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Excerpt from ENTER NIGHT
They say opposites attract. That was not the case when Lars Ulrich met James Hetfield in 1981. The only thing James appeared to have in common with Lars was their age. Where Lars was small and doll-like, pretty-boy Euro-trash who ate with his mouth open and would go days without showering, James was tall and rangy, a full-blooded young American of Irish-German descent who brushed his teeth twice a day and always wore clean underwear. Where Lars never shut up, James never used two words where none would do. Where Lars came from a background of money and travel, of music and art, of multilingual, open-door hippy liberalism, James came from a plain-folks working class family with strict fundamentalist religious beliefs, latterly an absentee father and, most recently and painfully, a deceased mother. Where Lars was ready to push his way through any door and say hi, James stayed in the shadows, couldn’t even bring himself to meet anyone in the eye.
A loner at high school, like Lars it was music that would finally bring James Hetfield into contact with other similarly obsessed classroom loners like Ron McGovney. “There was the cheerleaders, the jocks, the marching band people,” Ron recalls. James had discovered rock via his two older half-brothers. “I was always looking for something other people didn’t always dig. When I was into Black Sabbath, all my friends would go, ‘Oh, my mom won’t let me have that album’. So I had to go out and get it.” Now he looked to form his own band. Encouraged by James, who’d used early piano lessons as a springboard to playing guitar, Ron started having lessons. “I knew nothing about bass.” He just wanted to learn how to play Stairway To Heaven. James would be the UFO guy, tackling hard-line anthems like Doctor, Doctor and Lights Out.
Various high school outfits ensued. “My parents had a main house with three rental houses in the back,” McGovney recalls. “They let James and me live in the middle house rent-free. We converted the garage into our rehearsal studio.” Having left high school, they both had jobs now too, using their money to fund their latest group, Phantom Lord. “I worked at my parents’ truck repair shop during the day,” recalls Ron. James had a job in “a sticker factory” called Santa Fe Springs. They used their first month’s salaries to insulate the garage against noise, putting up dry wall, painting the rafters black and the ceiling silver.
In the final entry in his high school year book, under ‘plans’, Hetfield had written: ‘Play music. Get rich’. As with most young bands, however, Phantom Lord splintered before it had even played a gig. They carried on under a series of different guises. The one most surprising being Leather Charm, a glam band featuring James as a pouting glam singer, even dropping guitar to concentrate on becoming a full-on frontman. Once again, however, the new band quickly fell apart. Then they saw the ad in The Recycler: ‘Drummer looking for other metal musicians to jam with. Tygers of Pan Tang, Diamond Head and Iron Maiden’. A meet was arranged but James thought the kid that had placed the ad “weird” and “smelled funny.” He couldn’t even really play drums. “We ate McDonald’s, he ate herring,” was how James summarised it 20 years later. “His father was famous. A rich, only child, spoiled – that’s why he’s got his mouth. Knows what he wants [and] gotten it his whole life.”
Lars though sensed they might be more in common. “Even though we come from two different worlds, we were both loners. And in each other we found something that just connected with something deeper.” The first time James went to Lars’ parents’ house he was deeply impressed. “I was searching for people that I could identify with,” said James. “There's a part of me that craves family and another part of me that just can't stand people.” Unlike his own family home, where outsiders were rare, all were welcome here, differences celebrated, individualism prized. In Lars’ bedroom there was a whole wall of records by groups James had never even heard of. He brought his tape-recorder, filling cassettes with tracks by Venom, Motörhead, Saxon, Samson... “I bombarded James with all this new British stuff,” Lars said, “and soon he was sold on getting something together that would stand out in the ocean of mediocrity.”
Copyright © 2011 by Mick Wall
