Before Metallica broke out with their big 1983 debut album Kill 'em All they had previously done a bunch of demo recordings of songs compiled on a demo released called No Life Til Leather that would end up on future albums. Many of these were written or at least co-written by then lead guitarist and now Megadeth front man Dave Mustaine. The band until recently had plans to re-release all of these songs until problems with track credits arose.
According to Mustaine, drummer Lars Ulrich wanted writing credits for songs that he had no part in writing and that Mustaine had wrote entirely himself. Mustaine explains this in a tweet, saying:
"James contacted me 2 years ago. We were going to officially release the No Life Till Leather demo as a record, w/27 tracks, pics, the whole enchilada, and the talks broke down because Lars wanted credit on two songs I wrote every note and word to. I have the texts. I passed."
Quite frankly I can't say I blame Mustaine for this. Metallica have been profiting off of his writing for decades without Mustaine even being in the band since just before the first album. Plus, Lars is known for being a rather greedy S.O.B. and it doesn't surprise me that he would want to snake his way in to take credit where he hadn't earned it. Say what you will about Mustaine, but if he wrote the entirety of the songs then he should be the only one to get credit for them.
I just think that it's a shame that now we won't be getting what would have been a pretty special release. Honestly, this would be the best Metallica release in a VERY long time. I've heard quite a few of the tracks via bootleg and they're really something else. Mustaine's playing on them is phenomenal and the band was on fire at that time. They were hungry and it showed. This re-release would have given us a window into that special time, but unfortunately Lars had to be his greedy self and ruin it for us.
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