Mustaine:
A Life In Metal
Dave Mustaine

TO MOM AND DAD,I PROMISED I WOULD BE GOOD.

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATEDTO ALL OF THE PEOPLE WHO TOLDME I WOULD NEVER…

COME, COME, COME MY LITTLE DROOGIES. I JUST DON’T GET THIS AT ALL. THE OLD DAYS ARE DEAD AND GONE. FOR WHAT I DID IN THE FAST, I’VE BEEN PUNISHED. I’VE BEEN CURE.

ALEX, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

REGRETS, I’VE HAD A FEW…

SID VICIOUS

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

A HORSESHOE UP MY ASS

1 DADDY DEAREST

2 REEFER MADNESS

3 LARS AND ME,OR WHAT AM I GETTING MYSELF INTO?

4 METALLICA—FAST, LOUD, OUT OF CONTROL

5 DUMPED BY ALCOHOLICA

6 BUILDING THE PERFECT BEAST: MEGADETH

7 MISSION: TO BREAK ALL THE RULES OF GOD AND MAN

8 FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT

9 THE END OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

10 THE TRAVELING CARNIVAL

11 AGAINST MEDICAL ADVICE

12 THE LIVING YEARS

13 I PRAY THE LORD MY SOUL TO KEEP

14 THE INNER WEASEL

15 SOUL FOR SALE

16 SOME KIND OF GOD

17 MEGADETH: REBORN

EPILOGUE: THREE BOATS AND A HELICOPTER

Copyright

About the Publisher

A HORSESHOE UP MY ASS

HUNT, TEXAS

JANUARY 2002

IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR BOTTOM, THIS SEEMS TO BE ABOUT AS GOOD A PLACE AS ANY-ALTHOUGH I’D BE THE FIRST TO ADMIT THAT THE BOTTOM HAS BEEN A MOVING TARGET IN MY DARK AND TWISTED, SPEED METAL VERSION OF A DICKENSIAN LIFE.

IMPOVERISHED, TRANSIENT CHILDHOOD? CHECK.

ABUSIVE, ALCOHOLIC PARENT? CHECK.

MIND-FUCKING RELIGIOUS WEIRDNESS ON MY CASE THE EXTREMES OF THE JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES AND SATANISM)? CHECK.

ALCOHOLISM, DRUG ADDICTION, HOMELESSNESS? CHECK, CHECK, CHECK.

SOUL-CRUSHING PROFESSIONAL AND ARTISTIC SETBACKS? CHECK.

REHAB? CHECK (SEVENTEEN TIMES, GIVE OR TAKE).

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE? CHECK THAT ONE, TOO.

James Hetfield, who used to be one of my best friends, as close as a brother, once observed with some incredulity that I must have been born with a horseshoe up my ass. That’s how lucky I’ve been, how fortunate I am to be pulling breath after so many close calls. And I must acknowledge that on some level he’s right. I have been lucky. I have been blessed. But here’s the thing about having a horseshoe lodged in your rectum: it also hurts like hell. And you never forget it’s there.

So here I am, staring down the throat of another stint in rehab, at a place called La Hacienda, out in the heart of the pristine Texas Hill Country. It’s only about two hundred miles or so from Fort Worth, but it seems a world away, with only cattle ranches and summer camps for neighbors. The focus is on healing…on getting better. Physically, spiritually, emotionally. As usual, I’ve brought only modest expectations and enthusiasm to the proceedings. Ain’t my first rodeo, after all.

You see, I’ve learned more about getting loaded, more about how to get drugs, more about mixing drinks, and more about how to bed the opposite sex in Alcoholics Anonymous than in any other single place in the world. AA—and this holds true for most rehabilitative programs and treatment centers—is a fraternity, and like all fraternity brothers, we like to swap stories. It’s a ridiculous glorifying of the experience: drugalogues and drunkalogues, they’re called. One of the things that always bothered me most was the incessant one-upmanship. You’d tell a story, sometimes baring your soul, and the guy next to you would smirk and say, “Ah, man, I spilled more than you ever used.”

“Oh, really?”

“Damn right.”

“Well, I used a lot, so you must be one clumsy fuckhead.”

For some reason, this sort of interaction never did much for me, never made me feel like I was getting better or improving as a human being. Sometimes I got worse. It was at an AA meeting, ironically, that I first learned about the ease of procuring pain medication through the Internet. I didn’t have any particular need for pain meds at the time, but the woman telling the story made it sound like a great buzz. Before long the packages were coming to my house and I’d fostered one hell of an addiction. By this time I was a world-famous rock star—founder, front man, singer, songwriter, and guitarist (and de facto CEO) for Megadeth, one of the most popular bands in heavy metal. I had a beautiful wife and two wonderful kids, a nice home, cars, more money than I ever dreamed of. And I was about to throw it all away. You see, behind the façade, I was fucking miserable: tired of the road, the bickering between band members, the unreasonable demands of management and record company executives, the loneliness of the drug-addled life. And, as always, incapable of seeing that what I had was more important than what I didn’t have. The joy of writing songs and playing music, which had sustained me through so many lean years, had slowly been siphoned off.

Now I simply felt…empty.

And so I went off to Hunt, Texas, hoping this time the change would stick. Or not hoping. Not caring. Not knowing much of anything, really, except that I needed help getting off the pain meds. As for long-term behavior modification? Well, that wasn’t high on my list of priorities.

And here’s what happens. Early in my stay I wander off to get some rest. I remember slumping into a chair and tossing my left arm over the back, trying to curl up and sleep. The next thing I know, I’m waking up, dragging myself out of the fugue of a twentyminute nap, and when I try to stand up, something pulls me back, like I’m buckled into the seat or something. And then I realize what’s happened: my arm has fallen asleep and it’s still hooked over the back of the chair. I laugh, try to withdraw my arm again.

Nothing happens.

Again.

Still nothing.

I repeat this motion (or attempted motion) a few more times before finally using my right arm to lift my left arm off the chair. The moment I let go, it falls to my side, dangling uselessly, pins and needles shooting from shoulder to fingertips. After a few minutes, some of the feeling returns to my upper arm and then to part of my forearm. But my hand remains dead, as if shot full of Novocain. I keep shaking it out, rubbing it, whacking it against the chair. But the hand is numb. Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. I try to make a fist, but my fingers do not respond.

Out the door, down the hall. My breathing is labored, in part because I’m kicking drugs and out of shape, but also because I’m scared shitless. I burst into the nurse’s office, cradling my left hand in my right hand. I blurt out something about falling asleep and not being able to feel my hand. The nurse tries to calm me down. She presumes, not unreasonably, that this is just part of the process—anxiety and discomfort come with the territory in rehab. But it’s not. This is different.

Within twenty-four hours I will be on hiatus from La Hacienda, sitting in the office of an orthopedic surgeon, who will run a hand along my biceps and down my forearm, carefully tracing the path of a nerve and explaining how the nerve has been freakishly compressed, like a drinking straw pinched against the side of a glass. When circulation is cut off in this manner, he explains, the nerve is damaged; sometimes it simply withers and dies.

“How long before the feeling returns?” I ask.

“You should have about eighty percent within a few months…maybe four to six.”

“What about the other twenty percent?”

He shrugs. The man is all Texas, in movement and delivery. “Hard to say,” he drawls.

There is a pause. Once more, nervously, I try to squeeze my hand into a ball, but the fingers are unwilling. This is my left hand, the one that dances across the fretboard. The one that does all the hard creative work. The moneymaker, as we say in the music business.

“What about playing guitar?” I ask, not really wanting to hear the answer.

The doc draws in a long breath, slowly exhales. “Aw, I don’t think you should count on that.”

“Until when?”

He looks at me hard. Takes aim. Then he hits the bull’s-eye. “Well…ever.”

And there it is. The kill shot. I can’t breathe, can’t think straight. But somehow the message comes through loud and clear: this is the end of Megadeth…the end of my career…the end of music.

The end of life as I know it.

1 DADDY DEAREST

“No more of that shit in my house! You understand?”

FLIP THROUGH A STACK OF SCHOOL YEARBOOKS FROM MY CHILDHOOD OR ADOLESCENCE, AND MORE OF TEN THAN NOT YOU’LL FIND ONE OF THOSE GRAY SILHOUETTES, OR MAY BE EVEN A BIG QUESTION MARK-THE GREAT SCARLET LETTER OF YEAR BOOKS!-WHERE MY PHOTO SHOULD BE. LIKE A LOT OF KIDS WHO BOUNCE AROUND FROM SCHOOL TO SCHOOL, TOWN TO TOWN, I WAS FREQUENTLY ABSENT AND THUS BECAME SOMETHING OF A PHANTOM, A SULLEN, RED-HAIRED MYSTERY TO CLASSMATES AND TEACHERS ALIKE.

THE JOURNEY BEGAN IN LA MESA, CALIFORNIA, IN THE SUMMER OF 1961. THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN, ALTHOUGH IT’S POSSIBLE I WAS CONCEIVED IN TEXAS, WHERE MY PARENTS had lived during the latter stages of their tumultuous marriage. There were two families, really: my sisters Michelle and Suzanne were eighteen and fifteen years old, respectively, by the time I came along (I often thought of them as aunts rather than sisters); my sister Debbie was three. I don’t know exactly what happened in the years between the two sets of children. I do know that life unraveled in a great many ways, and in the end my mother was left to fend for herself, and my father became some sort of shadowy figure.

For all practical purposes, John Mustaine was out of my life by the time I was four years old, when my parents finally divorced. Dad, as I understand it, had once been a very smart and successful man, good with his hands and head, skills that helped him rise to the position of branch manager for Bank of America. From there he moved to National Cash Register, and when NCR transitioned from mechanical to electrical technology, Dad was left behind. As the scope of his work narrowed, his income naturally declined. Whether this failure contributed to his escalating problems with alcohol, or whether alcohol provoked his professional failures, I can’t say. Certainly the man who ruled the Mustaine household in 1961 was not the man who married my mother. Much of what I know of Dad was passed down in the form of horror stories from my older sisters—stories of abuse and generally insane behavior perpetrated under the shroud of alcoholism. There are snapshots tucked away in the back of my mind, memories of sitting on Dad’s lap, watching TV, feeling the razor stubble on his cheeks, smelling booze on his breath. I don’t have memories of him not drinking—you know, playing ball in the backyard, teaching me how to ride a bike, or anything like that. But neither do I have a catalog of despicable images.

Oh, there is one—the time I was down the street, playing with a neighbor, and for some reason Dad came strolling up the driveway to take me home. He was angry, yelling, though I don’t recall the exact words he used. Something about me being late. What I do remember is the sight of the channel locks in his hand. Channel locks are like pliers, only bigger, and for some reason I guess my father felt like he needed them to corral his four-year-old son. Or maybe he was working on something in the garage and forgot to put them down before setting off. Regardless of the motivation, the channel locks were soon taking a big bite out of my earlobe. I remember screaming and Dad seeming oblivious. He dragged me down the street, never releasing his grip as I stumbled and fell, then scrambled to my feet, trying to keep up, hoping my ear wouldn’t just rip right out of its socket. (Do ears have sockets? I was a little kid—what did I know?)

Over the years I’ve generally defended my father against the allegations of abuse. But I have to admit—this particular incident does not serve as much of a defense. It doesn’t exactly reflect the actions of a sober, loving daddy, now, does it? But sober is the important word in that sentence. I know better than most that people under the influence are capable of unspeakably bad behavior. My father was an alcoholic; I choose to believe that this did not make him an evil man. A weak man, perhaps, and a man who did some bad things. But I have other memories as well. Memories of a benign man smoking a pipe, reading the newspaper, and calling me over to kiss him good night.

After the divorce, though, my father became a monster. Oh, not in the literal sense of the word, but in the sense that he was referred to by everyone in my family as someone to be feared and despised. He even became a weapon to be used against me, to keep me in line. If I misbehaved, my mother would yell, “Keep it up and I’m going to send you to live with your father!”

“Oh, no! Please…no! Don’t send me to Dad’s house!”

There were periodic reconciliations, but they never lasted long, and for the most part we were a family on the run, always trying to stay one step ahead of my father, who supposedly was devoting his entire life to two things: drinking and stalking his estranged wife and children. Again, I don’t know if this was accurate, but it was the way things were portrayed to me when I was growing up. We’d settle into a rented house or apartment, and the first thing we’d do is run down to Pier 1 and get a roll of crummy contact paper to turn the shithole of a kitchen into something usable. Things would be quiet for a while. I’d join a Little League team, try to make some friends, and then all of a sudden Mom would tell us Dad had figured out where we were living. A moving van would show up in the middle of the night, we’d pack our meager belongings, and like fugitives we were on the run.

My mother was a maid, and we lived off her salary along with a combination of food stamps and Medicare and other forms of public assistance. And the generosity of friends and relatives. In some cases I could have done with a little less intervention. For example, it was during this period of transiency that we lived with one of my aunts, a devout Jehovah’s Witness. Very quickly this became the center of our lives. And trust me—this was not a good thing, especially for a little boy. Suddenly we were spending all our time with the Witnesses: church on Wednesday night and Sunday morning, Watchtower magazine study groups, guest speakers on the weekends, home Bible study. Then I’d get to school, and while everyone stood with their hands over their hearts during the Pledge of Allegiance, I’d have to stand quietly with my hands at my sides. When the other kids were singing “Happy Birthday to You” and blowing out candles, I’d stand mute. It’s hard enough to make friends as the new kid in school, but when you’re the JW freak as well…forget it. I was a pariah, always getting picked on, always getting smacked around, which really hardened me.

I remember going to work one day with my mother, in a very wealthy neighborhood called Linda Isle in Newport Beach. There was a little sand pit near the boat dock, and a group of boys was tossing around a football, playing a game that is sometimes referred to as Kill the Guy with the Ball, although in the politically incorrect world of adolescent boys in the early 1970s, it was more commonly known as Smear the Queer. These guys were all bigger than me, and they took great joy in kicking the shit out of me, but I didn’t care, and I had no fear. Why? Because by this time I’d grown accustomed to getting knocked around in school, and disciplined by aunts and uncles, and harassed by a variety of cousins. I blamed almost all of it on the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I mean, the fucking insanity of having a brother-in-law or uncle spank me because I supposedly violated some obscure rule of the Witnesses. And this was all stuff that happened under the guise of religion—in the service of a supposedly loving God.

For a while, at least, I tried to fit in with the Witnesses, although from the very beginning it seemed like some giant, multilevel marketing scheme: you sell books and magazines, door-to-door, and the more you sell, the loftier your title. Total bullshit. I was eight, nine, ten years old, and I was worried about the world coming to an end! To this day I still have trauma caused by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I don’t get all excited around Christmas, because I still have a hard time believing everything that goes along with the holiday (and I’m speaking as a man who now considers himself a Christian). I want to. I love my kids, I love my wife, and I want to celebrate with them. But deep down inside, there is doubt and skepticism; the Witnesses fucked it up for me.

WHAT DO YOU do when you’re a lonely kid, a boy surrounded by women, with no father or even a father figure? You make shit up, create your own universe. I played with a lot of plastic models—miniature replicas of Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, whose rivalry was re-created nightly on the floor of my bedroom; tiny American soldiers stormed the beach at Normandy or invaded Iwo Jima. Sounds weird, right? Well, this particular world, the world in my head, was the safest place I could find. I don’t mean to sound like a victim, because I’ve never felt that way. I think of myself as a survivor. But the truth is, every survivor endures some shit, and I was no exception.

Sports provided a glimmer of hope. Bob Wilkie, the chief of police in Stanton, California, was married to my sister Suzanne. Bob was a big, athletic guy (about six foot four, two hundred pounds), a former minor-league baseball player, and he was, for a time, something of a hero to me. He was also my first Little League baseball coach. Bob’s stepson Mike (my nephew—how weird is that?) was the team’s best pitcher; I was the starting catcher. I loved baseball from the very beginning. Loved putting on the hardware, directing the action from behind the plate, protecting my turf as if my life depended on it. Other kids would try to score and I would beat them down. I wouldn’t do anything illegal, but I would put the fear of God into them if they tried to get past me. And I could hit—led the league in home runs that first season.

I don’t mean to imply that I was destined for greatness in baseball, but I do think I could have been a jock if I wanted. Unfortunately, there was no stability in my life, and whatever extracurricular activities I chose to pursue, I did so largely without help. We would live with Suzanne for a while, until Dad would find us, and then we’d move out on our own, until the money ran out and we got evicted, and then we’d move in with Michelle or with my aunt Frieda. That was the cycle. One move after another, one home after another.

I wasn’t lazy. Far from it, actually. I picked up a paper route to pay for some of my baseball gear and registration fees, and then I added a second route so I’d have some extra money for food and whatever else I might need. During that period we moved from Garden Grove down to Costa Mesa; both of my paper routes were in the Costa Mesa area, but my baseball team was in Garden Grove. So I’d routinely spend the afternoon on my bike delivering papers and then ride my bike up to Garden Grove—a distance of some ten miles—for baseball practice. Then I’d ride back home and fall asleep. The end of that insanity came near the end of the season, when our coach, having exhausted all pitching options during one particularly ugly game, ordered me to the mound.

“But I’m not a pitcher,” I said.

“You are now.”

I wasn’t trying to be an arrogant prick or anything. It’s just that I was exhausted and in no mood to play a new position; I didn’t want to deal with the learning curve or the embarrassment and then have to pedal all the way back home, dejected and pissed off.

So I played, and I walked in several runs. And that, as it turned out, was one of my very last baseball games.

MUSIC WAS ALWYS there, sometimes in the background, sometimes inching forward. Michelle had married a guy named Stan, who I thought was one of the coolest guys in the world. He was a cop, too (like Bob Wilkie), but he was a motorcycle cop, and he worked for the California Highway Patrol. Stan would get up in the morning and you’d hear the leather squeaking, the gestapo boots smacking against the floor, and he’d get on his Harley, fire it up, and the whole neighborhood would rattle. No one ever complained, of course. What could they do—call a cop? I liked Stan a lot, not just because of the Harley and the fact that he was clearly not someone you’d want to mess with, but also because he was a genuinely decent man with a real fondness for music. Every time I went to Stan’s house, it seemed that the stereo was roaring, filling the air with the sounds of the great crooners from the sixties: Frankie Valli, Gary Puckett, the Righteous Brothers, Engelbert Humperdinck. I loved listening to those guys, and if you think that seems odd for a future heavy metal warrior, well, think again. I don’t doubt for a second that the sense of melody that would inform Megadeth took root back in Stan’s house, among other places.

My sister Debbie, for example, had a terrific record collection, mostly hook-laden stuff by the pop stars of that era: Cat Stevens, Elton John, and of course the Beatles. That kind of music was always in the air, sinking into my skin, and when Mom gave me a cheap acoustic guitar as a present for graduating from elementary school, I couldn’t wait to start playing. Debbie had some sheet music laying around, and before long I had taught myself some rudimentary chord progressions. Nothing great, of course, but respectable enough for the songs to be recognizable.

For a long time Debbie was my best friend, the person with whom I spent most of my time. She’d come home from school and we’d hang out together, watch TV, play music (Debbie on piano, me on guitar). We leaned on each other when things got hard; we also fought like siblings do, with Debbie usually getting the better of me in our disagreements.

As Debbie grew up and began dating, and eventually fell in love with a guy named Mike Balli, I was left behind. She was seventeen years old when they married. I knew even then it wouldn’t last, and of course it didn’t. Anyone who met Mike and saw him with Debbie knew it was a relationship doomed to fail. Whatever chemistry there was quickly evaporated, and they were left with an unbalanced union just waiting to die. Debbie was strong and dominant; she basically called the shots—a Big Momma kind of thing.

But Mike had his positive attributes, especially to a fourteen-year-old aspiring guitar player. For one thing, his mother was in some way related to Jack Lord, who at the time was the star of the hit television show Hawaii Five-O. In 1974, it didn’t get a lot cooler than Steve McGarrett, and Mike didn’t mind dropping the guy’s name in casual conversation: “Dude, McGarrett’s like…my second cousin or something!” Can’t say I blame him. I would have done the same thing. Mainly, though, what I liked about Mike was the fact that he could play electric guitar, and he didn’t mind playing with me. Admittedly, his guitar was a complete piece of crap; it was called a Supra, and it was a ridiculous sunburst red, with three pickups, but it served its purpose. To my still uneducated ears, he seemed to be a fairly decent player.

Mike’s little brother Mark was also a musician. He played bass in a band with a guy named John Voorhees (who later did a stint with a fairly successful band called Stryper). Mark and John heard me playing, asked if I might be interested in joining them.

“Sure,” I said. “Just one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t have a guitar.”

No problem, Mark said. I could borrow his acoustic. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just knew I liked the feeling of having a guitar in my hands, making music, being part of…something. I was a smart kid but an indifferent student, even as far back as elementary school. I’d get in trouble for fooling around or failing to have my homework completed, and sometimes I’d have to stay after school. Frankly I found this embarrassing. But I knew in my heart that I was a natural learner, especially if it was a subject that captured my interest.

Like music.

I loved having that secret weapon, that bond—where you sit down with another musician, and you start talking, and everyone else at the table immediately takes notice, because you’re speaking a language they don’t even understand, can’t hope to comprehend. It’s like they think the conversation is going to be empty-headed, but it’s not. It’s just…different. And if you don’t play music (as opposed to just listening to music), you really can’t possibly know what I’m talking about.

So joining a band was about camaraderie as much as anything else, I suppose.

And sex, of course. Ultimately, when it comes to rock ‘n’ roll, it’s always about sex.

ONE AFTERNOON WHEN I was about thirteen years old, we went over to Mark’s house to rehearse. There were a bunch of people hanging out, including one of Mark’s buddies, who lived across the street, and his girlfriend, whose name was Linda. When I walked into the house, Linda caught my eye. I wasn’t exactly a player, even by junior high standards, but I noticed right away that Linda was giving me a hard look. She hung out while we jammed for a bit, and afterward, having seen that I was the new lead guitar player, she introduced herself to me. Within a matter of days, Linda had chucked her old boyfriend for me. Why? Not because of my looks or dynamic personality, but simply because I played guitar. And I recall thinking, as Linda sidled up to me and took my hand in hers, Hmmmm…I kind of like this.

The hormonal inspiration for picking up a guitar is a cliché; it’s also fundamentally true, as pure and honest as any other muse. And it doesn’t change, even as you go from gangly, pubescent teen to full-grown adult male. That was one of the things that surprised me most about the music business: you hear all this stuff about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll…and you laugh it off. Then you get to peek behind the curtain, and guess what? It’s real! You go to Salt Lake City, the pristine capital of that most morally upright of states, and discover there’s a reason the rock stars call it Salt Lick City. You discover the cliché is based on truth. It’s absolutely real, and pretty soon you’re trying to decide which of the two proverbial bulls you want to be: the one that charges down the hill, full speed, and fucks the first cow he meets, or the one who saunters down the hill slowly and fucks them all.

MARK’S HOUSE BECAME a place of inspiration and experimentation. One of the very first songs I learned to play was “Panic in Detroit” by David Bowie, followed by Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes.” There was a pot dealer who lived up the street, and he introduced us to a variety of great stuff (in more ways than one): Johnny Winter; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Triumvirate; and, of course, Led Zeppelin. I mean, if you played guitar, you wanted to be Jimmy Page, right? And if you sang in a rock ‘n’ roll band, you wanted to be Robert Plant. Everyone was trying to learn “Stairway to Heaven,” which I actually picked up pretty quickly. But you know what really got me hooked?

KISS.

Man, I really dug the early KISS stuff—not just musically but stylistically. I was not a Gene Simmons guy, either; I liked Ace Frehley, because he was a lead guitar player. I liked the whole rock star thing, and KISS seemed to have taken it to a new level. In the same way that Axl Rose made people hate rock stars, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley made rock stars seem kind of decadent and megalomaniacal—which wasn’t a bad thing at all, so far as I could tell. KISS was one of the first bands I saw live, and I couldn’t help but notice that a disproportionate number of their fans looked like Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders: they all had blond hair and wore tube tops, and they seemed to be throwing themselves at the band. And if the band wasn’t accessible, well, then the guy next to them in the audience would do.

My love for music, and especially my fascination with the lifestyle it promised, was viewed skeptically by some members of my extended family. My mother, of course, was forever conflicted: on the one hand, I know that she loved me and supported me, and wanted to see me happy and successful. On the other hand, there was no reconciling her son’s drinking, drugging, and “devil music” with the tenets of the Jehovah’s Witnesses; they were fundamentally incompatible. Similarly, my brother-in-law Bob Wilkie grew increasingly disenchanted with my changing interests. He liked me when I was a baseball player or an aspiring martial artist (I first took lessons at the YMCA in Stanton, which was located directly across the street from Bob’s police station). Those were pursuits he could get behind. But playing in a band? Listening to heavy metal music?

Uh-uh.

One day when I was not quite fifteen years old, Bob came home and discovered me hanging out in his house, listening to Judas Priest’s Sad Wings of Destiny. He walked in the front door, marched over to the turntable, and turned down the volume.

“What the hell is this?” he said, waving the album jacket in disgust.

“Judas Priest,” I answered, somewhat sheepishly.

“Who does it belong to?”

I shrugged. “It’s mine.”

And with that Bob dropped the jacket, took two big steps in my direction, and punched me in the face.

“No more of that shit in my house! You understand?”

I stood there, stunned and dazed, holding a hand to my cheek, fighting back tears.

“Yes, sir.”

What else could I do? I respected Bob too much to fight back. He would have kicked my ass anyway. I mean, the guy was a professional athlete—and a cop! Not only that, but Bob had come into our family—and into my life—as a good guy. He’d married Suzanne, adopted her son, and generally conducted himself in an old-fashioned, chivalrous manner. This seemed completely out of character.

But as I retreated to the kitchen to get some ice out of the freezer and applied it to my swollen jaw, I had to wonder: Who the hell punches a fifteen-year-old?

And…

What the fuck does he have against Judas Priest?

2 REEFER MADNESS

“He likes to pour Al steak sauce on my pussy before giving me head.”

I WAS THIRTEEN YEARS OLD THE FIRST TIME I GOT HIGH.

WE WERE LIVING IN GARDEN GROVE AT THE TIME, AND A FRIEND WHO LIVED DOWN THE STREET HAD INTRODUCED ME TO THE MAGIC OF MARIJUANA. THIS KID WAS ONE OF THOSE INGENIOUS LITTLE FUCKERS WHO, IF HE HAD MANAGED TO CHANNEL HIS ENERGY AND INTELLECT IN OTHER DIRECTIONS, MIGHT HAVE EARNED A PHD SOMEWHERE. AS IT HAPPENED, HE PROVED MAINLY TO BE GOOD AT FINDING WAYS TO INGEST POT.

WE WERE HANGING OUT AT HIS HOUSE ONE DAY AFTER SCHOOL, AND HE SUGGESTED WE SMOKE SOME WEED. BUT NOT IN ANY MANNER THAT I RECOGNIZED. RATHER THAN ROLLING A DOOB, THIS KID WENT TO HIS ROOM and returned with a homemade bong crafted out of a Pringles potato chip can!

“What do I do with this?” I asked as he proudly showed me the tube.

And then he demonstrated. A half hour later I was staggering back down the street, red eyed and giggling, absolutely loaded. And that was it. Game on.

I liked smoking pot, liked the way it made me feel, and so I started experimenting with it. From there I naturally branched out into alcohol and other drugs, and before long I was skipping school, killing entire days at my friend’s house, sucking on the Pringles can. My grades quickly suffered, and I started to see how you could associate with the wrong people and make bad decisions, and pretty soon your life could be spiraling out of control. Not that I gave a shit. I’m just talking about awareness and the fact that as an adult, and a parent, I can look back now and see where it all sort of began. But you have to remember: there were no serious ramifications—none that mattered to me, anyway. Getting high on a regular basis did not make my life noticeably worse. In fact, it made life tolerable.

More than anything else (and this is true of most kids, I think), what I wanted was to feel as though I fit in somewhere. I wanted to belong. Music helped with that. So did smoking pot. Each time we moved to a new house, a new town, a new school, I endured an indoctrination period. I learned how to deal with this in a variety of ways—first through sports, then through music and partying, and eventually by breaking free of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. There was no greater stamp of weirdness than to be associated with the Witnesses, and to escape that stigma I deliberately behaved in a manner that was inconsistent with the teachings of the church. My mom and my aunts and all the other Witnesses would warn me that I was destined to burn in hell if I didn’t clean up my act, but frankly I didn’t care. I just wanted to get away from them. I wanted some semblance of normalcy, whatever that might mean.

There were times when I felt like the sad hero of some fairy tale. You know the kind—where the kids are left in the care of an evil stepmother or stepfather, or some other surrogate caregiver who really couldn’t give a flying fuck about the kids’ welfare. And the dreary circumstances of my life seemed less appealing than retreating to some make-believe world in which all I had to do was smoke weed, play music, hang out with likeminded slackers, and maybe try to get laid once in a while. Music, in particular, was my avenue of escape—everything else just went along with it.

THERE WAS, HOWEVER, one significant problem associated with cultivating a healthy appetite for drugs and alcohol.

Cash flow.

By the time I was fifteen we’d moved into an apartment at a place called Hermosa Village (which was actually located not in Hermosa or Hermosa Beach, but in nearby Huntington Beach), across the street from Golden West College, where I would eventually take classes. When we moved in there, I lost some friendships and the easy access to pot that came with them, and so I had to figure out how to keep the grass growing, so to speak. At the time, pot was going for roughly ten bucks an ounce. So, with no consideration whatsoever given to consequences or moral conundrums, I borrowed ten bucks from my sister, bought an ounce of pot, and went to work. I rolled forty joints and quickly turned around and sold them for fifty cents apiece. In a matter of just a few hours, I had doubled my money. Now, I was far from an economics wizard, but I knew a good thing when I saw it. From that moment on, I was in business: a low-rent pot dealer who made enough cash to stay high and to put food in his belly when the fridge was empty, which was more often than you might imagine. Before long, the going price for a joint went up to seventy-five cents. Then a dollar. Then Mexican weed gave way to the more potent and expensive Colombian, which in turn gave way to rainbow and to Thai. The culture embraced pot smoking with increasing fervor, which was good for my wallet and maybe not so great for my head. I didn’t really care. I was home. All I needed was some dope and music, and some buddies to hang out with.

I remember seeing Reefer Madness at the old Stanton Picture Palace, a theater in my brother-in-law’s jurisdiction. There were virtually no rules there in the 1970s; you could drink and smoke as much dope as you wanted. And when the cops came, the owner would get on the public address system and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, so as not to violate fire codes, please extinguish all smoking materials now.” And then the fans would come on and clear the fog, and the cops would leave and everyone would light up all over again. What a great place! I saw Fritz the Cat there, too, and Gimme Shelter. I’d have my little two-dollar pipe and my bag of pot, and I’d sit there for hours on end, hiding out, watching the movies. That was the culture. That was my life.

Mom naturally approved of none of this, and I can’t say that I blame her. On more than one occasion I’d be getting ready to leave, to go hang with my friends or play some music, and I’d have to alert my mother to the possibility of a delivery.

“Uh, Mom?”

“Yes?”

“There’s a good chance this dude will come by around three o’clock. He’s going to pick up a package. It’s in my room. Just give it to him. And tell him I need twenty-five bucks.”

Mom would look at me like I was insane. “What exactly is in this package, David?”

“Doesn’t matter, Mom. Just give it to him. Really, don’t worry. It’s cool.”

Remarkably enough, she went along with it. At least for a while. It’s hard not to love your kids, I guess, even when they’re making your life miserable.

Eventually Mom had had enough. Unable to reconcile my behavior with her own religious beliefs (and no doubt dreading the day when the cops would break down the door and arrest all of us for drug trafficking), Mom moved out of the apartment. I was not invited to join her. I was fifteen years old and, for all intents and purposes, totally on my own. An emancipated minor.

Fortunately, the two guys who ran the apartment complex wound up being terrific customers of mine. So if I was a little short on cash when it came time to pay the rent, all I had to do was broker a deal. A few joints here and there usually settled the issue and left everyone happy and high. By this time I was no longer just dabbling in the field; I was moving a considerable amount of dope. And I had no problem with it whatsoever. Here’s the truth of the matter: when you’re a hungry fifteen-year-old with no viable means of income and no parental support or supervision, you don’t have many options. You aren’t old enough to get a real job, so you have to be more…creative. Desperation fueled my entrepreneurial spirit—that and the knowledge that if I didn’t sell dope, about the only other way to make money was to sell myself. Peddle my ass. I knew enough kids who’d gone that route, or at least had heard about them, seen them working the streets, and there was no fucking way I was going to let that happen.

Under the right circumstances, though, I didn’t mind trading sex for drugs, or drugs for sex, or whatever. There was, for example, a girl named Willow who worked at a music shop at Westminster Mall. We got to know each other through my frequent visits to the store, during which I’d wander around for hours, thumbing through the stacks of vinyl, trying to figure out what I wanted to listen to next, whether there was some way to advance my knowledge. I was a pothead and a dope dealer, but I really did love music, and I wanted to be a great guitar player—I just had no idea how to make it happen. Eventually I struck up a friendship with Willow, who was maybe a year or two older than me, and the friendship evolved into something else. In exchange for free dope, Willow would give me free records. We’d smoke the dope and listen to the records while having sex at my apartment. Not a terrible arrangement, all things considered. It was Willow, after all, who gave me my first AC/DC album, a gift that kept on giving for years to come, long after we’d stopped having sex or even seeing each other casually.

I never labored under the illusion that I was anything more than a diversion for Willow, someone who shared her taste in music and didn’t mind trading dope for sex. But even at that age I had some meager standards, which bubbled to the surface one afternoon during a postcoital round of pillow talk.

“You know, my boyfriend likes it when I shave my pubic hair into a heart,” Willow said.

“Yeah, I noticed. Cool.”

“You know what else he likes?”

“What?”

She leaned over and put her arms around me, then whispered into my ear. “He likes to pour Al steak sauce on my pussy before giving me head.”

“Whoa…”

And that was that. Not even the prospect of an endless supply of records was enough to wipe from my brain the indelible image of Willow and her boyfriend and a big sloppy bottle of Al. We never had sex again.

WHEN BUSINESS SLOWED and my stomach rumbled, I had precious few options. I couldn’t really move back in with my mother—our relationship was simply too fractured, and her ties to the Jehovah’s Witnesses precluded accepting my increasingly decadent way of life. Salvation, then, lay to the north. Specifically, in a little town near Pocatello, Idaho. My sister Michelle had moved up there with Stan, who in addition to being a motorcycle cop was also a skilled carpenter. As tourism and an attendant real estate boom hit the region, work for guys like Stan became plentiful; he ditched the badge and uniform and went off to make some serious money. Tired of trying to support myself, and weary of the life I was leading at home, I called Michelle and asked if I could come up and live with her for a while. She graciously accepted, although strict parameters were placed on the arrangement.

For one thing, I had to get my ass back in school. I also agreed to get a part-time job. Michelle helped me land a gig bussing tables at a restaurant where she worked, a place called the Ox Bow Inn. My nephew Stevie (Michelle’s son) worked there as a busboy as well, so it was kind of a family affair. Stevie, though, turned out to be a real pain in the ass. He wanted to start a band but lacked the money to buy proper equipment. So he kept borrowing gear from other bands playing at the Ox Bow. There were a lot of people who weren’t best pleased.

That, however, was nothing compared to the grief Stevie caused me at school. Before I even arrived, he had spread the word about the imminent arrival of his uncle Dave, “the kung fu master from California.” Well, of course, I wasn’t a kung fu master; in fact, I hadn’t yet studied kung fu at all. I’d been taking martial arts classes* for about three years and had progressed to the point where I could handle myself in a fight, if necessary. But it wasn’t like I was a black belt or anything, and I certainly didn’t brag about it. The study of martial arts has been an important part of my life—spiritually and physically—for nearly four decades now, but I was nothing more than a novice at the time, taking classes to enhance my self-esteem and foster some sense of discipline in an otherwise chaotic life.

Stevie saw it differently, and so did everyone else. By the time I got up there, half the school was ready to fight me just for the sheer fucking sport of it. On the first day of school some dude walked by me at my locker and drove his elbow into my stomach. I was still trying to catch my breath when he looked at me and said, with a nasty, gap-toothed smile, “You and me, boy? We’re gonna fight after school today.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

He didn’t answer, just walked away, laughing, with a posse of rednecks.

Turned out his name was Wilbur. He was—I shit you not—the son of a pig farmer, which actually gave him a relatively prominent place in this particular backwoods social stratum. I had no way out of this. I had to take the bus home, and by the time I got on board, everyone knew there was going to be a showdown between the kung fu master and the pig farmer. Now, getting to and from school in rural Idaho involved numerous transfers and lots of bus time. My rendezvous with Wilbur occurred at one of the transfer points, while waiting for a second bus that would take me back to the mobile home where Stan and Michelle lived. Within seconds of getting off the bus, Wilbur and I found ourselves at the center of a big, heaving circle of bloodthirsty teenagers.

Damn it, I did not want this to happen.

Wilbur put up his hands, like some bare-knuckle fighter, and smiled confidently.

“Come on, motherfucker,” he yelled. “Hit me! Flip me or something.”

For some reason I heard that—“Hit me! Flip me…”—and the thought occurred to me that it sounded like the title of a punk song. A calm washed over me. The whole thing just seemed so ridiculous, me standing there in the middle of a bunch of strange, screaming kids, getting ready to fight this big Idaho pig farmer’s son. I thought I’d left California to get away from dangerous situations. How the hell did this happen?

“Come on, man! You gonna give me a karate chop or what?! Kung fu faggot!”

Stalemate. Wilbur didn’t want to hit me first because he was bigger; I refused to hit him because I had been taught by my sensei that I was to strike only in self-defense. And so it went, the two of us dancing awkwardly, until the bus arrived. We boarded, uneventfully, and the bus pulled away.

Crisis averted.

Or so I thought, until we reached Wilbur’s stop. As he exited the bus, he cocked his arm and drilled me in the back of the head with an elbow. I knew instantly I was fucked—and not because I was now compelled to engage Wilbur in battle, but rather because I’d worked up a sizable wad of chewing tobacco, a big chunk of which was now sliding down my throat. If you’ve ever accidentally swallowed chew, you know what came next. Within seconds I was incapacitated; by the time I got home I was vomiting from my shoes.

In response, I did what anyone in my situation would have done: I put a hex on the guy.

Well, maybe not anyone, but anyone with a sister who was heavily into witchcraft and black magic. Indeed, for me, this was the beginning of a very long and disturbing flirtation with the occult, the effects of which haunted me for years. At the time, though, it seemed just a handy tool to have at my disposal. Having been baptized Lutheran and harassed into stupefaction by the JWs, I was by my teenage years an empty vessel when it came to religion. Contrary to popular belief, while I did read The Satanic Bible I never became an actual Satanist—the whole concept seemed kind of silly, to be perfectly candid—but I certainly did dabble in the dark arts, and I don’t doubt for a second that it fucked with my head to an almost immeasurable degree.

I believed in the occult, and some people will say, “How can you believe in the occult and practice black magic and not be satanic?” Well, there’s a line there. Talk to anyone who has been involved in the occult and they will tell you that there are a lot of different factions for different types of magic. And as with anything else, there are good and bad aspects to the occult.

I only know that both witchcraft and the Jehovah’s Witnesses caused me a good deal of pain for a great many years. They’re different, of course. The pain from getting into witchcraft was residual. The pain of the religiosity of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, that was causal. It’s like when people say, “Hey, you’re on drugs, so your relationships are shitty,” and you respond with, “No, my relationships are shitty, and that’s why I’m on drugs.” Either way, you’re fucked-up.

But that afternoon, as I tried to calm my raging stomach? Witchcraft seemed like a perfectly reasonable coping mechanism.

Since Michelle was reluctant to offer, I stole some of her books; after just a few days of study, I went to work, crafting a doll out of bread dough, using poppy seeds to spell out W-I-L-B-U-R and tying a noose made out of string around the doll’s neck. Then I recited an incantation from the book of spells. Finally, at the very end, I picked up the doll and snapped off one of its legs.

Did it work?

I can’t say for sure, but I do know that a short time later Wilbur was involved in a car accident; his leg was broken. Given the nature of life in that part of the world—the way people drank heavily and drove without regard to consequence—and given that Wilbur was an imbecilic jerk, I suppose some sort of crippling episode was inevitable.

Then again…

Kind of creepy, huh?

AFTER MY HIATUS in Idaho, I returned to Orange County and loosely resumed the pursuit of a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. Since I liked cars and knew a little bit about how they worked, I got a part-time job working at a garage; this helped tide me over until I could cultivate enough clients to resurrect my business selling pot. I took classes at night in the hope of getting a high school diploma and found companionship in the arms of a girl named Moira, who became my first serious love interest.

Musically, I was a sponge, listening to anything I could get my hands on, trying to learn my favorite licks and mimic my favorite guitar players. During the day I hung out at the beach with my best buddy, Mike Jordan, and some other pasty-skinned friends of Northern European descent, drinking and trying not to fry. At night we wandered from neighborhood to neighborhood, from kegger to kegger, sometimes fighting, but usually just drinking, smoking pot, and laughing at the amateurish bands that passed for “entertainment.”

Even the worst of them, though, managed to tap into something primal and to achieve a minor level of celebrity, with all the attendant perks. I remember hearing about a guy named Pat Knowles, the one guitar player in our neighborhood universally viewed as a badass musician. Then I met him for the first time. What a disappointment! The guy was a skinny little vanillapudding, Peter Pan–looking motherfucker. Just a really soft kid. But Jesus…could he play! And then there was John Tull, who was almost the antithesis of Pat Knowles. John was a big lumberjack kind of guy, with thick arms and a cinder block of a skull. You know how they say the typical adult male has a forehead equal to the width of four fingers? Well, John was definitely a five. Maybe even a six. He had a black Les Paul with three pickups, and he was playing songs like no one I’d ever seen. Not locally, anyway. Good songs, too—songs I listened to on the radio and on my eight track, and as I watched him play, I couldn’t help but be impressed.

Man…this guy is good.

That was only half of it. When the band went on break and John put down his guitar, the chicks were all over him. And bear in mind, Mr. Five-Finger Forehead was not exactly the most handsome guy in the room. But it didn’t matter—it was the guitar and the magic of the music that made John attractive to the opposite sex. I wanted to be like him, and to be like Pat Knowles.

Only better than them.

IT BEGAN AT the age of seventeen, with a kid named Dave Harmon, a drummer from Huntington Beach whose home life seemed to be the exact opposite of mine. Dave came from a stable family, with a mother and father who supported everything he wanted to do, including becoming a musician. They understood that I was basically on my own, and so they took pity on me, opened their home to me, and treated me with kindness and understanding. For me, it was like winning the lottery. I was living on my own, drinking generic beer, eating ramen noodles and macaroni and cheese like they were going out of style. Then I meet this kid with cool parents and a fridge full of food.

Dave and I started talking about playing together and maybe putting together a real band, one that would kick the shit out of anything we’d seen at the neighborhood parties. To play guitar, Dave recruited a friend of his named Rick Solis, who had a beautiful Gibson Flying V. Like me, Rick studied martial arts, so we hit it off right away. Rick was also the first aspiring rocker I’d met who actually looked the part—he was like a cross between Vinnie Vincent and Paul Stanley. This was no accident. Rick was one of those guys with an innate understanding of image—he favored sleeveless shirts, long hair, and a weird assemblage of rock star jewelry. He also had an enormous nose and dark skin, which gave him a really exotic Mediterranean appearance, and was one of the most hirsute guys I’d ever met. He took the good with the bad—the bearskin rug on his chest (hey, in the seventies this was considered the height of virility) and the monobrow that stretched from one side of his head to the other.

Rick was the first guy I met who seemed committed to playing well and to becoming a rock star. We taught each other a bunch of songs, from “Fire” by Jimi Hendrix to most of the Judas Priest catalog to almost anything else that sounded interesting. Like me, Rick was still developing his taste for music. Before long he was behaving in a manner that was profoundly weird and unacceptable, which led not only to his expulsion from the band but, I can only presume, to a premature demise (Rick often drove while fucked-up, and died in a motorcycle accident just a few years later).

With Rick gone, Dave and I went about the business of building a new band. First to join was a guitar player named Tom Quecke, a friend of mine from night school. Tom came from a family with three brothers. The oldest worked for the government in national security; a terrific, great upstanding guy. The middle brother I didn’t hear much about—he was the black sheep of the family. And then there was Tom, who was like a black sheep gone good. Or trying, anyway. Truth be told, he was kind of a mediocre guitar player, but that’s all we really needed, because he only played rhythm; I handled lead.

Next on board was Bob Evans, a bass player who reminded me of that character Junior from the hillbilly TV show Hee Haw. He was heavyset, with short hair and bangs, and he wore overalls all the time. Bobby looked…well, kind of like a simpleton. But he was actually a pretty sharp kid. As was his father, who was an accomplished sound engineer who had built some incredible sound cabinets for his home. These things weren’t just bass cabinets; they were like bass enclosures from Royal Albert Hall or something. We’d go to play with this dude, and I’d have my little cabinets, and Bobby would be firing up these enormous cabinets, stacked eight feet high, and would hit that first bass note—BWOWWWWWW!—and sterilize the neighborhood. Bobby had money and a car, so naturally we were happy to have him in the band.

At that point all we needed was a singer—I hadn’t yet considered the possibility that I might handle the microphone myself—and we found one in Pat Voelkes. Pat was lean and muscular, with long straight hair—he looked like a singer. He was also a couple years older than the rest of us, a little bit more mature, a little smarter about the practical side of putting together a band. We built a rehearsal studio in Pat’s garage and got together as often as possible to practice. But we all had lives on the side. Mine revolved around the trafficking of illicit substances. By this time I’d gravitated from selling pot to selling anything I could get my hands on: hash, LSD, Quaaludes, cocaine. When it came to making money, I was indiscriminate.

I don’t say that with pride. It’s just the way it was. I needed cash, and this was the easiest, most efficient way to raise it. Moreover, you have to consider the cultural and political climate of the times. Chemically speaking, the late 1970s was a pretty liberal time. I didn’t see anything particularly dangerous or immoral about ingesting or distributing drugs. It seemed absolutely normal to me. Given my background and family history, this isn’t exactly a surprise.

We called the band Panic. I don’t even remember why—probably just because it sounded kind of cool, wild and anarchic. Our first performance was in Dana Point, at a party hosted by my cousin John. It was something of a makeshift affair. Dave Harmon was unable to play that night, so we recruited a substitute drummer named Mike Leftwich. We played pretty well, and the crowd loved us. The set list was a random collection of songs I’d heard at various keg parties—Def Leppard, the Scorpions, Judas Priest—along with some more obscure stuff that I liked, such as Budgie and Sammy Hagar (as a solo artist). Everyone had a blast, and by the end of the night the apartment had taken on the atmosphere of an orgy, with drunken girls removing their clothes and having sex with guys in the band.

I couldn’t have been happier.

The next day, though, brought horrific news. The band members had all gone their separate ways after the party. Mike had left with a friend named Joe, a big-hearted, unassuming kid who had doubled as our sound guy for the concert. On the drive home, on Pacific Coast Highway, just south of Huntington Beach Pier, Mike and Joe had been involved in a terrible accident. I got the news from Tom Quecke, delivered through the haze of an earlymorning hangover.

“Joe fell asleep at the wheel,” he said, his voice catching. “They’re both gone.”

AT SEVENTEEN YOU don’t instantly make the cause-and-effect connection between drinking and death, but I was beginning to understand that the lifestyle I was leading—and at times loving—had its consequences. For one thing, when I drank, I tended to get really violent. Pot had a soothing, almost soporific effect. Alcohol, though, provoked anger. I was probably sixteen the first time I drank to the point of blacking out. It wouldn’t be the last. Invariably, my mood turned dark on these occasions. My intent was never to hurt anyone. It wasn’t like I popped open the first beer with the goal of finding a fight by the end of the evening. My motivation was much simpler: to feel good and find somebody who wanted to commiserate naked with me. Typically, though, the plans went awry. Let’s put it this way: I did not get in trouble every time I drank, but every time I got in trouble, I’d been drinking. That’s for sure. Smoking pot was an entirely different experience. I’d get up in the morning, wake and bake, watch MTV, sing along with the Buggles, play some guitar, take a nap, and get on with the day. No harm, no foul.

All of it was of an ever-expanding piece: the music, the lifestyle, the drinking, the drugs, the sex. For the longest time I was incapable of acknowledging even the slightest possibility that I might have a problem with substance abuse. I looked in the mirror and saw a prototypical rock star. A party animal. It wasn’t until many years later that I took another look and saw something else:

Oh, my God. I’m not Keith Richards. I’m Otis from Mayberry! A fucking drunk!

But that took time. Pot was for the most part a socially acceptable drug in the seventies; to a lesser extent, so was cocaine, although I shunned it initially because it was linked in my view to the disco movement and then to house music and techno. Cocaine was for the Village People and Donna Summer crowds, or the pussies you’d see at a Flock of Seagulls concert. For metal fans, especially for metal musicians, there was booze and drugs. The hard stuff.

A FEW DAYS after the accident, Dave Harmon and I went over to Mike’s house and tried to speak with his family. We awkwardly offered our condolences, and they graciously accepted, but it was a painful encounter. I suppose on some level they blamed us for what happened to Mike, if for no other reason than because of his association with the band. Someone had to be at fault, right? Isn’t that the way tragedy works?

We tried to resuscitate the band, even played a bunch of shows in Dana Point, Huntington Beach, and the surrounding areas over the next couple months. But the spirit was lacking; there was too much baggage, too many reminders of what had happened. Too much guilt, maybe. I can only speak for myself, and for me, it just didn’t feel right. The kinship that drives a band during the formative years was lacking. We didn’t like each other enough, and we didn’t want it badly enough.

Drug use around Panic was common. I was doing drugs with the band members, fronting people stuff, getting high on my own supply…spiraling down the path of drugs and alcoholism. Even the greatest of all fringe benefits—random, indiscriminate sex—began to lose its luster. I told Moira one day that I’d had a dream about engaging in a threesome with her and one of her best friends (this was true, incidentally); that afternoon, when I came home from rehearsal, Moira and Patty were standing on the front porch, naked and smiling, awaiting my arrival. One might reasonably assert that such a greeting would boost the spirits of any red-blooded American male. And it did…for a while. But something was missing. I just didn’t know what it was.

I’d gotten into rock ’n’ roll for the lifestyle, not because I aspired to great musicianship. I didn’t sit around waiting for people to come up and say, “Gosh, Dave, you arpeggiate so beautifully!” No, it wasn’t that at all. I was a rock ’n’ roll rebel. I had my guitar strung across my back, I had a knife in my belt, and I had a sneer on my face. And that was it. That was enough.

Or so I thought.

AROUND THE SAME time, I briefly reconnected with my father. It was June of 1978; I was seventeen years old, and for some reason I got the urge to track him down. Mom and Dad had been divorced for so long, and he’d been such a shadowy figure in my life, that I just had to see for myself whether everything I’d heard was true. So distant were the memories that they couldn’t be trusted, any more than I could trust the lurid stories of abuse spewed by my sisters and my mother.

It didn’t take long to track him down, and when I called him up and suggested we get together, he seemed genuinely moved.

“I’d like that, yeah. When?”

“How about this weekend?”

We met at his apartment, a dark, sparsely furnished little place with bad wallpaper and rented furniture. It was Father’s Day, but that was almost beside the point. I didn’t feel like his son, and I don’t know that he felt like my father. We were just two people—strangers really—trying to connect. Whatever emotion I expected—anger, joy, pride—was overwhelmed by the sadness of his pathetic little life. My father did not look like the bogeyman of my nightmares; nor did he look like the successful banker he’d once been. He just looked…old. At one point I opened up the refrigerator looking for something to drink and was stunned by its emptiness. There, in the door, was a little jar of mayonnaise, crusty at the rim. On the center shelf was a loaf of bread, open and spilling out of its bag. A few random bottles of beer were scattered about the fridge.

That was it.

I didn’t know what to say, so I just shut the door and took a seat at the kitchen table. I don’t remember exactly how long the visit lasted. I do recall apologizing for being such a terrible son, an acknowledgment that brought tears to his eyes and a dismissive wave of the hand. When I left, we hugged and agreed to make an effort to get together more often.

That didn’t happen. The next time I saw my father, about one week later, he was in a hospital bed, on life support. His job at the time was hardly glamorous—servicing cash registers for NCR. Apparently, as I understand it (although there is some dispute regarding the events leading up to his death), Dad was in a bar when he slipped off a stool and hit his head. I’d like to think that he was working on a cash register at the time, that his death was in some minor way noble. But the likelihood of that is small. It’s like the guy who gets caught in the whorehouse and says, “Uh…I was just looking.” My father was an alcoholic, and he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in a bar. Hard to imagine he was sober when it happened. The tragedy is that he might have been saved, but by the time the doctors tracked down anyone who could give them permission to crack his skull and relieve the pressure, he’d already lapsed into a coma. Imagine that. You have an ex-wife and four children all living in the area. You have several brothers and sisters. Grandchildren. But on the day that you suffer a terrible accident, there’s no one to call, no one who cares.

When I got the call from my sister Suzanne, I kind of freaked out.

“Dad’s in the hospital,” she said. “You’d better get down here right away.”

“What happened?”

“Just hurry.”

The first thing I did—the very first fucking thing—was grab a pint bottle of Old Grand-Dad whiskey. I tucked it into my shirt pocket, then ran outside, hopped on my moped, and drove off down Goldenwest Street toward the Pacific Coast Highway. Funny thing is, I hated whiskey; it wasn’t even my bottle, just some shit left behind after a party, no doubt. But I saw it and knew I wanted to hurt someone, and I figured whiskey would help get the job done.

The trip to the hospital in Costa Mesa was one I could have made in my sleep, even though I’d never been there before. I knew my way around the whole region because I’d been like a flea, jumping from dog to dog through Orange County, Riverside County, Los Angeles, and San Diego. I raced down the highway, drinking with one hand, opening the throttle with the other. When I got to the hospital room, my father was in the fetal position, wires snaking from his body to various monitors and life-support equipment. My sisters were already there, lined up at the foot of the bed like the Three Wise Monkeys. Nobody said a word, until finally Suzanne drew close, smelled the liquor on my breath, saw my bloodshot eyes and the near-empty bottle of Old Grand-Dad poking out of my shirt pocket.

“You know what?” she said, her voice dripping with disdain.

“What?”

“You’re going to end up just like him.”

She put the emphasis on the last word—“him”—in such a way that I wasn’t sure which one of us—me or my father—was the true object of her contempt. I knew only that I was furious. I was angry that my father was dying just as I was getting to know him. I was angry that my sister saw in me the same character flaws that had led my father to such a miserable end. Most of all, though, I was angry at myself. I feared in my heart that she might be right. Maybe I would end up just like my father, curled up in a hospital bed, my brain drowning in its own juices, surrounded by blank-faced people who didn’t seem to give a shit whether I lived or died.

3 LARS AND ME,OR WHAT AM I GETTING MYSELF INTO?

“You got the job.”

PANIC DIDN’T SO MUCH BREAK UP AS DISSOLVE, THE RESULT OF A LACK OF COMMITMENT AND CHEMISTRY.* ONE OF OUR LAST SHOWS, IN LATE 1981, WAS ALSO ONE OF THE MORE MEMORABLE. IT WAS A BENEFIT CONCERT FOR A BIKER WHO HAD PASSED AWAY. NOW, COMPILING A SET LIST FOR A GROUP OF BIKERS-AND I’M TALKING ABOUT SERIOUS BIKERS, NOT THE GUYS WHO TRADE THEIR BEEMERS FOR HARLEYS ON THE WEEKEND-CAN BE A CHALLENGE. MY OWN TASTES WERE KIND OF ECLECTIC. I REALLY LIKED A LOT OF STUFF BY INDIVIDUAL BANDS I’D DISCOVERED JUST BY KEEPING MY EARS OPEN.

For example, there was a little-known band called Gamma, which was Ronny Montrose’s follow-up to his solo project. I loved Montrose, loved how they sounded and what they stood for. They were just a really solid rock band. Most of the bands you saw at backyard parties in this era were all playing the same stuff: Robin Trower, Rush, Ted Nugent, Pat Travers, Led Zeppelin, KISS. Some of it I liked more than others, but I digested all of it and figured out what it was people wanted to hear. In that way I could formulate a reasonably satisfying set list. But figuring out what kids from the suburbs want to hear is a little easier than meeting the expectations of a gang of drunken bikers. So one of the songs we learned specifically for this show was “Bad Motor Scooter” by Sammy Hagar. If nothing else, at least we’d done our homework.

The show took place out in the boondocks, at a big campground in a nature preserve. And I have to say, it was exciting—probably the most intense night Panic had known, or ever would know, as it turned out. These were hard-core bikers. Gang members. Now, I had seen Gimme Shelter, the 1970 documentary about the Rolling Stones’ infamous and tragic performance at Altamont, during which security provided by the Hells Angels resulted in murder and mayhem. So I had some idea what to expect. Was I scared?

Hell, no!

I thought I had arrived.

But the night was both more and less than I had anticipated. There were two distinct odors filling the air throughout the evening: pot…and chili. That’s right—chili. Vats of it, the result of a chili cook-off; these, unbeknownst to me, were fairly common at this sort of event. There were thirteen kegs of beer at the center of the compound—I specifically remember the number because of its symbolism (good luck, bad luck, as the case may be). We didn’t do a sound check or anything like that. We just hung out, smoking dope, eating chili, drinking beer with these guys, until one of them yelled, “Start playing!” And that’s what we did.

We roped off an area at the front of the compound and set up our gear. This was a time when cordless gear was still relatively rare (and often prohibitively expensive). But I rigged a cordless setup using a Radio Shack stereo, an amp, and a device known as a Nady wireless system. I was one of the first guys I knew who had a wireless setup, and I could tell it freaked out the bikers who watched us play that night. You could almost see them thinking, How the fuck is he playing that thing without any wires?

Anyway, we ripped through our set, playing fast and flawlessly. Tons of energy, no mistakes (none that were noticeable, anyway). We finished with a scorching version of “Bad Motor Scooter,” thanked the crowd for their support, and began to pack up.

That’s when things got ugly. The guy in charge approached the “stage.”

“The fuck are you doing?”

At first I said nothing, which was clearly the smartest approach. I thought about getting right in his face. I mean, I was a drug dealer, right? I understood the rules of marketing and fair trade. They had paid us to play. We played. How dare they not honor our contract?

Well, they were bikers, of course. They did what they wanted to do. And what they wanted, at that moment, was more music. Fortunately, we had a diplomat in our midst: Pat Voelkes, who, as I’ve mentioned, was the oldest member of the band and easily the most mature when it came to dealing with other people. Pat negotiated with them for a few minutes, then returned with a new contract. Here were the terms: we’d play another set; they wouldn’t pay us another dime. They did, however, agree to give us a bag of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Deal!

So we did one more set, and everybody ate the magic mushrooms and tripped out spectacularly, resulting in one of worst experiences of our professional lives. We all said things we didn’t mean, divulged secrets that should have been left unspoken. By the time we got home, the brotherhood had been destroyed. And getting home was no small task. Our primary means of transportation, Tom’s Volkswagen Rabbit, had blown a clutch on the way out. At first, we tried to push the thing home, and what a sight that must have been: a bunch of scrawny, anemic teenagers leaning into a couple thousand pounds of unwilling steel. It was hopeless, so we ended up sleeping overnight in the back of a flatbed truck that we had used to transport our equipment. With us that night were two buddies who had been helping with my drug trade—basically just keeping an eye on my house while I was traveling with the band or working at the garage. These guys were Dumb and Dumber but likeable enough under most circumstances. Unfortunately, their minimal brain power was diminished even further by the mushrooms, and at some point they thought it would be a good idea to steal a keg from the bikers.

It all went bad very quickly, of course. The keg got away from them and started rolling down a hill, clanging and clattering, banging against rocks, and waking up everyone at the campground. It finally came to rest in a stream.

Oh, shit…

Suddenly our little adventure had turned into Friday the 13th.

The perpetrators (Dumb and Dumber) remained at large, trying to communicate with us through bird calls and whistles, while the rest of us were corralled by the bikers and held prisoner in the back of the flatbed. Eventually, a settlement was reached (we played another set), the keg was retrieved, and everyone lived through the night. By the time we got back home, though, something had changed. It was like that scene in Almost Famous, where the band has survived a terrifying bout of turbulence while flying from a concert at the end of a tour, and everyone is sick and exhausted, and you just know the end is near.

That’s the way I felt. I had nothing left to give to Panic. And Panic had nothing for me.

A FEW WEEKS later I was leafing through an alternative newspaper called the Recycler when I came across a classified advertisement by an as-yet-unnamed band that was in search of a guitar player. This was nothing out of the ordinary—the Recycler was filled with these sorts of announcements on a weekly basis; they were required reading for just about every aspiring musician in Southern California. Few of them sparked my interest, largely because I had no desire to be a hired gun in someone else’s band. I knew I was a pretty good guitar player; I also was beginning to come to the realization that I liked to be in charge. I was not good at taking direction.

This particular ad caught my attention, though, since it was the first to reference not one or two but three of my favorite bands. The first was Iron Maiden. Nothing really special about that—you couldn’t play metal and not appreciate Iron Maiden. The second was Motörhead. Nothing unique there, either. The third, however, was a band called Budgie. Just seeing the name in print made my heart race. I’d been introduced to Budgie, a groundbreaking band from Wales—in fact, they are regarded in some quarters as the first heavy metal band—one night a few years earlier, while hitchhiking on PCH. The driver worked for a radio station in Los Angeles.* He was a decent enough guy. Shared some Quaaludes, kept the music blaring, and at one point, after finding out I played guitar, he smiled and said, “Dude, you gotta listen to these guys.” Then he inserted a Budgie tape in the cassette deck.

I was instantly blown away. The speed and power of the music, without abandoning melody—it was like nothing I’d ever heard.

Now here I was, reading the Recycler, wondering what to do with the next phase of my life, and it was like I’d been sent a message.

Budgie!

That day I called the number in the ad.

“Hey, man, I’m looking for Lars.”

“You got him.” The guy had a strange accent that I couldn’t quite place. He also sounded very young.

“I’m calling about your ad? For a guitar player?”

“Okay…”

“Well, I know Motörhead and Iron Maiden,” I said. “And I love Budgie.”

There was a pause.

“Fuck, man! You know fucking Budgie?!”

That was all it took. You see, Lars Ulrich, the kid (and, yeah, he was just a kid, as I would soon discover) on the other end of the line, was an avid collector of music from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM). And when I dropped the name of a band that was at the forefront of that movement, I was in. The thing is, I didn’t even realize until later that Budgie held such a prominent place in that world; I just liked their music. And Lars respected that, which just goes to show you that deep down inside, a very long time ago, we really were kindred spirits.

We met a few days later at Lars’s condo in Newport Beach. Actually, it was his parents’ house, which I didn’t realize until I arrived. The drive was like a trip down memory lane, as Lars lived in a neighborhood not far from where my mother had worked as a maid when I was growing up. At one point, after exiting the Pacific Coast Highway, I came to a stoplight and realized that if I made a right turn, I’d be driving into Linda Isle, where my mom had cleaned toilets for the rich folks. If I took a left, I’d be at Lars’s place in just a couple minutes. After making the turn, I remembered that once, many years earlier, I’d put on a little bow tie and white shirt to help out while my mom worked for a caterer at a private party in this very same neighborhood.

You can imagine what I was thinking when I pulled into the driveway in my old Mazda RX-7, with the rusted-out muffler rattling so hard I thought the windows might crack:

“Silver spoon motherfucker…”

Lars’s father, Torbin Ulrich, was a former professional tennis player of some renown. His mom was a housewife; I never knew too much about her. Lars was born in Denmark. Not surprisingly, he’d begun playing tennis at a very young age and was something of a prodigy himself. Supposedly, he’d come to the States with the idea of furthering his tennis career, but that soon took a backseat to his real passion: music, specifically playing the drums. I didn’t know any of this when we first met. All I knew when he came to the door that morning was that he was very young (I was twenty years old; Lars was not quite eighteen) and obviously had come from a different world than the one I had known.

I had no great expectations regarding this initial encounter. In a lot of ways, I was still very innocent. I had some pot and figured if nothing else, I’d hang out with this kid, get high, and listen to his plans for conquering the music world. We shook hands and went right upstairs to his bedroom, presumably to get down to business (whatever that might mean). The first thing I noticed when I walked into his room was that he had an assortment of interesting shit on the walls: pictures of bands, magazine covers. One that stood out right away was a big poster of Philthy Animal, the drummer from Motörhead, hammering away at this incredible drum kit, the skins of which were adorned with what appeared to be gaping sharks’ mouths.

Very cool, I thought.

A little more disconcerting was the gigantic stack of Danish porn on the nightstand. I was no prude. By this time I’d lived out my fair share of Penthouse fantasies. But this shit was strange. Not the kind of stuff you’d see in mainstream American skin magazines, but hard-core European strangeness: girls getting fucked by baseball bats and milk bottles, things of that nature.

“Dude, this is a little weird, huh?”

Lars shrugged. Part of it, I think, was that he looked so young. He could have passed for thirteen or fourteen, and it just seemed odd to be hanging out with him, leafing through Danish porn and talking about starting a band. And smoking dope, of course, which is what we did next. Lars had a bamboo bong sitting right out in the open (his parents rather obviously ruled with something less than an iron fist), and naturally the conversation gravitated to drugs. We traded war stories for a bit, and Lars told me about his favorite method of smoking hash. He’d dig a hole in the ground, bury the hash while it was burning, then dig a little tunnel and inhale the smoke through a screen on the other side. I tried to picture that: this little kid facedown in the dirt, sucking hash smoke into his lungs. I couldn’t imagine doing that myself, and I’m not sure what advantage this method provided over more traditional modes of delivery…but I had to admit it was inventive.

So we talked for a while, got high, and eventually I asked Lars if he had any samples from the band he was trying to form. There were three people in the lineup already, he said: a singer named James Hetfield (James had not yet begun focusing on playing guitar for the band), a bass player named Ron McGovney, and Lars, the drummer. They needed a guitar player—a really kick-ass player—to complete the lineup. Really, though, the band was still in its embryonic stages. It had no name, no history of performing. What it did have, apparently (although I didn’t know it at the time), was an agreement between Lars and a producer named Brian Slagel, whose new label, Metal Blade, was about to release a heavy metal compilation called Metal Massacre. A spot on the album had been reserved for Lars’s venture; all he had to do was come up with a song, a band, and a recording.

“Listen to this,” Lars said. He inserted a cassette into his stereo and played a rough demo of a song called “Hit the Lights,” written by James and one of his buddies from a previous band. The guitar work was by a guy named Lloyd Grant, who had played with Lars and James briefly, before I came along. The song wasn’t bad; the playing was uniformly sloppy, the sound quality even worse, and the singer had little pitch control or charisma. But there was energy. And style. When it ended, Lars smiled.

“What do you think?”

“You need more guitar solos, that’s for sure.”

Lars nodded. He didn’t seem offended. I think he wanted to hear my honest opinion. Lars had been looking for a guitar player who matched his taste in music, and maybe I fit the bill. Crude as it was, the tape reminded me of the NWOBHM stuff I’d been hearing. I understood the way those guys played guitar from a riff point of view. It wasn’t so much about strumming chords or arpeggiating—picking from one side of the guitar to the other—it was more like picking the same string over and over, to the point where it almost became monotonous. In that way, the riff had to carry the weight of the whole song. If that sounds simple, well, it isn’t. It’s incredibly challenging, because the guitarist is reliant on such a small measure of music. The effect, when executed properly, is almost hypnotic.

I came away from that meeting with minimal expectations. Lars was painfully laid-back. Moreover, as I said, he was just so young—it was hard to imagine that he had any kind of grand plan for assembling what would eventually become the biggest heavy metal band in the world. Like a lot of kids with vaguely defined rock ’n’ roll dreams, he was just sort of stumbling along. I’d been there myself.

The afternoon ended with a handshake and a promise to keep in touch, and then I drove back to Huntington Beach, bleary eyed and stoned. I didn’t know if I’d ever hear from Lars again. But he called just a few days later, wanting to know whether I’d be able to meet him and the other guys in Norwalk, where Ron McGovney lived.

“For what? An audition?”

“Yeah, kind of like that,” Lars said.

I said sure, again figuring I had nothing to lose. It was either play this one out to its logical conclusion—see if these guys had any potential at all—or return to Panic, which was clearly a dead end.

McGovney was a question mark to me. I knew nothing about him. Nor did I know much about James, who, as it turned out, was living with Ron. The two of them had been pals since middle school and were now sharing a duplex owned by Ron’s parents. In fact, they owned several units in the neighborhood, and Ron was given free reign to live in one and turn the garage space into a studio. It was hardly a lavish life—the entire neighborhood had a cheap cookie-cutter feel to it—but compared to the way I’d been living (selling dope to put food on the table), Ron appeared to have life by the balls. As did Lars.

Ron did not make a great first impression. I was a bit of a hard-ass, a wanna-be street kid, and I was suspicious (and probably a bit envious) of anyone who seemed to have been handed an easier path in life. At the time Ron was working—or at least dabbling—as a rock ’n’ roll photographer, with a particular interest in heavy metal. He was always pulling out photos of other bands, most prominently Mötley Crüe. For some reason Ron was a huge fan of the Crüe, and I guess he figured it would impress people to show them pictures of Vince Neil spraypainting his hair or putting his clothes on. I didn’t understand it, and I still don’t. Any more than I understood the way Ron was dressed that first day, in his knee-high go-go boots; Austin Powers–style, skintight stretch jeans; studded belt; and carefully pressed Motörhead T-shirt.

Yuppie metal. That was the look.

I remember being fairly quiet that day. It was almost like I was a gunfighter, and I took the matter with an appropriate degree of seriousness. Mind you, I had never been on an audition before. Whenever I’d played in a band, it had been my band. There was no “trying out” for someone else’s band. Fuck that! I was a leader, not a follower. Playing backseat to someone else really didn’t sit well with me and indeed had put me in a bit of a foul mood. Simply by agreeing to drive up to Norwalk and endure the process of being evaluated and interviewed, I’d compromised my own integrity and standards. That’s the way I looked at it, anyway. What can I tell you? I was arrogant. And I was angry. But I had to swallow my pride. I was tired of dealing drugs and playing with a dysfunctional band. Maybe this other thing was worth a shot.

There was a weird vibe almost from the moment I arrived at Ron’s place. In addition to Lars, Ron, and James, there were a few other people hanging out, including Ron’s girlfriend and a guy named Dave Marrs, a friend of Ron’s who would later work briefly as a roadie for Metallica. I’m not sure what they expected from me. I’d been pretty honest with Lars about how I filled the day. I told him I played music and sold pot on the side; in reality, of course, I sold pot and played music on the side. Regardless, he didn’t seem to care. And neither did anyone else.

Lars introduced me to everyone as I unloaded gear from my car and brought it into the garage. While I set up, everyone else went into another room, which I thought was kind of weird. There didn’t seem to be any excitement about what we were doing. And as far as I could tell, I was the only one competing for the job.

I plugged in my amp and calmly went about the business of warming up. Then I warmed up some more. I kept playing, faster and louder, figuring eventually somebody would walk in and start jamming with me; at the very least, I thought they’d come in and listen, ask me a few questions. But they never did. They just left me there to play on my own. Finally, after maybe a half hour or so, I put down my guitar and opened the door into the house. The entire group was sitting there together, drinking and getting high, watching television. I noticed, by the way, that James and Lars were drinking peppermint schnapps, which was almost comical. I didn’t know anyone who drank schnapps—it was an old ladies’ drink.

“Hey—we gonna do this thing or what?” I asked.

Lars kind of smiled at me and waved a hand. “No, man…you got the job.”

Huh?

I looked around the room. Was it really that easy? I didn’t know whether to feel like I’d been offended or complimented. My response vacillated between relief and confusion. Did they not care? Were they so impressed by my warm-up that they just had to have me in the band? (I knew I was pretty good, but I didn’t know I was that good.) The way I see it, looking back on it years later, maybe they didn’t want to conduct a real audition—with all of us playing together—because it would have given me the opportunity to gauge their level of skill and musicianship. That strikes me as a bit ironic now, given the sometimes acrimonious nature of our relationship over the years, and the fact that I have often been portrayed as someone who was lucky to be in the right place at the right time, filling a temporary hole in the Metallica lineup.

But I didn’t know any of this at the time. Both physically and in the way he dressed, Lars was as foreign looking as he had been the day we met, but I attributed that largely to his European upbringing. Ron was doing his thing, and James…well, James was rail thin, with black spandex tights tucked into boots and a cheetah-print shirt. Displayed prominently on his wrist was a wide leather bracelet with a clear patch in the middle of it—almost like the kind of thing a quarterback wears on game day, with the plays written on it. James, you could just tell, was trying really hard to look like a rock star. He had long hair shaped into a windswept coif, so that he resembled Rudy Sarzo, the bass player for Ozzy Osbourne.

I tried not to laugh.

Oh, my God. What am I getting myself into?

4 METALLICA—FAST, LOUD, OUT OF CONTROL

“You keep talking like that, I’m going to punch you in the mouth.”

IN THE BEGINNING IT WAS AS MUCH ABOUT STYLE AS SUBSTANCE.

I REMEMBER GOING OUT SHOPPING ONE DAY WITH LARS AND MARVELING AS HE SPENT THE BETTER PART OF THE AFTERNOON TRYING TO EDUCATE ME ON THE FINER POINTS OF PURCHASING HIGH-TOP SNEAKERS. IT WAS, APPARENTLY, SOMETHING OF A SCIENCE, AND LARS AND I DISAGREED ON THE PROPER FORMULA. CHECK OUT THE EARLY PHOTOS OF METALLICA AND YOU’LL SEE ME WEARING SHINY WHITE LEATHER CONVERSE ALL-STARS WITH RED STARS ON THE SIDE. THIS WAS MY CHOICE, NOT LARS’S. FOR SOME REASON, HE WAS OF THE OPINION THAT ROCK STARS WORE TRADITIONAL CHUCK TAYLORS.

“Fuck that!” I said. “That’s like the kids on Fat Albert. I’m not wearing that shit.”

I could be wrong, but I remember this as my first disagreement with Lars. It may sound like a petty detail, but I think it points to the inevitability of the dissolution of Metallica as it was in its infancy. Too many cooks in the kitchen. I was a band leader. So was Lars. Inevitably, the failure to agree on a common goal or to accept specific roles rose within the framework of the group. I’ve seen it time and again. Egos clash, combustible personalities ignite. The odds of surviving these obstacles—to say nothing of the financial, artistic, and managerial challenges—are astronomically bad.

And yet, in retrospect, I understand what Lars was doing because I’ve done it myself: he was trying to form an image as well as a musical entity. His heart, I think, was probably in the right place. To me, it was his taste that was misguided. One day he pulled out a photo of Diamond Head, a British heavy metal band that he admired to the point of obsession—he’d even trailed them, Deadhead style, on a European tour the previous year.

“Look at this,” he said. “These guys look like rock stars.”

I just stared, slack jawed. There was a lot to like about Diamond Head, but fashion was not high on the list. I looked at that picture, saw all the black spandex, the white boots, the long, flowing dress shirts unbuttoned to the waist with the bottom tied into a knot, exposing the singer’s hairy navel, and I wanted to gag.

“Lars, I can’t even believe a dude would dress that way. He looks like a chick.”

See, there were lines of distinction that couldn’t be blurred. You had to decide what type of music you were going to play, and your appearance had to properly reflect that music. In that sense, Diamond Head was not my cup of black coffee. A lot of bands were like that. Consider the importance of hair. Everyone had long hair in those days, with the exception of the punk bands. In hard rock and metal, hair was long, and within that framework a decision had to be made:

Up or down.

You were either like Page and Plant (hair down, and thus cool) or you were like KISS, Mötley Crüe, and so many other imitators (hair up, and thus not so cool). My hair went down. Always did, always will.

Next came the name. Every band needs a great moniker, right? We discussed and discarded several, including Leather Charm, which had been the name of a short-lived band in which James and Ron had both played. This was one of those names that just seemed incredibly wrongheaded to me. Leather Charm? What are you after with that one? Who’s your audience? It sounded kind of questionable in terms of projecting your notion of a good time, if you know what I mean.

It was Lars who suggested “Metallica,” and, it was an undeniably great name. The logo came from James. The first time I saw the Metallica logo, and everyone was raving about how cool it was, I remember thinking, Wow, it really is.

Whether Metallica had any reasonable chance for success, I couldn’t say. I do know that the first time I saw Lars play the drums, I was shocked at his mediocrity. Still, you had to admire his determination. The kid loved music (and good music, at that), and he wanted to be a rock star. That he would eventually become the Machiavellian character he is today…well, I didn’t see that one coming.

We obviously didn’t have a lot of material when we first started rehearsing together. Set lists in the beginning consisted primarily of cover songs, as well as songs written by James and his former bandmate Hugh Tanner. Most new material we had was written by me.

In early 1982 Metallica went into a studio for the first time. We hadn’t been together for very long, but somehow we ended up at a little place in Orange County, recording “Hit the Lights.” When it came time for the guitar solo, I nailed it, and everybody started freaking out about how great it was. For some reason, though, when the first version of that demo came out on Metal Massacre several months later, it also included some of Lloyd Grant’s guitar work. That struck me as somewhat odd and not really in the spirit of brotherhood that fuels a band, but I didn’t get all worked up over it. Things were happening rather quickly, and I was excited to be part of it.

Our first live show was on March 14, 1982, at Radio City in Anaheim, California. It was a raw, unpolished, but wildly energetic performance in front of about two hundred metalheads, many of them friends of ours. Still, a respectable audience for an unknown band playing its first gig. To give you an idea of where we were musically, nearly half of the nine-song set list consisted of Diamond Head covers. We also did “Hit the Lights.” The only song that could reasonably be considered a Metallica original, at that time—a song written exclusively by one of the members of the band—was “Jump in the Fire.”

That was mine.

I point this out simply as a way of illustrating that my role in Metallica was actually quite prominent. I was the lead guitar player and one of the primary songwriters. A band member’s role doesn’t get much more vital than that. Not that I was particularly concerned with territoriality at the time. We were just having fun, playing music, partying like crazy, trying to get better with each performance. We were all in it together, at least for a while.

We each had our strengths and weaknesses, and it’s interesting to look back now and see what Metallica looked like in those early days. Intent on playing the role of front man and singer, James did not pick up a guitar that night in Anaheim, nor for some time afterward. But there was a bit of a problem: James was not a naturally gregarious fellow, particularly onstage. At one of our earliest shows, I can remember him standing at the microphone, freezing, afraid to say a word. I don’t mean during a song—James had no problem singing or performing, and later, when he began playing guitar, he proved to be a sturdy guitarist as well. But the stage banter? That was hard for him. At one point, sensing his anxiety, I walked over to the microphone and started talking. That was the beginning of my persona as an unusually provocative and loquacious guitar player. A shit stirrer, in other words. Tradition, of course, dictates that guitar players perform wordlessly. They can jump up and down, rip off their clothes, maybe even set their instruments on fire. They are not supposed to speak. That role is assigned to the singer. Everyone knows that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

I didn’t care. I was doing what came naturally.

Two weeks later we got a huge break, playing a pair of shows in one night at the Whisky in Hollywood, opening for Saxon. Credit must be given to Ron for this one, since it was his connections with Mötley Crüe that helped open the door. Ron had taken a three-song demo tape to the club, hoping for an audience with the club’s manager. While there, he ran into the guys from Mötley Crüe and told them of his plan, and they offered to help out. If that sounds gracious, well, it really wasn’t. Mötley Crüe had originally been booked to open for Saxon, but at some point they, or their management, had decided that they were now too big to be an opening act; they wanted to headline. And since we were ready, willing, and able, with a solid demo as a calling card, the timing couldn’t have been better.

Again, during both shows, we played mostly covers. This time, though, we did two of my compositions, “Jump in the Fire” and “Metal Militia.” Although we were tighter and made fewer mistakes than in Anaheim, we certainly weren’t perfect. I recall taking the mike from James again and generally flailing all over the stage while playing guitar. In the days that followed, we generated considerable buzz, although the mainstream rock press was not initially impressed. Indeed, our first review was a stinging jab directed at almost everything about Metallica.

With one notable exception.

“Saxon could also use a fast, hot guitar player of the Eddie Van Halen ilk. Opening quartet Metallica had one, but little else. The local group needs considerable development to overcome a pervasive awkwardness.”

Ouch!

I don’t recall taking any pleasure in being singled out as the one bright spot in an otherwise forgettable show. (I’m sure I stood up in defense of my bandmates.) We experienced growing pains no different from those endured by all great bands. The truth is, we were doing something radical. We were fast and loud and dangerous, on the cutting edge of heavy metal. Practically speaking, thrash began with early Metallica, in both form and attitude.

The next few months brought a kaleidoscopic blur of rehearsing, writing, performing, and partying. Everything happened so fast. There was a four-track demo (commonly referred to as The Power Demo in Metallica lore) that we recorded in Ron McGovney’s garage. That tape included two of my songs, “Jump in the Fire” and “The Mechanix,” along with “Hit the Lights” and “Motorbreath,” which was credited to James (although I believe in its nascent stage it belonged at least in part to James’s former Leather Charm bandmate Hugh Tanner).

I’m not sure how we managed to accomplish as much as we did, given the lifestyle we were leading—all that fucking and fighting, drugging and drinking and vomiting. But we did. Our repertoire expanded, our performances improved. Very quickly we realized that in order to achieve the heaviness we wanted, we needed another guitar player. Since James still wasn’t interested in anything other than singing, we recruited a guy named Brad Parker. The first day of rehearsal he showed up wearing a striped shirt with high French cut sleeves—the kind you might see on a Russian sailor. He wore eyeliner and a white feathered earring. I took one look at this guy and started laughing.

Dude, if you last a day in this band, I’ll be shocked, I thought.

He actually lasted a few days—maybe weeks—but not long enough to matter. He played one show with us, at a place called the Music Factory in Costa Mesa. Before we took the stage, he turned to me and said, “Listen, while we’re out there, call me Damien, okay?”

“What?”

“Damien…Damien Phillips,” he said.

“Who the fuck is Damien Phillips?”

He smiled.

“I am. It’s my stage name.”

That was the first and only time Brad Parker and/or Damien Phillips played with Metallica. Our next gig was one month later, shortly before Memorial Day 1982, with James playing rhythm guitar and singing lead. By this time we had dispensed with the poseurs and the endless search for another guitar player and simply decided to encourage James to handle the job himself; he turned out, of course, to be a formidable player.

Throughout the summer our schedule intensified, and so did our reputation. We played at least one gig a week at various venues around Southern California: the Troubadour and Whisky in Hollywood, the Woodstock in Anaheim, any number of smaller parties and concerts at places you’ve never heard of. The first version of Metal Massacre was released in June, and within a month we found ourselves in a studio, working with a record company executive by the name of Kenny Kane. This guy owned a punk label and apparently had gotten the impression that Metallica would somehow appeal to the label’s demographic, so he offered us a chance to record an EP. When he heard the tapes, well, I guess he wasn’t thrilled, since (obviously) Metallica was not a punk band. He withdrew the offer and we kept the tapes. The resulting demo, titled No Life Till Leather, consisted of seven songs: “Hit the Lights,” “Mechanix,” “Phantom Lord,” “Jump in the Fire,” “Motorbreath,” “Seek and Destroy,” and “Metal Militia.”

I was the primary writer on four of those songs: “Mechanix,” “Phantom Lord,” “Jump in the Fire,” and “Metal Militia.” Without meaning to sound bitter, it’s important to note that this demo, which provided the spark for the underground phenomenon that Metallica became, stands as a rather indisputable piece of evidence in the war between those who think my contributions to the band were significant (Megadeth fans, mainly) and those who don’t (Metallica fans). When Metallica released its first album, in 1983, all four of those songs were included (although “Mechanix” had been reworked and given a new title, “The Four Horsemen,” I still received a writing credit).

No Life Till Leather became our calling card, and we used it to build an audience from L.A. to San Francisco. We had no formal contract, no means of distributing songs, but that was far from an insurmountable obstacle. Tapes were copied and passed around, and pretty soon we were playing in front of fans who knew the words to our songs, which I have to tell you is about as thrilling a thing as a young rock star can experience. We were getting better and we knew it.

We also were completely out of control. I will never deny that I was a handful in those days. I was aggressive, driven, and unpredictable, and I drank way too much. But so did everyone else in the band. We practically lived in our cars, driving up and down the coast, drinking before and after rehearsals and gigs. It wasn’t unusual for one or more members of the band to pass out during those trips and wake up to discover that his face or body had been painted. We shared homes, money, equipment, drugs, alcohol, girls. It was a life of utter decadence (and at times one hell of a lot of fun). For all of us.

The difference, and I suppose it is an important distinction, is that we were different types of drunks. I was often an angry, hostile drunk; Lars and James were happy drunks. Harmless, for the most part, although their antics were juvenile.

As word of No Life Till Leather spread, so too did our reputation. We found ourselves spending increasing amounts of time on the road, driving up and down the coast between L.A. and San Francisco. Invariably, those trips became exercises in humiliation. On every trip, it seemed like someone’s shoes would be tossed out the back of our truck, just so Lars or James could watch them get pissed off. If they had treated me that way, I would have left.

Admittedly, the person I was onstage—pissed off, trying to play my guitar so fast that it would nearly burn my fingers—was not far from who I was off the stage. When I drank, I would often get combative. I didn’t always go looking for a fight, but I certainly never walked away from one. Even when it involved my friends and bandmates.

Prior to the formation of Metallica, I’d bought a couple dogs to dissuade people from breaking into my house (which had happened on occasion, in part because of my “business” interests). These were formidable pups—Staffordshire terriers (which are similar to pit bulls) cross-bred with Rhodesian ridgebacks—and they quite naturally scared the shit out of most people. But they were also very affectionate and loyal, and I cared for them immensely. When I traveled to Ron’s house for rehearsal, or to a gig, I’d usually leave them behind to protect the house. Sometimes, though, one of the dogs would keep me company. One day in the summer of 1982, I drove to rehearsal, and when I let the dog out of the car she began running around. Dogs do that when they’ve been cooped up for a while. At some point the female jumped up on the front quarter panel of Ron’s car, a beautiful Pontiac GTO, prompting James to give the dog a hard kick across its chest. The dog (she was still just a puppy) let out a yelp and scampered away.

And I went nuts.

“What are you doing?”

“She’s scratching the car, man,” James said, as if that was an acceptable excuse for kicking a dog.

“Fuck you!”

The actual fight didn’t happen right there. They call it a hang fire, like when there’s an unexpected delay between the trigger of a gun being pulled and the actual discharge of the weapon. You know it’s coming, and there’s no stopping it. It’s just a matter of time. James and I alternately cursed at each other and refused to speak, until eventually we were both in Ron’s house, preparing to rehearse, and tensions boiled over. There was another round of accusations and insults, more cursing, more threats.

“You keep talking like that, I’m going to punch you in the mouth,” I said.

“Fuck off!”

In the middle of this exchange, Ron walked out of the bathroom and into the living room. He and James went way back, and despite the fact that James often treated him like shit, Ron instinctively defended his friend.

“You hit him, you’ll have to hit me first.”

“Shut up and sit the fuck down,” I said.

And then James jumped to Ron’s defense. “You touch him, you’re going to have to hit me first.”

Jesus, I thought, what is this, some kind of fucking game show?

I realized I would have to make a decision.

“Okay, you win,” I said, and with that I threw a right cross that landed flush against James’s face, turning his mouth into a pile of bloody Chiclets. To my surprise, Ron immediately jumped on my back. Reflexively, I gave him a hip toss; he flew across the room and landed on an entertainment center, sending shards of particleboard all over the place and destroying the old Pong video game hooked up to the TV. The fight might have gone on longer if not for the presence of my friend and martial arts training partner Rick Solis, who quickly intervened. I was enraged, ready to kill both Ron and James, when Rick came up from behind and grabbed my elbow, pinching the ulnar nerve and rendering me incapacitated.* We stood there together for a moment, saying nothing, when suddenly James began screaming at me.

“You’re out of the band! Get the fuck out of here!”

Ron was yelling, too. Lars, meanwhile, was standing in a corner, just sort of twirling his hair, and trying unsuccessfully to mediate a settlement. “Come on, man…I don’t want it to end this way.”

“Fuckyou! I quit!”

“Good! Fuck you, too!”

WHILE OUR DISAGREEMENTS had never reached this level of intensity, it should be noted that by this time Metallica was already a band struggling with personality conflicts. Each of us was guilty of pointing the finger of blame at one time or another. My job was safe, as far as I could tell, although obviously I’d failed to assess the situation properly.

The dismissal lasted roughly twenty-four hours. I returned for rehearsal the next day, apologized to everyone, and was welcomed back into the fold. Everything was fine. Except it wasn’t. Some things can’t be undone, and this was one of them. In many ways, it was the beginning of the end. Ron and I grew increasingly annoyed with each other. I thought he was smug and spoiled and not particularly talented; he viewed me as unpredictable and dangerous—not inaccurate, I must confess. When a break-in at Ron’s place was traced back to acquaintances of mine (not friends, mind you, and I certainly had no idea what they had done), Ron became angry and accusatory. My response, and I don’t say this with any pride, was to walk into the rehearsal room one day when Ron wasn’t around and pour a can of beer into the pickups of his Washburn bass, effectively destroying a very expensive piece of equipment.

I knew this would infuriate Ron, but I didn’t care. My rationale went something like this:

I don’t like you, I don’t like that you pinned this break-in on me, I don’t like that you’re a mama’s boy, I don’t like that you seem to have everything going on, everything handed to you, and you don’t appreciate it. It doesn’t seem like you’re one of us.

By this point, in the late fall of 1982, Metallica had begun performing regularly in San Francisco, where the metal scene was significantly less artificial than it had been in Los Angeles. Hair and makeup mattered less than the music. When it came to playing music, Metallica was like nothing anyone had seen or heard before. But there was always room for improvement. And that’s where Cliff Burton came in.

Cliff was the star bass player for a Bay Area band called Trauma. That term alone—“star bass player”—should tell you something, because bass players are typically at the bottom of the rock ’n’ roll food chain. Guitar players and singers are at the top, drummers in the middle, bass players at the bottom. I was once quoted as saying, “Playing the bass is one step up from playing the kazoo,” which predictably pissed off a lot of bass players, but it’s essentially true. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and Cliff was definitely not a glorified kazoo player. He was brilliant. The first time I saw him play, I knew he was something special, and so did Lars and James, which is why they began surreptitiously courting Cliff while Ron McGovney was still in the band.*

Cliff was worthy of pursuit, and I think we all (with the exception of Ron) saw him as the “missing piece.” We had arrived in San Francisco as the band of the moment, an underground sensation that quickly surpassed everyone, even the popular local thrash kings Exodus. We were locked and loaded, with an exhausting stage show featuring a dangerous, loudmouthed motherfucker on guitar and a variation on heavy metal that was at once heavier, faster, and more melodic. We were the real deal. As was Cliff. Trauma was nothing special, but everyone knew the band was worth watching if only to witness Cliff’s wizardry with a wah-wah pedal. It’s not often that a bass player stands out as the star of a band, but Cliff, with a wild mane of hair and an athletic, muscular style of playing, pulled it off. He was an innovator.

He also was reluctant to join Metallica or any other band not based in the Bay Area. But Lars kept pursuing Cliff. Eventually, when Ron departed, just a few days after the violation of his Washburn bass,* the door was open for Cliff to join the band. But concessions would have to be made. Cliff was impressed by what he’d seen of our work and more than willing to trade Trauma for Metallica. Under one condition.

We’d have to move to San Francisco.

If there was any hand-wringing over this decision, I don’t recall it. We all knew Cliff was talented enough to present what would ordinarily be considered an outrageous bargaining chip: Relocate the whole band? For a bass player! He was that good. And we were that driven; we were willing to do anything to be successful. I think we all recognized that by adding Cliff, we could become the greatest band in the world.

THE TRANSITION TOOK a few months, during which we altered living and professional arrangements in a half-assed attempt to save some money and prepare for the move to San Francisco. Shortly before Christmas 1982, James got the boot from Ron McGovney (no surprise, since Ron was understandably reluctant to continue supporting James after splitting with Metallica). I’d already moved back into my mother’s house because…well, because I was broke. So I invited James to come and live with me and my mother, creating a variation on the Three’s Company theme with predictably disastrous results. Suddenly you had two heavy metal warriors living with my mom, the quiet little housekeeper. To say she was bummed by the whole arrangement would be an understatement, and not merely because of her religious affiliation. The lifestyle we were leading—the drinking, fighting, carousing—was enough to give any parent cause for concern. But to have it happening under her own roof? It couldn’t have been easy. Especially as she came to realize that it wasn’t merely a phase. I was pretty good at playing guitar, and I was serious about making a living at it. But that wasn’t the only reason I played. It wasn’t only about strutting and getting laid and trying to become famous. When I held a guitar in my hands, I felt good about myself. When I played music, I felt a sense of comfort and accomplishment that I’d never known as a child. When I replicated the songs that I loved, I felt an attachment to them and to the musicians who had composed them. And when I started writing songs of my own, I felt like an artist, able to express myself for the very first time. Maybe my mother sensed all of this, and that’s why she put up with all the craziness. Or maybe that’s just what mothers do.

Regardless, out of respect for my mom (and fear of getting caught), I stopped dealing drugs and tried to earn some cash in a more reputable manner. Lars had gotten an overnight job delivering newspapers for the Los Angeles Times, and he asked me if I wanted a job, too. I did it for a little while, but I hated the hours and the drudgery of the work. Sometimes, just to make it more interesting, Lars and I would deliver papers together. We’d drive around in his mom’s AMC Pacer, careening through neighborhoods, sometimes sideswiping parked cars or mailboxes. There were few images funnier than Lars driving the Pacer, which was basically a fishbowl on wheels. To see him weaving down the street in one of the ugliest cars in history, chucking newspapers out the window, with no regard for where they landed, you couldn’t help but laugh. It was like a video game: Evil Danish Paperboy!

All you needed was Orson Welles or James Earl Jones providing the narration: “Metallica is coming to get you!”

By February of 1983 we had relocated to the Bay Area, specifically to the El Cerrito home of Exodus manager Mark Whitakker, who would soon become Metallica’s road manager and facilitator. Mark’s place, affectionately known as the Metallica Mansion, became ground zero for all things related to the band. Lars and James moved right in and took the two available bedrooms. I settled for a shitty little box of a room—with no shower, sink, or refrigerator—at the home of Mark’s grandmother, roughly an hour away. I lived out of a Styrofoam cooler, into which I would pack everything I needed for the day…or for two days…maybe even three. One of the guys, usually Cliff Burton, would pick me up in the morning and drive me to rehearsal. Cliff and I got pretty close in those first couple months, simply because we spent so much time together. We’d drive back and forth, smoking some of Cliff’s horrible homegrown pot, talking about music and listening to music. And not just metal or even vintage hard rock, but stuff you’d never associate with Metallica. I can recall several instances in which we were driving along, sharing a joint, and singing out loud to Lynyrd Skynyrd.

When rehearsal would end, and the other guys would start talking about doing something else with the rest of the day, I’d suggest we keep playing. Not necessarily because I loved rehearsal, but because I couldn’t stand the idea of going back to that little house by myself. Sometimes I would just refuse to leave; I’d sleep on the couch for days on end. It was a strange and surreal hand-to-mouth existence. I’d been there before, of course; I’d grown up poor, panhandled for beer money, knew how it felt to wear the same pair of dirty jeans for days on end and to live off boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese. I think it was harder for Lars and James. And for that reason, along with the fact that I considered us to be brothers-in-arms, I often found myself standing up for them.

There was, for example, the time we were all at a party, and in walked the guys from a band known as Armored Saint. As sometimes happens in these situations, harmless verbal jousting gave way to nasty, personal insults, paving the way for a physical confrontation. They targeted Lars, probably because he was the smallest. I don’t remember exactly how it began; I do remember jumping off my chair and telling them to leave my friend alone. They laughed at me, much as they had been laughing at Lars, which was not a good idea. Lars may not have been a fighter, but I was. I had training and expertise. More important, I didn’t give a shit.

As the guys from Armored Saint dog-piled on top of Lars, I ran across the room and applied a side kick to the first person in my path. His name was Phil Sandoval, and he was the band’s lead guitarist. The first thing I heard was a loud crack! Like the sound of a branch snapping in half. And then the sound of someone wailing as Phil fell to the floor and grabbed his lower leg.

I’d broken his ankle.

Needless to say, that was the end of the fight. I tell this story not to brag, but simply as a way of pointing out how I felt about Lars, James, and Cliff. I would have done anything for them. They were my friends.*

Although he looked the part of a gunslinger, James wasn’t big on confrontation either. One night I went to the Mabuhay Gardens, a nightclub in North Beach colloquially known as the “Old Mabuhay,” with James and his girlfriend. While we were waiting outside for the club to open, a girl came running out of a nearby alleyway, flailing her arms and screaming at the top of her lungs.

“He broke my nose! He broke my nose!”

I had no idea who she was or what had happened. And I didn’t care. Instantly I felt the rush of adrenaline you get before a fight. I looked at James, didn’t say a word. I just smiled, and I could tell what he was probably thinking.

Oh, what’s this crazy fucker gonna do now?

Finally, I touched him on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go, dude!”

So we ventured into the alley, hardly able to see a thing. I was quiet, but behind me, James was grunting, snorting, yelping half-baked threats.

“Gonna kill you, motherfucker!”

I almost laughed. James wasn’t so much threatening anyone as he was whistling past the graveyard. You know, like you did when you were a kid, trying to convince yourself that you weren’t afraid of anything when in reality you were about to shit your pants.

At the end of the alleyway was a parked van. As we drew near, with James still yelling, the driver’s-side door opened, and out stepped this big son of a bitch.

“Which one of you assholes wants to kill me?” he said, the look on his face signaling either inebriation or a complete lack of fear. Maybe both.

Before I could respond, James took a quick step backward.

Thanks a lot, brother…

There wasn’t time for an explanation. The big guy lunged at me, and as he moved forward, I opened my hand, thumb pointing down, and grabbed the back of his neck. Then I swept his foot out from underneath him, threw him on the ground, and started rabbit-punching his head until he was unconscious.

A few minutes later the cops arrived and took the guy away in handcuffs. James and I went back to hanging out in front of the club, acting like nothing had happened, but inside I was pretty shaken up. When I woke the next morning my hand was swollen and sore, like I’d punched a wall. When James asked me if I was okay, I just nodded. We never talked explicitly about the way that incident unfolded. There was no point.

5 DUMPED BY ALCOHOLICA

“You’re a bad motherfucker!”

SAN FRANCISCO, WITH ITS THRIVING CLUB SCENE AND VIGOROUS METAL FANS, PROVED TO BE A WARM AND WELCOMING PLACE FOR METALLICA. WE PLAYED OUR FIRST SHOW WITH CLIFF ON MARCH 5, AT THE STONE. ON MARCH 19 WE PLAYED FOR A SECOND TIME, AT THE SAME CLUB. IN BETWEEN, WE RECORDED ANOTHER DEMO AND WATCHED OUR POPULARITY SOAR. IT SEEMED AS THOUGH WE HAD TAKEN OVER THE CITY IN A MATTER OF JUST A FEW SHORT WEEKS. NOT THAT ANYONE SEEMED TO MIND THE INVASION; IT WAS ACTUALLY A NICE ENVIRONMENT UP THERE, WITH A LOT OF BANDS PURSUING SIMILAR GOALS, PLAYING AND LOVING THE SAME TYPE OF MUSIC, WHAT WOULD COME TO BE KNOWN AS THRASH METAL. THE JEALOUSY AND POSTURING THAT TYPIFIED THE L.A. CLUB scene was mostly absent in the Bay Area, and we bonded quickly and easily with other musicians, most notably (and ironically, as it would turn out), those in the band Exodus. At one point I even became blood brothers with some of the guys in their band. Like, real blood brothers—cutting our hands and swapping fluid in a manner that, in retrospect, given the lifestyles we led, can only be termed reckless.*

ANYWAY, METALLICA SEEMED to be moving at warp speed. One morning in April 1983, I rolled out of bed, bleary eyed, hungover, and smelling like bad cottage cheese, and saw a U-Haul was in the driveway. Everything had happened so fast that I didn’t even know (or, frankly, care about) most of the details. If anyone wonders why I became such a control freak later in my career, well, the evolution has its roots right here. I was perfectly content to go along for the ride.

The No Life Till Leather demo had drifted east and wound up in the hands of a guy named Jon Zazula. “Jonny Z” owned a popular record shop in New Jersey called Rock and Roll Heaven that was well known for finding and promoting underground artists. He also was an aspiring record producer; after hearing the demo, and seeing the reaction to it among customers, Jonny Z offered Metallica an opportunity to play a few shows in and around New York and to help the band secure a recording contract. Most of the discussions regarding this arrangement went on without my knowledge or involvement. Days later, when we arrived in New Jersey and I discovered that my name wasn’t on any of the contracts and got a little nervous, Lars suggested that I was overreacting.

So I let it go.

I suppose I could blame Lars or James or even Mark Whitakker for cutting me out of the loop, which they did, but I also have to take responsibility for failing to keep my eye on the ball. I was too busy fucking and getting fucked-up. These guys were my friends, and despite our periodic disagreements, I trusted them.

My mistake.

Just one of many, as it turned out.

A woman I’ll call Jennifer was my bed partner the night before we left San Francisco. She was, at the time, the semiserious girlfriend of Kirk Hammett, the guitar player from Exodus (like I said, we shared a lot of things with the guys in Exodus). Jennifer was a cute girl who liked guitar players, and I certainly didn’t mind hanging out with her. As I walked out of the bedroom, Lars and James were waiting.

“Sorry,” I said. “Give me a few minutes to shower. I can’t go all the way to New York like this.”

They nodded. Everything seemed perfectly fine. But it wasn’t. I had no idea that my time in the band was nearing an end.

There has been much dispute regarding the timeline of events during this period of Metallica, but here is what I believe happened. At some point in the preceding weeks, or maybe even months, a flirtation had begun; Lars and James—Lars, mainly—had discussed with Kirk Hammett the possibility of Kirk joining Metallica. Since there was neither room nor need for a second lead guitar player, his role was clear: he would replace me.

Regardless, I never saw it coming.

WE PACKED A twenty-four-foot U-Haul and attached James’s pickup truck to the back. At any given time, three of us rode up front, in the cab of the U-Haul. The other two passengers, including Mark Whitakker, who was now officially Metallica’s road manager, slept in the cargo bay, where the temperature alternately soared and plummeted and the vibrations rattling off the sheet-metal walls made it feel like the inside of a trash can. We stopped for beer less than a mile after pulling out of the driveway and remained in a drunken stupor for most of the trip.

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