In a new interview with Classic Rock magazine, Dave Mustaine of Megadeth explained why a previously planned, expanded version of the METALLICA 1982 demo tape, “No Life ‘Til Leather” has still not been released.
The seven-song demo was recorded with the first incarnation of Metallica, including Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield, lead guitarist Mustaine and bassist Ron McGovney.
According to Mustaine, the release of the demo “No Life ‘Til Leather” is unlikely to arrive anytime soon.
“I wrote all the music on ‘Phantom Lord’, all the music on ‘Metal Militia’, all the music on ‘Jump In The Fire’ and ‘The Mechanix’, And I wrote the lyrics for ‘Jump In The Fire’ and ‘The Mechanix’. So do the math: if I wrote the music and James wrote the lyrics, then the credit is 50 percent me, and 50 percent James. Well, that’s not what went down when I left. James and Lars figured out that they were going to give Lars some percentage of the songs he didn’t write anything on, and that happened on all four songs.”
“This was a bone of contention for me going forward with METALLICA on anything because, you know, it just wasn’t fair, You guys got more money than God, why do you have to take my money?
Mustaine continued:
“So James called me up,” , “and he says, ‘Hey, man, we want to release this ‘No Life ‘Til Leather’ thing, and we want to get all this publishing stuff straight, and, you know, we really don’t remember what went down. And I said, Well, that’s good, because I do. I remember what went down, and I can help with that. And then the conversation took a turn. James goes, ‘Well, that’s not the way that we remember it’. And I went, Well, James, honestly, there’s three ways to look at this: there’s your way, my way, and the truth, which is some combination of the two. And that was the end of the conversation. He took offense to that, and we hung up, and I don’t remember speaking to him since then. You know, I was trying to be really friendly with him; he told me that the last three projects they did bombed, and they wanted to go back and use all the stuff that I was on, and I said sure. As soon as I said that ‘three stories’ bit, it was over.”
Mustaine has also said in interviews that he didn’t want to “perpetuate false information” by giving Ulrich songwriting credit on the expanded version of “No Life ‘Til Leather”. The Megadeth frontman also discussed the proposed expanded edition of “No Life ‘Til Leather” during a June 2018 interview with Kerrang! magazine.
In the interview he claimed that the last time he spoke to Hetfield was when the Metallica guitarist / vocalist called him to talk about the “No Life ‘Til Leather” re-release, Mustaine recalled:
“He was trying to get me to give publishing over to Lars, despite James and I being the sole songwriters. Lars wanted a percentage and I just said no. I love James, he’s a terrific guitar player, but yeah, I can’t do that. The songs are already out there. I’m not going to release something just to have a product to sell — especially if they are perpetuating false information. Lars did not write the songs. It was just me and James. Period.”
Lars Ulrich told Metal Forces in an interview in 2016 that:
“Some unexpected difficulties on the legal side… prevented the ‘No Life ‘Til Leather’ box set and our vision for how we were going to kick this whole reissue series off. We spent some time doing that dance, but then James and I decided that it wasn’t worth it getting bogged down in all the unpleasantries, because this was supposed to be a celebration and not end up being a tug of war, so we thought, ‘You know what? Fuck it. We’ll just move on to ‘Kill ‘Em All’,”
At the time, Ulrich did not get into the details of the exact issues that were preventing the demo from being released.
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” he said. “There’s no reason to go deeper into it. It was just something that we hadn’t expected.”
Back in November of 2017, Mustaine tweeted that he had been contacted by Hetfield two years earlier to discuss “officially” releasing “No Life Till Leather” with “27 tracks, pics, the whole enchilada,” but, he said:
“the talks broke down because Lars wanted credit on two songs I wrote every note and word to. I have the texts. I passed.”
Metallica’s original demo “No Life ‘Til Leather” was recorded on July 6, 1982 at Chateau East Studio in Tustin, California. All of the songs appeared on the band’s 1983 debut album, “Kill ‘Em All”.
(Source: Blabbermouth.net)
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