Free Metallica: Enter Night by Mick Wall Page B

of big people’.)
    When Lars Ulrich got to hear what his buddy Brian Slagel was now up to ‘[He] just called me up one day and said, “Hey, if I put together a band can I be on your compilation album?” I said, “Sure, no problem, why not?”’ The only issue, says Slagel, was that ‘Metallica didn’t exist, at that point’. Lars and James didn’t even get together to jam very often any more ‘because they couldn’t find anybody else to play with’. But when Lars heard about Metal Massacre , he decided he didn’t need a band. He just needed James to agree to help record what amounted to a demo tape. Weeks passed, though, before Brian heard any more from Lars. ‘I called him up and said we’re kind of coming down to the wire here on getting your song on the record, what’s the story? He said, “Give me a date and a time when I have to have it and I’ll make sure I get it [to you] by that time.”’ Everything went quiet again until the day came when Slagel and Kornarens were actually at Bijou Studios, mastering the disc. They had all but given up on Lars when suddenly, at around three that afternoon, the door burst open and there stood their crazy little pal with the funny accent – holding a cassette in his hand. Brian laughs as he recalls the scene. ‘They recorded the song on this little tiny Fostex recorder, like a little cassette recorder that had like four channels. It wasn’t really something you would record to put out. But that’s all they could find and afford. They did it basically the night before, just him and James. They had Lloyd Grant, James’ guitar teacher, do the lead.’
    In order to get the recording onto the finished disc, it first had to be transferred onto a reel-to-reel tape, for which the studio charged $50. More problems. Recalls Slagel: ‘Lars doesn’t have fifty dollars, I don’t have fifty dollars. Luckily my friend John had the fifty dollars so he loaned us the fifty bucks so we could get the thing bumped up and mastered and finished.’ Brian says he doesn’t know if John ever got his fifty back. As Kornarens later recalled: ‘Lars suddenly starts to panic and he gets all frantic and he looked over at me and goes, “Dude, have you got fifty bucks?” And, you know, fifty dollars was a lot of money back then. I pull my wallet out and there was fifty-two dollars in there, which was a lot of money for me to be carrying around back in 1982, but I had it, so I gave it to Lars and he says, “You’re going to be known as John ‘50 Bucks’ Kornarens on every Metallica release in the future!” Anyway, he made it onto Metal Massacre.’
    ‘Hit the Lights’, the track Lars and James had recorded together for Slagel’s compilation, although credited solely to Hetfield/Ulrich, may well have been, as others now suggest, an old Leather Charm number originally configured by Hugh Tanner. But what the pair did with it under their NWOBHM-influenced guise in Metallica took the song in a wholly new direction, right down to Hetfield’s cringe worthy, high-pitched, Diamond Head-style lead vocal. Mostly, though, it was about speed and power, and compared to every other track on Metal Massacre – which featured other, ostensibly far more developed groups such as Ratt, Malice and Black ’N Blue, all of whom would later land major record deals – Metallica’s ‘Hit the Lights’ stood out like a sore thumb. Although corny of lyric (‘When we start to rock / We never want to stop…’) and featuring a typically singsong, playground-dumb melody, ‘Hit the Lights’ exploded from the speakers in a blur of speed and noise, sounding like one long crescendo, making everything else on Metal Massacre sound horribly ponderous, irritatingly slow and immediately dated. With Ulrich on drums, Hetfield on guitar, bass and vocals, it also featured a guitar solo by the only other person to appear on the track and another significant bit-part figure in the early Metallica story: a tall,