The newly christened Metallica made their live debut on 14 March 1982 at Radio City in Anaheim, California. Within a year, original guitarist Dave Mustaine and bassist Ron McGovney would be ousted in favour of Kirk Hammett and Cliff Burton respectively.
The singer had more in common with the working-class Burton than he did the cosmopolitan Ulrich, and the pair swiftly bonded over guns, beer and Southern rock.
Burton didn’t want to live in Los Angeles so the band relocated to his turf, moving into a two-bedroom house in the San Francisco suburb of El Cerrito. Here they indulged their passions to the full. “I mean, music was the fuel,” says Ulrich. “Alcohol was the second, then girls were third. Alcohol was definitely more important than girls.” The band’s fondness for booze prompted them to nickname themselves Alcoholica.
Their debut album, Kill ’Em All, was released in July 1983. With no radio support and no videos, they thrived on gritty resolve. “ We’d play anywhere,” says Hetfield. “The people’s band. Go and deliver the goods.”
The more sophisticated Ride The Lightning followed the next year. Keen to further their career, the band became clients of Q-Prime, the management company that looked after Def Leppard, and signed a major US label deal with Elektra in 1984. In mid-’86 they supported Ozzy Osbourne on his American tour, an ideal showcase for their new record, Master Of Puppets. It was their first album to go gold in the US, selling 500,000 copies by the end of the year. But Metallica’s best year to date abruptly became the worst in their entire history when their bus overturned on a deserted road in Sweden, killing their bassist.
Cliff Burton was cremated on 7 October 1986 at the Chapel Of The Valley in his hometown of Castro Valley, California. His bandmates, family and friends stood in a circle with the bassist’s ashes in the centre. One by one, they paid their respects and scattered a handful of ashes on the ground.
Despite his closeness to Burton, Hetfield struggled to comprehend the magnitude of the event. Funerals weren’t part of his Christian Scientist upbringing, and the grieving process was alien to him. “I didn’t feel the vibe,” he says. “I just drank more.”
Burton’s death marked a turning point for Metallica. Their alcohol-fuelled excesses stepped up, though getting wasted was less about having fun than it was a coping mechanism. “There was so much anger because of [ Burton’s death],” says Hammett. “That kicked the drinking up two or three notches. Between 1987 and 1990, we were raging alcoholics.”
They also threw themselves into their work. On 28 October, Jason Newsted – of Arizona metal band Flotsam & Jetsam – was hired as Burton’s replacement, and they went straight back out on the road.
For the three surviving members, it was a woefully ineffective strategy for dealing with their grief, and Newsted soon felt their pain. The bassist faced a brutal initiation ritual that lasted, in Ulrich’s words, “two or three years”. In Japan, the drummer persuaded Newsted to swallow a spoonful of hot wasabi sauce, telling him it was mint ice cream. Hetfield would amend his autograph of “Jason, bass face” by crossing out the “B”. The fact that Newsted would rise to the bait only encouraged his new bandmates.
“There was some misguided frustration [over Burton’s death],” Newsted tells Q today. “He’s taken from you and another person is put in his shoes, playing out of his amp, 25 days later. What the fuck?”
Lars Ulrich has joked that the band’s fourth album, 1988’s …And Justice For All, was originally going to be called Wild Chicks And Fast Cars And Lots Of Drugs. This was an accurate picture of Metallica’s growing intemperance, even if Ulrich didn’t like cars and Hetfield steered clear of drugs. Thanks to the success of the album – helped by the single One, for which they made their first promo video – Metallica could now afford to indulge their excesses to the full. “We kept it under wraps, but there were an awful lot of drugs around,” says Ulrich, whose income allowed him to pursue a growing interest in art (the first piece he bought was an Andy Warhol painting of three apples; he refuses to say how much it cost). For the first time, a rift was starting to appear in Metallica’s ranks; the faultline was the members’ individual vices. Ulrich and Hammett had developed a fondness for cocaine (“A lot and often,” says the drummer). Hetfield, on the other hand, was terrified of narcotics and stuck to drinking. |
