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and charisma radiating from the stage’. When he heard Kill ’Em All, ‘I lost my mind.’ He had ‘never heard a record that alive-sounding and I loved the songs and the energy’. He admits, however, he ‘didn’t know what to tell the company about them. I gave Lars a call or two to express my interest but at the time they had a deal with Megaforce Records.’ They returned to his thoughts in the summer of 1984 with news that they were coming back to New York for a show with Anthrax and Raven. ‘I was doing demos with Raven at the time because the Zazulas managed them and wanted a US deal’, so he was already going to the show. The fact that Metallica would also be on the bill simply meant he would be coming early, he decided.

Jonny, who had put the whole show together as a showcase for CraZed Management talent, was delighted, inviting Alago and a slew of industry people, including record company execs, agents and – most importantly, from the Megaforce label’s point of view – key distributors. Following a stonking warm-up at the Mabuhay Gardens on 20 July – their first hometown show for over nine months, supposedly secret, and billed as a performance by the Four Horsemen – Metallica was buzzing and ready to go. Alago brought Elektra chairman Bob Krasnow with him to the Roseland show, along with ‘some promotion folks’ – not to see Raven, but to check out Metallica. Says Alago, ‘That night there was so much excitement and energy in the air I just knew it was gonna be a special evening. Metallica blew the roof off the stage. I ran backstage after the gig and basically hogged the entire evening and had them up at my office the next morning. We had a great meeting, got some beer and Chinese food and now had to figure out how to sign them away from Megaforce. Jonny was furious at me but in the end money talks and Megaforce got a financial override and the rest, my friend, is fuckin’ history!’

There was a further twist to the tale, though – one that Jonny had not seen coming but which would be the real reason he was furious: the arrival on the scene of a rapidly up-and-coming New York management company named Q Prime. Fronted by Peter Mensch – a thirty-one-year-old former tour accountant for Aerosmith who had graduated in the late 1970s to day-to-day management with Contemporary Communications Corporation (CCC), known in the biz simply as Leber-Krebs, after Steve Leber and David Krebs, who formed the company in 1972 – Q Prime was fast becoming in the Eighties what Leber-Krebs had been in the Seventies: the most successful company in American rock management. Leber-Krebs’ clients had included Aerosmith, AC/DC, Ted Nugent and the Scorpions; the perfect schooling for a player like Mensch who would go on to manage multi-platinum US stars such as Def Leppard, Dokken, Queensrÿche and, biggest of all eventually, Metallica. Along with his business partner Cliff Burnstein – a former Mercury Records A&R executive also schooled in the Leber-Krebs way – Q Prime was then riding the crest of a wave with the third Def Leppard album, Pyromania, the second-biggest-selling album in America in 1983 after Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Now they were in expansionist mood and Metallica, having recently appeared on their radar, looked like prime candidates to be assimilated into the rapidly evolving Q Prime universe. Indeed, Mensch – overseeing the ‘international’ side of the company’s business from his London home while Burnstein ran the New York office from his Hoboken apartment – already had a proven track record in pouncing on rising rock artists whose management support system was considerably weaker and less experienced than his own. Back in 1979, he had been instrumental in persuading AC/DC to leave Michael Browning, who had taken the band from the pubs and clubs of Australia to the brink of worldwide success, and sign with Leber-Krebs. Eighteen months later he managed to do something similar with Def Leppard, then one of the leading lights of the NWOBHM, on the verge of cementing a major deal in London with Phonogram. Neither act had cause to regret their