On March 23, 1984, Metallica didn’t look like a band who were set to change the face, and sound, of loud music.
That evening, singer and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and Danish-born drummer Lars Ulrich were patrolling the Royal Standard pub, in Walthamstow, asking gig-goers if they fancied popping down to the San Francisco group’s own concert – their first on British soil – at the Marquee club the following night. Given the recent cancellation of their recent tour – for which only 15 tickets had been sold for a date at the 3200-capacity Hammersmith Odeon – the pair had good cause to hustle, and to worry.
They did, though, have a bullet in the chamber. Ten days earlier the band had finished making their second LP, Ride The Lightning, at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen. Its eight tracks would prove that as well as gnashing and foaming with swivel-eyed fury, the young quartet were able to transcend the boundaries within which lesser acts were content to be confined. Released on July 27, 1984, this week the thuggish yet precociously progressive album celebrates its 40th birthday.
Recorded over 29 restless nights – like Nosferatu, its authors slept during the day – Ride The Lightning is rightly regarded as a beacon of heavy music. In 2014, the rock bible Kerrang! declared it the best metal album of all time, conveniently overlooking the bald truth that it isn’t even the best Metallica album. Not to worry, though, because by leaping and bounding beyond the feral parameters of its bombastic yet brittle predecessor, Kill ‘Em All, the young group produced a corker all the same. With sales of 10-million and counting, in the fullness of time, it has made almost as much noise at the box office as it has on turntables.
Not that many saw it coming, mind. Encountering Metallica on the East Coast, in 1983, Dee Snider, from Twisted Sister, concluded, “They’re good kids, but they’re not going to make it”. Time and again, this is how it went; throughout the Eighties, certainly, the band were underestimated by gatekeepers from within the scene and without. “They’re dirty, noisy, obnoxious and I hate them… but you can’t deny their success,” wrote one flat-footed American journalist. Only the young and attentive saw the hostile takeover of an entire musical subculture unfolding in real time.
Despite pitching their stall on what was then metal’s lunatic fringe, Metallica’s designs on world domination were masterminded by a strategist in their ranks. With a piercing eye for detail, Ulrich noticed the name Fleming Rasmussen, who was credited as the engineer on the album Difficult To Cure, by Rainbow, from 1981. Ulrich also noted the facility at which that album was recorded, and he persuaded his own bandmates to work there in the thick of a Scandinavian winter. At Sweet Silence Studios, Rasmussen assumed the role of producer on Ride The Lightning. He too underestimated the group, at least at first. “I thought they were pretty childish,” he said. “I thought they were kids.”
His job was to ensure Metallica did not choke on the hubris of their own ambition. Despite their pulverising racket, as a unit, the group displayed a number of fundamental deficiencies. Despite a preternatural knack for executing the most challenging drum fills with apparent ease, Ulrich kept time like a knockoff Rolex. Front of house, meanwhile, Rasmussen rated James Hetfield as both “the greatest rhythm guitarist of all time” and, in all likelihood, the least technically proficient singer with whom he’d ever worked. “I was basically just yelling in key,” Hetfield later noted. Rather effectively, though, it might be added.
Naturally, these formal shortcomings conspired to offend both heavy metal’s reactionary old guard and musicians of an entirely different stripe. At Sweet Silence, while Metallica battered their way towards the finish line, the studio’s second live room played host to a jazz band laying down their own sounds under cover of darkness. “These musicians would hear Metallica and go, ‘God it’s so fast, it’s so loud and it’s so un-tight,” Rasmussen told me in 2012. “And I’d be going, ‘But it’s f–cking brilliant!’ Me, I didn’t just like it, I loved it. And the jazz musicians were saying, ‘Yeah, but they can’t play!’”
The assessment is unfair; Metallica were never the Ramones. Ride The Lightning features The Call Of Ktulu, a more than eight-minute instrumental that would in time be performed live, on four occasions, in the company of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. It also includes the ballad-adjacent Fade To Black, a divisive masterpiece that attracted the first cries of “sell out!” from early-day fanatics aggrieved that the band had dared to deviate from the nascent thrash metal blueprint.
In search of influence, Metallica cast their net across entire oceans. Immediately prior to recording Ride The Lightning, Gem Howard, the general manager of the British independent record label Music For Nations (on which the LP was released), drove the group from city to city in a minibus on their first tour of mainland Europe. “I’ve been out [on the road] with lots and lots of bands,” he once told me. “I’ve sat in tour buses, mini buses and all the rest of it. And the ones who come through are the ones who are listening to stuff that isn’t necessarily what you’d expect them to be listening to.”
He went on. “With Metallica, at one minute they’d be singing along to [US punk rock group] the Misfits, while the next minute they’d almost be crying their eyes out listening to Homeward Bound by Simon & Garfunkel. And they’d be listening to Ennio Morricone… They were listening to all this stuff that they then figured out a way to incorporate into their music. And that made them stand out above the others.” Cliff Burton, in particular, dug deepest of all. “Bach,” he once declared, “is God.”
Let us not get carried away, though. Arriving in London following the completion of Ride The Lightning, Metallica weren’t beating a path to the Royal Opera House to catch a production of Così fan tutte. Instead, Lars Ulrich spent an early spring evening playing with Lemmy, from Motorhead, and the late, great English music journalist Malcolm Dome, at the St Moritz rock bar, on Wardour Street in Soho. With evident foolhardiness, that night the young Dane declared that his appetite for liquid refreshment matched those of his companions “shot for shot”. He played in a group nicknamed Alcoholica, after all.
“He didn’t quite make it,” Dome told me in 2012. “At the end of the night I had to pour him into a cab. At the time the band were staying in West London and I remember him getting into the cab and the driver asking him, ‘Where to, mate?’ He didn’t reply at first, so I asked him, ‘Lars, where are you going?’, to which he announced, ‘Denmark! Take me to Denmark!’ So there’s me asking, ‘Lars, seriously, where are you going?’, and him answering, ‘Denmark!’ And, of course, there’s Lemmy, totally sober, totally fine.”
Three years earlier, as a 17-year-old traveling alone through Europe, Lars Ulrich had charmed his way into Motorhead’s rehearsal space in time to watch them conjure up the classic song Iron Fist. At home in California, he appointed himself president of the Motorhead Appreciation Society of America. In 1984, Ulrich even tried to persuade Metallica to sign with Motorhead’s record label, Bronze. A meeting was duly convened at Sweet Silence Studios.
It didn’t go well. In the presence of its producer, Bron and son Richard described Ride The Lightning’s sound as “cr–p”. The sessions, they reckoned, should be scrapped entirely and recorded again. Looking directly at Lars Ulrich, Fleming Rasmussen called the Brons “idiots”. The deal went unsealed. Four years later, the label filed for bankruptcy.
In 1984, though, Metallica’s own finances were in a state of such peril their manager Jon Zazula was required to rush in from New Jersey in an attempt to put out fires. “It was my first time abroad and I was just eaten up,” he would later recall. “I was a Bambi in a forest full of hunters – all of these businessmen with their pots and pots of money, and me running up debts I didn’t even know I could pay. Not only had the album cost more than it was supposed to but the band had blown all of their European money. So I was going, ‘Woah, this is getting out of hand.’”
After evading the clutches of Bronze, instead, on August 4, 1984, Metallica agreed to sign with Elektra Records. The deal was completed without Zazula’s prior knowledge. Later that year, when the group aligned themselves with the all-conquering Q Prime organisation, Zazula himself was deemed surplus to requirements.
With this, they were off. Within two years, in the United States alone, the band sold a million copies of their third LP, Master Of Puppets, without recourse to a single or a music video. Five years later, their eponymous fifth LP, known to all as The Black Album, embarked on a 750-week (and counting) residency on the American chart.
Anyone doubting that at this point the group had become the most important name in the history of metal would do well to consider what the scene might look like without them. In 1984, Iron Maiden issued the Powerslave album, the point from which (gradually, at first) their powers began to wane. Contemporaries such as Slayer and Megadeth, meanwhile, would surely have struggled without the San Franciscans having smashed through the boundaries before them. Certainly, many of the numerous other heavy metal bands subsequently lassoed by major labels would have gone unbidden.
In other words, in the long-haired civil war that raged in the Eighties, the wimps would have won. As it was, though, Metallica provided a substantive alternative to poodle rock for a vast and fanatical constituency that has yet to forget them. In fact, James Hetfield had the good taste to emblazon one of his Gibson Explorer guitars with the words “Kill Bon Jovi”.
As Ride The Lightning met its increasingly attentive public, inevitably, it was Lars Ulrich who saw the future in all its clarity. “[There’s a] big belief,” he said, “that what we are doing will be the next big thing… I’m not saying it’s something that’s going to happen overnight, but it could start developing and Metallica could be the front runners of a new branch of heavy metal.”
It was, and they were. On December 20, 1984, following a concert at the Lyceum Theatre, in London, Metallica were presented with a silver disc certifying 60,000 sales of Ride The Lightning in the United Kingdom alone. It was the first time the group had ever received a music recording certification – though it wouldn’t be the last.
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