Metallica Kick Off Reissue Project With ‘No Life ‘Til Leather’ Cassette
Metallica will revisit their early years in a big way for the first time next month, when they put out an exact duplication of their thrashing declaration of intent — the 1982 demo tape No Life ‘Til Leather — as a limited-edition cassette on April 18th. “Twelve people will be able to play it, but everybody else will be able to hold it in their hands and, uh, have a great time with it,” drummer Lars Ulrich tells Rolling Stone with a laugh. The band will release the cassette on Record Store Day before issuing expanded CD and vinyl editions this summer, marking the first time any of their demos have been officially released.
Metallica earned their first accolades with the seven-track cassette when it arrived in the summer of 1982. At the time, the group consisted of vocalist-guitarist James Hetfield, lead guitarist Dave Mustaine (later of Megadeth), bassist Ron McGovney and drummer Ulrich, who was only 18 at the time, playing bloodthirsty thrash riffs on songs like “Jump in the Fire,” “Seek & Destroy” and “Metal Militia.” Only one of the tape’s tracks, “The Mechanix,” would not appear on the band’s debut LP, Kill ‘Em All, the following year. The cassette, which became a fixture on metal’s underground tape-trading scene, captured Metallica at their most raw, as Hetfield shredded his vocal cords and Mustaine doled out impressive, bluesy, breakneck-paced solos.
The band has remastered the original tapes for the reissue, keeping the mix intact, to show “the same innocence and, I guess, borderline ignorance, of four kids barely out of puberty, rockin’ along, doing their thing,” according to Ulrich. The artwork has been made from Ulrich’s own copy and will feature the Danish drummer’s handwriting.
The release is part of a new series of upcoming reissues, since Metallica now operate their own label (Blackened Recordings) and own the master recordings to their catalogue. “It’s time for us to put out some next-level reissues and do the song and dance of the catalog that everyone else has done; the U2s and the Led Zeppelins and the Oasises,” Ulrich says. “Instead of starting with Kill ‘Em All in 1983, we figured we’d go back another two years to when the band was formed in 1981.”
The expanded CD and LP versions of the cassette will cover what the drummer calls the “No Life ‘Til Leather era, but it’s not necessarily limited to the cassette.” Asked whether the band will include other demos from the time, such as its four-song Power Metal cassette, Ulrich requests patience and says he’s sifting through “lot of goodies that are laying around in cardboard boxes and tape vaults.”
Within a couple of months, “depending on how quick we can turn it around,” the group will announce “a big package” of reissues. “Yesterday, I found another tape and handed it to [engineer] Greg Fidelman, and there was some crazy stuff on the B-side that I didn’t even know existed,” he says. “It’s all coming. We’re doing our best.”