkwind, Heep) – through Polydor. Jonny took Lars’ suggestion seriously enough to invite Gerry Bron over to the USA, with the idea of having Bronze put out the Metallica album in the UK and Europe, while Jonny formed his own label to work with US distributors. It might have happened, too. Says Jonny, ‘[They were] offering money for me to get the fuck out of the way…After that went down, Marsha and I spoke to Lars and said, why can’t we just do it?’
In the USA, Megaforce found an ally in Relativity, who agreed to distribute the Metallica album, while over in the UK the newly founded independent label Music for Nations was similarly contracted to put out the album. From that point on, says Jonny, he and Marsha ‘did everything; recording, producer, plus the artwork, also designed by us’. Still intending to call the album Metal up Your Ass, the band had originally come up with their own idea for the album sleeve: an arm coming up through a toilet bowl, brandishing a machete. Jonny, who was up for it until the appalled sales force at Relativity intervened, then had the job of trying to explain that while he was fine with it, the distributors had told him they would consider it ‘commercial suicide’ to put out an album called Metal up Your Ass, let alone one with such an obviously offensive front cover. Recalls Jonny: ‘It was very stringent then. It was before [parent advisory] labelling but they still had this moral issue. Wal-Mart or any of what they call rack-jobbers, they wouldn’t touch the record.’ Outraged, nevertheless, at the thought of having to compromise, to keep the record stores happy, Cliff bellowed at Jonny: ‘Kill ’em all! Kill ’em all!’ Jonny laughs as he recounts the incident. ‘Cliff got real mad, but Lars goes, “Kill ’em all…That’s a good name.” I go, “That’s a great name!” The next thing you know the album was called Kill ’Em All.’ The eventual sleeve, based on another idea from Jonny, which he says the band ‘were