Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [74]
It was the start of a mostly one-sided verbal war between Mustaine and Metallica that would persist, in various forms, to the present day. From his endless jibes in the press about how ‘Kirk Hammett ripped off every lead break I’d played on that No Life ’Til Leather tape’, to his snide comments to Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro in 2008: ‘I don’t really like him because he got my job, but I nailed his girlfriend before I left – how do I taste, Kirk?’ If there was any envy between Mustaine and Hammett, though, it wasn’t the new Metallica guitarist who was feeling it. As Mustaine’s collaborator and closest confidant, David Ellefson, points out, any ‘copying’ by Kirk Hammett of Mustaine’s original guitar lines on Kill ’Em All would have been deliberate: ‘To some degree Kirk put his own stamp on [Kill ’Em All] but that kind of music isn’t just random solo over three-chord blues riff. The solo is a part of the composition, every bit as crucial to the song as the lyric and the choruses. That’s what we like about the music. It’s the difference between when I went to see Van Halen and they were like a sloppy party band, and when I went to see Iron Maiden and they played every single solo note for note. As a fan, I hung on every note…I wanted to hear it exactly the friggin’ way it is on the record.’ Kirk sticking to the No Life template was exactly what was required. ‘I always saw it like they tried to honour all of the good that Dave did bring to the band. They used his songs, they gave him credit. They paid him for it. When we would drive down the street in LA and some guy would yell out, “Metallica!” to me, that wasn’t “Fuck you!” to Dave. That was, “Dude, you were in fucking Metallica!”’
Despite being largely ignored by the mainstream music press, by the end of 1983 the first Metallica album was already starting to be recognised as a watershed moment in the history of rock. It showed that, far from being dead – as the post-punk British music press had been trumpeting since the day Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten claimed to have fallen asleep while watching Led Zeppelin, calling them ‘dinosaurs’ – punk and metal had a lot more in common than previously acknowledged. You could hear the musical antecedents of the juncture where Metallica come into the conversation in the ironclad riffs and spat-out vocals of the first Stooges and Pistols albums, and there again in the warp-speed rhythms and clattering drums of the earliest Motörhead and Ted Nugent recordings. Not that Metallica seemed particularly conscious of the radical moves they would soon be congratulated for making: ‘We thought that whatever we did, there’d be people who would approach [the album] with a lot of hesitation, because it was so different back then,’ said Kirk Hammett. If to the uninitiated the tracks seemed to fly by in a blur, that was just the way it was, insisted James Hetfield: ‘We’d just keep practising and the songs would get faster and faster, and the energy kept building up.’ Playing the songs live was ‘always faster’ because of all the ‘booze and freaks dinking around, just the excitement’.
There was, however, far more to the new sound that Metallica, knowingly or not, were now pioneering than merely playing faster to keep the freaks that came to their shows happy. Apart from its sheer speed, the defining sound of thrash was to be found in the frenzied downstrokes of James Hetfield’s rhythm guitar playing. Until then, with few exceptions – the best-known being Johnny Ramone, whose single-minded reliance on downstrokes gave the Ramones their unique, ‘untutored’ sound – rock guitarists tended to allow their chords to ring out and resonate. Hetfield, in his determination to make his playing