Metallica: Enter Night (10 page)

Dave was the one who dealt pot, stole beer and did all the talking onstage, acting like he was the leader of the band, not the newbie. That also made Ron ‘pissed as shit’. There had already been several flashpoints between the two before the trip to San Francisco, like the Sunday afternoon James actually fired Dave from the band – before allowing the contrite guitar player to talk his way back in. Mustaine had turned up at the bungalow Ron shared with James with ‘his two pit bull puppies’. Ron, who’d been taking a shower when Dave arrived, was aghast to discover when he came out that the dogs were ‘jumping all over my car’ – a reconfigured 1972 Pontiac LeMans – ‘scratching the shit out of it’. Ron recalls James running outside and yelling, ‘Hey, Dave, get those fuckin’ dogs off of Ron’s car!’ According to Ron, Dave yelled back: ‘What the fuck did you say? Don’t you talk that way about my dogs!’ The two men flew at each other and a nasty brawl ensued. According to Ron, ‘They started fighting and it spilled into the house. I see Dave punch James right across the mouth and he flies across the room, so I jumped on Dave’s back and he flipped me over onto the coffee table.’ At which point James got to his feet and told Dave, ‘You’re out of the fuckin’ band! Get the fuck out of here!’ Says Ron, ‘Dave loaded all his shit up and left all pissed off. The next day he comes back crying, pleading, “Please let me back in the band,”’ which, to Ron’s chagrin, James and Lars, not thrilled at the prospect of having to find yet another guitar player, eventually – after more from Mustaine – agreed to do.

Speaking with writer Joel McIver, in 1999, Mustaine recalled the incident with some regret, regarding it as the first nail in the coffin of his career in Metallica. ‘If I had to do it all again,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have brought the dog[s]. I was dealing drugs to keep myself afloat, so I had these dogs to protect my merchandise. I took them up to rehearsal one day and [one of] the dog[s] put her paws on the bass player’s car. I don’t know if it scratched it or left paw prints on it, or put a fuckin’ dent in the car, I don’t know. Whatever happened, James kicked it, we started arguing, push led to shove and I hit him. And I regret it…’ Only Lars, who was equally outgoing, for different reasons, really enjoyed Dave’s company. It might be argued, in fact, that Dave Mustaine was the missing link between Lars Ulrich’s ultra-confident, says-me personality and James Hetfield’s stone-faced, emotionally fragile character. In common with the latter, Mustaine was a young Los Angelino who had come from a badly broken home. But where James had erected an impenetrable, monosyllabic façade to shield him from the world, Mustaine met everything head-on, ready to out-gun all comers with his fast guitar and even faster mouth and fists. Like James, Dave had an inordinate fondness for Clint Eastwood movies, particularly
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
. Unlike James, he had an absurdist streak that meant he also loved the Pink Panther films. Meanwhile, like Lars, Dave’s musical influences were broad-shouldered enough to encompass both The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, before similarly falling for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, although in Dave’s case as much as a reactionary fuck-you to the existing LA scene as for any musical merit; his tastes veering more towards the less boxed-in, more technically able end of the spectrum where Diamond Head and Judas Priest existed than the purely heavy-legged likes of Saxon or Samson. ‘Motörhead, Mercyful Fate, Budgie and AC/DC’ had ‘all added’ to his musical education, he said. ‘After that, I was pretty much done.’

Lars also appreciated that Dave could be a useful guy to have around when things got out of hand in other ways. Getting shit-faced at a party with East LA metal newbies Armored Saint, Lars’ big mouth got him into trouble with Saint guitarist Phil Sandoval. When Sandoval shoved Ulrich to the floor, Mustaine, never backwards at coming forwards, launched a karate kick at Sandoval which poleaxed him and resulted in a broken ankle. Years later, after Mustaine finally straightened up he sought Sandoval out and apologised, bringing him a gift of a brand new ESP guitar, in order to bring what the newly sober Mustaine referred to in counselling-speak as ‘closure’ to the incident. Dave had just been watching Lars’ back, he explained. Sandoval understood. All little guys need a big guy to do that for them, right? Especially when the little guy has a big guy’s mouth. As Mustaine would later tell me, ‘I felt like I had something on everybody else. I was a bad boy. I didn’t realise I was tainting my image.’ Not even when he began dealing drugs from his apartment, which made him the odd man out in the band straight away. All of Metallica drank, but none had yet really experimented beyond smoking pot. Ron didn’t even like getting drunk; he hated the fact that it stopped him from driving and being in control. For Lars, dope was aptly named and slowed him down. Cocaine, when he could scrounge some, was more suited to his driven, megalomaniac personality. As for James, any form of drug was simply a no-no; even simple over-the-counter medication was viewed with suspicion. As a child, he had suffered from migraines, for which the only help his parents offered was prayer ‘or reading the Bible’. It wasn’t until he had lived with his elder half-brother that he first swallowed aspirin. Even then, he later told the writer Ben Mitchell, ‘I was freaking out. What’s it going to make me feel like, what’s it going to do?’ The first time Dave offered James a hit on a joint, he nearly ran from the room in terror. By then he had tried smoking pot – as a grand experiment, in the same way others would have viewed their first LSD trip – but ‘it hit me so hard, I freaked out’. From that point on, James would look down disapprovingly whenever anyone, particularly from his own band, used drugs of any description, whether viewed as ‘soft’ or ‘hard’. That Mustaine so clearly felt the opposite to James about drugs would help drive a further wedge between them that would eventually result in an irreparable fissure. Though not quite yet, not just as things were beginning to get interesting for Metallica. In fact, the first victim of the band’s steadily rising star wasn’t the hard-to-please Mustaine but the ever-dependable Ron McGovney.

According to Brian Slagel, McGovney’s difficulties in Metallica revolved around his stunted abilities on bass. ‘After Metallica had been around a while and they were getting better as musicians, the one thing they felt was that Ron, as great a guy as he was, wasn’t progressing as much as they were. So Lars came to me and said, “Hey, we’re thinking about looking for a bass player, is there anybody you think that would be good for us?”’ Brian immediately thought of Joey Vera, the bassist in Armored Saint, who had been on Metal Blade, and who were about to get signed to Chrysalis. ‘Joey was a thought,’ he says now, ‘but [on balance] I didn’t think that was gonna work.’ Joey was too committed to his own band, who were much further down the road with their own career anyway, at that stage. That was when Slagel came up with another idea. ‘I told Lars, “Look, there’s this band called Trauma…”’

Brian knew Trauma from San Francisco; they had been one of the bands he was putting onto
Metal Massacre II
, with a short but surprisingly sweet track titled ‘Such a Shame’. ‘Their manager had sent me a demo with three songs, which were awesome and recorded really well. So we put the band on
Metal Massacre II
and they came down to play in LA. The band was pretty good but the bass player was
phenomenal
. Really awesome.’ So when later Lars asked about bass players Brian mentioned ‘the Trauma guy’, who happened to be playing in LA again in a couple of weeks, this time at the Troubadour. ‘I said, “You guys should come see him and check it out.” So him and James came down to the show and Lars came up to me – I can’t remember if it was during the set or immediately after – and said, “
That
is going to be our bass player!” And when Lars says those sorts of things he seems to make them happen. Sure enough, he was able to make that happen too.’

The Trauma bass player’s name was Cliff Burton – the same guy who’d been to watch Metallica’s show at the Old Waldorf in October – and ‘Such a Shame’ was destined to become the only track Trauma ever released with him on it. Cliff was ‘the strangest-looking dude’ Lars had ever seen on a Hollywood stage. While the rest of Trauma sported the same image, interchangeable with any number of West Coast metal bands then strutting their stuff, Burton took to the stage in bell-bottom jeans and a denim waistcoat. His hair was hippy-long and looked like it had barely seen a comb, let alone been teased and sprayed like his bandmates’ evidently had. Most impressive of all, he really knew how to play the bass, eschewing plectrums for finger-picking, like all the best bass players in his book, from obvious influences such as Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler, Rush’s Geddy Lee and Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott, to less obvious but equally significant teachers such as American jazz player Stanley Clark, whose use of the electric double-headed bass Cliff was in absolute awe of, and even Lemmy, whose rumbling bass in Motörhead Cliff was in thrall to primarily for the guitar-like way Lemmy played, and the technique he utilised to bring distortion into his heavy-handed riffing. One influence Burton didn’t share with the rest of Metallica, though, was an interest in NWOBHM, not even the machine-gun bass of Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris, so highly regarded elsewhere. Instead, Cliff was more interested in trying to emulate certain guitar players – most especially Jimi Hendrix, although Hendrix copyist Uli Jon Roth was held in almost equal high regard, as was UFO’s Michael Schenker ‘to a degree’ and Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, who ‘also had an influence’. Like James, Cliff also liked Aerosmith ‘a lot’. As a result, unlike standard rock players, what Cliff did on the bass could be characterised, as Lars says, ‘as playing the bass like a guitar’. Using his wah-wah pedal to create strange ‘washes’ and ‘drags’, as future Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett later told me, ‘for someone as great as Cliff was on bass, offstage he mainly played guitar. He had that kind of approach to what he did.’

Henning Larsen, who later became Metallica’s drum tech, was with Lars and James at the Troubadour that first night they saw Cliff play and recalls their pop-eyed reaction. ‘I could just see them go, “Oh my God! Look at that guy!” The thing that struck them most was…here you had a guy playing lead bass! They thought that was great.’ Or as James would tell me in 2009, ‘our jaws fell onto the floor, and we said we’ve got to get this guy. So there was respect because we had searched for him to get him.’ So awestruck were they, in fact, that not even the über-confident Ulrich could summon up the courage to actually talk to Cliff that first night. Instead, he and James went away and talked about it in secret, before returning to the club the following night where Trauma were playing a second show, and approached him then. James: ‘We said: “We’re in this band, we’re looking for a bass player, and we think you’d really fit in. Because you’re a big psycho.” And he knew that. It was no surprise to him. But the music made him feel like that.’ Ever practical, ‘after we’d swapped numbers I started going to work on him immediately’, said Lars.

Patrick Scott recalls being tipped off about Trauma by K.J. Doughton, who’d recently featured them in his fanzine,
Northwest Metal
. Managed by an expat Englishman named Tony Van Litt, it was through K.J.’s connection that Patrick visited the band on-set during a video shoot in Santa Anna. When Patrick asked Lars if he wanted to come along too he was taken aback at how enthusiastic Lars was for the idea. When he insisted he brought James as well, Patrick started to suspect something was up. ‘He knew of them, and I didn’t know that at the time. He hadn’t mentioned it to me. I think he’d already seen them play. So we went down to this studio and watched them shoot this video. The band almost looked like an LA band – all except for this bass player, who looked like he always did. You know, bell-bottoms and headbanging out of time, that crazy look.’ On the way back in the car, Lars kept talking about the bass player, ‘what a great bass player he was, and did I think he’d be good in a band like [Metallica]?’

But while not even Ron McGovney would argue he was anything other than at best workmanlike on the bass – as he says, ‘James would show me what to play’ – musical chops were only part of the reason why the others originally began plotting to replace him with Cliff Burton. Behind the scenes, things had steadily been going from bad to worse. ‘It was difficult for me to have to be in the middle between my parents, who owned the house we were living in, and the band members,’ he says. ‘Of course there was drinking and girls among other things at the house and my parents didn’t like it. I had to be the bad guy many times. We used my father’s truck to haul us and our equipment, and that was another difficulty I had to deal with. It was like trying to be a road manager and the Metallica bass player at the same time. Yes, I did have an attitude because I didn’t think all of that should be my sole responsibility.’ Then there were his ongoing personality clashes with Dave: ‘Dave Mustaine didn’t like me at all. He started stealing things from me and even arranged to have my bass stolen at one of our gigs. He poured a beer into the pickups of my other bass and I got an electric shock. I became more upset about the way things were going and the attitude showed even more.’

It wasn’t just Mustaine’s antics that were starting to get Ron down. As he revealed in an interview with Bob Nalbandian’s Shockwaves website in 1996, he and Lars also ‘butted heads’ during this period. ‘I hate when people show up late and use you all the time and that’s just what Lars did. I would have to drive all the way down to Newport Beach to pick him up.’ In the end Ron grew so tired of the situation he told Lars he would have to arrange his own transport. Then there was the general attitude of the others towards him. Using his Visa card to pay for everything while the others frittered away what little cash they had on partying ate away at him until he could stand it no longer and he became the misery of the band. ‘They couldn’t understand why I was mad. They said, “Well, you’re getting the cheque after the gig,” and we were only getting paid a hundred dollars per gig at the most, which [in San Francisco] didn’t even cover the hotel room. Plus we drank a couple hundred dollars’ worth of alcohol. I always said to them, “If I’m a part of this band, why is it up to me to pay for everything while you guys get the free ride?”’ Ron suggested they get a manager to help shoulder the financial burden, but the others just laughed at him, told him to lighten up. ‘Dave, at the time, was an asshole, 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.’ Speaking now, Ron has a cooler perspective but the hurt is clearly still there buried not so deep inside. ‘I suppose they all became tired of me and they started looking elsewhere for a bass player. When they saw Cliff perform with his band Trauma, I guess they decided that he was the one. I saw the writing on the wall and I knew that my days were numbered when we played in San Francisco in November of 1982. Cliff was there hanging out with the guys while I was loading equipment. When we got back to LA, I quit. It was probably a relief to the rest of the guys as well.’