Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [85]
Cliff was different, as far as I could tell. The day before, we had sat beside each other on Leppard’s private plane as we flew from Portland to Tacoma and I had taken the opportunity to ask him about his background. He told me how he’d gotten his start working in A&R at Mercury Records, how he’d always loved what he called ‘the British rock sound’. How he’d been one of the few American music-biz people that really got Thin Lizzy, how he’d tried to help break them in America but that the band was its own worst enemy. He meant drugs. Cliff didn’t dig drugs. ‘I don’t like the feeling of being out of control,’ he said. I nodded my head sagely.
Just then the plane did something sudden and dramatic and I felt the blood rush to my head. The plane did it again and this time it felt like my head was trying to jump off of my shoulders. Things got rapidly worse. I yelled, ‘Fuck’s sake! What’s happening?’
The captain’s voice came over the tannoy. ‘I thought as this was our last flight we’d treat you folks to something special.’ He’d put the damn thing into a nosedive, he said, its tail spinning, the plane spiralling towards the ground. I gripped the armrests of the chair and held on, terrified. Around the luxury cabin several other faces were grinning, some whooping. I couldn’t believe it was happening. We were all going to die…
I managed to swivel my head round to look at Cliff. He looked as terrified as me, his face frozen, holding on to his composure – just – as terrified maybe of losing his cool as the plane crashing.
‘Make – it – stop,’ I pleaded, barely able to speak. ‘Please – make – it – stop—’
‘That’s enough,’ he said, though not loud enough for anyone else to hear. A little louder: ‘I said…that’s enough.’
I looked across at Peter. He was sitting, oblivious, frowning at a magazine. Then, as though picking up the signal, he tuned into Cliff’s voice, glanced up and saw the panic.
‘Hey – that’s enough!’ he barked. This in turn was picked up by the singer Joe, who repeated Peter’s order and – thank God – the plane suddenly righted itself. There were one or two disappointed voices grumbling. Like, what the fuck? ‘Hey, there are visitors on the plane today, okay?’ said Joe, one of the good guys.
I breathed out, tried to regain control of myself without seeming to make some big effort. I looked at Cliff, the only other one on the plane who seemed to feel it. He was breathing in, out, righting his wings, pulling out of the nosedive, the man who didn’t like to feel out of control. He ignored my look, kept his eyes focused on the straight and narrow…
Despite the fires Metallica were now starting all over the country, by the end of 1983 Kill ’Em All had sold barely 17,000 copies in America – a drop in the ocean in terms of US record sales; certainly not enough to cause more than a blip on the radar of the mainstream media. ‘We knew the next album would be the one,’ says Jonny Z. ‘It was just a case of finding the money to make it.’
Jonny and Marsha were broke. They had given all they had and more to get the first Metallica album made and then put the band out on the road. That, plus the running costs of setting up their own label and management company, on top of the day-to-day running of Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven, meant ‘the well was dry’ – a phrase the band got so used to hearing they would put it next to his name on the credits of their next album. Jonny and Marsha had been able to spring for a limited-edition twelve-inch EP version of ‘Whiplash’ (along with three other tracks from the album) to try and help promote their end-of-year shows but again sales barely covered costs. With Anthrax in tow as support on those final shows of 1983, the increasingly frantic crowd reactions they were now getting meant they felt sure it was only a matter of time before things picked up, but it all came