CONTENTS

Foreword

Birth of a Monster

Kill ‘Em All

Ride the Lightning

Master of Puppets

…And Justice for All

Metallica

Load

Reload

Garage Inc.

St. Anger

Death Magnetic

Lulu

Hardwired… To Self-Destruct

72 Seasons

Live Recordings

Glossary

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

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FOREWORD

We should beware of defining the style of music played by Metallica.

Although the group invented thrash metal, they have nevertheless refused to use this term, which is too reductionist to describe a complex body of work that is much more subtle than it seems. Although the vocalist and guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, both founder members, have always claimed multiple influences, it was the heavy metal and new wave of British heavy metal movements, which sprang up in the UK from the end of the 1960s to the late 1970s, that inspired them to let rip in front of their audiences. While synthesizers and drum machines dominated the 1980s, Metallica remained faithful to their principles: fast, powerful drumming, a duo of sharp guitars, and a sense of melody that opened up a once esoteric style of music to a wider and more varied audience. However, it was not until 1991—when their fifth album, bearing the group’s name but nicknamed The Black Album, appeared—that the whole world fell under the spell of the combo from San Francisco and propelled them to the summit of rock. Whether long-standing fans or newcomers who discovered the group through Nothing Else Matters or Until It Sleeps, everyone has a memory linked to a song by Metallica. Whether synonymous with violence or emotion, rage or tranquility, their music is now firmly fixed in the collective unconscious; they have succeeded in presenting metal music in all its complexity—often powerful, sometimes soothing, but always profound and redeeming, for it most often bears witness to tortuous personal journeys. This is why, rather than risking a careless definition of their music, we will instead try in this book to tell the story of a group who are now more alive than ever, having already joined the ranks of the stars of world rock music thanks to their exceptional repertoire—which deliberately conceals mysteries that will be revealed in these pages. At full volume, with your foot to the floor, dive into the heart of the tornado of Metallica.

Metallica in its current form: Robert Trujillo (bass), Lars Ulrich (drums), James Hetfield (lead vocals, guitar) and Kirk Hammett (lead guitar).

BIRTH OF A MONSTER

In the mid-1970s, Southern California, like many other regions in the United States, was busy flaunting its flashy, almost arrogant, flights of fancy in a world gripped by social and economic turmoil. The Hollywood movie industry had dominated the world for decades, Walt Disney’s characters had been welcoming visitors to Disneyland in Anaheim since 1955, and the West Coast beaches were where Californian youth would hang out, enjoying a sun-kissed lifestyle made famous by The Beach Boys. The music industry in California had played its part in the mid-1960s, offering the world a wealth of pop that catered for trendy hippy idealism. The Mamas and The Papas and California Dreamin’ were the soundtrack for American youth hitting the dance floors, while The Doors urged them to join the artificial paradises of their illustrious singer, Jim Morrison. With the rise of rock guitars on the other side of the pond, where Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath had just launched heavy metal on the world from the United Kingdom, it was only a matter of time before the frenzied six-strings that appealed to novelty-craving youngsters invaded America. It was in this California of the late 1970s that Metallica was born. For the greatest thrash metal band in the world to exist, the stars had to align one day in 1981, and two diametrically opposed personalities had to cast aside their differences and join forces to give birth to a musical monster, a four-headed hydra ready to conquer the world.

From Obsession to Leather Charm

James Hetfield was still an angst-ridden high-school student emerging from a difficult childhood when he began playing guitar in the middle of the disco decade. With his Gibson SG and accompanied by his friend Ron McGovney, whom he had met a few years earlier at East Middle School in Downey, a medium-sized town about 12 miles (20km) from Los Angeles, the teenaged Hetfield found a balm for his tortured soul in the frenetic music of Aerosmith, Blue Öyster Cult, and Kiss. He was raised in a strict tradition of Christian Science—a religious movement that advocates natural healing without medical treatment—and was bullied and mocked because of his parents’ beliefs. Like others before him, music accompanied his early years, and when he joined his first band in 1977, he finally found a world where he could flourish. While Obsession, the group in which he played alongside guitarist Jim Arnold, bassist Ron Veloz, and drummer Rich Veloz, failed to go anywhere, Phantom Lord, the band he then formed with Hugh Tanner and Jim Mulligan, allowed him to develop his own style, carried by furious and uncompromising guitar riffs. As he himself wrote in the Brea Olinda High School yearbook when he left in 1981, he hated punk and disco above all else. The budding musician also declared that his life’s ambition was to “to play music and get rich.”¹

Hetfield was then living with Ron McGovney in McGovney’s parents’ Norwalk house, later demolished to make way for the Century Freeway from the city to Los Angeles airport. It was here that the musicians of Phantom Lord—a name that was swiftly changed to Leather Charm— rehearsed. When the second reincarnation of the band fizzled out, McGovney was asked to play bass in Hetfield’s next venture. At the same time, Hetfield replied to an ad in the local newspaper The Recycler posted by a drummer looking to start a band. The drummer stated he was influenced by Diamond Head, Tygers of Pan Tang, and Iron Maiden, a new British band who had just released their second album, Killers.

Metallica pose for Ross Halfin, who was to become one of the group’s most regular photographers.

Ian Hill, K. K. Downing, Rob Halford, Dave Holland, and Glenn Tipton of Judas Priest, a group that were emblematic of the 1970s British heavy metal scene, and forerunners of the new wave of British heavy metal.

A disastrous audition

It was undoubtedly his attraction to the emerging new wave of British heavy metal (often known as NWOBHM), championed by Judas Priest, Motörhead, Tank, Def Leppard, and Iron Maiden, that pushed drummer Lars Ulrich to publish the ad. The young man from Denmark, whose family had recently settled in upmarket Newport Beach, California, was certainly highly motivated. In his home country he had been a promising tennis player with a bright future ahead of him, but he now turned his focus to his new passion: creating the world’s greatest heavy metal band.

Hetfield had called to suggest a meeting, and the drummer—still very much an amateur at this stage—agreed to meet at Ron McGovney’s home. This legendary first jam session between the three musicians quickly turned into a fiasco, as an amused Hetfield would testify in 2001: “Lars had a pretty crappy drum kit, with one cymbal. It kept falling over, and we’d have to stop, and he’d pick the fucking thing up.”²

The Brian Slagel spark

Despite the disastrous first encounter, Ulrich soon contacted James Hetfield again and made him a very tempting offer. Eight months before the abortive audition in August 1981, Ulrich had met Brian Slagel, co-founder of the fanzine The New Heavy Metal Review and the Metal Blade Records label. A heavy metal enthusiast, Slagel was fully committed to promoting the local scene. “The Michael Schenker Group played a venue called the Country Club in Reseda, Los Angeles, California in December of 1980 […],” Slagel recalled. “I was there with my good friend John Kornarens who basically helped me with the fanzine and the compilation album. So after the show, John sees a kid in the car park wearing a Saxon European T-shirt. Now in 1980, nobody in LA knew who Saxon was [...]. So John runs up to the kid and says, ‘Where did you get that shirt?’ And the kid [Lars Ulrich] said, ‘I just moved here from Denmark two weeks ago. I didn’t think anyone knew who Saxon [was].’ And John said, ‘No, no. We are totally into it. My friend Brian and I are really into it so you got to meet him.’”³ The three boys shared a love of heavy metal music and got on well. In summer 1981, when Slagel told Ulrich that he was planning to release a compilation of local bands, Ulrich’s reaction was immediate. “Hey,” he said, “if I put together a band, can I be on your compilation album?”⁴ Slagel said yes, and so began a musical adventure that would last over 40 years.

Metal Massacre, the compilation event

Despite that rather unsatisfactory first encounter with Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield was tempted when the Dane told him about the compilation project in progress. In autumn 1981, while Hetfield was working as a graphic designer for the Steven Label Corporation and Ulrich a delivery boy for the Los Angeles Times, the two musicians met again and became inseparable. Lars, whose artistic intelligence is matched only by his pugnacity, introduced his new friend to all kinds of bands. Hetfield spent a lot of time at Lars’s house, listening to music and amazed at the size of the Dane’s record collection. “I could afford maybe one record a week, and he would come back from the store with twenty. He bought Styx and REO Speedwagon, bands he’d heard of in Denmark.”² The duo quickly decided that they needed a name if they wanted to appear on Metal Massacre, Slagel’s compilation. A long list of names was suggested by the garrulous Ulrich, including Nixon, Blitzer, Helldriver, and Thunderfuck. Legend has it that the name the two young musicians eventually chose was in reference to the heavy metal bible, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1980 by Brian Harrigan and Malcolm Dome. Their name was now officially Metallica. It was Hetfield who designed a logo, immediately adopted by his bandmates, which remained unchanged for the following decades.

Once Metallica’s visual identity was decided, the founding members began writing a frenzied track in McGovney’s garage, and recorded it on a rented multi-track cassette recorder. Hit the Lights, which would soon feature an additional guitar solo by Lloyd Grant, a musician Ulrich had met some time previously, was laid down on tape and taken in extremis to Slagel and Kornarens, who were in the process of completing the mastering of the compilation. With this first song in hand, Hetfield and Ulrich enlisted the services of McGovney on bass, and decided to publish a new ad in The Recycler, this time with the aim of finding that rare gem: a gifted guitarist with the dexterity required to meet the demands of the Californian band that was determined to make a name for itself.

Like Judas Priest, Motörhead were sometimes regarded as part of the new wave of British heavy metal, even though their members were heavy metal veterans. From left: Lemmy Kilmister, Eddie Clarke, and Phil Taylor.

The Dave Mustaine tornado blows in

When Dave Mustaine, a six-string virtuoso, arrived in Ron McGovney’s garage for an audition after answering the ad in The Recycler, he received a frosty reception, as he later recalled in his 2011 autobiography. “While I set up, everyone else went into another room, which I thought was kind of weird. There didn’t seem to be any excitement about what we were doing. And as far as I could tell, I was the only one competing for the job. I plugged in my amp and calmly went about the business of warming up. [...] I kept playing, faster and louder, figuring eventually somebody would walk in and start jamming with me [...]. But they never did. They just left me there to play on my own.”⁵

After some furious guitar twirling and showcasing of his skills, Mustaine finally decided to call out to the members of Metallica, who were sipping schnapps and watching TV in the next room. Asking them if the audition was going to happen, Mustaine settled for this answer from Lars Ulrich: “No, man...You’ve got the job.”⁵

From the very first rehearsals, the nascent chemistry between the four members of Metallica had to contend with each man’s strong character. Hetfield, quiet and reserved, usually had the turbulent Ulrich on his side, while Mustaine quickly proved to be headstrong. As 1982 began, the repertoire, mostly consisting of covers of songs by Diamond Head (The Prince, Sucking My Love), Savage (Let It Loose), and Sweet Savage (Killing Time), was expanded with a few original compositions that Leather Charm had already worked on. “We would all get together after work,” recalled Ron McGovney. “[...] At the time it was just Dave playing guitar and James was just singing. It got to the point where James had said that he didn’t think he was too good of a singer and he only wanted to play rhythm guitar. So we found this singer named Sammy Dijon who was in a local band called Ruthless—he rehearsed with us for about three weeks but we never played a show with him. They told Sammy it wasn’t working out and James went back to singing again.”⁶

Helping hand from Mötley Crüe

In early 1982, the quartet, who were by then comfortable using multi-track, decided to record their first demo in McGovney’s garage, convinced that this would lead to their first concerts. They used a rented TEAC tape recorder to record their covers of Killing Time and Let It Loose, to which they added Hit the Lights. With their first demo in hand, Metallica played their first concert on 14 March 1982, at the Radio City club in Anaheim, to a crowd of loyal friends. Hetfield decided to concentrate on the vocals and leave the guitar parts to Mustaine. “There were a lot of people there, maybe 200, because we had all my school friends and all Lars’s and Ron’s and Dave’s buddies,” Hetfield recalled. “I was really nervous and a little uncomfortable without a guitar, and then during the first song Dave broke a string. It seemed to take him forever to change it and I was standing there really embarrassed.”⁷ “[...] the longest period of time I’d ever experienced in my life,” Lars Ulrich confirmed, “sitting up on stage trying to hide behind my drums and being severely uncomfortable...”⁸ Despite a chaotic first concert, something happened to help them on their way. When Ron McGovney heard that Saxon were scheduled to perform at the Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood, he enlisted the help of the members of Mötley Crüe, for whom he regularly worked as a photographer. The increasingly famous Los Angeles band had been considered for the event, but they felt they were now too well known to open for other groups. Tommy Lee and Vince Neil, respectively drummer and singer of Crüe, agreed to help McGovney by passing on the Metallica demo to the venue’s programmer, who loved their style, and invited them to open for Saxon at the show on 27 March 1982.

James Hetfield and Dave Mustaine on stage at the Paramount Theatre, New York, 8 April 1983.

Los Angeles glam metal in all its splendor: the outrageous Mötley Crüe in 1983.

The Power Metal demo

When Metallica opened for Saxon at the Whisky a Go Go, they won over the crowd, and heavy metal fans across Southern California started showing increasing interest. Although audiences at their concerts were often thin on the ground, word spread that a new band was making a name for itself, and demos were soon being passed around among metalheads. Metallica’s second demo, which would later be known as Power Metal—a reference to the term McGovney used on the business cards he had made up to send to record labels to describe the music his band played—contained Hit the Lights along with three new songs: Jump in the Fire, The Mechanix, and Motorbreath. The atmosphere in the band was friendly, although the guitarist, Dave Mustaine, regularly drank a lot, and became aggressive and argumentative, whereas the others, keen schnapps drinkers, just enjoyed the party. Metallica were already enjoying the benefits of rock-star life at this time, even though it was still early days in their career. “I’m not sure how we managed to accomplish as much as we did, given the lifestyle we were leading—all that fucking and fighting, drugging and drinking and vomiting. But we did,”⁵ Dave Mustaine later said. James Hetfield did not play the guitar most of the time, and a new musician called Brad Parker was therefore brought into Metallica, only to be kicked out again after a single concert at the Music Factory in Costa Mesa on 23 April 1982. This experience that led nowhere pushed Hetfield to pick up his Gibson once more and, to the delight of fans, he has never put it down again. On 25 May that year, at a concert at the Back Bay High School in Costa Mesa, the frontman performed his new duties brilliantly during a set that Lars Ulrich described in his diary as “Absolutely a day to forget! Played like shit, went down like shit and sounded like shit. Really awful.”⁹

Metallica’s rise to fame

The Metal Massacre compilation was released on 14 June 1982, just as the band was playing back-to-back gigs at venues from Huntington Beach to North Hollywood, and benefiting from some great word-of-mouth. After seeing them live in June, Kenny Kane, the young owner of an up-and-coming local label, High Velocity Records, offered to produce their first EP. The sessions, which took place at the Chateau East Recording Studio in Tustin on 6 July 1982, turned into a confrontation between the musicians and the businessman after Kane made it clear he was disappointed and unhappy with what he heard. The songs recorded that day (Hit the Lights, The Mechanix, Phantom Lord, Jump in the Fire, Motorbreath, Seek and Destroy, and Metal Militia) were snarling metal salvos, not at all the kind of music Kane had heard at the concert he had attended. After discovering that the less heavy songs he had liked were covers of other bands, the young entrepreneur decided to break off his commitment to Metallica, who nevertheless left with a quality demo, which they dubbed No Life ’Til Leather, a nod to Motörhead’s live album No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith. The demo was an impressive calling card that was changing hands from one end of California to the other. An advertisement purchased by the band (but paid for solely by McGovney) in BAM Magazine touted Metallica’s abilities and presented them as “the best, the fastest & the heaviest of all U.S. Metal Bands,”¹⁰ helping them extend their reign across the state.

A powerful style was emerging, actively driven by Lars Ulrich’s thundering drums, James Hetfield’s increasing vocal precision, and Dave Mustaine’s blistering riffs. The audience liked what they were hearing, and attendance was high at concerts performed by the band, who continued their rock’n’roll lifestyle of camaraderie and debauchery. “We shared homes, money, equipment, drugs, alcohol, girls,” says Mustaine. “It was a life of utter decadence (and at times one hell of a lot of fun).”⁵

Cliff Burton enters the scene

Despite the band’s growing success, tensions within Metallica quickly escalated. Dave Mustaine’s drinking began to seriously break down the group’s cohesion, and something soon happened to push them to rethink the makeup of their band. In summer 1982, following various intrusions into his home, Mustaine decided to buy two dogs, crosses between Staffordshire Bull Mastiffs and Rhodesian Ridgebacks. One day during a rehearsal at Ron McGovney’s house, one of the dogs, left unattended in the garden, decided to jump on the bonnet of McGovney’s Pontiac LeMans, which earned him a violent kick from James Hetfield. With tensions running high, insults were hurled and Mustaine punched Hetfield in the face. The band made various threats to get rid of Mustaine, at which point he lashed out at McGovney and poured all his beer into the flight case of McGovney’s Washburn bass, rendering it unusable. Despite the guitarist’s aggression and the playground brawl, the Hetfield/Mustaine/Ulrich trio stayed together, while Ron McGovney lost out, his days in Metallica now numbered. “Dave, at the time, was an asshole,” he later remembered, “and Lars only cared about himself. But what really hurt me was James, because he was my friend and he was siding with them and I suddenly became the outcast in the band.”⁶

On 29 November, while attending a concert at the Whisky a Go Go, featuring Violation and Trauma, Hetfield and Ulrich were blown away by the performance of Trauma’s bassist, whose dexterity was matched only by his musical creativity as he played his many solos using a wah-wah pedal, and filled the stage with rare ease, headbanging like no one else before him. Cliff Burton was introduced to the band by Brian Slagel, the concert organizer, and from that moment on, Lars’s only goal in life was to recruit the virtuoso bassist. The drummer’s perseverance eventually overcame Burton’s hesitation, and he accepted the offer on one condition: that Metallica move near his home in San Francisco.

Paul Quinn, Nigel Glockler, Biff Byford, Graham Oliver, and Steve Dawson of Saxon, in 1982.

Cliff Burton with his famous Rickenbacker 4001, which he quickly relinquished in favor of an Alembic Spoiler.

FOR METALLICA ADDICTS

In the first few months of Metallica’s existence, James Hetfield was not yet convinced he was a good enough singer. The band even asked another front-man, John Bush from the Los Angeles band Armored Saint, to join them. Bush declined the offer, preferring to remain loyal to his musician friends. He nevertheless went on to play for Anthrax from 1992 to 2005, and again from 2009 to 2010.

JAMES HETFIELD, THE TACITURN FRONTMAN

James Alan Hetfield was born on 3 August 1963 in Downey, California. His father, Virgil, a truck driver who ran his own company, and his mother, Cynthia, an artist with a passion for singing and graphic design, raised their children according to strict Christian Science beliefs. A religious movement created by Mary Baker Eddy in the late 19th century, it rejected science as a cure for disease in favor of an all-powerful faith. The practice of Christian Science in his home had a huge effect on James’s friendships when he attended Rio San Gabriel Elementary School in Downey: “I wasn’t allowed to sit through health class, to learn about the body, to learn about illnesses and things like that,” Hetfield remarked. “And, say, I’m trying out for the football team [and] you have to get a physical, to get a doctor’s note, I’d have to go and explain to the coach that, you know, our religion says this. So I felt really like an outcast, and, you know, kids would laugh about it. When health class would begin, I would be standing in the hallway, which was basically a form of punishment in other aspects. Everyone who walked by would look at me like I’d been some criminal of sorts, you know?”¹¹

With his two half-brothers, Christopher and David, from Cynthia’s first marriage, and soon his younger sister Deanna, James Hetfield grew up in an environment where music played an important part. Besides the three years of piano lessons his mother made him take, the young Hetfield discovered an LP in his brother David’s impressive record collection that would change his life: the eponymous first Black Sabbath album. He immersed himself in the discography of Aerosmith, AC/DC, Blue Öyster Cult, and Kiss, becoming a well-informed music lover and a promising guitarist once he stopped tinkling the ivories of the family piano and moved on to his first guitar with his brother Christopher. “I realized quite early that music was a great communication tool,” he recalled. “I liked being alone. I liked being able to close off the world, and music helped a lot with that. I’d put on the headphones and just listen to music. Music would speak my voice, and it connected on so many levels.”¹²

When his father suddenly left home in 1976 and his mother died in 1980 after refusing treatment for an aggressive cancer, certain that her faith alone would cure her, Hetfield lived with his brothers for a while before moving in with his friend Ron McGovney, whom he had met at high school. His first musical adventures in Obsession, Phantom Lord, and Leather Charm forged his appetite for playing music in a band, and then came his decisive meeting with drummer Lars Ulrich in 1981.

James Hetfield proudly gives the finger as he prepares to conquer the world at the start of the 1980s.

LARS ULRICH, METALLICA’S MASTERMIND

Born on 26 December 1963 in the town of Gentofte, Denmark, the young Lars Ulrich had a bright future ahead of him in tennis, a sport he had played from childhood, following in the footsteps of his father, Torben, a professional player, accomplished musician (clarinet and saxophone), and well-known Danish intellectual. Lars had a privileged upbringing, benefiting from his father’s tastes in jazz (Miles Davis, John Coltrane) and an early introduction to the rock artists of the 1960s (The Doors, Jimi Hendrix). On 9 December 1973, when he was just nine years old, Ulrich discovered heavy metal with his father, when he was taken to see Deep Purple in concert at K B Hallen in Copenhagen. “[...]The next day I went down to the local record store about ten minutes from where we lived on my bike and I bought their Fireball album,”⁸ Ulrich later reported.

As a child, he became used to moving house on a regular basis, as the family followed the Grand Slam tournaments in which his father played every year. Lars lived in Melbourne, Paris, New York, and London before he and his family returned to Denmark in the early 1970s. In 1979, his parents enrolled him in the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Tampa, Florida, hoping he would become a professional player. The young man did not take to the posh youth of the south-eastern United States, nor the iron discipline of the famous institution, reputed to be a factory for champions. Drawn more to beer and cannabis than to perfecting his tennis game, he became increasingly captivated by rock’n’roll and, already a great fan of the drums, finally ditched tennis to concentrate on his music-playing skills. He discovered the new wave of British heavy metal, of which a young band called Iron Maiden were the most famous ambassadors at the time. This new wave was rising from the ashes of heavy metal as played by Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple. It was a revelation for Ulrich, whose only ambition by then was to become an accomplished musician and live the life of a rock star. When he returned to Denmark in 1980, his parents told him they were planning to move to California so that Torben could play in the Tennis Grand Masters, a competition for players aged 45 and over. After moving to the upmarket town of Newport Beach, Lars attended Corona Del Mar High School but found it hard to fit in, with his Iron Maiden T-shirts standing out like a sore thumb among his classmates’ Lacoste polo shirts. He then started to get interested in the Los Angeles music scene, with bands like Yesterday & Today (subsequently Y&T) from Oakland, who caught his attention after a memorable concert at the Starwood in Los Angeles in November 1980. The drummer expanded his network by frequenting the concert venues of the Californian metropolis and it was there he met Brian Slagel, founder of the Metal Blade Records label, who in 1981 offered him the chance to contribute to the Metal Massacre compilation, on condition that he became part of a band.

Lars Ulrich photographed by Fin Costello, who was famous for his portraits of Ozzy Osbourne, Rainbow, and Judas Priest.

DAVE MUSTAINE, THE FIERY GUITARIST

David Scott Mustaine was born on 13 September 1961 in La Mesa, a medium-sized town in San Diego County, California. A decline in social status plunged his father, John, a National Cash Register employee, into alcoholism and ended his marriage to Emily in 1965. “I don’t have memories of him not drinking—you know, playing ball in the backyard, teaching me how to ride a bike, or anything like that,”⁵ Mustaine commented.

After his parents divorced, Dave found himself caught in the midst of constant conflict between a mother devoted to her children and a father determined to exact revenge on his estranged wife, comparing the family’s constant moves to a life on the run. Raised for a time in accordance with the beliefs of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, thanks to an aunt who took in his mother, himself, and his sisters Michelle, Suzanne, and Debbie, young Dave pursued his path toward independence and trying to get away from the constraints and difficulties of his childhood. His brother-in-law Stan, a motorbike cop with the California Highway Patrol married to his sister Michelle, introduced Dave to new musical styles and Dave also shared with his sister Debbie a passion for the melodic folk of Cat Stevens and The Beatles. When Debbie gave the young man his first guitar, he enjoyed playing the timeless melodies of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

At 14, Dave joined his first band as a guitarist, playing covers and sharing a taste for soft drugs, to which he soon became addicted. He loved the music and unmistakable visuals of Kiss and, in 1978, formed a band called Panic with bassist Bob Evans, drummer Dave Harmon, guitarist Tom Quecke, and singer Pat Voelkes. Some time after this adventure ended, Mustaine responded to an ad in The Recycler from a band looking for a new guitarist, whose influences ranged between Motörhead, Iron Maiden, and Budgie. The meeting between Ulrich and Mustaine, during which they smoked a large number of joints, led the drummer to introduce Mustaine to James Hetfield and Ron McGovney. The guitarist’s fiery temperament as well as his fast and precise playing made him a prominent figure in the world of thrash metal in the 1980s.

Despite his undeniable talent, the hot-headed Dave Mustaine did not feature on a single Metallica album.

CLIFF BURTON, IDOL OF A GENERATION OF METALHEADS

Born on 10 February 1962 in Castro Valley, California, Clifford Lee Burton grew up in a protective environment, surrounded by his parents, Jan and Ray Burton, his brother Scott and his sister Connie. A shy, solitary, and studious child, young Cliff was passionate about literature and music. As a teenager, his discovery of Aerosmith and Lynyrd Skynyrd encouraged him to learn to play bass with the support of his parents, who enrolled him in lessons with a teacher who also introduced him to classical music, notably Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, when he was just 13. This period coincided with Scott’s death from an aneurysm on 19 May 1975, leaving Cliff distraught, but even more determined to become a better musician. “He said to a couple of people, ‘I’m gonna be the best bassist for my brother,’” his parents would say years later.¹³ He studied the bass playing of Geddy Lee (Rush) and Geezer Butler (Black Sabbath), also discovering Stanley Clarke and Lemmy Kilmister, whom he especially admired for his unparalleled use of distortion, an effect more frequently found in guitarists than in four-string players. He worked on music theory in depth, and soon began learning the guitar, enabling him to insert numerous solos into his scores, which would become one of his trademarks in Trauma, and then Metallica. Playing in the bands EZ Street and Agents of Misfortune, Burton experimented whenever he was given the opportunity, and quickly became one of the most gifted musicians on the incipient Los Angeles metal scene.

In 1980, while attending Chabot College in Hayward, Cliff realized his future lay in music and told his parents, who once again supported him. His mother, Jan, commented: “We said, ‘OK, we’ll give you four years. We’ll pay for your rent and your food. But after that four years is over, if we don’t see some slow progress or moderate progress, if you’re just not going anyplace and it’s obvious you’re not going to make a living out of it, then you’re going to have to get a job and do something else. That’s as far as we’re going to support you.’[...] He said, ‘Fine.’ And, boy, did he make it!”¹³

After his early death in 1986, the bass guitarist Cliff Burton became an icon of the world of metal.

HIT THE LIGHTS

(James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich/4’25)

FIRST VERSION

Musicians

James Hetfield: vocals, electric guitar, bass

Lloyd Grant: electric guitar

Lars Ulrich: drums

Recording

Metallica’s home studio (Ron McGovney’s garage), Norwalk: spring 1982

Lloyd Grant’s flat,?: spring 1982

Technical team

Producers: James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Brian Slagel, John Kornarens

Sound engineers: James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich

Metal Massacre compilation

Released in the USA by Metal Blade Records: 14 June 1982 (LP ref.: MBR 1001)

SECOND VERSION

Musicians

James Hetfield: vocals, electric guitar, bass

Dave Mustaine: electric guitar

Ron McGovney: bass

Lars Ulrich: drums

Recording 2nd pressing

Metallica’s home studio (Ron McGovney’s garage), Norwalk: 1982

Technical team

Producers: James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Brian Slagel, John Kornarens

Sound engineers: James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich

Metal Massacre compilation (second pressing)

Released in the USA by Metal Blade Records: 1982 (LP ref.: MBR 1001)

Genesis

1982. Lars Ulrich was determined to appear on the Metal Massacre compilation that his friend Brian Slagel was about to produce. So he had to form a band as a matter of urgency. Lars went back to James Hetfield, who was not particularly happy about their first jam session together, and convinced the singer that being on Slagel’s compilation would make him forget that Lars’s drumming was still amateurish.

The newly formed band started rehearsing, and their first original composition was none other than Hit the Lights, a track that had been worked on with guitarist Hugh Tanner in James Hetfield’s previous band, Leather Charm. Introducing the band’s goal with an explicit phrase—“We’re gonna kick some ass tonight”—the track displays the youthful ardor and naivety of a novice band determined to play as fast as possible and thus depose the idols of the 1970s British heavy metal movement. With its obvious references to Motörhead’s Ace of Spades, released in November 1980, Hit the Lights is the foundational track of the thrash metal style.

Production

The first version of Hit the Lights was recorded in Ron McGovney’s garage in spring 1982 on a rented Tascam multi-track cassette recorder. Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield were the only musicians to play on the first take, the former on drums, the latter on vocals, guitar, and bass. For the title track solo, the two friends decided to bring in Lloyd Grant, a musician Ulrich had met when he placed his first ads in The Recycler. “I remember the day I went over to Lars’s house, he said, ‘Check out this song’ and he played me Hit the Lights,” recalled Grant. “He wanted me to play some guitar leads on it but I couldn’t make it over to Ron McGovney’s house to do the recording so James and Lars brought the 4-track over to my apartment and I did the solo [...]”.¹⁴ Grant’s thunderous score was played on a small vintage Montgomery Ward amp, the guitarist’s only appearance on a Metallica recording. When Dave Mustaine joined the band, he laid down his own guitar solos on a second version of the song, which appeared on the second pressing of the Metal Massacre compilation a few months later.

Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield, Metallica’s inseparable songwriters, on stage at the Aardschokdag Festival in Zwolle, Netherlands, 11 February 1984.

FOR METALLICA ADDICTS

On the first pressing of Metal Massacre, Brian Slagel and John Kornarens made a stupid mistake, which has since become part of the compilation’s mythology. The name of Hetfield and Ulrich’s band featured a typo: Mettallica. The error was corrected on the second pressing of the record a few months later.

On 5, 7, 9, and 10 December 2011, the band performed on stage at the Fillmore in San Francisco to celebrate their 30th anniversary. On the final day of festivities, Metallica performed a version of Hit The Lights that would go down in history, featuring prestigious guests who had participated in its creation: Ron McGovney, Dave Mustaine, and Lloyd Grant.

THRASH METAL IS UNLEASHED ON THE WORLD

The arrival of Cliff, James, Lars, and Dave in San Francisco was a key moment in the story of Metallica. Although Los Angeles was just six hours’ drive away, the two cities were worlds apart, especially from a cultural perspective. Far from the glitter of a heavy rock that they regarded as outdated, it was here that the musicians—having accepted Cliff Burton’s request—settled in February 1983. As Lars Ulrich later explained: “[…] That was the first time that we belonged to something. There was people up there that were like us, there were people up there that were listening to the same music, that felt like we did. […] It was the first time I think we felt that sense of belonging to any place, which we certainly didn’t here. When Cliff called up […], we were out of here before I hung the phone up.”¹⁶ Warmly welcomed by Mark Whitaker, their live-recording engineer and also the manager of a group they were friendly with—Exodus—James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich moved into Whitaker’s house in El Cerrito, while Dave Mustaine was in temporary accommodation a few dozen miles away. On 5 March 1983 the group gave their first concert in heavy metal’s California hideout, The Stone in San Francisco. That evening, for a show entitled The Night of the Banging Head!!!, Metallica shared the billing with the groups Läaz Rockit and Exodus, who were protégés of Whitaker’s. From his first gigs with the group, Burton excelled with his virtuosity and stage presence, fitting in perfectly with the line-up. The band’s life in the El Cerrito house was punctuated by very drunken parties, the crash of Ulrich’s drums, and the antics of the visiting Mustaine, who was bent on making an impression through his increasingly worrying attitude, alcohol consumption, and behavior that continued to concern his companions. While the group was building its reputation in northern California, a major event was to boost the musicians’ career.

Rock n’ Roll Heaven

At the other end of the country, in New Jersey, Jonny Zazula and Marsha, his wife, founders of the company CraZed Management, organized concerts in the United States for bands such as Anvil and Venom, and also ran a record stall at the flea market in East Brunswick. Named Rock n’ Roll Heaven and specializing in dead artists, the stall was a place where fans could buy all kinds of records imported from the United Kingdom, as well as back issues of the magazine Sounds. The Zazulas enforced a rule in their small operation: never to sell bootleg recordings or any artist’s demos. This did not prevent them, in June 1983, from listening attentively to a recording brought by one of their regular customers, who had just spent a few days in California where he had been to a heavy metal concert and bought a demo by the group who had played that evening. Thus Jonny and Marsha discovered No Life ’Til Leather, the cassette containing the songs Metallica had recorded in 1982. “I was just playing a tape against my will because I frowned on playing unapproved demos at the store during business hours,” Jon remembered. “For some reason I put it on despite my unfounded rules. As soon as I heard it I was blown away. I was smitten. I remember the first thing I thought was that this was America’s answer to the NWOBHM. At the time, America had nothing to compare to it. It was America’s answer to Motörhead. I wanted to work with these guys and get involved with them, although I knew nothing on the subject of producing a band.”¹⁵ On examining the sleeve of this amateur effort, Jon Zazula spotted the number of one K J Doughton, who was described as the official agent in the group’s dealings with professionals in the industry. Zazula made an initial contact. When Lars Ulrich called him back, Zazula made him the most tempting proposition. For a fee of $1,500, the band was invited to make the journey from California to New Jersey, where they would be the support act for the groups Venom and The Rods. In no time at all, the foursome had loaded their equipment onto the van lent by Jon, and headed for New Jersey. It was during this expedition of some 3,000 miles (4,800km) from El Cerrito to Old Bridge, where the Zazula family lived, that a series of events unfolded that were to seal the destiny of Metallica.

FOR METALLICA ADDICTS

The hammer shot by the photographer Gary L Heard for the sleeve of Kill ’Em All belonged to Cliff Burton, who always carried it with him, for he was always ready to smash something up—notably the group’s dressing rooms when giving concerts.

Cliff Burton, Kirk Hammett, James Hetfield, and Lars Ulrich—unofficial ambassadors for the American beer brands Coors and Budweiser.

On the road to the Garden State

On board the U-Haul van rented for the occasion were the four members of Metallica and their recording engineer, Mark Whitaker. There was a party atmosphere, or rather that of a drinking session—for the musicians, who took turns driving, spent most of the journey making merry, then sobering up in the back of the van. However, this conviviality was short-lived, for Dave Mustaine, whose excesses were notorious, almost caused the deaths of the whole band with a series of near misses due to a blood alcohol level well above normal. As tensions increased, a split between the guitarist and the rest of the band now appeared inevitable. “The guy couldn’t control himself under various situations,” Ulrich explained. “We decided [to find a replacement guitarist] somewhere between Iowa and Chicago.”¹⁷

Once the musicians arrived in Old Bridge, they settled in at Jon and Marsha’s house. The four soon took to the general party mood, shared with the metal groups Jon introduced them to, and quickly became a nuisance for the couple, whose young daughter, Rikki, was just learning to walk. “It was uncanny and very different than the way Marsha and I lived,” Zazula said. “Soon, however, having this young band living in our house wasn’t working out too well, with all the partying they were doing. There was a point where Raven, Venom, and Metallica were all hanging at Casa Z! I was trying to work in a small area of the basement with my desk surrounded by sleeping bodies that were always snoring away.”¹⁵ In order to preserve his family environment, Jon Zazula decided to steer Metallica in the direction of The Music Building, an artistic residence in the Jamaica neighborhood, in the heart of Queens, New York. Taking advantage of a rehearsal space shared with the group Anthrax, Metallica’s musicians settled into the freezing cold building, their sleeping bags sharing space with the debris that covered the floor—their only companions being bottles of Jägermeister and a few guitar riffs. Meanwhile, Zazula spared no effort, and secured the group several dates around Manhattan. On 9 April 1983, as the musicians were preparing to perform as the supporting act to Vandenberg at the L’Amour club in Brooklyn, Mustaine roundly insulted Vandenberg’s bass guitarist Dick Kemper, who was in the process of adjusting the settings on his amplifier. This was one outrage too far for Metallica who, two days later, informed Dave that he was fired from the group. He was immediately taken to the nearest bus station, where he boarded a Greyhound bus for a four-day journey to California.

The arrival of Kirk Hammett

A few days before the incident in the L’Amour club, Hetfield and Ulrich had taken action, on the advice of their friend and recording engineer Mark Whitaker. On 1 April a decisive phone call was made to the West Coast, during which Whitaker addressed the guitarist of Exodus, one Kirk Hammett, in these terms: “Hey, Kirk, these guys are not having a good time with Dave [Mustaine], there are some problems with him personally. They wanna start looking for other guitar players, I played them the Exodus demo and they liked what they heard. So they’re interested in trying you out, I’m gonna send you the No Life ’Til Leather demo.” ¹⁸ Hammett already had the demo, and the group’s songs were familiar to him. And so, five days later, he was seated on a plane headed to New York. On arrival he was welcomed by Mark Whitaker and Cliff Burton, who took him straight to The Music Building to meet the musicians—whom he already knew, since Exodus and Metallica had played together several times in the past. The first song played that day was Seek and Destroy. From that day in April 1983, Kirk Hammett became Metallica’s official, definitive guitarist, and on the 16th of that month, armed with his Gibson Flying V, played his first concert with the group, at The Showplace club in Dover, New Jersey.

Cliff Burton, king of headbangers, in 1983.

The genesis of Kill ’Em All

During this same period, the group was invited to leave the squalid Music Building in New York and move to Farmingdale, to the home of Joe Chimienti, AKA Metal Joe, a member of the Old Bridge Militia, a collective that helped young people in the city who could not afford music equipment or lessons. The Old Bridge Militia took Metallica under its wing and helped Zazula in his efforts to introduce them to US record labels, which met with one rebuff after another. These disappointments led Zazula to found his own label, MegaForce Records, with one avowed goal: to produce Metallica’s first album. Once the label’s management was in place, Zazula followed the advice of a friend, Joey DeMaio, Manowar’s bass guitarist, who directed him to a recording studio in Rochester, Barrett Alley Recording Studios (later Music America Studios). After a financial agreement was reached with the owner, Paul Curcio, under which the latter would co-produce the album and Zazula could reimburse his recording costs at a later stage, the members of Metallica could get down to producing their first album: Kill ’Em All.

Metal Up Your Ass

During the recording sessions, Zazula suggested a visual to the group for the future record, which the musicians wanted to call Metal Up Your Ass. Accompanied by a drawing by Stephen Gorman showing a hand emerging from a lavatory bowl and brandishing a gladiator’s sword skyward, the album was quickly rejected by its future distributor, Important Records, which felt that neither record shops nor potential buyers would find the title and graphic appealing. On hearing this, Cliff Burton cried: “You know what? Fuck those fuckers, man, those fucking record outlet people. We should just kill ’em all.”¹⁹ On hearing this thoughtful response, Jon Zazula replied that “Kill ’Em All” would make a perfect album title. It was immediately agreed by all that Kill ’Em All would be the title of Metallica’s first record.

Famous for their antics of all kinds and for their excessive alcohol consumption, the group were quickly nicknamed Alcohollica by their fans. T-shirts bearing this sarcastic name appeared at their concerts from 1983. On these, “Kill ’Em All” was replaced by “Drank ’Em All,” with an upturned vodka bottle in place of the hammer.

On stage at Willy’s in Sayreville, New Jersey, 7 May 1983: a legendary concert featuring Metallica, Anthrax, Prey, and Steel Fortune.

KIRK HAMMETT, FROM EXODUS TO METALLICA

Born on 18 November 1962 in San Francisco, Kirk Lee Hammett grew up in the small town of El Sobrante, California. His father, Dennis L Hammett, an officer in the merchant marine, displayed a violent character, soon aggravated by a liking for alcohol. Having got hold of his first guitar at 15, Hammett found refuge, and a certain comfort, in music, but also a means of expressing anger that had been too long suppressed after his father had walked out. Hammett’s mother, Teofila, who was of Filipino descent, was left to support herself and her two children as best she could: “I’ve definitely channeled a lot of anger into the music,” he admitted.²

It was on hearing Purple Haze by The Jimi Hendrix Experience—whose influence he never failed to credit—that Hammett experienced a revelation. The youth shut himself away in his room with his first guitar—an entry-level Montgomery Ward—and practiced his instrument for days on end, playing along with one record after another. In 1976, when he discovered Led Zeppelin’s concert film The Song Remains the Same, and the eponymous live album, Kirk was blown away by the virtuosity of their guitarist, Jimmy Page, and soon learned to reproduce the entire version of Dazed and Confused, lasting almost 27 minutes, that features in it. “[…] Seeing the magnificence of Zeppelin onstage, the visual impact of it all…it made the music that much bigger,” he said. “I permanently set my perspective on Hendrix and Zeppelin!”²⁰

Also a devotee of the music of UFO and Michael Schenker’s biting riffs on their 1975 album Force It, in 1979 Kirk Hammett formed his first group, Exodus. “To this day, UFO are my favorite band in the whole world,” Hammett said in 2008. “I was playing Doctor Doctor [from 1974’s Phenomenon] for my one-and-a-half-year-old son. He went crazy.”²¹ Together with the vocalist Paul Baloff, guitarist Tim Agnello, bass guitarist Geoff Andrews, and drummer Tom Hunting, Hammett performed rock inspired by the new wave of British heavy metal, and quickly became part of the new scene in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was during this period that he met the members of Metallica, with whom Exodus shared the billing several times. When the latter’s manager told him that there would be a vacancy for a lead guitarist in Hetfield’s group, Hammett tried his luck, and dazzled with his matchless virtuosity and creativity. “I remember the first time I heard Kirk,” Lars Ulrich recalled. “He had a feel that very few young players have—very rooted in European metal. It was really nice to hear an American guy who didn’t play like Eddie Van Halen.” ²²

Kirk Hammett and his famous Fernandes FST-135 guitar, nicknamed “Edna.”

HIT THE LIGHTS

(James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich/4’17)

Musicians

James Hetfield: vocals, electric guitar

Kirk Hammett: electric guitar

Cliff Burton: bass guitar

Lars Ulrich: drums

Recording

Barrett Alley Recording Studios, Rochester: May 1983

Technical team

Producers: Jon Zazula, Paul Curcio

Recording engineer: Chris Bubacz

Assistant recording engineer: Andy Wroblewski

Genesis

First recorded for the compilation Metal Massacre by Brian Slagel and John Kornarens, Hit the Lights was reworked with Dave Mustaine when he joined the group. It was expected by fans as the introduction to Metallica’s early concerts, and became the foundation stone of the thrash metal style. With its 160 bpm tempo and explicit lyrics (“We know our fans are insane/We are gonna blow this place away”), the group proclaimed its vision of a revitalized heavy metal, and threw all its energy into this project. James Hetfield wrote the song jointly with Lars Ulrich—a way of working that would be employed almost throughout Metallica’s repertoire. “The version on Kill ’Em All was basically a marriage of two songs,” Ulrich explained,²³ with Hetfield bringing the verses and the chorus—which he had done in a band called Leather Charm—and Ulrich bringing the whole back half, also from something he had previously done.

Production

Hit the Lights was the first number Kirk Hammett recorded for Metallica—and a baptism of fire for the musician, who had made the journey from San Francisco to New York with the goal of landing the guitarist’s job. Having joined the band on a Monday in mid-April 1983, Hammett played his first concert the following Friday, and began his first recording sessions for Kill ’Em All a month later. “I kind of realized I must be in the band because nobody told me otherwise,” he said.²³ Hammett asserted his presence in Metallica with a deluge of notes (“I really wanted to be flashy,”²⁴ he admitted). By contrast, Hetfield—whose voice, which was not yet completely under control, was recorded using a Neumann U87 microphone combined with an RCA ribbon microphone—was already displaying a hostility that the group would not be rid of in a hurry. “I was making decisions just to make it big and loud and nasty,” explained the record’s producer, Paul Curcio.²⁵

James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, and Lars Ulrich backstage at Mickey’s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 13 August 1983.

THE FOUR HORSEMEN

(James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Dave Mustaine/7’08)

Musicians

James Hetfield: vocals, electric guitar

Kirk Hammett: electric guitar

Cliff Burton: bass guitar

Lars Ulrich: drums

Recording

Barrett Alley Recording Studios, Rochester: May 1983

Technical team

Producers: Jon Zazula, Paul Curcio

Recording engineer: Chris Bubacz

Assistant recording engineer: Andy Wroblewski

Genesis

The Mechanix was written by Dave Mustaine and introduced to the group during their first writing sessions. “When I got into Metallica,” he explained, “we didn’t have a lot of songs. ... We were playing cover songs by Killing Joke, Sweet Savage, and a lot of Diamond Head, and we played my originals.”²⁶ The band’s flagship song at the time of their first concerts, The Mechanix quickly became a classic for fans. When Mustaine left the band, in April 1983, Metallica decided to keep the song and modify it somewhat, first of all by changing the original lyrics Mustaine had written. “The lyrics are about a horny gas-station attendant because I was a horny gas-station attendant. I was a teenager living down in the Huntington Beach Harbor and girls would come into the gas station, driving these really expensive cars in bikinis. Fuck, are you kidding me? And that’s back when they had full service, so you would wash the windows and they would sit there in their bikinis and you got to check ’em out while they were sitting in their cars,” the guitarist remembered.²⁶ Delving into memories of his childhood, when his parents made him study the Bible, James Hetfield borrowed from the Book of Revelation (the last in the New Testament) the image of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—representing death, famine, war, and conquest—to produce lyrics more profound than those of Hit the Lights, thus laying the foundations for songwriting based on his reading and above all on his personal history.

Production

When Lars Ulrich introduced The Mechanix to the other members of Metallica, he felt an instrumental part following the traditional pattern of verses and choruses should be written, to open up the song. Dave Mustaine had come to rehearsal that day with Cliff Burton, who was already a member of the band, and had an idea that was both mischievous and ingenious. “I’d been listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd in the car with Cliff and I figured, ‘OK, I’ll play Sweet Home Alabama, he’ll never know.’ And he [Lars] was like, ‘Fuck, man, that’s the greatest part ever.’ And so I went, ‘Oh, my God. You’re kidding, right?’ So Mechanix with Sweet Home Alabama in the beginning is what we fondly know now as The Four Horsemen.”²⁶

Dave Mustaine offered his own version of The Mechanix in June 1985 on Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good!, the first album from his group, Megadeth.

The songs written by Dave Mustaine (center) would live on after his departure from the group.

MOTORBREATH

(James Hetfield/3’03)

Musicians

James Hetfield: vocals, electric guitar

Kirk Hammett: electric guitar

Cliff Burton: bass guitar

Lars Ulrich: drums

Recording

Barrett Alley Recording Studios, Rochester: May 1983

Technical team

Producers: Jon Zazula, Paul Curcio

Recording engineer: Chris Bubacz

Assistant recording engineer: Andy Wroblewski

Genesis

In the many interviews he has given to the rock press over the years, Dave Mustaine has claimed that Motorbreath was written by Hugh Tanner, not by James Hetfield. Whether that is true or not, one thing is certain: the singer and Tanner, his bosom buddy in Leather Charm, were already playing Motorbreath during the group’s rehearsals, before the formation of Metallica. Although the song was not inspired by the famous rock musicians of the band Motörhead, of whom Hetfield was then a confirmed fan, the piece’s infernal tempo echoes some of the British band’s songs, such as Iron Fist and Heart of Stone, which feature on their 1982 album Iron Fist. As he declares in the lyrics of Motorbreath (“Don’t stop for nothing, it’s full speed or nothing,” he sings in the second verse), Hetfield was determined to make the most of life, and burn it out in the most violent way. Recalling the recording of the album Kill ’Em All, Lars Ulrich said: “There was no money and everything was a struggle. We drank the cheapest, shittiest beer we could get hold of and ate the worst fast food […].”²³ He goes on to explain how they stayed at the home of Gary Zefting—“a guy who worked at the studio”²³—for two or three weeks and completely trashed it.

Production

Although Kirk Hammett’s guitar solo in Motorbreath is not as long as that in The Four Horsemen, it nevertheless demonstrates meticulous writing on the part of the musician, for whom every note counted—something that would contribute to his fame over the years. A master of the C-sharp minor pentatonic scale, which he joyfully employs in this song, here Hammett shows his ability to free himself from the restriction of musical genres, while indulging in the most furious rock. “It’s bluesy licks in a thrashy context,” he said of the guitar solo that lights up the song from 1’38 to 1’48. “I found out really early that it worked.”²⁴ No one would dare contradict him!

As James Hetfield teasingly said, if Motorbreath is so short it is because of Lars Ulrich. “The song has never got past like two minutes because every time he hit the cymbal it fell over and we had to stop,”²⁷ he joked.

Metallica and Jon Zazula (crouching), photographed by Kevin Hodapp in 1983.

JUMP IN THE FIRE

(James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Dave Mustaine/4’50)

Musicians

James Hetfield: vocals, electric guitar

Kirk Hammett: electric guitar

Cliff Burton: bass guitar

Lars Ulrich: drums

Recording

Barrett Alley Recording Studios, Rochester: May 1983

Technical team

Producers: Jon Zazula, Paul Curcio

Recording engineer: Chris Bubacz

Assistant recording engineer: Andy Wroblewski

USA version

Studio side: Jump in the Fire/4’38, Whiplash (Special Neckbrace Remix)/4’10

Live side: Seek and Destroy/7’02, Phantom Lord/4’53

UK version

Studio side: Jump in the Fire/4’38

Live side: Seek and Destroy/7’02, Phantom Lord/4’53

Released in the USA by MegaForce Records: 23 January 1984 (maxi single ref.: MRS-04)

Released in the UK by Music For Nations: 20 January 1984 (maxi single ref.: 12 KUT-105)

Genesis

Like The Mechanix, which became The Four Horsemen, Jump in the Fire was originally written by Dave Mustaine before being reworked by the group during its first rehearsals. Before James Hetfield rewrote its lyrics with a view to the recording of Kill ’Em All, the song did not touch on the theme of fire as an unavoidable element of a satanic ritual the singer seems to be conducting in his home, urging listeners to come and take part. The words of the initial version of the song, like those of The Mechanix, contained a message that was more sexual than occult, which Mustaine had come up with as a reaction to his strict upbringing. “[…] Those were the writings of a young male who was not quite 21 yet and had been severely religiously abused from my mom’s religion,” he explained. “She was a Jehovah’s Witness, and, to me, I don’t believe in it. My opinion is that it’s a cult, and my family’s still in that religion, and it’s a bummer. You grow up learning certain things like you can’t do the pledge of allegiance [to the American flag, recited by schoolchildren in class every morning], you can’t have a birthday party, or any of that, and that kind of stuff really affected the way my myopic of the world and the prism that I saw it through.”²⁸

Production

All the guitar parts on the album Kill ’Em All were recorded using the same amplifier, James Hetfield’s Marshall SLP Master Volume. This had been previously modified by Jose Arredondo, a Californian nicknamed “The Amp Guru” for his work on the equipment of such guitar virtuosi as Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai. While James Hetfield used only his famous Japanese Electra Flying V 2236 guitar, bought for $200 in 1981, on the album, Kirk Hammett used his precious Gibson Flying V guitar, fitted with 496R and 500T humbucker (double coil) pickups, noted for their powerful output. “When we were tracking, so much time was spent tuning those guitars because we didn’t have any back-up guitars or anything else,” explained Kirk. “We didn’t have any techs or roadies in the studio, so we pretty much had to change strings ourselves, tune it up ourselves. Which was fine for us because that’s what we were used to at that point.”²⁹

Kirk Hammett, playing his famous black Gibson Flying V, accompanies James Hetfield on stage at the Aardschokdag Festival in Zwolle, Netherlands, 11 February 1984.

(ANESTHESIA) – PULLING TEETH

(Cliff Burton/3’27)

Musicians

Cliff Burton: bass guitar

Lars Ulrich: drums

Chris Bubacz: spoken voice

Recording

Barrett Alley Recording Studios, Rochester: May 1983

Technical team

Producers: Jon Zazula, Paul Curcio

Recording engineer: Chris Bubacz

Assistant recording engineer: Andy Wroblewski

Genesis

On the second floor of Barrett Alley Recording Studios (which would become Music America Studios a few years later), there was a room where musicians and the in-house recording engineer, Chris Bubacz, set up the bass guitar and guitar amplifiers, a studio technique that prevented their sound feeding back to the drum kit’s microphones and vice versa. As he had done with his previous group, Trauma, Cliff Burton wanted to establish a bass guitar solo within Metallica’s repertoire, a suggestion he put to its members when he joined the group. “At that time, drum solos and those sorts of solos were sort of frowned upon by who we were,” Lars Ulrich explained. “But we figured with his talent, he should. So we tried to find a way to do a bass solo in a way that would maybe be a little more in line with the way we were thinking at the time, so we thought maybe putting some drums behind it and making it a little bit more of a rhythmic experience that people could bop along to or whatever was the right thing to do. And then when it came time to put it on a record, instead of it just being a bass solo, we turned it into more of a composition.”³⁰

Production

Standing tall in front of his amplifier, which consisted of a 300-watt Randall head connected to two speakers of the same brand, one with an 18-inch (45cm) driver and the other with two, Cliff Burton said to Kirk Hammett: “Get away from me, man—I’m about to do this.”²³ Burton then took a drag on a joint, drank a gulp of beer, and retreated into his bubble to create his masterpiece. He launched into a classic solo, this time largely improvised, as his drummer, who was in another room in the studios at the time, described: “Everything about Cliff with that type of stuff was very, very off the cuff. He didn’t labor over it. If there was five different takes, I’m sure all five of them would be completely different from each other.”³⁰ Holding his famous Rickenbacker 4001, its pickups replaced by a Gibson EB-0 Sidewinder on the fingerboard, a Seymour Duncan Hot Stack Jazz Bass, and a Seymour Duncan Hot Stack Strat at the bridge, Burton unleashed his solo, with his instrument plugged into its Morley Power Wah Boost pedal, thus simultaneously producing the distorted effect of the sound and of its filter—the hallmark of wah-wah pedals.

Cliff Burton, newly recruited by Metallica, backstage at Mickey’s, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 13 August 1983.

WHIPLASH

(James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich/4’06)

Musicians

James Hetfield: vocals, electric guitar

Kirk Hammett: electric guitar

Cliff Burton: bass guitar

Lars Ulrich: drums

Recording

Barrett Alley Recording Studios, Rochester: May 1983

Technical team

Producers: Jon Zazula, Paul Curcio

Recording engineer: Chris Bubacz

Assistant recording engineer: Andy Wroblewski

Genesis

“The phrase ‘thrash’ suggests lack of music ability and that’s one thing we do not suffer from,” James Hetfield said in 1984. “I don’t know exactly what I’d call us but I hate the phrase trash […]”³¹ Even though Kirk Hammett made the same point in several interviews, Metallica nevertheless remained famous for being the group that founded the thrash metal style with the release of their album Kill ’Em All, with its furious tempo. “We were young, we were hungry and had a lot of youthful energy,” Kirk Hammett explained in 2008. “Part of the reason why we would play so fast is because we were just nervous.”³²

When they were writing Whiplash, one of Hetfield and Ulrich’s main reference points was the group Venom, whose album Welcome to Hell (1981) was a real revelation for the Metallica vocalist, who admitted being hugely inspired by songs such as Angel Dust and Live Like an Angel (Die Like a Devil), in composing what would become a promotional single after Jump in the Fire, released as a single on 20 January 1984. “Venom need to get namechecked more when people talk about Metallica’s early days,”²³ Hetfield said.

Production

Lars Ulrich revealed in 1988 that Whiplash borrowed from Stormchild by the British group Jaguar, after he had come across this song on the compilation Heavy Metal Heroes, released in 1981 by the Heavy Metal Records label, which featured other bands such as Twisted Ace and Grim Reaper. However, it was another musician, Cronos, Venom’s legendary bass guitarist, who pointed out the similarities between Whiplash and a song by his group, Witching Hour. Between 3 February and 29 August 1984, Venom invited Metallica to be the support act on several dates of their European tour, and the former would not forget in a hurry the juvenile attitude—to say the least—of the band from San Francisco. “The first gig was in Zurich, and they were pretty lame onstage,” Cronos commented. “[…] I don’t know if they were over-excited or if they had jetlag. But they went backstage and smashed the shit out of the dressing room. We had to kind of rein them in a bit: ‘If you’ve got the energy to smash your dressing room up, you didn’t put enough into the show. You need to come offstage so tired that the last thing you want to do is this […].’ They were fine after that.”⁴

FOR METALLICA ADDICTS

On 3 August 2004 the compilation Metallic Attack: the Ultimate Tribute was released—a disc of Metallica covers by various bands on the international rock scene. By way of a homage to those who have ceaselessly claimed Motörhead was one of their major influences, Lemmy Kilmister’s band contributed a widely appreciated cover of Whiplash.

A mock satanic ritual with Anthony “Abaddon” Bray, Conrad “Cronos” Lant, and Jeffrey “Mantas” Dunn of the group Venom, 1982.

PHANTOM LORD

(James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Dave Mustaine/4’52)

Musicians

James Hetfield: vocals, electric guitar

Kirk Hammett: electric guitar, acoustic guitar

Cliff Burton: bass guitar

Lars Ulrich: drums

?: synthesizer

Recording

Barrett Alley Recording Studios, Rochester: May 1983

Technical team

Producers: Jon Zazula, Paul Curcio

Recording engineer: Chris Bubacz

Assistant recording engineer: Andy Wroblewski

Genesis

In the same vein as Hit the Lights, Phantom Lord features the punk rhythms that had permeated the new wave of British heavy metal, even though thrash metal and speed metal musicians initially rejected the British trend exemplified by The Sex Pistols, before timidly supporting their legacy—for example, by declaring their love of bands such as The Ramones. The song’s title of course references one of the first groups James Hetfield belonged to, Phantom Lord, which also nurtured the guitarist Hugh Tanner and the drummer Jim Mulligan. In the lyrics, Metallica’s singer for the first time deals with a phantasmagoric, imaginary world peopled by mysterious warriors, brave, victorious lords, and unsettling monsters that is the trademark of many metal groups such as the American band Manowar—whom Metallica detested, as Lars Ulrich indicated in a reply to his French fans in the magazine Metal Attack in 1983.

Production

Phantom Lord has firepower, delivered by James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett, who advocated using two guitars in their recordings, especially for the frequent harmonization in the latter’s solos. “Using the English sound and the English way of doing things, which was two guitars,” Ulrich explained. “Everything in America was primarily one guitar, a little bit looser,” but he goes on to list some “guiding lights.” “If you take Diamond Head’s Lightning to the Nations, Motörhead’s Overkill, Ace of Spades […], Saxon’s Wheels of Steel, Tygers of Pan Tang’s Wild Cat… those are the blueprints that fed into what we were doing.”²³

Before he became one of the most famous ambassadors for the Tama brand, Lars Ulrich earned his spurs on a Pearl drumkit.

NO REMORSE

(James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich/6’24)

Musicians

James Hetfield: vocals, electric guitar

Kirk Hammett: electric guitar

Cliff Burton: bass guitar

Lars Ulrich: drums

Recording

Barrett Alley Recording Studios, Rochester: May 1983

Technical team

Producers: Jon Zazula, Paul Curcio

Recording engineer: Chris Bubacz

Assistant recording engineer: Andy Wroblewski

Genesis

According to Ross Halfin, who would become Metallica’s official photographer when they were on tour, Hetfield and Ulrich had drawn inspiration from the main riff in Hocus Pocus, a rock oddity by the Dutch group Focus, released in 1971 (1973 in the United States), that combined rock rhythms, yodeling, sound effects made with the mouth, and Hammond organ playing in the style of Jon Lord, Deep Purple’s virtuoso keyboard player. As Lars Ulrich confirmed, the initial version of the song was remodeled with the idea that it should find a place on the group’s first album: “No Remorse was embellished to a degree from when we first wrote it, as was Phantom Lord and Four Horsemen and Seek & Destroy, but the songs weren’t radically different to the way they were written.”²³

Production

The production of Kill ’Em All created some problems within the team. First of all, the members of Metallica felt that the producer appointed to lead this project, Paul Curcio, was a producer in name only. He had no experience of making a heavy metal album, but benefited from his position as boss of the Barrett Alley Recording Studios, and from the fact that he had not yet asked Zazula to pay the bill for recording the LP. But it was when it came to mixing Kill ’Em All that tensions came to a head. To bring this enormous project to its conclusion, Curcio and his recording engineer, Chris Bubacz, decided to dispense with the group and not involve them in this crucial stage, which required peace and quiet. Thus only Zazula was allowed to communicate Metallica’s complaints to the two men, who were shut away in the control room. “[…] That was a real eye-opener,” Kirk Hammett explained. “It was like, we’re not going to let this happen again, there needs to be at least one person from the band in there representing the band.”³³

Despite numerous interviews in which Metallica’s musicians complained of the delay and reverb effects introduced in the mixing process against their will, Curcio defended himself against the attacks of Hetfield, Hammett, and Ulrich in the pages of Billboard in 2018: “[…] They were reaching over the engineer and grabbing the control knobs and just getting in the way. So I locked them out of the control room. My son always tells me that I was mean to them. I wasn’t mean; I was trying to get the album done.”²⁵

An ambiance like a hairdresser’s salon—photographed by Ross Halfin in 1985.

SEEK AND DESTROY

(James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich/6’50)

Musicians

James Hetfield: vocals, electric guitar

Kirk Hammett: electric guitar

Cliff Burton: bass guitar

Lars Ulrich: drums

Recording

Barrett Alley Recording Studios, Rochester: May 1983

Technical team

Producers: Jon Zazula, Paul Curcio

Recording engineer: Chris Bubacz

Assistant recording engineer: Andy Wroblewski

Genesis

It was James Hetfield who created what would become one of the most famous riffs in the history of metal: the one in Seek and Destroy. When it came to lyrics, the lead singer did not look far for inspiration, for there is something unquestionably autobiographical in his tale of the adventures of musicians roaming through the city with the sole aim of fighting and smashing everything in their path. From the point of view of the song’s structure, by contrast, the band at this time decided to fill out their songs by adding bigger instrumental parts to the traditional verses and choruses. This idea came from their passion for Mercyful Fate, a Danish group that Ulrich and his companions listened to constantly during the period when they made Kill ’Em All. “They had long songs that were journeys through all different moods and dynamics and light and shade, and they were responsible for us lengthening our own songs […],” Ulrich explained, adding that the aim was to improve on it.²³

Production

Beyond its legendary opening riff, Seek and Destroy is recognizable by its guitar solo, performed with virtuosity by the great Kirk Hammett. Since 1980, when he was already playing with Exodus, Kirk Hammett had taken guitar lessons from someone who would become one of the greatest guitar players in the history of rock: Joe Satriani. While still unknown, Satriani was a guitar teacher like no other. His playing, which was inventive and of unparalleled technical mastery, brought joy to many musicians, including the future maestros Steve Vai, Alex Skolnick (of Testament), and Larry Lalonde (of Primus). For some of his pupils, including the young Hammett, Satriani could see a brilliant future, as he explained in 2020: “I could tell that they were turning into geniuses, they were turning into super talents, and I didn’t see anything standing in their way.”³⁴ Kirk Hammett never got over a detail hidden in the heart of his solo: “On a couple of notes in that solo, I bend the notes out of pitch [at 3’44 and 3’48]. For 18 years, every time I’ve heard that guitar solo, those sour notes come back to haunt me!”¹⁹

Before he became one of the most famous shredders, Joe Satriani was Kirk Hammett’s guitar teacher until 1988.

METAL MILITIA

(James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Dave Mustaine/6’06)

Musicians

James Hetfield: vocals, electric guitar

Kirk Hammett: electric guitar

Cliff Burton: bass guitar

Lars Ulrich: drums

Recording

Music America Studios, Rochester: May 1983

Barrett Alley Recording Studios, Rochester: May 1983

Technical team

Producers: Jon Zazula, Paul Curcio

Recording engineer: Chris Bubacz

Assistant recording engineer: Andy Wroblewski

Genesis

It was back to business with Metal Militia, which bears the red-hot hallmark of Dave Mustaine. This song, which features on the 1982 demo No Life ’Til Leather, is, together with Hit the Lights, one of the cornerstones of the thrash metal style. While the thunderous drumming of Lars Ulrich hammers out patterns frequently found in punk music, the lyrics reference a heroic fantasy world, from which the group wished to quickly detach themselves, breaking free of a style that marked certain metal groups at the time. “As we started figuring out what we were doing,” Ulrich explained, “we deliberately started to move away from […] the heavy metal clichés—the sword and sorcery imagery, the leather and studs […] we started getting into things like fear and manipulation, the idea of being trapped in situations you can’t get out of.”²³ A wise decision, that would soon produce masterpieces such as Ride the Lightning, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Master of Puppets.

Production

As fans know well, the tension between Dave Mustaine and his former group rarely eased, and the jibes the guitarist aimed at Kirk Hammett were a regular feature of Metallica’s history. To understand the origin of the conflict, it is necessary to go back to the time Hammett joined the band. After a few warm-up concerts in April 1983, the group were sent to record their first album in Rochester, a suburb of New York. From the first takes, Jon Zazula asked Hammett to reproduce Mustaine’s guitar solos exactly, for fear of disappointing fans, who had taken to the songs from hearing them at concerts. Kirk accepted reluctantly, and on condition that he retain only the first four bars of each solo and play what followed as he wanted. “If you listen to the solos on the album and then listen to the No Life ’Til Leather demo you’ll find that completely different. My style is totally different to Dave’s. He likes to masturbate on the fretboard, playing 10,000 notes in a small time measure. I don’t come from that school of guitar playing, all my notes are thought out.”³⁵ Mustaine’s response was: “[…] Kirk got my royalties for Metal Militia for many, many years. […] Not bitterness—I’m over it. It’s just money.”³⁶

On 6 November 2022, Metallica gave a concert in memory of Marsha and Jon Zazula, who had died in January 2021 and February 2022 respectively. On this occasion the group performed only songs that had been recorded in 1983 and 1984. Raven played the first part of the show, which was held at Hard Rock Live, the auditorium of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida.

Metallica and The Old Bridge Militia, who supported Metallica in their development, as well as helping young people in Old Bridge, New Jersey, (and, later, young musicians further afield) wishing to get involved in performing music.