Free Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I by Paul Brannigan, Ian Winwood Page A

it comes out. The lead guitarist is pretty fast. I think you’ll like him … We rehearse six nights a week so we are getting pretty tight and we are (tryin’ to) writing some pretty good songs, where we try and stay away from the norms and be a bit different, so at least we won’t be slacked [
sic
]off as being too predictable and stuff like that. Let’s see what happens.’

    There is a story told about the Los Angeles rock scene circa 1982, which has long since passed into Metallica lore. According to legend, Lars Ulrich found himself at the famous Troubadour nightclub on Melrose Avenue one summer evening when Metallica’s candy-floss-haired nemeses Mötley Crüe strode into the bar with their entourage. The story has it that the Crüe party were intoxicated, obnoxious and in high spirits, having freshly inked a lucrative major label deal with Elektra Records; Ulrich, meanwhile, was said to have been drinking alone to numb his growing frustration over his own band’s failure to detonate a bomb under the Strip. The sight of Crüe bandleader, songwriter and bassist Nikki Sixx, and his coterie holding court in the club that night then served only to inflame the drummer’s sense of injustice. Drawing himself to his full height, the five- foot-eight -inch Dane allegedly approached Mötley Crüe’s table and informed the group’s towering bassist that his band ‘sucked’, at which point, to howls of laughter, Sixx grabbed the impertinent critic by his lapels and threw him halfway across the room.
    It is an amusing anecdote, one which feeds nicely into the received wisdom that at this time Metallica were fearless lone wolves who prowled the hair metal jungle in search of a kill. In truth, however, the incident never happened. The reality of the story is rather more prosaic. As James Hetfield remembers it, Metallica did indeed cross paths with the Crüe one night at the Troubadour, but their encounter was made on uneven terms.
    ‘We were outside a club, sitting on a parked car, pissed off and drunk,’ Hetfield recalled. ‘We didn’t even have enough money to get into the show, so we were sitting outside trying to weasel our way in somehow, meet someone, you know? Then those guys[Mötley Crüe] come walking out with high heels and grandma’s jewellery on. They walked by, and we yelled, “You guys suck!” They turned around like tough guys and just stood there. They looked like fucking giants ’cause they’ve got their Elton John heels on. Meanwhile, we’re standing there in our fucking tennis shoes going, “Huh?” They flicked a cigarette on us and walked away.’
    At this time Mötley Crüe were a band of unhinged delinquents as unlikely to back down from a fight as they were to decline a line of cocaine deposited in the cleavage of a stripper. That they chose not to crack Metallica’s skulls against the Melrose Avenue sidewalk that evening said everything about the two acts’ respective fortunes in the summer of 1982. The Crüe, to borrow a title from their first seven-inch single, were the toast of the town: LA natives whose self-financed, independently released 1981 debut album
Too Fast for Love
had already sold more than 20,000 copies on their own Leathur Records imprint. Metallica, by contrast, were a glorified covers band with a singer who could barely look an audience in the eyes, a drummer who could not keep time, a self-obsessed, damaged guitarist and a bassist who didn’t even want to be in the group. As Ulrich has often insisted, Metallica may well have defined themselves as the ‘anti-Mötley Crüe’, but in the haziest days of 1982 the chasm between the two parties was so vast that the more established group were barely aware of their snotty brethren’s existence. To Mötley Crüe, Metallica were invisible men, a life form unworthy of even the most common of Sunset Strip courtesies: contempt.
    In truth, one could easily view this casual humiliation as representative of Metallica’s status