Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [80]
As with all music scenes, drugs also played their part. ‘Everybody was on speed, that was the thing,’ says Robb Flynn. ‘We called it crank. We all totally got into crank. Sit there and do crank and just go in and do the craziest things that you could think of, the craziest dives.’ That was fine for the fans. For the bands the mix was much broader. To the speed and crank was added weed, psychedelics, and, when they could afford it, coke. For Dave Mustaine and David Ellefson, heroin would also be on the menu, eventually overwhelmingly so. ‘We went down to hell together,’ says Ellefson. For others, like James Hetfield and Anthrax’s Scott Ian, drugs were to be disdained completely in favour of the arguably even more punishing regimen of alcohol. ‘I know our British counterparts drank a lot,’ said Lars, ‘but in some way it felt like we drank more. I don’t know why, maybe it was because drinking had been more a staple of European culture, so it wasn’t as big of a deal, or something like that. But around all those [thrash] camps in ’81, ’82, ’83, in America, it was all about the fucking vodka bottles, and about jumping in the vodka bottles and anything went from there, you know what I mean?’ He laughed. ‘Smirnoff and whoever else…’
Thrash audiences would also connect with the skateboard scene in LA. This was an aspect of the emerging culture which filtered across to leading lights such as Metallica, who in James Hetfield (by 1985, taking a skateboard on tour with him and riding around backstage at shows) did, after all, contain one member whose LA roots genuinely reflected that scene, and, more puzzlingly, Anthrax, from New York, whose overlapping interest in the skate scene only really came with the music and clothes, particularly the latter. Anthrax became the first thrash band in the spotlight to abandon the tight black jeans of Metallica and Slayer in favour of the baggy shorts and reversed baseball caps of lesser known but disproportionately influential bands such as Suicidal Tendencies – the first-generation punk metallists featuring future Metallica man Rob Trujillo on bass. Robb Flynn: ‘The big skate band for us was Suicidal Tendencies. They were from LA so they were genuinely from that skate culture, and we knew that. Going to Suicidal shows, that’s when I really started noticing the crossover thing happening. You’d see gang dudes with long-haired thrasher dudes and then punk rock dudes – and chicks – all under one roof.’
All of the so-called Big Four thrash bands recorded punk covers at some point. Anthrax would record ‘God Save the Queen’ for their 1985 Armed and Dangerous EP; Megadeth would do ‘Anarchy in the UK’ (with Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones guesting) on their 1988 album, So Far, So Good…So What!; Slayer would eventually release a whole album’s worth of punk covers, Undisputed Attitude; and Metallica would intermittently record covers of songs by The Misfits, the Anti-Nowhere League, Killing Joke and others throughout their career. ‘I could relate to punk lyrics,’ Hetfield shrugged. ‘They were about me, rather than that “Look at me riding a horse, with a big sword in my hand” typical heavy metal fantasy crap.’
Certainly, thrash dress style, if it could be called that, would have more in common with the straight-legged, collar-turned-up, safety-pinned thrift-store look of punk than it did the studded wristband and spandex-trousered