I may well have bumped into LU back in the day as we both haunted the Marquee club and followed a lot of the NWOBHM acts, but I was more into Motorhead at that point, especially Lemmy's playing style
I have some friends who met him "pre-sellout" on the Justice tour and said he was actually a super nice guy who took them backstage and shot the shit for a couple of hours and gave one of them drumsticks and cymbals when he mentioned he played drums, too, even jammed with him on his warmup kit in the dressing room. I guess he developed his coke/asshole problem when he started partying with Slash, who seems to be a carrier, but not a sufferer, of the douche virus.
I asked about the
S&M thing because my wife got me that CD for Christmas the year it came out, and it's pretty good, but in its context of the
Load era, I hear too much of the bad things in the band to truly dig it. The way they kept shitting on Newstead never sat right with me and hiring Trujillo to replace him only furthered my disgust. I have the remastered 45's of
Ride the Lightning and
Master of Puppets but they're just "cleaned-up" vinyl mixes. I always get a chuckle out of hearing Hetfield's quote about how Lighting had a better sound but he couldn't place what it was that was better. I can; you can
almost hear Cliff with the full band on Lightning.