A queue of rock fans gathered on West Hollywood’s fabled Sunset Strip is hardly an occurrence likely to make the evening news. But as a crowd convened on the evening of Sunday August 11, 1991, observers with a keen eye for detail would have noticed something different from the norm. Those waiting in a more or less orderly line on this notable thoroughfare were different from the usual faces familiar to ‘The Strip’. For although this was still a rag-bag collection of young rock fans, these were people – mostly male – who looked as if they’d just come from a shift at a blue-collar workplace rather than a day spent in the company of stylists whose techniques suggested artisans who were losing their eyesight.
The hour was just a cigarette-break shy of midnight. For the first time in this new decade, Metallica were about to unveil a new studio album, a self-titled collection that had already come to be known as ‘The Black Album’. As if this alone were not a cause for excitement, the band’s decision to make their fifth album available to fans living in or near Hollywood gave the introduction of what was just one of literally hundreds of CDs released that year the feeling of a Special Occasion.
At one minute past midnight, fans were let loose on the shop floor of the West Hollywood branch of Tower Records, a one-storey building that looks more like a prefab shack than an emporium of the recorded arts. In 1991 ‘Tower on Sunset’ was North America’s most iconic record shop. As is the case with so many other record shops all over the world, today it is closed for business.
The idea of allowing patrons to purchase an album from midnight on its day of release was not new, although it was still relatively unusual. In 1987 U2 had introduced their blockbusting fifth album, The Joshua Tree, at the branch of Tower Records in South Kensington, London. The difference here, however, was that while fans of the Irish band comported themselves in a manner befitting those whose tastes ran to thoughtful and considered Celtic rock, Metallica’s crowd behaved like a performers in a drunken am-dram production of Animal House.
Come the witching hour the scene within resembled a zoo in which the animals had been freed from their enclosures.
A film crew was on hand to capture the chaos. Hands lunged towards boxes of CDs and cassette tapes as sales registers beeped like a symphony of smoke alarms. The album was also being pumped at a volume sufficient to dent skulls through speakers positioned throughout the air-conditioned store. For those not gathered on Sunset Boulevard, local rock radio station K-ROQ broadcast news of the good-natured stramash.
For Metallica themselves – and for Lars Ulrich in particular – the symbolic chutzpah of this event would not have gone unnoticed. In August 1991 it had been almost nine years since the group had packed up their possessions and left Los Angeles for permanent exile in San Francisco. During their short LA existence the group had performed for small crowds in the city in which they had formed, their basketball boots finding little traction on LA’s unforgiving thoroughfares. Metallica might have made their debut live appearance in West Hollywood (a two-set stand that comprised only the band’s third and fourth concerts) supporting Barnsley’s entirely unreconstructed Saxon, but in the time that had elapsed since this 1982 performance at the Whisky a Go Go – a club situated just yards from Tower Records –the quartet had not once returned to ‘The Strip’ as a live act. In these earliest of days Los Angeles had dismissed Metallica with the gravest insult in its arsenal – it ignored them.
‘It was very lonely being Metallica in LA in 1982, that I can tell you,’ was how Ulrich recalled those times.
But if his band had lost the battle with the city of Los Angeles, Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett and Jason Newsted were about to win the war.
Clutching a copy of ‘The Black Album’ in his hand, inside Tower Records a young fan breaks with convention. Rather than looking into the camera pointed at his face and screaming the word ‘Metallica!’ with as much force as his lungs will allow, instead he offers a thought that neatly encapsulates one of the core beliefs of millions of the band’s fans.
‘Finally,’ he says, ‘someone in metal is saying something right.’
With their fifth album, Metallica were also trying something new. ‘The Black Album’ saw the quartet reverse their juggernaut from out of the over-developed cul-de-sac in which they had parked themselves (and, seemingly, bricked themselves into) with 1988’s constipated . . . And Justice for All set. This they did with a root-and-branch re-imagining of their songs, their style and their sound.
That this was so was established even before the album was released. As the one member of Metallica who can be said to have had ‘a vision’ – actually, ‘the vision’ – of what his band’s next collection should sound like, Lars Ulrich also understood, as if by instinct, which song from the album should be its calling card. Almost a quarter of a century after the fact, it is unimaginable that the group would have chosen any song other than ‘Enter Sandman’ with which to kick open the doors of the Nineties. But the truth is that this was not something apparent to everyone in and around the Metallica camp. Towards the end of ‘The Black Album’s torturous nine-month recording sessions, Ulrich and Hetfield accompanied producer Bob Rock to a bar in Vancouver and were treated to the following opinion.
‘You’ve got an incredible album,’ said the Canadian. ‘You’ve got, as far as I’m concerned, five or six songs that are going to be classics, both with your fans but also on the radio. But the first song [from] this album that should come out is “Holier Than Thou”.’
Wrong. Dead wrong. By opting to introduce ‘Enter Sandman’ – a single which stage-dived its way to the top five in the UK singles chart – to fans and listeners of modern rock radio (as well as, emphatically, Music Television) Metallica treated the world to the most sumptuous and seductive introduction to a hit single since . . . actually, there is no since. With a growing sense of menace that builds the stage on which the signature riff penned by Kirk Hammett can shift air on an industrial scale, within days of becoming public ‘Enter Sandman’ had established itself as the first Metallica song to become known by people who previously had never before heard the group’s name (and in many ways remains so to this day). With James Hetfield’s masterful ear for fitting lyrics precisely into the available space, the words ‘exit light’ and ‘enter night’ evoke a man who sounds as if he is in control of such things. The effect is a minimalist chorus of maximum force. In little over five minutes, here Metallica had learned valuable new lessons in ways of harnessing a power that in the past had sometimes overwhelmed them.
On a musical level ‘The Black Album’ is unfailingly sophisticated. In each of the collection’s twelve songs Metallica fight and win a battle against every instinct they had indulged on . . . And Justice for All. In place of tempo changes and the kind of endless curiosity normally reserved for police officers armed with a search warrant, the authors put their shoulders to creating aerodynamism and the kind of spacious throb that comes packed with atmospheric pressure.
The word for all this was ‘groove’, which Lars Ulrich used in interviews at the time at least as much as he used his other favourite word, ‘fuck’. Examples of this litter the album, from the cripplingly heavy ‘Sad But True’ to the monumental ‘The God That Failed’. Even the almost uniformly mid-paced nature of ‘The Black Album’ served the band well by creating the impression that this was but one piece of music, a template of varying moods separated only by one or two seconds of silence every five or six minutes.
While this was the first Metallica album to sound entirely effortless, the truth is that it was anything but. Bob Rock’s jibe during the recording process, that ‘their friends in Anthrax and Megadeth’ would tease them if they heard too much melody on the album, might have been deliciously barbed, but the producer’s efforts in translating his charges’ industrial strengths into an organic and magnificent whole were not without reward. True, ‘The Black Album’ was a release that cost a million dollars to record, but the results make this (at the time staggering) amount sound like a bargain. And while Metallica’s fans and contemporaries might have questioned (at tireless length) the group’s decision to employ ‘pop metal’ producer Bob Rock in the first place, the band themselves were free of doubt. As Hetfield explained, it was all about the sound. Even when working with bands whose music stood diametrically opposed to his own (such as was the case with Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe), Rock’s work thundered and shone.
‘The sound of the albums was great,’ he said. As for everything else, he explained, ‘The songs were crap and the bands were fucking gay.’
Lars Ulrich was in Budapest when he learned that ‘The Black Album’ had walloped its way to the top of the US Billboard album chart at the first time of asking, and where it would remain for the next month. Ulrich and his band mates were on tour as special guests to AC/DC on the Monsters of Rock caravan when he learned of his group’s first no. 1 album anywhere in the world. In his room a fax arrived from the band’s management company, Q Prime, in New York City. It stated, simply, that Metallica were atop the Billboard Hot 200. Ulrich considered the piece of paper he now held in his hand and wondered what it was that was delaying the attendant fireworks and marching band.
‘You think one day some fucker’s gonna tell you, “You have a no. 1 record in America”, and the whole world will ejaculate,’ he says. ‘I stood there in my hotel room with this fax [which read] “You’re number one” and it was, like, “Well, okay.” It was just another fucking fax from the office.’
Alongside its success in the US, ‘The Black Album’ also debuted at the summit of the charts of no fewer than seven other countries – the UK and Australia among them – and was top five in a further five nations. By the end of the decade, Metallica was the eighth-best-selling album of the Nineties in the US, having spent more than four and a half years on the Billboard listings.
Not everyone could be said to be overly chuffed with what Metallica had achieved, though. Rock’s joke about irate peers crying foul had a predictably prophetic ring. As has been seen, this was a group that was not only viewed as having responsibilities to their own artistic instincts (the only thing that mattered) but also a duty of care as standard bearers for a now rapidly stagnating thrash metal scene, as well as God knows what else. The response from old friends rapidly disappearing in Metallica’s rear-view mirror may not have been universally dismissive, but much of it did carry with it what must have been for its targets an infuriating subtext of class treason.
Having gathered his thoughts for at least ninety seconds, Dave Mustaine offered his view that ‘The Black Album’ featured just one interesting song, this being ‘The Unforgiven’. From the genre’s noisiest outpost, Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo put down his drumsticks in order that he might throw his copy of Metallica’s latest album down the stairs – literally.
‘I can definitely understand people going, “Oh, ‘Enter Sandman’, ‘Nothing Else Matters’ – what happened?”,’ Lars Ulrich later reflected. ‘[But] if we had’ve made . . . And Justice for All [Part] II, that would have been the sell-out . . . We had a fear of being stuck. With some of our peers we saw that there was a Status Quo element that we saw was not for us.’
Metallica’s capacity to disassociate themselves from hotbeds that were now leaving them cold remains unmatched. When it came to thrash metal, the notion that the genre had run its course was confirmed by the very fact that so many of its practitioners had so quickly come to adopt the reactionary and conformist mindset that their genre had challenged just a few years earlier. More than this, though, was the question of why on earth Metallica would wish to associate themselves with a community in creative decline? All of this stuff was in the past; while the future was one of open water and endless space.
Released in an extraordinary period for American rock – a six-week span that saw the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Guns N’ Roses Use Your Illusion parts 1 and 2 – with ‘The Black Album’ Metallica went from being the world’s most commercially significant cult band to being a mainstream concern.
But by coming to dine above the salt, the band learned quickly just how much things had changed. Despite having spent eight years talking to members of the press, in 1991 Ulrich discovered that these efforts counted for nothing. The truth was, there remained hundreds of journalists and publications that knew nothing of metal’s now all-conquering heroes.
It seems surreal to recall these times but, in the days before the Internet, entertainment reporters were reliant on two or three sheets of paper supplied by a band’s record label to provide them with a potted history of the group to whom they were about to speak. In the case of Metallica, it seems that some writers failed even to manage this. With a phone cradled to his ear, it was with equal measures of bewilderment and amusement that Ulrich noticed that many publications believed ‘The Black Album’ to be a debut.
Meanwhile, though, a better class of opinion-former was beginning to take note. Metallica being at no. 1 in the US meant attention from that country’s pre-eminent music publication, Rolling Stone. While it would be wrong to say that the magazine founded by Jann Wenner in 1967 did not write about metal bands – Mötley Crüe, for one, had in the past graced the front page – given the choice, they would rather not. It is, though, to the magazine’s credit that when it came to Metallica its editorial team recognised something different from the norm. That this was true had been signalled by a four-star review of ‘The Black Album’ that treated the collection with the respect it deserved, while avoiding exit-strategy caveats concerning the genre it represented.
Not content with this, Rolling Stone also placed Metallica on their cover on not one but two occasions during the album’s two-year cycle. The first story came in the weeks following the CD’s release, the point at which many in the wider musical world were still rubbing their eyes and attempting to make some kind of sense of the hairy, unsmiling men staring out at them.
‘I know there were a lot of bands that went, “Oh yeah, Metallica – they sell a lot of records but they can’t play or write songs,”’ reported a gleeful Ulrich. ‘I was just reading an interview with [The Cult front man] Ian Astbury where he said that going to a Metallica concert was one big wanking session with all these guys jerking each other off – and where’s the femininity? Well, excuse me! So this is a big “Fuck you”, not especially to Ian Astbury, but for all those people who felt that way for years and years, who came up and smiled to our faces, but as soon as they walked away they were laughing at us.’
Elsewhere, while Jason Newsted confessed, ‘I never thought we’d have a no. 1 album playing the kind of music we do,’ James Hetfield expounded on the notion that his band no longer felt compelled to defend their territory like wolves. Now, he explained, they were merely Dobermann Pinschers. ‘We’re just a little more confident,’ was his opinion. ‘We’re not afraid to hear a suggestion and adapt it to our thing. ‘
‘Before we didn’t want to hear it,’ he added. ‘Now we’ll hear it [and] then we’ll say, “Fuck you!”’
For Rolling Stone, Hetfield was now a Person of Interest, and it was to the front man alone that Metallica’s second Rolling Stone cover feature was dedicated. In a marriage of words and pictures that did everything right, the magazine showed just why it had maintained its position as market leader for more than a generation. The front cover was a master class. Shot by the Texan-born portrait photographer Mark Seliger, the image that screamed forth from magazine racks the world over saw a topless James Hetfield standing on flat and barren earth, his legs astride and teeth bared. He holds a black Gibson Explorer guitar next to a headline that reads, ‘The leader of the free world speaks.’
With such a brazen statement, Rolling Stone recognised Hetfield as being a man of substance, if not always wisdom. Just as millions of metal fans suddenly found themselves drawn to Metallica’s lyrics in a way that had never before been the case for any band of their kind, so too Rolling Stone recognised deep waters when they saw them. But while many fans of the band listened to the lyrics on ‘The Black Album’ and heard the voice of God, this was the God of the Old Testament. Sounding like a man who carries a gun, on songs such ‘Wherever I May Roam’ (‘carved upon my stone, my body lies but still I roam’), ‘Of Wolf and Man’ (‘I hunt therefore I am, harvest the land, taking of the fallen lamb’) and ‘The God That Failed’ (‘broken is the promise, betrayal, the healing hand held back by the deepened nail, follow the God that failed’), Hetfield gives the impression of a man who has taken the most fundamental of American principles and subtly adjusted it to his own ends: Give him liberty, or he’ll give you death.
This motto was propelled recklessly to its logical conclusion on the most misguided – and, actually, most misunderstood – track on ‘The Black Album’, the hawkish ‘Don’t Tread On Me’. The point the song makes is simple, and not without some kind of logic – the most reliable way of maintaining peace is to make sure that one is always primed for war. This hard-headed outlook, however, is not the song’s real problem. The problem is one of jingoism. The lifting of Leonard Bernstein’s melody from the West Side Story song ‘America’ signals trouble only a few seconds after the song has started. But whereas West Side Story lyricist Stephen Sondheim pirouettes around the original melody with phrases such as ‘automobile in America, chromium steel in America, wire-spoke wheel in America . . .’ James Hetfield has only gracelessness to offer; not so much wire-spoked wheel as a tin ear. ‘Love it or leave it,’ he says of the country of his birth, as if these were the only two options available. He also speaks of liberty ‘shining with brightness’, which, to be fair, is a lot more impressive than a beacon of hope that shone with darkness. But just as the cliché and nonsense running wild through the song’s verses threaten to torpedo ‘Don’t Tread On Me’, the song reaches its conclusion in a chillingly convincing manner. As the music swells beneath him, Hetfield warns, ‘touch me again with the words that you will hear evermore’ before adding in a manner befitting a man with whom even the hardiest of fools would hesitate to tangle, ‘Don’t tread on me!’
On the evidence of this, one might assume that the safest way of speaking to Hetfield might be from behind bullet-proof glass. Appearances, though, often deceive, and the occasion of the Rolling Stone cover feature was the first time he had been subjected to the type of questions asked by a magazine that interviewed not just rock stars but also presidential candidates.
The journalist in question was David Fricke, then as now America’s best and most authoritative rock reporter. In an interview that is by turn therapy session and politically minded interrogation, the Metallica front man unveiled himself and shed his public armour.
On the subject of his then burgeoning reputation as a heavy drinker, the front man revealed, ‘I used up all my hangovers. It was basically [me] waking up, not feeling very good and not wanting to do a show. I started to feel a sense of responsibility, at least to myself, let alone anybody else, to play better.’
At another point in the interview Fricke questioned Hetfield on comments he had made to the New Musical Express about how rap music was an ‘extra black’ phenomenon, and how the genre’s lyrics took the form of ‘[the rapper saying] me, me, me, and my name is in this song’.
To this line of enquiry Hetfield responded, ‘They say a lot of “I’m this, I’m this, I’m doin’ this, you got to do this with me.” It’s just not my cup of tea. Some of the stuff, like [rapper Ice T’s utterly hopeless metal band] Body Count, our fans like it because there’s aggression there. I love that part of it. But the [Body Count song] “Cop Killer” thing, kill whitey – I mean, what the fuck? I don’t dig it.’ (Despite there being no real evidence of a racialist strain in the front man’s DNA, using the word ‘they’ at the start of the quote above is ill-judged.)
Next Hetfield – by this point a skilled and dedicated hunter – gave this thoughts on conservation, albeit with a less than forensic eye for scientific detail.
‘There are too many people on the fucking planet,’ he said. ‘I love nature. I love the wilderness, and there is not much more of it left. It makes me hate people. Animals, they don’t lie to each other. There is an innocence within them. And they’re getting fucked.’
Not least by James Hetfield armed with a hunting rifle.
But as Rolling Stone readers the world over wondered quite how one animal might go about lying to another, Hetfield was gone, once more on his way on a journey ever skyward.
To argue that at this point in their career Metallica were not ‘playing the game’ is disingenuous. But while ‘Enter Sandman’ may have supplied the booster rockets that propelled ‘The Black Album’ into the midnight sky, the track itself was served most effectively not by rock radio but by television.
It seems strange to think back, but at the beginning of the Nineties Music Televison actually used to play music videos. In fact the channel did nothing but play music videos. For the most part the playlist – as it existed outside ‘specialist’ programmes such Yo! MTV Raps!, the independently minded 120 Minutes and the self-explanatory Headbangers Ball – appeared as if they were compiled to cater for people who liked their music some way off in the background, presumably with their television playing very quietly and in a different room. But while in 1991 MTV gorged itself and force-fed its viewers innumerable airings of Bryan Adams’s blockbusting and fully nauseating ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’, sometimes, if only very occasionally, the channel would throw on the air something that made rational people question their otherwise wisely held believe that MTV was a corrosive influence.
The phrase ‘necessary evil’ springs to mind. For while in 1984 Dead Kennedys front man Jello Biafra insisted that ‘MTV [should] get off the air’, by 1991 few bands could get off the ground without the channel’s assistance. Metallica, of course, were the exception. But in making their point by waiting eight years to film their first video clip (for . . . And Justice for All’s ‘One’), by the Nineties the quartet were ready to come in from the cold.
In ‘Enter Sandman’ MTV found its perfect foil. With lyrics that lent themselves to visual interpretation, the group had found the ideal vessel with which to launch themselves on the air. Hetfield’s twisted lullaby about a child who knows that Mr Sandman is coming to bring him not a dream but a nightmare is ripe with unusually precise imagery. Not all of this imagery is good (‘heavy thoughts tonight, and they aren’t of Snow White’ is certainly not one of the front man’s better couplets) but much of it is, and in a grandly cinematic sense.
Directed by Wayne Isham, the video for ‘Enter Sandman’ is a piece of likeable nonsense that allowed Metallica to look suitably ‘metal’ without appearing uncommonly stupid. Fastcut and lavishly coloured, the clip features a variety of different nightmares. Here snakes writhe around on a child’s bed, a young man is chased by a Heavy Goods Vehicle and (most terrifying of all) Lars Ulrich gurns manically every time the camera is trained on his bare-chested body. MTV loved what they saw, and aired the clip throughout the day and night for weeks on end.
‘Enter Sandman’ was the perfect recruiting sergeant for innumerable fans now flocking to the band’s flame. These newcomers, however, what not always made welcome by others that had been at the quartet’s side for years and who were beginning to bristle at just how easy it now was to discover music that previously had been hidden from the ears of the mainstream. ‘Enter Sandman’ was Exhibit A in the case for the prosecution, a song and music video that stood jarringly at odds with everything the band had been ‘about’ up until the summer of 1991.
Metallica had changed, this we know. The only question that mattered, however, was whether this change was creatively sincere. The old showbiz gag about how sincerity is the key to any performer’s success, and that once you can fake that you’ve got it made, is just that, a gag. The truth could not be more different. Insincerity – fraudulence, in other words – is always the first thing to be spotted by any member of an audience paying even half a mind to what it is they’re being sold.
The implication that, with the success of ‘Enter Sandman’, Metallica had forever turned their backs on their more creatively challenging instincts is wholly unfair. What’s more, they were about to prove it.
The second single unleashed from ‘The Black Album’ was ‘The Unforgiven’, one of the finest compositions to which the group have put their name. A tale of strangulated potential and emotional cruelty, the song tells the story of a ‘new blood [who] joins this earth’ and ‘quickly he’s subdued’ where through ‘constant pained disgrace’ the young boy ‘learns their rules’. (Note, by the way, that it is not merely the rules to which the song’s subject is forced to adhere, but their rules, those laid down by the others.) This is a nightmare that can only end, as it does, in the narrator’s death, the point at which even his tormentors recognise ‘a tired man’ who ‘no longer cares’, a tragic figure, who ‘prepares to die regretfully’.
This compellingly miserablist anti-fantasy is drawn from the same well of despair as are songs such as Morrissey’s ‘Yes, I Am Blind’ and Nirvana’s ‘Heart-shaped Box’. There is no hope here, no chance of redemption, no means of escape aside from death itself. Were ‘The Unforgiven’ merely a flight of imaginary fancy, an exercise in creating a vision of personal dystopia, then the words printed on the lyric sheet of ‘The Black Album’ would be impressive enough. But this is James Hetfield’s own personal nightmare, his own Room 101, and in committing this sparse and gruelling lyric to paper he has exposed his gravest vulnerabilities to anyone who cares to listen.
Clearly, then, a song that is less a twisted take on the Brothers Grimm and more a sleepless demon of a kind that stalked the movements of Josef K would not be at all well served by A. N. Other heavy metal video, even one as expertly realised as ‘Enter Sandman’. But the clip filmed to accompany ‘The Unforgiven’ is so far from the norm as to exist in its own world entirely.
Matt Mahurin is not an average music video director. Born in Santa Cruz, California, on January 31, 1959, Mahurin first came to prominence as both a photographer and illustrator. In the former field, his pictures have graced the cover of Time magazine on numerous occasions, including an infamous shot of O. J. Simpson in which the removal of colour saturation darkened the erstwhile American football player’s skin and led to the charge that the magazine was unnecessarily focusing on Simpson’s race. As a photographic essayist Mahurin has heard his shutter click in locations ranging from the Clemens Unit prison in Texas to abortion clinics across the US, as well as collections harvested from visits to (among other places) Haiti and Belfast. A number of Mahurin’s prints form part of the permanent collection within the beautiful confines of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. His work as a video director began towards the end of the Eighties with credits that included Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ and REM’s ‘Orange Crush’.
Metallica first approached Mahurin in 1989 with the request that he direct the video clip for ‘One’. This request was politely declined, as the band stipulated that they wanted the video to feature snippets of the film Johnny Got His Gun – on which the lyrics to the parent song are based – and Mahurin ‘didn’t like using other people’s work in [his] own work’. Three years later, though, the band was back, asking the same question but in a different context and with a different song.
‘They had a vision that stretched beyond a video in its obvious form of a three-, four- or five-minute video,’ says Mahurin today, speaking from his home in Long Island. ‘They saw this as an opportunity to do something epic. Their songs are pretty epic anyway, I think, but also lyrically a lot of them have this kind of fable that you can sort of unfold and get connected to. And what was cool about it was that they were treating the video as you would a short film. Normally videos are put out to serve the band and to show the musicians to the world, or if it’s an older artist to keep their career going and keep people connected to them. But what was great about this is that it pretty much turns those ideas on their head. Instead of having a band performing to the song with some other images crammed in, instead it’s the images themselves that take precedence. On “Unforgiven” you don’t know which came first, the song or the film. In that sense it’s more like traditional film-making, where the song becomes the soundtrack to the movie.
‘But in my work as a photographer and an illustrator,’ he continues, ‘I’ve prided myself on pushing myself and challenging conventions. I can’t see the point in doing something that’s been done before. I want to at least try and create something that people have never seen before.’
With ‘The Unforgiven’, he certainly managed that. Twenty-one years after the fact, the director is unable to recall the video’s precise budget but does remember it being ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars . . . a bloody fortune, and I work pretty simply as well.’ Pockets bulging with cash, Mahurin was able to build a set in New York’s Navy Yards and to hire extra hands to help realise in full ‘this movie, this thing about phobia, that I had in my head’. In preparation for the shoot Metallica were shown illustrative story boards, all of which they approved. According to the film-maker’s recollections, ‘The band were happy to let me do my thing . . . they seemed to trust my instincts.’
‘Metallica were a really smart band to work with,’ he says. ‘You know, I’m not going to go into the studio and tell them how to mix a song or play a guitar solo, and similarly they left me alone as a film-maker. They just showed up when they were needed.’
Metallica were on the set for ‘The Unforgiven’ for just one day, and flew in to New York by private jet. By this point the tour in support of ‘The Black Album’ was well under way and the band’s diary did not contain a great deal of latitude. But the entire shoot took four days, an amount of time virtually unheard of in the field of promotional videos.
This, though, is as it should be as ‘The Unforgiven’ is unlike any other music video, of the time or since. As was the case with ‘One’, Metallica cut more than one version of the film (in this case, two). One version features footage of the band performing live, albeit in images that appear only infrequently. This more conventional working has much to recommend it: it is poignantly shot, its narrative thread is non-linear and unusual, and the overall feel of the images on screen chimes harmoniously with the song it is there to serve.
But it is the second, less often seen, version of ‘The Unforgiven’ that is truly extraordinary. One of the oddest and most beautifully realised pieces of short-film making – here the term ‘music video’ is an ill-fitting description – the piece begins with a segment of music not from the start of the song, but rather a refrain from its middle. Clocking in at almost twice the length of the track itself, the film then opts to do something that no other piece of its kind had dared to do, or even thought to do: it makes its point without any music at all. After barely a minute of on-screen footage, Metallica’s music disappears, and does not reappear for almost five whole minutes.
With Mahurin assuming the role of cinematographer as well as director, the film is shot in flint-hard black and white. But it is more than the monochromatic tones that suggest that this is a film set in a world entirely devoid of colour. The viewer is presented with the image of a boy standing bare-chested, who, while not quite being emaciated, does not appear to be overly well fed either. Then comes a shot from the boy’s point of view, showing a frame that is crowded with the hard faces of older men. By this point the only sounds the viewer hears are, by turn, the ticking of a pocket watch and the sound of birdsong from some distant place, presumably, where things live in freedom.
The film’s geographical setting is immaterial, but more than this the exact nature of the child’s dwelling is unclear. At certain points water cascades from a hole in a stone wall, so might be this be an aqueduct? The one piece of furniture to which the child in the film appears to have access is a wooden chair, on to which he clambers in order to investigate the source of the water. Could it be that he’s trying to escape? More alarmingly, why is there a strange image of a human face hanging from an uneven rock wall, and why does the child have to pass through it as if it were a cat-flap in order to find any kind of genuine shelter? And who is feeding the boy? Who, and where, are his parents?
This final question appears to be a pressing one, as the first noises the viewer hears from the infant’s mouth are not words but rather the kind of noises that might be made by a wild animal. It is as if the child is being kept secluded in order that he might learn – what? – the language of God? But, no, that’s not it either, because seconds after this the protagonist is seen in the company of a young girl in a white dress. As the pair play – the young boy smitten in a manner that he is years away from comprehending – the viewer can discern words spoken in English. In the girl’s company, the boy seems happy. But she, and it, are not to last.
By the time Kirk Hammett’s lead guitar comes scything into range (in what is one of the great guitar solos of the twentieth century) things on-screen have taken a turn for the worse. The child is now gone, and in his place stands the sinew-ripped torso of an elderly man. As Hammett teases histrionic notes from his guitar, the old man dances in a way that suggests that he has gone mad. As the song glides to its graceful conclusion, on-screen the wizened figure rummages among the detritus of a life that was never his. In a moment of awful cruelty, the viewer is shown a keyhole; moments later the character on-screen happens upon a key. But it is much, much too late to discover what lies on the other side of the door.
As the eleven-minute, thirty-three-second clip fades to black, literal-minded viewers may have asked themselves what it all meant? But this is to miss the point. With the song’s lyric as a guide, Matt Mahurin’s masterful short film is a study not so much of loss but of things that were never uncovered – let alone loved or savoured – in the first place. Alongside this, viewers might marvel at, or be unnerved by, the length of time and the resonant clarity with which the film-maker’s images stayed with them.
‘Actually, not long after I’d made the video I was on a train from New York to Washington DC,’ remembers Mahurin. ‘In a really wild coincidence, sat on the two seats in front of where I was sitting were two college kids. I could hear them talking and much to my amazement they were talking about the ‘Unforgiven’ video. They were discussing the meaning of the old man and of the kid that was in the video. Obviously they had no idea that I’d directed the thing. Just as obviously, I couldn’t help myself so I joined in their conversation, and so the three of us discussed various aspects of the piece and what they might mean and stuff like that.’
In a just and fair world, the ‘theatrical’ version of ‘The Unforgiven’ would be at least as widely discussed (and as widely revered) as is the video for ‘One’. A key reason why it is not might be that, unlike ‘One’, the piece did not arrive out of an otherwise empty blue sky, but was instead just another component in a frenzy of activity upon which Metallica were embarked. But this union between band and director remains one of the most inspired collaborations of the group’s career. And if nothing else it contradicts the notion that with ‘The Black Album’ they had permanently steered the wheels of their juggernaut closer to the centre of the road.
Elsewhere Metallica went about their business in a much more quotidian manner. With their music now spreading like an airborne disease, and with their faces appearing on MTV as often as Madonna’s, it is feasible to argue that in 1991 this was a band that didn’t actually need to head out on tour at all. As the first metal act in history – metal, as opposed to ‘hard rock’ – to bludgeon their way on to the high table of the multi-platinum set, why now tour at all? And if you are going to tour, surely take it a little easier than in years past.
Not a bit of it. Metallica’s Wherever I May Roam tour – which in time metamorphosed into the Nowhere Else to Roam tour – endured for twenty-three months and comprised no fewer than 301 concerts, most of which lasted for more than three hours. Until their efforts were superseded twenty years later by 30 Seconds to Mars, Metallica’s excursion looked like being a globecrawl the duration of which would never be beaten. Today in Q Prime’s New York office there hangs a frame inside which are printed every single date and venue of the 301 concerts Metallica performed in the name of their unnamed fifth album. The thing looks like the Washington DC Vietnam War Memorial.
But all journeys begin with a single step, and on the Wherever I May Roam tour Metallica made theirs in the direction of the Phoenix Theater in the modest Californian ‘city’ of Petaluma, where the band undertook a two-night stand. As was the case with their startling lack of preparation for a stadium tour with Van Halen in support of . . . And Justice for All (in this case, a single performance at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles), the quartet felt that this was the only tune-up they required. After this, it was ‘All aboard!’ the private jet for a transatlantic flight over to the Old World.
With just four dates ticked off the docket, Metallica’s fifth appearance on the Wherever I May Roam tour saw the group appear onstage at Donington Park, then as now their spiritual home. Despite pulling scenery-chewing faces for the benefit of audiences that number well into the millions, Lars Ulrich confesses that this inhospitable and remote racetrack hard by the East Midlands Airport is now the only venue capable of flooding his central nervous system with pre-show nerves.
In 1991 the drummer certainly had plenty of cause for butterflies, even stage-fright. As in 1987 (the last time Metallica had appeared at Donington Park) his band’s live engine was covered in rust. Their last appearance at the racetrack had been one of the worst performances ever seen on the Monsters of Rock stage, an appearance so wretched that Iron Maiden bassist Steve Harris could be seen at the side of the stage wincing. Four years on and Metallica had once again crawled one place up the bill; this time AC/DC were the only band to appear onstage after the San Franciscans, with (in reverse order) Mötley Crüe, ambitious Seattle rockers Queensrÿche and fast-emerging Georgian retrostars the Black Crowes as the day’s first attraction. Some members of the rock fraternity felt that Metallica’s third appearance at Castle Donington should have been as headliners. But the band’s decision not to lobby for top spot was a wise one. The San Franciscans were received by the vast crowd as if they were the last act of the day, while the responsibility of closing the show went to AC/DC. For their part Metallica were left with the simple task of delivering a thirteen-song set in the ‘Special Guest’ slot that was strong enough to remind people that the band was back. This they managed to do.
By 1991 rock music in general was ‘smashing through the boundaries’ of more than just taste and trends. On September 28 the Monsters of Rock caravan – its bill strengthened by the addition of emerging Texan act Pantera – arrived in Russia for an appearance at the Tushino airfield in north-west Moscow. Previously the headquarters of the Russian air force, and the launch site for the Workers’ Day flyover above Red Square each May, on this gloomy autumn day the field was occupied by no fewer than a million people (with unofficial estimates placing this figure at a million and a half) amassed for a free concert in worship of ‘Western’ rock. As far as signs went that the socialist ideals of Lenin’s November revolution were dead, the view from Tushino airfield was hard to beat.
The presence of AC/DC atop the bill afforded the rolling sea of faces the opportunity to see a band whose status was by any measure legendary. But for an audience seeking an outlet for their anger and alienation, Metallica were the only game in town. The San Franciscans had not come all this way to disappoint. Footage from the occasion shows a band that at times appears impossibly intense. This was fitting, as the occasion was not without its own measure of turmoil; in the crowd Russian military officers proved themselves to be truncheon-happy to a degree that appalled Jason Newsted.
But at least the quartet onstage were fully equipped to provide their own lesson in violence. As its title had always suggested, closing song ‘Battery’ seemed more than sufficient both to energise a million people as well as to beat into surrender anyone who might choose to question the authority of the music being played. Moments later, backstage Lars Ulrich posed for a photograph with a snare-drum skin splattered with his own blood, with the words ‘bleeding for Moscow’ written above. And once again the notion that the ‘Old Metallica’ was now dead simply did not tally with the shock waves the group had volleyed into the turbid Moscow sky.
The quartet’s transition from arena-botherers to ball-park figures was further cemented on October 12 when the group returned to the Oakland Coliseum – at the time trading under the catchy name of the Networks Associates Coliseum – for the Day on the Green festival, this time as headliners. But if the top-of-the-bill bow in the Bay Area’s most troubled city served notice on their intentions to become ‘The Biggest Band in the World’, the quartet’s most significant hop-with-the-jet-set would wait until the following spring.
The occasion was both serious and celebratory. Staged on April 20, 1992, the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert was a diamond-studded event in honour of the Queen front man, who had died of AIDS at his London home just five months earlier. Appearing onstage before 72,000 people that night were Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Elton John, Robert Plant, George Michael, David Bowie, Annie Lennox, Lisa Stansfield, and bands such as Guns N’ Roses, Def Leppard and – seeming almost comically out of place – Metallica. This discomfiture was rather charmingly encapsulated backstage by a bewildered Lars Ulrich who had seconds earlier been glad-handed by an unnamed and insincere ‘well-wisher’. Dressed in a T-shirt of the Orange County punk rock band Social Distortion, Ulrich asked, ‘Tell me, why do people just lie to [me]?’
It seems outrageous to consider this today, but in 1992 there was no small measure of fear and suspicion regarding the nature and habits of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Just four years previously Guns N’ Roses front man W. Axl Rose had penned the lyrics for the explosively incautious ‘One in a Million’, a song that sees its narrator speak of being unable to make sense of the ‘immigrants and faggots . . .’ who came to America, apparently, ‘. . . to spread some fuckin’ disease’. (Whether or not these words represented Rose’s personal views or were rather used to describe a character – admittedly an extremely well crafted one – remains a moot point.) It was also around this time that Sebastian Bach, the lead singer with also-rans Skid Row, filed his entry for the title of World’s Stupidest Man by appearing onstage wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words AIDS KILLS FAGS DEAD.
But this gathering of some of the most famous – not to mention a number of the most sexually promiscuous – people on the planet did help cast light on a disease that in 1992 was seen by some as a plague for the twentieth century. Beneath the darkening sky of a gorgeous London spring evening, this significant achievement was made possible by the exalted levels of showbiz brilliance radiating from the stage.
‘It really was a magical event,’ is the opinion of then Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash. ‘The spirit of that show was one of the best multi-band, multi-artist productions that I’ve ever been involved with. Everybody got along, there were no egos, the whole thing was brilliant. A lot of people put together these events for great causes but this was one of those things that went the way it was supposed to go and meant what it was supposed to mean. It was wonderful, one of the high points of the Nineties for me.’
The choice of venue itself was not without emotional resonance. It was on this very stage that just seven years earlier Queen performed what has often been acclaimed as one of the greatest live performances in the history of rock. The occasion was Live Aid, a fund-raising concert organised by Bob Geldof and promoter Harvey Weinstein to raise money for the people of Ethiopia, people that were not just starving but being starved. In aid of this, at 6 p.m. sharp on the evening of Saturday July 13, 1985, Queen strode onstage at Wembley Stadium and ripped into a twenty-minute set, the command of which was not so much complete as messianic. Honed by three days’ rehearsal at London’s Shaw Theatre, the band tore and swung through segments of songs such as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Radio Ga Ga’, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, ‘Hammer to Fall’, ‘We Will Rock You’ and closing track ‘We Are the Champions’. This final song was fitting, because by twenty minutes past six no one who had seen the performance was in any doubt that this was so.
The following summer Queen would return to Wembley Stadium for a two-night stand, the second of which would be their penultimate performance on British soil.
On the evening of April 20 the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert was split into two distinct halves. The second half of the evening was given over to the members of Queen themselves who provided the music for a succession of impossibly famous people to join the band as guest vocalist for just a single number. Annie Lennox and David Bowie sang ‘Under Pressure’, with the latter proving what a terrible old ham he can be by reciting the Lord’s Prayer (this presumably being the same Lord that saw fit to bestow AIDS upon the world in the first place). Liza Minnelli sang ‘We Are the Champions’ and Lisa Stansfield – pushing a hoover – sang ‘I Want to Break Free’. For his part James Hetfield strode the stage singing ‘Stone Cold Crazy’, the Queen song Metallica had covered for the Rubãiyãt double album released two years previously in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of Elektra Records. Onstage at Wembley Hetfield fronted a Queen line-up strengthened by the addition of Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi. Out of step he may have been, but the delight on the singer’s face was radiant just the same.
But for Hetfield and Metallica it was the first half of the show that was not so much problematic as it was emblematic of their musical inflexibility. During this opening section (as with Live Aid), bands were given the chance to play for twenty minutes or so. Onstage bands such as hard rock mediocrities Extreme played a set peppered with moments from Queen’s own past, while Sheffield’s shameless Def Leppard took cues from Queen by truncating their own songs into one bumper package of megahits. That Metallica are a better band than both Extreme and Def Leppard is not a difficult case to prosecute; but that Def Leppard and Extreme were better than Metallica at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert is an easy one to defend.
During the opening proceedings at Wembley Stadium that evening, Metallica’s cause was hardly helped by an introduction from Queen bassist John Deacon in a voice that sounded hesitant and shy. And while there was nothing wrong with what Metallica did next – they performed their three-song set of ‘Enter Sandman’, ‘Sad But True’ and ‘Nothing Else Matters’ with typical emphasis – the place and occasion in which they chose to do this showed that this was a band that has difficulty cutting their cloth according to the needs of special occasions.
To play ‘Sad But True’ six minutes into a concert that is intended to celebrate the life and music of one of rock ’n’ roll’s most irrepressible talents was simply perverse. As Hetfield sang that ‘I’m your hate when you want love’ and how ‘I’m your pain when you can’t feel’, the observation once made by Time Out magazine that this was a band whose ‘songs could use a bit of jollying up’ seemed startlingly true. There must surely have been a proportion of people inside Wembley Stadium who wondered, ‘Who invited this lot to the party?’
But while on April 20 this rigidity did not serve the band well, in other ways it remains one of Metallica’s defining characteristics. That despite the success, this is a band who are in the mainstream without ever quite being of it.