Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [82]
As soon as Kill ’Em All was released in July, Jonny Z had Metallica out on their first cross-country US tour, on a double bill with Raven. Dubbed the Kill ’Em All for One tour (the Raven album at the time was called All for One), the thirty-one-date trek began in New Brunswick, on 27 July, and finished up on 3 September back at their old haunt, the Stone, in San Francisco. Along the way they visited many cities they had never been to before as a band: Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Milwaukee, moving down through Arkansas, Texas and eventually back through northern California. By the time they returned to the Stone, Metallica was a very different proposition from the band that had last played there six months before. Kirk Hammett wasn’t the only beneficiary of Mustaine’s departure. Says Bill Hale, who caught the show, ‘Dave had the attitude. When he got canned, James had to adopt that attitude. ’Cos Dave did all the talking onstage. “Fuck you, blah, blah…this is our next song.”’ With Dave gone, ‘James had to step up a whole lot. James really had to improve his whole game.’
Still quietly harbouring doubts about his long-term place at the front of the band, but toughened up by ten weeks of non-stop touring, Hetfield also had the added confidence that having his first album released had given him. Taking his stay-the-fuck-away-from-me face with him onstage for the first time, he’d learned on tour how to hide behind that mask, how to manipulate an audience so that it only saw what he wanted it to. He became fierce, copying Mustaine’s fearless approach by swearing at the audience, almost daring them to call his bluff: ‘As a kid, intimidation was a great defence for me to not have to get close to people or communicate or express my fears and weaknesses. So, going into Metallica as the staunch statue of a frontman, that intimidation factor blossomed and was a great defensive weapon. I could keep people at bay with that, and not state what I actually needed.’
The tour had also included their first outdoor shows. Lars: ‘It was basically us and [Raven], a motor home and a truck with the equipment and some mattresses. We’d take turns sleeping in the motor home and the equipment truck. When we hit Arkansas, our manager had hooked up with some bogus guy who set up six outdoor shows in these fields, in towns you’d never heard of. We were down there a good week. It was a field, a stage, us, Raven and about twenty kids. We’d never experienced that summer thing with bugs, one-hundred-and-twenty-degree weather, a camper with no AC. That was a good time…’ The first Arkansas show was at the amusingly named Bald Knob Amphitheater – in Bald Knob. James kept the poster for that one: ‘That name is so funny. The amphitheatre was nothing but a giant field and a big cement block. But by six o’clock, they had everything set up: food, booze, catfish sandwiches.’
While every place they played, the kids were going thrash-crazy, the band was undergoing its own musical education. Lars told me, ‘The biggest thing in America was The Police, Synchronicity, summer of 1983. We all loved that record. We were listening to that record every day as we were driving across America on