Man, Record Store Day is really shaping up to be quite the metal affair. First, Slayer announced they'd be releasing a new single and now Metallica are throwing their hat into the race.
The band just announced they will be re-releasing their legendary 1982 demo tape, No Life 'til Leather exclusively on cassette on April 18th. According to the press release, the "original source material has been re-mastered to maximize the sound potential for 2015 without altering the original mixes" and features all four original members, Hetfield, Ulrich, guitarist Dave Mustaine and bassist Ron McGovney.
Here's what Metallica had to say about the release:
This year we decided to celebrate Record Store Day with our friends at independent retail by taking a huge leap back in time to our humble beginnings with that little rectangle of plastic known as the "demo tape." In 1982 we recorded seven songs that became our initial calling card known as No Life 'til Leather and it led us to our first record deal . . . the rest, as you some of you may know, is history! We hope you enjoy this little walk down memory lane with us and that you will continue to join us in supporting independent record stores around the world.
The demo will feature the track "The Mechanix," quite a controversial song in the Metallica/Megadeth history. Dave Mustaine originally wrote the song for the band, and then once he left, Metallica re-worked it to become "The Four Horsemen" on their debut album, Kill Em All. The story of why they changed it is pretty interesting. Lars tells Rolling Stone:
"Dave was a force of energy," Ulrich says. "He came like a hurricane, just like whirling into our world with his charm and his good looks and he had great gear, like a backline, and he had roadies. He had everything. He had some skeletons or blueprints for a couple songs, and we tweaked them. We 'Metallica-ized' them or whatever."
Later, after the group kicked Mustaine out, they decided the song needed some new lyrics. "The lyrics to 'Mechanix' were literally – and I say this without judgment – about a sexual encounter at a gas station. There were all of these euphemisms that had sexual undertones. It wasn't that they were particularly bad lyrics, but it was just in line with so much of the American hard rock and metal at the time. Over the subsequent year or two, we wanted to go a little darker and lock on to what was going on in England, so we decided to put the lyrics in a different direction."
The cassette will be available for sale on Metallica.com and your local record stores.
For those of you without casette players, fret not. The band promise an "expanded" version on CD and vinyl this summer. Here is the, ahem, cover art for the cassette:
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