Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [73]
Officially released in America on 25 July 1983, Kill ’Em All was not a hit but nor was it expected to be. The fact that it got as high as Number 120 in the Billboard Top 200 album chart was considered cause for celebration by everyone at Megaforce. Had anyone dared suggest to Jonny Z back then that the album would eventually sell over three million copies in the USA, ‘I’d have thought you were even crazier than me.’ What Megaforce lacked in clout was more than made up for in the freedom it allowed Metallica to forge their own identity – musically and image-wise. As Lars would later tell me, ‘Early on we had a very distant attitude to the business side of things. We firmly stood our own ground on things like what we played, how we looked, how we presented ourselves. Or how we didn’t present ourselves…Just doing what we were doing. The thing is there weren’t really any decent independent labels going in America when we were starting out. You really had to be the right package to get a record deal in 1983. But we said, “Fuck that!” and just plodded away, doing our own stuff and feeling great about it. Then suddenly there is an independent label and we do have a record out and a lot of people start buying it because there was never quite anything like this [musically] in America before.’ The fact they were initially shunned by the major labels worked in their favour. In 1983, he said, ‘the [major] record company philosophy in America has always been, well, give the public a choice of A, B or C but the menu stops there, and we’ll decide that a band like Metallica will not be on the menu because they are not saleable. So all the people got to listen to hard rock through Styx or REO Speedway or whatever. And then this band Metallica came out and they thought, “Wow, where has all this shit come from? How come we haven’t heard this before?” Because the record companies never believed that anything like that could actually sell. So we start selling a shit-load of records and at the same time James’ lyrics are different from all the clichéd crap that all the older metal bands spew out, and people started to take notice of that.’
Initial press reception, however, was hugely mixed. With the exception of Kerrang!, the mainstream music press in both America and Britain largely ignored the album. The metal fanzines that had supported the band from day one, though, went ballistic. Reviewing it in Kerrang!, Malcolm Dome wrote: ‘Kill ’Em All sets a new standard…Metallica know only two speeds: fast and total blur.’ The UK’s leading metal fanzine, Metal Forces, meanwhile, voted it the album of the year, and Metallica band of the year. In America, Bob Nalbandian, first off the block as ever, summed up his review of the album in The Headbanger with the words: ‘Metallica might just be America’s answer to Motörhead’ – the highest accolade Lars Ulrich or James Hetfield could have wished for in 1983.
There was only one major dissenting voice and that belonged, with a certain sad inevitability, to Dave Mustaine. Interviewed within a few months of the album’s release by Bob Nalbandian, ostensibly about his new band Megadeth, Mustaine couldn’t resist using the opportunity to sound off about what he saw as the dreadful shortcomings of Kill ’Em All. ‘I’m just wondering what Metallica are gonna do when they run out of my riffs,’ he sneered, adding, ‘I already smashed James in the mouth one time, and Lars is scared of his own shadow.’ As for his replacement, ‘Kirk is a “yes” man…“Yes, Lars, I’ll do Dave’s leads.” “Yes,