Mustaine: A Life in Metal. Dave Mustaine

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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