Metallica: Enter Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

motifs, borrowed almost entirely from old gods Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. Lars had first come across them via a tape of their early single, ‘Shoot Out the Lights’, which he regarded as ‘good but not outstanding’. When, however, he read in Sounds about the band’s independently produced, mail-order album, Lightning to the Nations , he couldn’t resist sending off a cheque and ordering a copy. He later gleefully recalled how ‘each copy was signed by one member of the quartet and it was pot luck whose autograph you ended up getting’. Lars, who had the luck of the devil, ended up with the handwritten signature of the band’s singer, Sean Harris – a rare prize indeed for the NWOBHM devotee.
    However, a long delay in the album’s arrival at the Ulrich household resulted in Lars striking up a correspondence with Linda Harris, Sean’s mother and then co-manager of the band. ‘She wrote really nice letters to me [and] sent me embroidered patches and singles – but still no album! Finally, in April 1981 the white label arrived and the riffing and freshness just amazed me.’ So amazed was he, in fact, that Metallica would later play live – and, later still, record – five of the album’s seven tracks, including ‘Am I Evil?’, ‘Helpless’, ‘Sucking My Love’ and ‘The Prince’. In particular, he was enthralled by a track called ‘It’s Electric’, which he had already heard a version of on another would-be NWOBHM compilation called Brute Force . ‘That was fucking unbelievable!’ he said. ‘If you take a look at the sleeve of the record now and compare the photo of Diamond Head with all the other groups there, they had an attitude and a vibe about them that none of the others could match. There was something special about Diamond Head, no doubt about it.’ Any secret thoughts Lars had of becoming a musician himself were still held in check, though. Certainly, none of his collector friends had any inkling yet of his ambitions to form his own world-beating NWOBHM-type band. ‘There was no mention initially that Lars wanted to form a band,’ says Brian Slagel. Then one day at Lars’ parents’ house Brian noticed there was a drum set ‘that was not put together, just sitting in the corner [in pieces]. He was like, “I’m gonna start a band” and we’re like, “Yeah, right, Lars, sure.”’
    But when Brian Slagel started his own fanzine, The New Heavy Metal Revue , he began to feel like he should hurry up and do his own thing too. ‘There were so many great bands that I just loved, I kind of thought it was an interesting thing to do something like that,’ Slagel says now. ‘There was nobody over here in the US that really knew anything about any of these NWOBHM bands.’ The first issue was ‘thrown together for fun’ in early 1981. ‘We just wrote some reviews and some things on Maiden and some US bands, and photocopied a few of them and tried to get them anywhere we could get them, basically.’ It was around this time that Slagel also started working at a local independent record store, Oz Records, where for the first time he came into contact with ‘a lot of the import distributors and stuff, so I had more of an avenue to get some distribution’. With the fanzine now on sale in the same independent stores that he and Lars had first gotten to know as fans hunting down import copies of NWOBHM records, the itch Lars felt to also somehow become more involved grew unbearable. It was now that he put his drum kit back together and really began practising again. The problem with being a drummer, though, is that you can only get so far playing on your own. You need other musicians to play alongside to improve your technique. Not having any musician friends remotely interested in the type of music he wanted to play, Lars tried seeking a solution to the problem by placing an ad in the classified section of local music free-sheet The Recycler : ‘Drummer looking for