In April 2015, Metallica released an exact duplication of the most famous demo cassette in heavy metal history for Record Store Day. The band's original No Life 'Til Leather demo, recorded by James Hetfield, Dave Mustaine, Ron McGovney and Lars Ulrich in 1982, was copied and passed around thousands of times on the global underground metal tape-trading community in the early '80s, with six of its seven tracks later re-recorded for the band's 1983 debut album Kill 'Em All, while The Mechanix, written by Dave Mustaine, was reworked with different lyrics by Hetfield and Ulrich and retitled The Four Horsemen for the album.
Talking to Rolling Stone in 2015 about the re-issue (limited to 10,000 copies worldwide) Lars Ulrich enthused about retaining the cassette's original mix which captured "the same innocence and, I guess, borderline ignorance, of four kids barely out of puberty, rockin’ along, doing their thing" and revealed that he was sorting through “lot of goodies that are laying around in cardboard boxes and tape vaults" for an expanded reissue of the cassette on CD and vinyl on their own Blackened Recordings.
Since then, as Metallica fans will be aware, the group have reissued every studio album from Kill 'Em All through to Load, but the promised No Life 'Til Leather record has still not emerged. And it's unlikely to be appearing anytime soon, according to Dave Mustaine.
"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," Mustaine clarifies to Classic Rock. "And I wrote the lyrics for Jump In The Fire and The Mechanix. So do the math: if I wrote the music and James [Hetfield] wrote the lyrics, then the credit is 50 per cent me, and 50 per cent 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?
"So James called me up," Mustaine continues, 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 offence to that, and we hung up, and I don't remember speaking to him since then."
Mustaine's Megadeth released their seventeenth, and final, studio album on January 23. The self-titled collection concludes with Megadeth's take on Metallica's Ride The Lightning, which Mustaine also co-wrote. Mustaine has stressed in recent interviews that he has no problem with Metallica, and considers the recording of the song a full circle moment for his storied career.
Reviewing the record for Metal Hammer, Dom Lawson wrote "Megadeth are bowing out with another great album, and one that skilfully captures their leader’s blazing inner fire, just as it is extinguished by his own, masterful hand. What a way to go."
