Free Metallica: Enter Night by Mick Wall

also determined to prove to his parents that he hadn’t made a bad move in dropping the tennis. That he had this music thing all figured out. ‘We weren’t careerist,’ he would insist, years later, but Lars Ulrich never did anything by halves. So when he claimed his ‘big hard-on’ at that stage merely extended to ‘playing fifteen New Wave of British Heavy Metal songs in LA clubs’ the fact that he and James would get together ‘every day at six’ where they ‘went for it’ like there was no tomorrow shows how determined both kids were to turn these jams into something much more solid and long term. ‘Playing those songs was like headbanging taken one step further,’ said Lars. An apt description for everything he would attempt to do over the subsequent four decades.
    Nevertheless, Brian Slagel remembers Lars being ‘pretty frustrated’ during this period and that he and James eventually stopped jamming for a while. ‘It was going nowhere,’ says Slagel. ‘It was really hard for Lars because James was the only guy he met who had any sort of understanding of the kind of music that Lars was into. James was into some of the same stuff but they couldn’t really find anybody to jam with.’ There had been one positive development, however: the discovery of a name for the nascent band Lars and James were putatively putting together – Metallica. This, though, was not something either James or Lars could truly lay claim to. Indeed, the name ‘Metallica’ had been bandied about by another Anglophile friend of Lars’, met through the tape-trading scene: Ron Quintana. Ron had first gotten to know Bob Nalbandian and the crew after getting a letter published in an early issue of Kerrang! . Inspired both by Kerrang! and the smaller but in his eyes equally impressive success of Brian Slagel’s New Heavy Metal Revue fanzine, Quintana now looked to start his own like-minded American publication.
    Ron Quintana recalls the night he showed Lars a list of names he had come up with as possible titles for his long-dreamed-of ‘super heavy metal magazine’. Lars had travelled up to San Francisco to stay with Ron during the lull with James and the two were ‘always throwing band and ’zine names around when we would hang out or go to local record stores’, Quintana says. Lars had previously shown Ron a list of prospective band names – ‘the worst, most generic, Americanised, like, car names. Hot-rod names, trans-am names’ – including Red Vette and Black Lightning. In return, Ron showed Lars a list he’d made of possible titles for his new mag, including Metal Death , Metal Mania and several other of a similar ilk. Also on the list Ron showed Lars was the name Metallica . Lars said, ‘Oh, that’s a cool name.’ Then, quick as a flash: ‘What are you gonna call your magazine, how about Metal Mania ?’ Ron fell for it. ‘I thought it was funny,’ Quintana says now, ‘because I had started Metal Mania in August of ’81 and hadn’t talked to Lars in at least six months when he called and told me he’d named his band Metallica. I was already on issue number three and happy with the Metal Mania name. I didn’t even think Lars could play drums at that time!’ Plus, he says with a laugh, ‘I liked Metal Mania as a moniker better than Metallica .’ Until then Lars and James had compiled a list of over twenty possible names, including Nixon, Helldriver, Blitzer and – an early frontrunner, certainly as far as Lars was concerned – Thunderfuck. Once he’d left Ron’s that night with ‘Metallica’, though, the conversation was closed. Crazy kid all right, funny accent, clever as fuck.
    It was through another friend of Lars’ that he got his next significant break. Since he’d begun working at Oz Records and running his fanzine, Brian Slagel had been seeing less of Lars, Bob, Patrick and the guys. He was also now helping to promote local metal shows at a small club called The Valley, and had even begun