Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I Read Free Page A

the summer of 1966 the couple now had four mouths to feed from a single income. As much as the head of the family assured his wife that God would provide, the Almighty wasn’t prepared to clock in at 6 a.m. each morning in order to drive an eighteen-wheel rig for minimum wage, so Virgil’s stints on the road expanded from days at a time into weeks. With her eldest boyshaving descended into the hormonal clusterfuck of adolescence, and her infant daughter reacting to Virgil’s prolonged absences with ever more rebellious behaviour, Cynthia considered her sensitive youngest son’s sullen silences the least of her worries. But in a bid to bond with the boy, and draw him out of his black moods, she suggested to James that he might enjoy piano lessons, just as she herself had as a child. If three years of tuition proved to be an utterly joyless experience for Hetfield – ‘I hated it,’ he has stated baldly on more than one occasion – nonetheless in later years he was gracious enough to concede that it was not time entirely wasted, admitting, ‘I am so glad it was somewhat forced upon me, because the act of left and right hand doing different things, and also singing at the same time, it gave me some inkling of what I do now.’
    With his interest in music piqued, the child began experimenting with some of the other instruments lying around the family home. His half-brother David played drums in a rock ’n’ roll covers band called the Bitter End, while Christopher Hale, much taken by the developing singer-songwriter scene developing in the Los Angeles Canyons, flirted with acoustic guitar: neither instrument initially made much sense to James’s young ears, though the obvious irritation his exploratory noise-making caused other family members secretly delighted the youngster and served as some incentive to persevere. But it was the discovery of David Hale’s record collection that truly brought the power of music into focus for James. David had warned his half-brother countless times that the vinyl in the corner of their shared bedroom was off-limits to him, instructions which only served to inflame the younger boy’s curiosity. And so, one afternoon while David was at his accountancy class, nine- year-old James plucked up the courage to rummage through the dog-eared sleeves. He was drawn, ‘like a magnet to metal’, to one album cover in particular, the artwork for which featureda mysterious, unsmiling black-garbed woman standing outside an old watermill in a woodland clearing. He placed the black vinyl within on David’s record-player turntable, and dropped the stylus on its outermost groove. The sound of rainfall, thunder and a single, solemn, tolling church bell crept from the stereo’s battered speakers. And in that moment everything changed for James Hetfield, changed utterly.
    Released on Friday February 13, 1970, Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut album stands as a death knell for the idealistic hippie dreams of the Sixties. Inspired by horror movies, bad dreams, drug come-downs and the terminal grind of the factory floor, it was designed to unnerve and unsettle – ‘Everybody has sung about all the good things,’ reasoned bassist Geezer Butler. ‘Nobody ever sings about what’s frightening and evil.’ – and succeeded in offending the sensibilities of every notable music critic of the era. But in Ozzy Osbourne’s baleful vocals and guitarist Tony Iommi’s dread-laden, down-tuned riffs, young James heard the sound of liberation. ‘This was more than just
music
,’ he recalled, ‘[this was] a powerful, loud, heavy sound that moved [my] soul.’
    ‘Sabbath was the band that put “heavy” in my head,’ he said. ‘That first Sabbath album I would sneak out of my brother’s record collection and play on the forbidden record player. I wasn’t supposed to touch any of that stuff, but I did, and the first Sabbath album got in my head. That initial song, “Black Sabbath”, was the one [where]