Garage Days

Before K.J. Doughton enlisted in the Metallica army, he was high school kid growing up in a tiny mill town in rural Oregon. The state has never been a metal hotbed, so how did he get his hands on the music? At first, Doughton and a friend would drive into bigger cities like Portland to buy import albums in big bursts on the weekends. Then he started making connections in other states, by writing letters and making phone calls.

"I was on the journalism staff in high school and would call people from school," says Doughton. "I remember one day my parents got a phone call from the principal saying, 'There's this phone bill for thousands of dollars in long distance charges, who's going to pay it?' "

The crucial underground ritual of tape trading began in the early '80s. Ron Quintana, a fan, disc jockey and collector from Northern California, had a large list of live shows he taped off the radio, and offered to trade them; it was cheaper than buying tapes he wanted from bootleggers who advertised out of record collector magazines.

As Quintana recalled in Metallica Unbound, a biography of the band written by Doughton, he met Lars Ulrich when he visited the Bay Area in the summer of 1981. They immediately struck up a friendship over their love of Diamond Head, a New Wave of British Heavy Metal band that was one of Metallica's biggest influences. Ulrich also knew Brian Slagel, a fan from Southern California who had a huge tape list; Slagel went on to found Metal Blade Records.

When Ulrich was in Southern California, he, Slagel and John Kornarens (another mutual friend and fan) would scour small independent stores like Moby Disc, Aaron's, Poo Bahs and Oz Records, which mainly sold metal albums and imports. Like many metal fans, Ulrich was very competitive about who got the coolest new album in the underground first. As Doughton recalls, "when those guys would go record shopping together, Lars would be the first one to get out of the car and into the store, to get his hands on the key record everyone was looking for."

England's Kerrang! Magazine was the bible for metal fans. In the fourth issue, Quintana placed an ad looking for underground fans with whom he could correspond and trade tapes. Quintana got over a hundred responses, including letters from K.J., Harold Oimen (who would also become one of Metallica's early photographers) and Pat Scott, who was Metallica's light man in the club days. Another important magazine that Ulrich read backwards and forwards was Sounds, which coined the term The New Wave of British Heavy Metal.