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By Root 418 0

playing, go backstage, sit down, have a drink, maybe just have a quick splash of water, and then they’d come and sit there with towels round their necks and just sign until everybody had gone. They were there for probably an hour or so, talking to the kids. They’d go, “How did you like the show?” and they’d go, “Oh, it was great. I really liked that guitar solo,” or, “I think you fucked up such and such tonight.” They got this immediate feedback on their performance. Any constructive criticism, they were open to it and that’s another sign of a band that isn’t in it for the money. They’re in it for the art.’ Bill Hale says this is a tradition started by Cliff: ‘He was the first one who went out and shook hands with the fans, ’cos Cliff was a fan. I would always see him do that the most.’ Lars and James, though, drew on their own experiences of being fans – both pro and con. As someone who had himself always pestered his favourite bands for autographs, Lars knew the value fans placed on personal contact, however small, and the loyalty it engendered, while James recalled his own bitter experiences writing to Aerosmith as a fan, addressing letters personally to Steven Tyler and Joe Perry: ‘I expected something back…because they were so personal to me. I could feel their music, they were my buddies. And I didn’t get anything back. I got an order form for a Draw the Line T-shirt. Wow, thanks a lot.’ That was when he learned ‘about how I would like not to treat our fans’.

The release in the USA on the Megaforce label of Ride the Lightning did not generate as much excitement at national level as it had in the UK, but Jonny and Marsha Z still had high hopes for its long-term success. ‘Martin had done a great job at Music for Nations,’ says Jonny. ‘They had invested a lot of money in marketing and ads.’ Unable to make that same level of investment, Jonny planned to launch the album with a big show at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, with Metallica second on the bill between headliners Raven, who he was also now looking after full-time, and openers Anthrax, his other main clients.

Jonny and Marsha had also continued exploring the possibility of getting Metallica signed to a major US label, targeting Michael Alago at Elektra, who Raven were also then doing demos for with a view to sealing a deal. Describing himself as, ‘a real New Yorker and a real music fan’, Alago was a native of Brooklyn whose life was changed, he says now, by seeing an Alice Cooper concert in 1973: ‘From the age of fifteen I ran around to all the rock clubs [and] bars like CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City and the Mudd club and Danceteria.’ Working at a pharmacy in the East Village to help pay his way through college, in 1980 he got his first job in the music business working at the Ritz nightclub, where he began tipping off some of the record company talent scouts who regularly came down about the best of the new bands that had played there. When Jonny first met Michael in 1983 he’d just begun working at Elektra in the A&R department as a talent scout in his own right. At the time, Mötley Crüe were Elektra’s flavour of the month, their first album for the label, Shout at the Devil, penetrating the Top Twenty and on its way to selling four million copies. Ratt had also made a chart breakthrough that summer, their first major label release on Elektra’s sister label, Atlantic, the Out of the Cellar album, going Top Ten; while Van Halen, on the other Elektra affiliate in the WEA triumvirate, had just had their biggest album yet, the ten-million-selling 1984, including their first Number One single, ‘Jump’. Hard rock was getting bigger than big again in the US market. Nevertheless, Metallica was still viewed as an entirely different proposition, even for Elektra. For any major label to sign Metallica would still have seemed a remarkably left-field thing to do. But, says Alago, ‘I was never interested in the hair bands. I liked my music fuckin’ dirty and snotty.’

Having seen Metallica at the Stone in San Francisco at the end of 1983, he’d been ‘blown away by the energy