BY STEFFAN CHIRAZI
 
As I worked on the piece So What! recently ran on how Blackened Recordings put the Master of Puppets box set together, it quickly became clear to me that the project quarterback, director, and fulcrum point, Dan Nykolayko, had far more to say than there was room to publish in said-feature. Dan is, by his own admission, an obsessive Metallica fan. If digging through band storage units and other nooks ‘n’ crannies for material was archeology, Dan would be Howard Carter (In 1922 Carter discovered the intact tomb of pharaoh Tutankhamun. See? SW! gives you history in them-there metaphors!) because Dan digs out the treasures people want. 
 
It struck me as I read through the transcript of our conversation that there was some deep-level detail which hardcore fans might well find interesting with regards to Dan’s MOP (and other set) searches. Thus what follows are further parts of the conversation we had for the initial MOP feature. Enjoy.
 
Steffan Chirazi: Explain to people exactly how you came to co-produce these box sets. 
 
Dan Nykolayko: Twenty-five years ago, I traded tapes and was about getting all the demos and all the live shows, and just learning as much as I could about the material. when Kill ‘Em All and Ride the Lightning started, the band was struggling finding content solely because most of it resided in Lars’ vault and I don’t really think he liked too many people going into it. So at one point he pulled me aside and said, “I’d like you to come by. I’d like you to look through and find whatever you can find, and hopefully it’ll be great.”
 
SC: Did you have any inkling at that point that you were gonna be in servitude to these box sets?
 
DN: No. I think after the first trip to the vault for Kill… and Ride… I kinda got a sense of what I was going to be up to, but definitely not right out of the gate. And as the projects progressed… look… I’m as much of a control freak as [Lars] is or James or is. So as I found this content, I’d start drafting track lists for the things that needed to be sequenced. And I’d return them to the Blackened Recordings folks and say, “Okay, this is what I found. This is what I think it should be. Let’s cross our fingers and hope it’s awesome.”
 
SC: You’ve just said that you’re a control freak. So given that Lars is also one, do you think that familiarity breeds, well, in this case friendship, and trust? 
 
DN: I definitely think it’s a trust thing. I came up for that first storage visit, pulled a couple more nuggets, and as I was going through Kill… and Ride… I was trying to think forward. So I’d pull a couple things related to Master of Puppets, just to be prepared. Because obviously these deluxe box sets are gonna be a thing through Death Magnetic and who knows if by the time we get to the end of Death Magnetic it’ll be time to remaster Hardwired...? I say that jokingly, but you never know. 
 
SC: Paint the true picture of what you first walked into when you went to the Ulrich vault. 
 
DN: You mean the three feet of steel and the retina scans? No, I mean, you walk through the door and you’re greeted by three or four aisles worth of shelves – and shelves containing not just Metallica. It’s his vinyl collection. It’s his CDs, his old tape collection. There are nuggets and nuggets of amazing stuff. I remember spotting an advanced tape of Armored Saint’s Symbol of Salvation and a bunch of other random shit that he probably got from Q Prime over the years. 
 
SC: What’s the oddest thing you saw?
 
DN: Oh, God…Trixter. The first Trixter album on cassette.  The same cassette I bought when I was in sixth grade. Now granted, it was still in the shrink wrap, so I’m guessing it was a promo and probably given to him. But it’s still there. It didn’t land in the trash.
 
SC: You’ve never asked him about this?
 
DN: No, I try not to ask too many questions because it’ll end up in a back and forth sarcastic jabbing fest that I probably don’t want to get into.
 
SC: So you’re in there for what, two days?
 
DN: Yeah. Actually I think I was there for three, but I think the third day I’d already reached my peak. Your brain kind of turns to mush. I was sitting on the floor, he had a boom box in there with a little tape deck in it, and I would just sit there, pull a bunch of cassettes off a shelf, and start going one by one. The first time I went it was to find the best stuff. It was stuff like this show from 1985 that sounded great, would be great with Ride the Lightning, and that turned out to be the Hollywood Palladium show. But after looking through that first batch, it was a case of doing a deeper dive. And that’s when I would do less listening and more discerning, “Okay, this has 1984 and 1985 stamped on it.” Pull it off the shelf, bring it back to Kent [Matcke – HQ sound engineer]. Kent would transfer it into Pro Tools, we’d review it, and build from there.
 
SC: Was there one phone call with you, Lars, Brant (Weil – Q Prime & Blackened Recordings), and Marc (Reiter – Blackened Recordings) about the material?
 
DN: No. I mean we went into these first two reissues with the release dates already set. And it was like, “We’re doing two.” I remember thinking, “Are you out of your fucking minds?” 
 
SC: How hard was it to deal with officially being vetted to work on security clearance 12 by a man whose work you’re a huge fan of? 
 
DN: Whenever I talk about this with my mom she jokes, “Imagine if you could go back and tell sixteen-year-old Dan that you’d be doing this; the Dan who used to sit on the floor in his bedroom copying tapes, listening to stuff, and just trying to absorb as much knowledge as he could so that he could be a bigger fan.” And, I mean, it’s true! It’s a total mind fuck just to think that I went from my Midwestern bedroom in 1993 to sitting on Lars’ floor going through his cassettes…
 
SC: Telling him what you think needs to be done.
 
DN: Yeah, and basically making mix tapes. I mean at the end of the day it’s a lot like making a bunch of mix tapes. If I gotta sequence this, “Hey, let’s have ‘Motorbreath’ start the whole thing off because there’s the engineer talking at the beginning,” or finding which live shows worked better than others. Sometimes it’d be quality over not so much quantity. But you consider: Is it a special show? Yes. Does it sound good? Yeah. So, do you put it in because it’s special or do you leave it out because it sounds like shit? And sometimes we included some stuff where the sound quality leaves a little to be desired, but it’s history.
 
SC: But that’s where the emotion is. And the emotion of any moment is not always captured by this “perfect quality.”
 
DN: In this upcoming …Puppets set, I thought it was very important to include Cliff’s last show. There’s no sound board recording of it. Lars has a recording in the vault, but it’s an audience recording that’s super ambient and sounds like it was recorded in a bathroom in the back of Solnahallen.
 
SC: Probably about right, actually.
 
DN: Probably. So I reached out to an old tape trader friend of mine named Jeff; he had a copy in his collection that I thought was listenable. I gave it to Kent and basically said, “Kent, we’re gonna use this recording from my buddy Jeff that some people have probably heard, but it’s missing the last song, ‘Fight Fire With Fire,’ which has never been out in the trading world. So I want you to take ‘Fight Fire With Fire’ off of Lars’ cassette and mix it in.” It was really helpful to have two different sources because, on the first recording, there was a tape cut at the end of side A where the taper had to flip it over to side B and he lost a little bit of the beginning of “Fade to Black.” So Kent was able to take a bit of “Fade…” from Lars’ tape, mix it in, and there you go. You have a complete track! It’s from the same show and that’s the most important thing.
 
SC: Right. But of course again the emotion of the moment isn’t always captured with the highest quality.
 
DN: Exactly. No matter how Cliff’s last ripping bass solo was recorded, it’s important.
 
SC: How has it been when you have had to tell Lars things to do with certain ingredients?
 
DN: There’ve been a couple times where I’ve said, “This is really important to include.” And look, he’s a guy who’s all about getting stuff out there. So I think he’d be more concerned if we weren’t including enough. We did reach a point with Master of Puppets where the cost of the box was gonna end up being, like, $200. So we had to make a difficult decision to cut material, and it was one that he was involved in, but basically Marc came to me and said, “Is there anything in here that’s expendable?” And it’s like, “Well, okay, I included this show for this reason. I included that show for this reason. But there’s this show from the Aragon in Chicago, it’s pressed on vinyl, it’s great! There’s this other show that we were going to include from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, literally like a week before. Same leg of the tour, pretty much the same set list, so, okay, that can go.”
 
On the DVD, we have a Japanese show from Nagoya which is Jason’s fourth show and we were going to include on CD, literally, the very next show, in Osaka, which was on Kirk’s birthday. 
 And you realize, “Okay, if something needs to go, we’ll take those out just so that people don’t have $200 sticker shock.” And look, they may come out at some point with something else, you know? 
 
SC: Do you think you even know everything (in the archives) or do you still think there are areas that you didn’t get into?
 
DN: I think there are definitely missing bits. You don’t know what’s lurking in someone’s closet. 
 
SC: Right, even though you spent so much time in there.
 
DN: Yeah. I spent a lot of time in his vault and Master of Puppets is the perfect example, because Master of Puppets was supposed to come out last year. It was supposed to be November of 2016. Then we had a little thing called Hardwired… that swooped in and knocked the schedule on its side. We were gonna have this box set come out in conjunction with the Back to the Front book, there was a whole plan, and of course Hardwired… was more important. …Puppets is cool but it’s gonna have to wait. And I’m glad we did, because as the people who have interacted with the CID Enhanced Experiences [on tour] know, there are different drawers full of memorabilia in that exhibit. Well, there are two drawers there that blew my mind because I didn’t know they existed. They were James Hetfield’s cassettes!
 
SC: Oh, yeah, right.
 
DN: So we’re putting the CID museum together and Vickie Strate [Met Club President] sent me a bunch of photographs of these drawers we had and asked me to start making some labels and... I literally did not hear the rest of the conversation when I landed on the two trays of cassettes, because it’s like, “Holy shit! What is this? Why didn’t I know about this six months ago?” So by the time Jon Michael [CID] was finalizing everything, I came up to help him with it but I told him, “We’re working on Master of Puppets right now, I need to take twelve cassettes out of this display.” And I did. And they ended up being James’ riff tapes, plus a couple of different demos. A lot of what was available for CID, Ray [James’ assistant] brought from his storage unit. I really don’t know how many more cassettes may exist… 
 
SC: Those Het riff-tapes really gave this Master… project even greater life, right?
 
DN: Yes. I had Kirk’s riff tape and it only had two things on it, “Master of Puppets” and “Disposable Heroes” and I remember thinking, “Oh, hey, cool, I wish I had James, I wish I had Cliff, but you know, at least we got something.” So then when I got James’ stuff to add to the mix, it was fantastic. I mean they were the original cassettes that were used in a Fostex four-track. Kent literally found a Fostex on eBay, bought it, sent it to Tascam – or whoever the company may be now – to have it refurbished, so we’re really talking about taking it back to the source. It was a cool deeper dive.
 
SC: Let’s try to put the time spent on this into perspective, if you can. If you were to try to articulate how many hours you have spent putting the Master of Puppets package together, what are we looking at?
 
DN: Well, I probably reviewed about 35 cassettes. And if we say each set was 60 minutes, that works out to whatever that works out to be, here, let’s pull out the old calculator… it’s 35 hours.
 
SC: That’s just listening to the tapes.
 
DN: Yeah.
 
SC: And then there’s other stuff that you’re looking—
 
DN: Yeah, there’s helping Alex Tenta pick out photos, working on sequencing, proofreading, if you can believe that. One thing that came late in the project was Lars decided that he really wanted to have kind of a pared down version of the box set so that people who couldn’t afford, or maybe weren’t interested in, the big $175 mammoth monster, could get something cool too. So it became, “Let’s also do a 3-CD Expanded Edition.” So I put that whole thing together myself over an afternoon. The goal wasn’t so much to include the best material as it was to give everyone a taste. So you have disc one which is the album, disc two which was built off demos and rough mixes, so each song was represented in some way. There’s “Battery” on down to “Damage, Inc.” and then it’s capped off with the two previously unheard and unfinished covers of Fang’s “The Money Will Roll Right In” and “The Prince.” And the third CD is all live; basically I looked at a set list from 1986 and said, “Okay, we’re gonna do ‘Battery’ and ‘Master of Puppets’ from East Rutherford, we’re gonna do ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ from Hampton,” and we worked our way down and sequenced so that it all flowed.
 
SC: So it’s done now. Are there things you still wish you’d got in there?
 
DN: There’s a laundry list of stuff that I wish I found, but hey, it just doesn’t exist. I mean look, I as much as anyone else in the world would love to have a professionally shot show from the Master of Puppets tour, regardless if it’s with Cliff or if it’s with Jason. But that just doesn’t exist. It sucks but it is what it is. 
 
SC: Do you see yourself as a packrat after seeing how Lars retains stuff?
 
DN: A bit. I’m starting to loosen up as I get older. He’s definitely not.
 
SC: No. So, you see him as like a fanboy?
 
DN: Absolutely. I mean Jesus Christ, there’s a shelf that is solid Deep Purple vinyl. I mean box sets and multiple copies of the same thing. You’ll go down another aisle and there are stacks of old CD longboxes. There are a couple copies of Garage Days… in a longbox. That’s always the one that I look at and think, “That’s so cool.” But you can tell he’s proud of his career, of his work. He’s always said he’s the biggest Metallica fan in the world.
 
SC: So do you think of the next box set project with excitement or trepidation?
 
DN: Fear. Paralyzing fear.
 
SC: What’s the fear? That you’re not gonna do them justice, if you’ll pardon the pun? 
 
DN: I’m most afraid of the mountain of content. With Kill ‘Em All and Ride the Lightning, and to a lesser degree Master of Puppets because Master of Puppets had significantly more content than the first two, what we had to work with was finite. …Justice has more overall “documentation.” There’s so much Video8 footage from that …Justice era in Lars’ vault that is a total mystery to me. I don’t know if they were shot on a tripod by a fan at the soundboard, or if they’re screen feeds, if they even had screen feeds in 1989! I try to manage my expectations. Expect the worst and hope for the best. But you look at this wall where it’s row after row after row of tapes, and some of ’em aren’t even properly labeled! So you’re like, “Okay, this says ‘Irvine #3’… well, they played three nights in Irvine in ’89 so I’m gonna take a stab and say that’s from 1989.” There’s just a lot more material. Lars has a ton and James has a ton.
 
SC: So here’s my final question to all of that. Are you going to relinquish a little bit of your control to bring in somebody else, an assistant so-to-speak? 
 
DN: I’d bring an assistant in if I got to the point where I needed it. I don’t know if I do yet, but I’m sure we’ll find out the answer to that question pretty quickly. Kent’s been cranking away at transferring old demos and riff tapes for …Justice and he’s got a good 40 more tapes to go. I raided the CID museum again at the San Diego show [this past summer] and pulled out a bunch of stuff from James, because he has reference mixes and other demos. I’d rather transfer something that they both have that’s “identical,” just in case something’s different.
 
SC: Isn’t …Justice your favorite record?
 
DN: Yeah. That’s the one. It’s definitely gonna be interesting. I’m just starting to scratch the surface on it so we’ll see how it goes.