Metallica garage days album11/6/2023 I had all these Iron Maiden shows and Deep Purple shows on video, but a lot of them came from Europe or Japan, and the only way to play them was to get what was called a 'multi-system television,' because they had different formats for video in different countries - PAL and NTSC. I'd bought it in Japan when we were there a couple months earlier, because I'd started collecting VHS tapes and making my way into the underground tape-trading of video. "I had this shitty old nasty couch, a couple of shitty old chairs, a fucking old bed with holes in it," he laughs, "and then I had a television that looked like it came from 30 years in the future. Living alone for the first time in ages - "I'd spent three or four years with James at the Metallica Mansion," he recalls, "most of that time sharing the same bedroom" - Ulrich also turned his attention to furnishing his new bachelor pad. We put some carpet up on the walls, and put some different carpet on the floor." And then James and I and Jason, we spent a month soundproofing it all ourselves. "I asked my landlady if we could convert the garage into a small studio. "It was like a standard middle-class California suburban ranch house, a two-thousand square foot house with a two-car garage," he recalls. He used the unexpected free time to begin transforming its garage into a practice space for the group. But when James did it again, that put everything on the back burner for a month or two." Ulrich had recently moved into a house of his own in El Cerrito - just down the street from the tiny "Metallica Mansion" that the band called headquarters from 1983 to 1986. "It had happened on the Ozzy tour the summer before, and John Marshall, who was Kirk's roadie, took over. "There was definitely a pattern there," laughs Ulrich. "And then there was a break in the action."Ī break in the action, indeed: On March 26th, Hetfield wiped out while skateboarding and fractured his wrist - his second wrist-breaking skateboard tumble in less than a year - forcing the band to cancel a scheduled appearance on Saturday Night Live, and putting the writing sessions for the new album on hold. "We went in and just started throwing riffs and ideas at each other," Ulrich recalls. The band returned home to the Bay Area in the middle of February after a few weeks of rest, they reconvened at what Hetfield would mockingly refer to in the Garage Days Re-Revisited liner notes as "a fancy, so-called 'real' rehearsal studio" to begin working on musical ideas for the follow-up to Master of Puppets. Obviously, Jason was awesome, and he stood his ground."Īfter Japan, Metallica finished out the turbulent year with a month of North American shows, then kicked off 1987 by making up the European dates that had been canceled in the wake of their bus accident. He was the target, because he was the one that had taken Cliff's position. And you have to understand that it didn't really have anything to do with Jason. We were drunk and miserable and trying to figure it all out. "We'd never done that kind of stuff before. "It was such an odd energy," laughs Ulrich, ruefully. My recollection is that we just jumped in a vodka bottle and stayed there for quite a few years!" We didn't know how to process feelings, or any of that stuff. We didn't know what was up, down or sideways. "I mean, we were not emotionally prepared to deal with this. ' It was just, 'OK, we've gotta keep going, and now we need a bass player.' It was very blinders-on, very pragmatic, and off we go! "I don't remember that there ever was a conversation where we said, 'OK, what are our options? We can call it a day, we can continue, we can do this or do that. "I don't remember there ever being a choice," Ulrich tells Revolver today. Though wracked with grief and struggling to make sense of their friend and bandmate's sudden demise, the surviving members of Metallica quickly plunged into auditioning potential replacements. Indeed, the story of the EP really begins during the bleary weeks immediately following the band's fateful tour-bus accident of September 27th, 1986, which ended Burton's life on a lonesome stretch of Swedish highway.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |