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By Root 385 0

the UK and Europe-wide MFN release of Ride the Lightning scheduled for 27 June, the band were back on the road that same month: four shows opening for Twisted Sister in Holland and Germany, followed by an appearance low on the bill at the Heavy Sound Festival on 10 June, then a return performance at the Poperinge Sports fields in Belgium, opening for Motörhead. Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider, who still recalled the bunch of kids he saw playing for Jonny in Old Bridge a year before, was fond of telling people that Metallica were a nice bunch of kids but there was no way they were ever going to make it. Most non-thrash fans agreed. The most optimistic forecast among the non-believers was that maybe, if they played their cards right, Metallica might become as big as Motörhead one day. Oblivious, the band was back at El Cerrito by the time the album was released a fortnight later. Reaction was immediate. In Britain, Sounds became the first heavyweight music weekly to give a Metallica album a rave review, in a glowing piece written by a seventeen-year-old Motörhead fan named Steffan Chirazi – these days better known as the editor of the official Metallica fanzine, So What. Reviewing it for Kerrang!, Xavier Russell called for readers to ‘soundproof the walls, get in a six-pack of beer, sit back and listen to one of the greatest heavy metal albums of all time!’

Ride the Lightning may not have been quite that but it would certainly become one of the most influential. Not all their old fans were so in thrall to its confection of illicit charms. Ron Quintana maintains now that in San Francisco, where Metallica had hardly shown their faces since temporarily relocating first to New Jersey and then to Copenhagen and London, Exodus’s debut album Bonded by Blood – although not released until early 1985, completed in the summer of 1984 and already receiving exposure on the underground tape-trading scene – ‘was liked better than Ride the Lightning by most of the underground kids here, and paved the way for the metal-punk crossover that spurred thrash to its heights’. In the UK, Dave Constable, then a key figure both in the pages of Bernard Doe’s Metal Forces fanzine and, even more influentially, serving behind the counter at London’s most high-profile metal-specialist record shop, Shades, in Soho, when asked to sum up the new, emerging thrash scene in a piece for Kerrang!, described Ride the Lightning as ‘a much watered-down follow-up’ to Kill ’Em All, designed specifically for ‘cracking the conservative home market’.

Both victims of the same fanzine mentality that always feels threatened when one of its own begins to attract much broader appeal, Quintana and Constable were right about one thing: RTL was far less about perpetuating Metallica’s image as godfathers of thrash, far more about establishing their credentials as serious rock contenders, musically and commercially. Malcolm Dome, who interviewed James and Lars for the first time after Ride was released, recalls how ‘Lars immediately struck me as being completely different. Unlike most drummers he was articulate and it was clear he and James had a long-term vision for the band. They weren’t going to be here today then serving pizza tomorrow. Lars had a vision of the band being big. James was more the musical vision. In terms of business, I think he went along with what Lars said, but James was the one already talking of their music moving on.’ As Lars insists now, at root Ride the Lightning was about ‘when we started writing with Cliff’, which for Lars and Metallica represented ‘a giant leap forward in terms of variety and musical ability…it was a much bigger palate’. Kirk recalled Cliff walking around during recording, proclaiming, ‘Bach is God.’ He had thought he was joking. ‘Then realised he wasn’t.’ Cliff was ‘a major enthusiast, understood harmonies and melody, he knew the theory, how it all worked, the only person who was able to figure out a time signature and write it on a piece of paper’. James talked of how Cliff wrote on guitar, not bass, carrying around an acoustic