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

across the Hollywood rock scene as a whole. For while James Hetfield would once describe Los Angeles as being a place that ‘didn’t show [his group] a lot of love’, neither did the city show them any measure of discernible hatred. Instead, the group were met with the most galling of receptions, one of indifference.
    ‘In those days no one was even paying attention,’ Hetfield admitted. ‘We were playing, and people would just have this lost look on their faces,’ he said. ‘We’d go, “Man, what the fuck is the matter with you? Give me the finger, spit on me, yell, smile, do something” … That made us angry.’
    Metallica’s first concert took place on March 14, 1982, at Radio City, an unprepossessing, 150-capacity club situated at 945 S. Knott Ave in Anaheim. On the afternoon of the show, Hetfield, Mustaine, McGovney and Ulrich assembled in the garage of 13004 Curtis and King Road, pressed down the ‘Record’ button on a boombox, and ran through a nine-song set featuring ‘Hit the Lights’, a new Mustaine-penned composition titled ‘Jump in the Fire’ and seven New Wave of British Heavy Metal cover versions, including no fewer than four Diamond Head tracks – ‘Helpless’, ‘Sucking My Love’, ‘Am I Evil?’ and ‘The Prince’. After listening to their cassette, which also featured versions of ‘Blitzkrieg’ by Leicester quintet Blitzkrieg, ‘Let it Loose’ by Mansfield’s Savage and ‘Killing Time’ by Northern Irish metallers Sweet Savage, the satisfied quartet began breaking down their backline for the twenty-minute drive to Orange County.
    Practice, of course, can only take a band so far: the acid test of a group’s character comes when their songs are presented in front of a paying audience. In this regard Metallica did not get off to the strongest of starts.
    ‘I was really nervous and a little uncomfortable without a guitar,’ Hetfield recalls, ‘and then during the first song Dave broke a string. It seemed to take him an eternity to change it and I was standing there really embarrassed. We were really disappointed afterwards. But there were never as many people at the following shows as there were at that first one.’
    ‘The crowd didn’t get into them,’ is the considered verdict of Patrick Scott, who drove the band’s drummer to the show. ‘But it was still a cool thing to see, just to see somebody playing SweetSavage songs and Blitzkrieg songs in LA, because there was none of that going on.’
    ‘I went there with Pat,’ says Bob Nalbandian, who at the time edited
Headbanger
fanzine from his parent’s Huntington Beach home. ‘It wasn’t a great show by any means, but it was something different in Orange County, because you never saw bands play like that before.’
    For his part Lars Ulrich considered that his band ‘went down pretty good’. Recording the details of the gig in his diary, as he would for every future Metallica show that year, the meticulous drummer estimated that the crowd numbered seventy-five people and noted that the quartet were paid $15 for the engagement. ‘Very nervous’ he admitted. ‘Played so-so.’
    Ironically, given Ulrich’s stated antipathy towards the group, he would have Mötley Crüe to thank for his band’s next significant live outings, a pair of performances which would see Metallica share a stage with one of their New Wave of British Heavy Metal heroes, Saxon.
    ‘We had heard that Saxon was gonna be playing the Whisky [a Go Go] in Hollywood,’ is Ron McGovney’s recollection. ‘So I went over to the club with our demo, and as I was walking up, I run into Tommy Lee and Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe (who I was taking pictures for at the time). They said, “Hey Ron, what’s up?” I told them that Saxon was doing a gig at the Whisky and I wanted to try to get my band to open up for them. They said, “Yeah, we were gonna open up for them but we’re getting too big to open. Come on in and I’ll introduce you to the