Metallca’s first recorded appearance came on the “No Life ’Til Leather” demo in 1982. The lineup at the time featured guitarist James Hetfield, guitarist Dave Mustaine, drummer Lars Ulrich and bassist Ron McGovney.
In 2015, “No Life ‘Til Leather” was released as a limited-edition cassette for Record Store Day. It featured artwork copies from drummer Ulrich’s own personal copy of the original demo, as well as his handwriting.
At the time, the band also promised expanded editions of the demo would arrive on CD, vinyl and in a collector’s set, but that has never materialized.
In a new interview with Guitar.com, Mustaine sheds light as to why the re-release hasn’t happened. He also hints that a project between himself and Hetfield was also halted for the same reason.
“There’s three sides to every story, right,” Mustaine said. “There’s my side, there would be the other person’s side, and then there would be the truth which is somewhere right in the middle.”
“You know, oddly enough that was one of the last conversations I ever had with James Hetfield, because we were talking about getting back together and doing a project. Something had come up about the publishing discrepancy that we have been arguing about for years and years and years, and I told James, ‘I’ll do it but we’ve got to get this stuff sorted out first’. And he said, ‘Oh yeah, sure’.”
“So I said, ‘Now these two songs you and me split 50/50. Lars didn’t write on this song — you know that. I don’t know why you gave him percentages, but I’m not. I’m not going to sign another deal that’s gonna confirm that because I never agreed to that’. And James said, ‘Well, Lars has a different recollection of that,’ and I said that’s fine; there’s his side of the story, my side and the truth is somewhere. And that blew his mind, and we haven’t talked since.”
“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 previously said that he didn’t want to “perpetuate false information” by giving Ulrich songwriting credit on the previously announced expanded version of “No Life ‘Til Leather”.
Ulrich told Metal Forces 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’,” he said.
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