Justice for All: The Truth about Metallica

www.joelmciver.co.uk

1

Before 1980

If the Metallica story is to begin anywhere, it might as well begin in a jazz club in Rome, where, on a May night in 1973, a bearded, music-loving Dane called Torben Ulrich took his ten-year-old son Lars to listen to a show by his friend, the 50-year-old tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon.

Thirty years later, Ulrich can still snigger at the memory of that night. The first time I saw Lars performing on stage was down in Rome, he remembers. I’d been playing the Italian Open. Dexter was playing in a nightclub and Lars’ mother and I went to see him. And all of a sudden, Lars went up on stage and sang into the microphone and ran around on the stage for a few moments. He pauses, shaking his head in amazement at the innate courage of a kid who would do such a thing. It was like some dog who runs amok for a moment. It was very surprising to everyone.

And so the die was cast.

Lone Ulrich gave birth to Torben’s first and only child on December 26, 1963, at Gentofte in Denmark. The boy they named simply Lars was fortunate in the privileges he would enjoy: his father was an internationally recognised tennis star and was active in many other areas as an actor, musician, writer and painter. He played for 20 years at Wimbledon, as did his own father, but he is now deeply philosophical about the talent that took him there. What does it mean to have that sort of heritage? he asks. I try not to see it in very narrow terms – what it means conventionally – but also to view it in greater terms.

The deeply philosophical psyche of Torben Ulrich sheds invaluable light on the character of his son: for example, he has much to say on the nature of the tennis-ball-themed art which he has created over the years: Cosmology comes up very quickly when you think about the balls, with the spheres and the planets. You investigate the limits of that perception if you try not to take the conventional measures. You say, what is ball-playing about, and you question the concept of winning and losing, and if you question that, you question the nature of play itself.

Torben’s extra-curricular interests outside the tennis court included movie-making (he had collaborated on a film called Motion Picture in 1969) and acrylic painting, best exemplified by a long-running series of ink and rice-paper works called Imprints Of Practice, which he started in 1971 and exhibited in Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Seattle. Add to the résumé his spiritual interests (Torben had visited Indian teachers in music and yoga in the Fifties, as well as studying Japanese Zen in London in the Sixties) and the cultural depth which Lars observed, even as a child, is clear.

The Ulrich family was both well-travelled and well-connected. Before Lars was born I played music and visited London, recalls Torben. I was friends with Chris Barber, who is a trombonist who plays traditional jazz music. Humphrey Lyttelton too. I would play with him at 100 Oxford Street, we’d spend a lot of time there. The jazz influences which would mould Ulrich’s own playing came from clearly defined sources. I was a student of Sidney Bechet’s work, both before I knew him and later on. Even in the late Forties I was interested in him. I travelled to France and saw some bands who were playing in the style of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. Bechet was a big hero there, and I tried to get to Paris as often as I could to be around him.

Torben’s relationship with the intense Bechet grew, but the tennis star’s professional activities caused his mentor some consternation: Slowly we developed a relationship where he was the teacher and I was the student, says Ulrich, with evident pleasure. Then he saw in the paper that I had misbehaved on the tennis court and phoned me up and scolded me.

A certain stubborn extrovert quality might be inferred from the way that Ulrich refers so casually to his on-court ‘misbehaviour’ – but how much of this was the same exuberance shown in the antics of his son on stage with Dexter Gordon that night in Rome? It turns out that there is a reason for Lars’ appearance on stage that night after all: Gordon was his godfather.

The Ulrichs and Gordon shared a similar itinerant lifestyle and Gordon settled in Denmark in the Seventies for a while – in Copenhagen, where the Ulrich family were living at the time. There was an interest in Copenhagen in that kind of music: for example there was a club called the Montmartre, says Torben. Stan Getz lived there for a while, and so did Bud Powell. Dexter came to Denmark after playing at the London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s for a few weeks. There was a whole setting there, if you will, and we were the young guys who would follow it intimately and write about it. It was Ulrich’s activities as a journalist which brought them together: "At the time I was writing about jazz for a Danish newspaper called Politiken. Dexter became a large figure in the nightlife in the late Fifties, into the Sixties and onwards. We would see him when we were travelling."

The two men developed their friendship and when Lars was born Gordon agreed to be his godfather, but circumstances dictated that they were unable to develop any kind of relationship. Gordon relocated to the USA shortly afterwards, as Torben recollects: When they could have had a closer relationship, Dexter was either already living in New York, or was in bad shape, or had passed away.* But the memory of his godfather stayed with Lars in some form, it seems: I remember Lars telling me that he had met Lionel Hampton on the road, and that he had told Lionel that Dexter Gordon was his godfather, adds Torben. They had a good long talk about that in some breakfast place.

Even in Gordon’s absence, Lars began to soak up the music he heard around him from a very early age. There were always musicians around the house from the day he was born, recalls Torben. An early turning point came when Lars was 10, in 1973, when a family friend visited: We had a good friend called Ray Moore, a South African player, who was playing in Copenhagen. Ray took Lars to see his first concert, says Torben now.

The nine-year-old boy was so smitten by the show that he went into the city the next day and bought the new album by the group he had seen. The record was called Fireball. And the band that had so impressed was Deep Purple.

Several thousand miles and a whole universe away, a generation of American children and young adolescents were experiencing the same rush that Lars Ulrich felt on seeing Deep Purple for the first time. In the mid-Seventies, American rock fans were in thrall to homegrown stadium fillers such as Kiss, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent and ZZ Top; huge sellers who toured the cities and heartlands with equal diligence until the point came where each new album from any of them wasn’t merely a release – it was An Event. They were following in the footsteps of the British rock bands who had spent years establishing vast followings in America, groups in the vanguard, like The Rolling Stones and The Who, then the second tier bands like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and – most notably of all – Led Zeppelin, whose over-the-top histrionics, spitfire blues and bludgeoning riffs established the idea that heavy rock could be British and cool at the same time.

If you were born in the early Sixties and were living in the more liberal areas of the USA like Los Angeles and San Francisco, and you enjoyed rock music, you would almost certainly have developed a fondness for the music of these acts. The concept of ‘heavy metal’ was still quite new in the minds of most fans, who would happily listen to Meat Loaf, Kansas, Journey, Vanilla Fudge and Blue Cheer and classify it all as ‘rock’ without worrying too much (or at all) about which category it belonged to.

One such fan was David Mustaine, born on September 13, 1961 in La Mesa in California, a community east of San Diego. His home life was more or less diametrically opposed to the privileged upbringing which Lars Ulrich was enjoying in Denmark. Dave’s father is alleged to have been troubled and unstable, whose erratic behaviour forced Mustaine and his mother to move house frequently. By 1974, Dave had been introduced to the pleasures of pop music via his sister, a Cat Stevens fan, although he was tiring of the gentility of confessional singer-songwriters and beginning to explore the world of rock. Like so many insecure American teenagers, he was drawn to Led Zeppelin, as he told the author in 1999: "Houses Of The Holy or Four Sticks [sic]* were my favourite records … Or The Beatles’ White Album. I would just listen to them and not even realise that I had gone to the turntableto flip the disc. That was just a mind-melding period for me."

As time passed, Dave began teaching himself to play the guitar, although he made one or two decisions he regretted despite his growing fondness for music: "Led Zeppelin did come through my town once, but this was just after The Song Remains The Same had come out and I thought that they were starting to lose it, so I didn’t go. I was just becoming a cocky young guitar player at the time, and I had no idea how much I’d cheated myself." But music remained his obsession, and by the late Seventies Mustaine was jamming with other musicians.

His first successful band was an outfit named Panic.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in California, another, less troubled kid by the name of Kirk Lee Hammett was growing up and getting into rock music at the same time as Mustaine, although he wouldn’t start learning the guitar until his fifteenth year in 1977. Born on November 18, 1962, Kirk grew up in El Sobrante, a valley community located not far from San Francisco.

Kirk was a rock fan from an early age, recalling via a webchat hosted by Twec.com in 2000: I loved Jimi Hendrix, Kiss, Aerosmith, and ZZ Top, and I felt that if I learned how to play their music, I’d become closer to them, I’d be unlocking some sort of mystery. When you learn how to play someone’s music, it answers questions on a musical level, but it remains a mystery on other levels. I just felt that if I made their music, I’d be making a connection to them.

The half-Irish, half-Filipino Hammett was the middle child between an older brother Rick, who encouraged him to learn the guitar, and a younger sister Tracy; his father was a naval officer and his mother a government employee. The pensive, almost cerebral Hammett was clearly a child of unusual spirituality, even at a young age, although this didn’t stop him celebrating the rawer end of heavy rock and working hard to improve his skills and equipment.

Kirk’s first guitar was a Montgomery Ward model ordered from a catalogue, which he played through a home-made amplifier, constructed from a shoebox and a four-inch speaker. After many hours of practice he managed to scrape together the funds for a 1978 Fender Stratocaster, which he constantly adjusted in the hunt for an improved sound. A sojourn at Burger King gave him the money for a Marshall amp and he began looking for other musicians to play with: his hunt ended when he met a singer named Paul Baloff. The pair decided to form a band called Exodus, and started to write material together.

About three weeks after Kirk’s birth, a couple who lived just east of San Francisco named Jan and Ray Burton had a son, Clifford Lee. Born on February 10, 1962, the young Cliff was the youngest of three children (he had a brother, Scott, and a sister, Connie) and was an active child, playing Little League baseball for the Castro Valley Auto House team and studying firstly at Earl Warren Junior High and then Castro Valley High School. During his vacations, Cliff was always busy: he worked at an equipment rental yard called Castro Valley Rentals and spent time with his friends, hunting, playing music and fishing.

The biggest change in his teenage life came when Cliff began to learn the bass guitar. He had studied music theory at school and made rapid progress in the lessons he took on the instrument from September 1978 to January 1980, and it wasn’t long before he was in demand with local groups. One band he played with was called AD 2 Million, another was Agents Of Misfortune (after the Blue Oyster Cult record of the same name) and consisted of Cliff and a guitarist called Jim Martin, who would later find fame as a member of Faith No More. The only band which Burton and Martin placed much stock in, however, was an outfit called EZ Street, which also featured the future Faith No More/Ozzy Osbourne drummer Mike ‘Puffy’ Bordin, although his place was sporadically filled by a friend, Dave Donato.

Martin, who is now living away from the public eye after several years in Faith No More, remembers those times clearly: I started teaching myself electric guitar around 1974 and wanted to find other musicians to jam with, he recalls. I hooked up with a singer and a guitar player who’d been playing Rolling Stones covers together around the campfire, and we talked about forming a band. My neighbour played drums, so we got him. We found a bass player who later quit and recommended a fella to take his place. His name was Cliff Burton.

The problem of finding suitable rehearsal space was solved when the musicians’ parents allowed them – perhaps unwisely – to use their homes to practise in: We went through a few rehearsals at the homes of our parents, who were good enough to indulge us on a rotating basis, says Martin, before adding: Generally they would leave the house. Things got broken. Puffy’s next-door neighbours’ baby went to the hospital and the neighbours accused us of killing the baby. As might be expected, EZ Street didn’t create much of a buzz. Martin recalls, We played a few talent contests, the church fiesta, and parties. Our only paying gig was in Berkeley, a dive called the International Café. It was run by a couple of Greeks. They loved us; all our friends would come out to see us and we’d drink the place dry. We were about 15 at the time.

Cliff had a quixotic personality, which manifested itself in many bizarre ways. He drove a green Volkswagen (which he dubbed ‘the Grasshopper’) and his musical tastes ranged from Bach and Beethoven to out and out rock. But he had darker influences, too: his elder brother Scott died of cancer at the age of just 16, an event which seems to have affected Cliff’s character as he grew older. Asked to elaborate on the character of his friend Cliff, Jim Martin becomes thoughtful: Cliff and I spent our formative years as musicians together. Dave Donato was also a big part of that. We all three used to go to a remote cabin in the California coastal mountains and experiment with crazy, weird music. We’d just play whatever came up, stuff right from the top of our heads. Some Faith No More and Metallica songs that you are familiar with were germinated during these sessions. The results are rumoured to exist on an unreleased recording called the Maxwell Ranch Tapes, although few people claim to have heard them.

Like most of their acquaintances, Martin was both entertained and charmed by Cliff’s slight eccentricity – evident not least in his choice of instrument: He played an old Rickenbacker with a crazy thing called ‘Bass Balls’ through a Sunn amp with a single 18-inch cabinet. This ‘Bass Balls’ was like an automatic wah-wah pedal. But despite his unorthodox ways, Cliff had simple tastes. He liked to fish and drink beer. Shoot and drink beer. We’d go to concerts and see the new metal bands and hang out, says Jim. He also knew when to be polite. He and his folks lived in an apartment, so we’d have to be real quiet whenever we were there. Cliff would make huge food and we’d rock out real quiet like.

There was a definite air of self-confidence about Cliff. He figured he could pretty much make things go any way he wanted, and he taught me to think that way, says Martin. Eventually they parted. Cliff left EZ Street, and I kept the band going for a little while with an ever-changing cast of characters. I started playing in lots of bands; I think I was in four bands at one time, so I was pretty much doing it every night. Cliff and I would still get together to jam, mostly with drummer Dave Donato.

Among the audience at an early EZ Street show was Kirk Hammett, who was putting his own band, Exodus, together and was checking out local musicians. He later recalled that Cliff’s amplifier blew up during the set, but rather than leave the stage, the bass player simply sat down in front of the amp and headbanged.

Martin joined Faith No More shortly afterwards, after Cliff suggested to Puffy that he should consider him as a guitarist. But Cliff’s Jim Martin connection was not quite laid to rest: together with Puffy, FNM bassist Bill Gould and Burton, the guitarist played a single gig at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco – with an inspired choice of name: We were called the Chicken Fuckers, laughs Bill Gould now. There’s not much to tell, it was just one show – it was a giant jam. We drank as much and smoked as much weed as we could and went on stage with no real rehearsal. And how did you go down with the audience? Horribly! That was the idea! It was fun, though.

Burton – whom Gould describes as a very, very cool guy. Super bright, super perceptive … he had a big heart – had other plans beyond joke bands, though. He left EZ Street to join a San Francisco act called Trauma, a well-known Bay Area band which other groups admired for their musical excellence. The band began gigging locally and Cliff soon developed a reputation for the bass solos which he would perform over the rhythm guitars, unusual at the time. Label interest soon began to grow, with one particularly motivated observer an LA-based metal fan called Brian Slagel.

Around two thousand miles away, a teenager named Jason Curtis Newsted was similarly dedicated to learning how to rock. Born on March 4, 1963 in the town of Battle Creek, Michigan, and raised in the city of Niles until the age of 14, Jason may have been inspired to learn an instrument by his family’s relocation in 1977 to Kalamazoo, close to the headquarters of the world-famous Gibson guitar company. The new home was a farm, where Jason enjoyed looking after the horses which the Newsteds kept: he lived an active, sports-filled life alongside his two elder brothers and younger sister. His siblings also introduced him to music (the Osmonds and the Jackson 5 were reportedly family favourites) while his parents, Bob and Jo Newsted, also owned a piano.

Although Jason was a good student, school in Kalamazoo proved to be not to his taste and he dropped out before graduation (he has since gained his leaving diploma). Music was an alternative to study, it seemed: Jason’s first attempt at music was a failed effort to learn bass guitar (he had been moved to choose the instrument because of his hero, Kiss bassist Gene Simmons) and a stint at his father’s piano. However, a second attempt to learn the bass proved more enduring and he joined a local band, Gangster, with his friend and occasional guitar teacher Tim Hamlin.

While Lars Ulrich remained cocooned in the bosom of his well-off, culturally literate family in Copenhagen, Dave Mustaine’s family planned their next move with one eye on the unpredictable Mustaine Senior, Kirk Hammett practised his guitar in El Sobrante, Cliff Burton strolled through the Bay Area woods with Jim Martin, and Jason Newsted cooled his heels in darkest Michigan, another family were getting through the trials and tribulations of life in the Seventies with help that only they could count on: the power of faith, as defined by Christian Science, a branch of the church which cherishes spiritual balance and the strength of self-healing.

Virgil and Cynthia Hetfield lived with their three children, David, James and DeDe in Los Angeles: Virgil was a truck driver with a small distribution company of his own, while his wife was a singer. Their middle son, James Alan, was born on August 3, 1963 and had demonstrated some early musical talent with two years of piano lessons, although these ultimately led to nothing. More successful were his attempts to play the drum kit which belonged to his older brother David, who played in a band, and his decision to turn to guitar in his early teens.

Although James always maintained that his parents loved and supported him, he was shaken by their divorce in 1976. The following year James enrolled at Downey High School in southern LA where he came across others who shared his interest in rock (and in Kiss and Aerosmith in particular): Dave Marrs and Ron McGovney. They met at East Middle School, where James was notable in music class for being the only student who could already play the guitar. In 1993 Ron told Shockwaves radio interviewer Pat O’Connor that in September 1977, when the pupils in his year started high school, Everybody had their little clique … there was the cheerleaders, the jocks, the marching band people … and you ended up with the laggers hanging around without any real social group, and that included James and I. A misfit even at this early stage, Hetfield took refuge in Aerosmith. According to McGovney, He was a total Steven Tyler freak. And our friend Dave Marrs was a total Kiss freak … they would make fun of the music I listened to, so in return, I would tell them Kiss sucked and Aerosmith sucked, and it went back and forth. As Hetfield’s guitar skills improved he began to toy with the idea of joining a band.

James was something of an outsider as a result of his family’s beliefs. As he later told Playboy: I was raised as a Christian Scientist, which is a strange religion. The main rule is, God will fix everything. Your body is just a shell, you don’t need doctors. It was alienating and hard to understand. I couldn’t get a physical to play football. It was weird having to leave health class during school, and all the kids saying, ‘Why do you have to leave? Are you some kind of freak?’ As a kid, you want to be part of the team. They’re always whispering about you and thinking you’re weird. That was very upsetting. My dad taught Sunday school – he was into it. It was pretty much forced upon me. We had these little testimonials, and there was a girl that had her arm broken. She stood up and said, ‘I broke my arm but now, look, it’s all better.’ But it was just, like, mangled. Now that I think about it, it was pretty disturbing. Famously, these experiences would go on to colour James’ life and work.

By 1980, Hetfield had formed a band called Obsession, which included his friends Ron and Rich Veloz on bass and drums respectively, and a second guitarist, Jim Arnold. During rehearsals in the garage at the home of the Veloz brothers, James sang and played guitar on the band’s painfully raw renditions of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple songs such as ‘Never Say Die’, ‘Communication Breakdown’ and ‘Highway Star’, as well as material by Thin Lizzy and UFO. Jim Arnold and Ron Veloz would swap vocal duties with Hetfield from time to time, as the band tried to ascertain who was its most natural (or least untalented) singer.

McGovney, a close friend of James, roadied for Obsession when they performed at the occasional backyard party and attended their rehearsals at the Veloz house. He told O’Connor that Rich and Ron had set up some stage lights in the garage which he and his friend Dave Marrs would manipulate via a home-made control panel. But the relationship with the Veloz brothers wasn’t destined to last, and after around 18 months James, Jim Arnold and the latter’s brother Chris broke away to form another band, Syrinx, which specialised solely in Rush covers and didn’t last long.

No recordings of either Obsession or Syrinx are known to exist, although hearing any such tapes would be a revelation for Metallica fans accustomed to Hetfield’s melodic roar of today. Back then James’ voice was fairly weak and his ability to hit and then hold a note was barely adequate. Furthermore, improvements would not take place for some time, as the Hetfield family was struck by a tragedy: not long after James left Syrinx, his mother died of cancer. Ron McGovney had no recollection of his friend mentioning his mother’s illness to him: We had no idea. He was gone for like ten days and we thought he had gone on vacation. When he told us that his mom had just died, we were stunned.

Hetfield, then 16, met his friends by the lockers on his return to school and informed them he was about to move house and school. Our jaws dropped, we didn’t know what to say, says Ron. He said, ‘I have to clean out my locker now and move in with my brother in Brea and go to Brea Olinda High School.’ And we were like, no way, this isn’t happening.