Metallica: Enter Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

Slagel now, ‘and we had gone to see [former UFO guitarist] Michael Schenker play at the Country Club, in Reseda. This must have been in about December 1980. After the show John was in the parking lot and saw a kid wearing a Saxon European T-shirt. Now nobody, aside from me and him, knew who Saxon even was in LA, let alone had a European T-shirt. So John ran up to him and said, “Wow, where did you get that shirt?” I look down the road and there’s this little guy with long hair and a wrinkled Saxon T-shirt on,’ Kornarens later recalled, ‘so I went over the way. Lars was all excited ’cos he thought he was the only one in LA. So we started talking about the NWOBHM and the next day or the day after I’m round at his house for like a NWOBHM marathon.’ Soon their nerdy little gang was joined by fellow LA-based NWOBHM anoraks such as Bob Nalbandian, Patrick Scott and, further afield, Ron Quintana in San Francisco and K.J. Doughton in Oregon, all of whom would make small but important contributions to the early development of Metallica. ‘Obviously there was a lot of innocence,’ Lars smiled, when I prodded him for more memories in 2009. ‘There was a lot of youthful energy, there were a bunch of kids that came from all over the place that probably shared one thing in common [which] was that they were all outcasts and were all loners and had a difficult time fitting in with the kind of American way things were supposed to be – with school and goals and dreams and all this crap, right? And that we all found music and we all got off on the same things, which was this incredible thing that the British press had kind of [invented]. And I mean that in a positive way. We all believed in what this whole thing coming out of England was. Also because…it united us, and it was something that was taking place far away, so it made it more exciting. It wasn’t immediately accessible, physically. It’s very easy to kind of dream yourself into that whole state. And the New Wave of British Heavy Metal did that for many of us.’
    ‘We just thought he was some crazy Euro-metaller,’ says Ron Quintana, who first met Lars at the end of 1980. However, Ron and his ‘Golden Gate Park hilltop’ friends soon ‘came to respect his knowledge of bands we’d only read about or more commonly only seen logos of and suspected were heavy…[Lars] knew his shit early on and was an expert on newer bands to me’. Brian Slagel, who these days runs his own successful Metal Blade label, had discovered the NWOBHM through the tape-trading scene, which he’d first gotten into at high school, swapping home-made bootlegs with an increasingly wide range of fellow fanatics. Eventually, ‘I would trade live tapes [with people] all over the world,’ he says now. One of the people he regularly traded tapes with was in Sweden and it was he who sent him a live AC/DC show, which he also stuck some stuff ‘by a new band called Iron Maiden’ onto the end of. ‘It was The Soundhouse Tapes , three songs stuck on the end of the AC/DC stuff. I was like, “Oh, wow! This is awesome! What is this?”’ Brian began pumping his Swedish pen-pal for info, heard about the NWOBHM, then started buying import copies of Sounds , ‘which you could get at one of the local record stores’ to find out more. Soon he had amassed an impressive second-hand knowledge of the emerging British scene and begun to share his newfound spoils with other friends. To begin with, ‘There was me, my friend John Kornarens and Lars,’ he recalls. Once a week they would set off together to visit all the independently run record stores they knew that sold import copies of this decidedly non-American rock. ‘There were only like three or four stores and sometimes they would be an hour away from each other [by car]. There was Zed Records [in Long Beach]. Moby Disc [in Sherman Oaks] was another one closer to where I lived. And there were a couple of others I can’t remember the names