As the sun signals noon on a late summer afternoon in Paris, no member of Metallica has seen the morning. For one of this book’s authors however, it had been an early start. At 6 a.m. at Waterloo Station a Eurostar train bound for the Gare du Nord in the City of Light awaited, and so too did an audience with Metallica.
The band’s hotel is in the centre of the city, and is a place of hushed magnificence. It has by now been a very long time since Metallica slummed things, although like their presence in the mainstream itself, the sight of their physical selves in five-star lodgings can sometimes appear incongruous. Despite having been a millionaire for a number of years, on the road in the US in support of ‘The Black Album’ James Hetfield could still be heard complaining about the cost of a grapefruit breakfast – $14! – in the kind of hotel where menus comprise a single sheet of paper tucked into a firm leather folder. When he swaggered down to the hotel bar on that same tour and in this very city – dressed as usual in his de rigueur uniform of black – he was told by the maître d’ that to be served an overpriced beer he would first have to put on a tie. Informed that the front man was not in possession of a tie, in an exchange of Jeeves-esque condescension beloved of maître d’s the world over, Hetfield was loaned one – a pink number. With perfect insouciance, this ‘Leader of the Free World’ put on the tie and was thus served with a drink. Moments later an American patron who did appear entirely at home in the lap of five-star luxury approached Hetfield and told him that he didn’t ‘have to go to this extreme to look ridiculous’ and that he ‘[looked] like a child’. As the stranger returned whence he had come, Hetfield muttered, ‘Wear a tie, don’t wear a tie. Fuck you. I’ll come down here naked next time.’
(A seasoned world traveller from childhood, Lars Ulrich, naturally, is the member of Metallica most comfortable amid such finery. This said, in years to come the drummer will instruct his handlers to book him into Claridge’s, London’s most exclusive hotel, with the words, ‘I want to stay at Selfridges.’)
In one of the two-Michelin-starred restaurants here, a starter of carpaccio of beef costs thirty francs, and a main course of pasta no bigger than a golf ball carries a price equivalent to that of a Fabergé egg. Fortunately such gastronomic sophistication – entirely lost on a twenty-five-year-old music journalist – is on Metallica’s tab, as it is on Metallica’s time. Because when one finds oneself in Metallica’s orbit, time belongs to them, and them only.
Hammett, Hetfield, Newsted and Ulrich convene gradually on the hard floors of the vast expanse that is their hotel lobby. The band may be currently on tour in Europe, but after each show the musicians return by private jet to this spot. It is a rather old-fashioned way of touring, and one practised by only the most exalted of groups. The practice was – inevitably – conceived by Led Zeppelin in the Seventies, who after any concert within a two-hour flight of Los Angeles would return to the Hyatt Hotel – ‘The Riot House’ – on Sunset Boulevard in order to partake in the kind of antics that are still being spoken of forty years later.
Outside Metallica’s hotel there stands a coach. Security men – bodyguards – stand discreetly on the street as their four charges ascend the steps at the vehicle’s side door. Hetfield, dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt that has a bastardised Coca-Cola logo and the word ‘Satan’ on the front, sits alone on a double seat. He is approached by Hammett. The pair swap stories about the quantity of alcohol each man had drunk the previous evening, at separate engagements. From the front of the vehicle an engine purrs into life and as the fifty-two-seat coach inches its way into the glacial crawl of Saturday traffic, Metallica’s working day has officially begun.
The sights roll by. The Eiffel Tower stands imperious in the distance. In two years’ time France is to host the football World Cup, and as the coach passes by the partially constructed shell of the Stade de France one of the band’s minders pushes his face up against a coach window and in a pronounced London accent tells all that this is the place where England are going to win the World Cup. As the throb of Paris cedes ground to the city’s outskirts, the coach picks up speed en route to its destination, a private airport at which waits Metallica’s private jet.
For the visiting journalist, the experience is at first intimidating. Travelling with a band whom one has never before met can be a disconcerting experience, especially if that band is a personal favourite. Perhaps if the group were younger, or less well known, it would be easier to impose oneself upon them in the hope of at least giving the impression that you were not just A. N. Other music journalist. But this is Metallica.
Today’s flight is bound for Belgium, where this evening the quartet will appear at the Flanders Expo arena in the city of Ghent. As French immigration officials board the aircraft in order to inspect each passenger’s passport, hundreds of miles away a crew of a hundred people are occupied with the ten-hour task of assembling an ‘in-the-round’ stage the size of an ice hockey rink and a lighting rig that weighs twenty-seven tons. This caravan is transported from city to city in nineteen trucks and carries with it its own generators, as the venues lack the kind of juice required to energise such a spectacle. Speaking of which, each night the show concludes with what appears to be a technical calamity, where lighting trusses collapse to the ground and a technician hurtles across the stage consumed by flames. In the pre-Internet age this frankly stunning sight excites and astonishes up to 15,000 people every time the band performs.
In Paris the plane prepares for take-off. But really this is a plane in the sense that the TARDIS is a police phone box. Inside, the aircraft is partitioned into two living rooms; a communal area towards the front – in which James Hetfield sits in a spacious armchair – and a more private dwelling towards the rear. Fridges appear to have been stocked by the patron saint of alcoholism. As the aeroplane taxis onto the runway, Metallica dare their English guest to stand up during take-off, knowing full well that the laws of physics will compel him to hurtle backwards towards the rear of the vehicle. This invitation is politely declined. Uninterested either way, Hetfield leafs through a music magazine. He happens upon a piece about Soundgarden front man Chris Cornell that features a quote about how on the band’s recent Lollapalooza tour Metallica opted to play ‘secondary’ cities in order that they could play larger metropolises on their own arena tour. Reading this, Hetfield mutters the words ‘dumb ass’.
With the plane now airborne and level, the Metallica front man retreats to the plane’s second room to answer questions posed by a journalist who, at this point, is consumed by nerves. Despite a strong opening, the general consensus regarding the recently released Load album is no longer emphatically positive. Photographs of Kirk Hammett wearing eye-liner and of the lead guitarist French-kissing Lars Ulrich have not been well received. Whispers float through the air that potential second night ‘holds’ in venues across Europe have not been booked. Regardless of the overall creative success of Metallica’s sixth studio album – the results of which are varied – there can be little doubt that its propulsion away from the sound of ‘The Black Album’ is evidence of a band that still possesses a restless and beating artistic heart. But it is also undeniable that for the first time, at least publicly, dissension has begun to smear the greasepaint of Metallica’s public face. There is no surer sign of this than Ulrich’s claim that his band was a metal act ‘eight or nine years ago’ – surely the clue was in the name – while Hetfield himself says ‘absolutely’ the opposite.
Asked if this represented a genuine difference of opinion, the front man answers, ‘Yup.’ He adds, ‘It’s okay to disagree in the press. I think one thing and [Ulrich and Kirk Hammett] think another. I think they’re afraid to be called heavy metal and I’m really not afraid of that. People call you what they will anyway. On [Master of] Puppets it was “Are you a thrash metal band?” So I think the reason they’re afraid of it is that it puts you in a hole. I say we’re a heavy metal band, but we’re also a rock band, we’re a ballad band, a crushin’ fuckin’ slow Sabbath [type] band. We’ve got so many parts to Metallica and I’m not afraid to be called any of the fuckin’ things.’
In print, James Hetfield sounds irritable here, perhaps even angry. But he isn’t. Eating a bowl of breakfast cereal served to him by the aircraft’s one stewardess, he is laconic and even droll. On the subject of Kirk Hammett’s current ‘Cuban pimp’ look, the front man says he thinks maybe Kirk has lived in San Francisco a little too long. On the charge made by Pantera front man Phil Anselmo – whose own band’s Far Beyond Driven (1994) set stole the crown from ‘The Black Album’ as being the heaviest record ever to attain the no. 1 spot on the US Billboard Hot 200 – that Metallica had lost both their teeth and their way, the response is ‘I guess he’s run out of fucking comedy material’ and that anyway ‘coming from a man who just fuckin’ OD’d [Anselmo had recently had a substantial mishap with a vial full of heroin] it doesn’t sound like he’s got his shit together too well’, an observation that caused its author to laugh, and to laugh hard.
‘I can understand that [Anselmo] maybe doesn’t like the record,’ comes the more considered opinion. ‘But what I can’t understand is why he wants to talk about us at a Pantera show.’
But if Hetfield was able to dismiss Phil Anselmo with a forearm smash and the words ‘[what he has to say] doesn’t really bother me too much’, on the wider subject of an uncommonly lukewarm reaction to Load on the part of Metallica’s larger constituency, the front man suddenly found that he had more meat, and more gristle, upon which he is forced to chew.
At first the topic is met with a resonant chuckle and the observation that ‘in our business – as with any business to do with entertainment – there are going to be people who slag you and who don’t like everything you do.’ But this rather boilerplate response is quickly embellished by the admission that ‘yeah, when someone starts slagging you off when they don’t really know what the fuck they’re talking about, we can’t really write a letter back to every fuckin’ guy explaining and justifying what you’re doing in your fuckin’ life, you know? If they’ve taken the time to sit and slag you, then I guess they must be pretty fuckin’ bored in their [own] life. So we’re getting slagged for some of the things we’re doing. But we’ve been slagged before; this isn’t a new thing. When “Fade to Black” came out on Ride the Lightning, it was like “Oh, you’ve sold out!” How many times can you sell out? I think some of these people think we’ve sold out on every record we’ve done.’
A generation on from the afternoon when Hetfield spoke these words above the Franco-Belgian border, they still carry the authority of a man who is convinced to the point of defiance regarding the course on which Metallica was set. In this he was largely, if not entirely, justified. And for all the talk about a disappointed and at times dismayed fan base, during its initial residency on the Billboard Hot 200 Load still sold in excess of four million copies, seven million worldwide. In fact Hetfield might well have answered every charge put to him aboard a private jet he personally co-owned with a simple, three-word response: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’
In the intervening years, however, and benefiting from the blessing of hindsight, Hetfield’s opinion on Load had not so much hardened as calcified. A band ‘absolutely has to evolve, but let’s have it naturally,’ he says, adding that for him this period in Metallica’s history ‘didn’t seem natural’.
‘Why did we need to reinvent ourselves?’ comes the question. ‘What’s wrong with what’s going on here? [We were] trying to be something we weren’t, I would say [and this stylistic change of gear] confused us even more musically . . . On Load, we tried to mix a bit of this and a bit of that and it just didn’t seem to work. It had long songs that were just ploddy and went nowhere. There’s quite a few great songs [on Load]’ but they could have been greater.
‘Lars and Kirk drove on those records. The whole “we need to reinvent ourselves” topic was up [for discussion]. I’m a team player most of the time and I know Jason and I did not agree [with] what was going on. But if we’re going to make this work, let’s [all] get into it and try and make this work. But it was very image-based. Image is not an evil thing for me, but if the image is not you then it doesn’t make much sense to me. I’m okay playing a role where I’m acting, and doing something “cool” in a video, but not on the record itself. I think they were after a U2 kind of vibe, the reinvention of Bono, him doing his alter-ego thing. But I couldn’t get into that. The whole “now in this photo shoot we’re going to [look like] seventies glam rockers”. Like what? I would say half – at least half – the pictures that were to be in the [CD] booklet, I yanked out. The whole cover thing, the whole image, it went against what I was feeling.’
For Metallica the first seeds of disunity had now been sown.
Two months to the day after Metallica flew from Paris to Ghent, the band was in London. The quartet had flown in from Utrecht in Holland to play a part in the inaugural MTV Europe Awards, a live transcontinental event presented by ex-Take That singer Robbie Williams – at the time an artist similarly occupied with what for him was the ultimately overwhelmingly successful matter of reinventing himself – and staged at Alexandra Palace.
Despite having twice been gutted by fire since its construction in 1873, ‘Ally Pally’ remains an architectural wonder positioned majestically on top of a hill that affords magnificent views of London’s eastern corridor. In 1936 the building, erected to rival south London’s Crystal Palace, became the site of the first live BBC television broadcast, the transmitter of which still points skyward to this day. Sixty years on and the ‘People’s Palace’ was once more the site of a ‘Televisual Event’ – albeit one of a more specialist kind. For Metallica, as for every artist present that evening, the brief was simple: turn up, nibble canapés in the same room as Simply Red, The Fugees, Smashing Pumpkins and Oasis, play their single – in this case ‘King Nothing’ – and have your music broadcast live to an entire continent of viewers. What could possibly go wrong?
Plenty, as it happens. Metallica’s sound man, ‘Big’ Mick Hughes, first learned of his employers’ change of plan when he was summoned to the group’s dressing room and asked the times not of ‘King Nothing’ but of two other, distinctly off-piste compositions. Come the evening itself, Hughes was the only person who had any idea of just what was about to be unleashed. Moments before the San Franciscans take to the stage the audience is ‘treated’ to a backstage link from English comedian Julian Clary. An otherwise talented performer, at the MTV Europe Music Awards Clary carries himself with the air of a man who believes himself to be above it all. As his in-ear monitor informs him that Metallica’s short set is about to begin, he offers the viewing public a dismissive flap of the back of his hand and the words, ‘Get on with it now, it won’t be long and we can go home.’
Metallica are now onstage in a live broadcast. The camera glides over the heads of the people in the main hall and settles on James Hetfield. As it does, the front man leads the band not into ‘King Nothing’ but instead into four minutes’ worth of music with lyrics that cover infanticide, bestiality, hebephilia, rape, drug use, one use of the word ‘cunt’ and several variations of ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’.
‘I’ve got something to say,’ he sings as the band smash into their cover of the Misfits’ gloriously tasteless ‘Last Caress’, ‘I killed your baby today [and] it doesn’t matter much to me as long it’s dead.’ This established, Hetfield then goes on to reveal ‘I raped your mother today.’ In little more than ninety seconds ‘Last Caress’ is done, but Metallica are not. Leaning into the microphone, Hetfield serves up a rhetorical question for the millions of by now open-mouthed viewers from Stockholm to Sicily. ‘So fuckin’ what?’ he snaps, before turning his head in order to deposit a mouthful of phlegm on the Alexandra Palace stage. Faster, clearly, than the technicians in the MTV VT truck outside can cut to an unscheduled commercial break, Metallica are now headlong into their cover of the Anti-Nowhere League’s impossibly offensive ‘So What’. As if spitting loose a mouthful of broken teeth, Hetfield informs everyone that ‘I’ve fucked a sheep, I’ve fucked a goat, I rammed my cock right down its throat’ before asking, ‘So what? So what? So what, so what, you boring little cunt.’ As the song smashes to its conclusion – in front of an audience in which a number of people are holding sunflowers – Hetfield throws his microphone to the ground and without a by-your-leave Metallica have gone. As everyone watching asks themselves, ‘Did that really happen?’ MTV finally cuts to the commercial break its controllers wished had begun five minutes earlier.
At least in principle Metallica’s exhilarating outburst on a television broadcast that was no more likely to permit foul language than was Songs of Praise would be a moment for which they are still celebrated, if only because rebellion for its own sake is still worth the candle. But after being caught flat-footed, MTV quickly regained control of the situation; the innumerable repeats of the 1996 MTV Europe Music Awards were excised of Metallica’s contribution. On the whole the channel had fortune on its side. The band themselves made nothing whatsoever of the incident and did not speak of it (or were not asked about it) in the press. To go with this, at the time MTV was at best a fringe channel in the UK. And with the Internet not yet a widely used tool of instant communication, those in mainland Europe that did see the original broadcast didn’t think anything of keeping their thoughts to themselves. Tallied up, these factors mean that one of the most explosive moments of the group’s career went unnoticed by even their most hardcore devotees.
But while at Alexandra Palace Metallica proved that, as with artists from Pete Townshend to John Lydon, it was unwise to believe that they were as yet fully house-trained, elsewhere the group continued on a march that to many spoke of premature middle age. In the summer of 1997 Metallica returned to The Plant studios in Sausalito, California, to finish recording the songs that had not featured on Load the previous year. With producer Bob Rock once more attempting to inspire his charges, Metallica secreted themselves in this wood-panelled studio emerging exactly three months later with thirteen completed songs. This collection, fittingly, would be called Reload.
Preceded by the single ‘The Memory Remains’, Reload was introduced to its waiting public on November 17, 1997, and one day later in the US (where albums are released on a Tuesday). Fans of the band may well have been thinking, ‘We wait five years for a new Metallica studio album and two come along more or less at once,’ but at the same time the volcanic expectations that preceded the release of Load were not repeated here. Metallica’s constituents were not jaded, but as a whole neither were they quite the swivel-eyed fanatics that had galloped to record shops in 1993 to drop £75 on the Live Shit: Binge & Purge box set.
This, though, seemed to Lars Ulrich just fine.
‘I’ve stopped trying to calculate anything,’ he said on the subject of how he expected Reload to be received by listeners who at this point were still a number of weeks away from hearing it. ‘I can’t predict or hope or wish any more for anything. I don’t know what anybody else is thinking about anything. I think the only difference between me now and a few years ago is that I’m a lot less concerned with what people think and I’m also a lot less interested in defending Metallica, or trying to get people to understand my way of looking at [the subject]. As you probably know, I used to spend a great deal of time explaining the way we looked at certain things and all this stuff. I’m not so bothered about doing that any more.’
Coming from the mouth of the normally irrepressible Ulrich, such apparently phlegmatic sentiments sound forlorn and even despondent. That a man who just years earlier was happy – determined, even – to conduct no fewer than six interviews a day before hopping onstage in order to tub-thump his way through a three-hour set of fiendishly complicated music should be reduced to such apparent apathy is striking. It might be that the drummer was simply having a bad press day, but if so this was the first one on record. It could be that the Dane was simply fatigued by the endless questions about Metallica’s changing nature. But then such questions had been chasing him for years, and when they were not he would happily chase them. Could it be, then, that Ulrich’s despondency is informed by a lack of confidence in his band’s new material?
The real problem faced by Metallica during the period of Load and Reload was not that the band misplaced their mojo for writing songs, but rather that the sheer volume of material recorded for both albums meant that the wood was lost to the trees. The band’s Achilles heel wasn’t so much the writing, but rather the total absence of editing. The logic was this: that Metallica had written and recorded twenty-seven songs for two studio albums – they even allowed Jason Newsted to feature as co-writer on one song – and so they were going to release twenty-seven songs over two albums even if the weaker material sapped the strength of the listener’s capacity to appreciate the stronger tracks. Had the best songs from both albums been compiled into one release – although the sounds of both albums are quite different from each other, a point never made – then the resulting CD would surely have been a collection about which people still enthuse today. But of course, this was never considered.
‘I’m an artist and I don’t write shitty songs,’ was Ulrich’s chuckled response to the notion that a spot of judicious editing might have been in order. On the specific point that Load and Reload would have be better served in unity as one shorter album Ulrich conceded that that was ‘an interesting idea’, before admitting, ‘It wasn’t one we ever considered.’ At this point in the conversation Metallica’s English PR appears on the line to tell the journalist that Lars might have to leave the line soon as he is in fact in make-up at the video shoot for ‘The Memory Remains’. His response is quick.
‘I’m not in make-up! Real men don’t wear make-up!’
Reload features no songs that are as awful or as acutely misjudged as ‘2 x 4’ or ‘Ronnie’, but it does feature moments so stodgy that one wonders whether it is intended to be listened to or used to grout the bathroom. That its overall feel is more unified than its predecessor means it doesn’t shift moods like a day-release patient who has forgotten to bring his medication to the family picnic: this is compromised, however, by the fact that at an over-long seventy-eight minutes the collective whole is boring.
This, though, is the bad news first. In places Reload carries much that is good and some that is great. Opening track ‘Fuel’ kicks out the jams in a manner that suggests this might be the start of something rather special indeed. And for Metallica, most unusual. Instead of first wading through forty-eight bars of riffs and drum fills, the song begins with James Hetfield’s voice urging, ‘Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire.’ Ostensibly a song about one man’s appetite for petrol fumes and speed, this is not a subject matter that augurs well for those who viewed Metallica as being the one metal band who could be relied upon not always to be thick. But Hetfield knows better than many that it is not a song’s subject that counts so much as the manner in which the subject is conveyed. And as the front man seems to literally spit out the words ‘turn on beyond the bone, swallow future, spit out home, burn your face upon the chrome’, the listener is reassured by the finesse with which he transcends so many obvious pitfalls.
The peaks of ‘Fuel’ are matched by ‘The Memory Remains’ (which features a guest vocal contribution from an alarmingly broken-voiced Marianne Faithfull) carried aloft by an intangibly precise sense of finality and foreboding. Two songs later Metallica revisit their past in the form of the not encouragingly titled ‘Unforgiven II’. While not repeating its predecessor’s glory, it nonetheless showcases how in the years since the release of ‘The Black Album’ its creators had learned to arrange their music with subtlety and depth when circumstances required this. Elsewhere, despite presumably attempting to coin the worst song title in the history of recorded music, ‘Carpe Diem Baby’ proves just how effective Metallica could be at merging verses and choruses into one rather minimalist whole, not least when attempting to stretch their own ideas beyond their natural limits.
Most impressive, and most unusual, of all is ‘Low Man’s Lyric’, a song which begins in a restrained manner and stays that way for the seven minutes and thirty-seven seconds it takes to make its point. To a melody that is more folk music than heavy metal, and to instrumentation that includes the sound of a hurdy gurdy, Hetfield tells a never quite in-focus tale of acute loss and inevitable and continued personal failure. ‘The trash fire is warm,’ he reveals, adding, ‘but nowhere [is] safe from the storm.’ As the song progresses it seems as if this pitiful and forlorn figure might have found a chance of redemption. But, no, this isn’t to be, with the fault lying with the narrator and him alone. ‘So you bring this poor dog in from the rain,’ he says of whoever it may be that has attempted to lessen his burden, ‘though he just wants right back out again.’
With the release of Reload the debate continued as to whether Metallica were still equipped to deliver music of the quality to which they had put their name in the past. But while the voices in this debate rose to a clamour louder than anything on Kill ’Em All, few seemed interested in the state of the band’s lyrics. Those who did care to consider this would see that on Reload Hetfield’s ability with a pen was soaring. On ‘Prince Charming’ (which, with a chorus cribbed almost wholesale from ‘The Four Horseman’, is far from a musical classic), he takes the unspecified and threatening other witnessed in songs such as ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ and ‘Sad But True’ and bestows upon it more identifiable characteristics. ‘The marks inside your arms spell me, spell only me’ he reveals, continuing, ‘I’m the nothing face that plants a bomb and strolls away.’ On ‘The Memory Remains’ Hetfield is once again concerned with death and madness, but this time in the form of the declining fortunes of one once famous. As a ‘nowhere crowd [cries] the nowhere tears of honour’, a fading starlet raises a cigarette ‘up to lips that time forgets while the Hollywood sun sets behind [her] back’. As all this unfolds, the lyric describes a band playing somewhere in the distance as a life recedes ‘ash to ash, dust to dust, fade to black’. That Hetfield could manipulate words into arresting couplets had been evident since ‘Battery’ in 1986. But on Reload his capacity for conjuring up specific and often deeply moving images is often exquisite.
When Reload was released just weeks before Christmas in 1997, however, the talk was all about stagnation. Even Kerrang!, normally the band’s most reliable of tub-thumping supporters, saw fit only to afford the album a tepid three-K (out of five) review.
‘I don’t read the Kerrang!s of the world every week,’ Lars responded, unconvincingly. But on the subject of his group’s changing sound he remained typically resolute, saying, ‘I think that, if anything, hopefully Metallica will be looked upon and remembered as [a group] that didn’t have their guard up in the way that other hard rock bands [did], and that as we went through all these different metamorphoses – whether people liked them or not – they were pure and natural and were the honest thing to do . . . [but] I am surprised at people’s surprise over some of the things that have happened to us over the last couple of years, because I thought we always wore all those potential changes and all that stuff on our sleeves. Us going away for five years [from the recording studio following the making of ‘The Black Album’] what the fuck did they expect?
‘But I have to tell you,’ he continues, ‘that I do like the fact that people have a problem with what we’re doing, because that causes debate and when debate starts then people sit and talk about all different types of things and then hopefully something good will come out of that debate. I kind of welcome that and I think it’s healthy in an incredibly stagnant hard rock scene of 1997. And if we’re the ones that end up pushing those envelopes and getting people to look at some of these things – not necessarily to agree with all of the points [Metallica are making] but at least respecting or acknowledging different points of view – then I think that’s really healthy.’
Despite its tepid critical reaction, Reload still found millions of friends. It was the third Metallica album in succession to debut at no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 200 and, as with its predecessor, sold a not insubstantial four million copies to American listeners during its initial run (and, again, seven million copies throughout the world). Of course, compared to the band’s monolithic fifth studio album, this was relatively small beer. But ‘relatively’ is the operative term. With the exception of Def Leppard’s blockbusting Hysteria – an album which in North America actually exceeded the sales of its similarly ubiquitous predecessor, Pyromania – virtually all bands who spent time in the stratosphere on one album inevitably saw their circumstances reduced on subsequent releases.
And anyway, as the drummer-as-spin-doctor was on hand to explain: he thought that ‘if “The Black Album” came out today I don’t think it would do as much as Load [or Reload] did. I don’t think there’s as many people that listen to rock music as in 1991, 1992 and 1993. That’s definitely a fact. Rock music is a dying breed. It’s that simple.’
Of course, reports of rock’s demise have over the years been innumerable and, at least at this time, invariably premature, something which Lars Ulrich – ever the keenest student in the class – should have understood. That said, a glance about the guitar-strewn mainstream of North American and European rock music at this time does suggest a strong case for despondency. In platinum terms the pop-punk movement that had been elected by the youth of America to replace the darker hues of the alternative nation – time on which had been called by Kurt Cobain firing the finishing gun in 1994 – had failed to extend beyond the charms of Orange County’s The Offspring and the Bay Area’s own Green Day. The world’s most popular guitar band of this time was arguably west London’s Bush, a group comprised of nice men who made music that today is remembered by no one. In terms of metal, the pickings were even slimmer, with thrash metal now discoloured by the sepia-toned tinge of yesteryear and the movement’s heirs apparent (notably Pantera and Sepultura) busy stretching the creative value of their sound while at the same time cutting its commercial cloth. A new kind of sound was beginning to emerge with groups such as Korn and Deftones, but such stirrings had yet to coalesce into a recognisable movement, let alone one that could be given a name.
Not for the last time, in this sense Metallica could count themselves fortunate. Despite this being a time when many other artists questioned the group’s authority, none of them had the capacity to steal their crown. This was also the period during which Metallica’s personnel found itself occupied by matters other than the band to which they had dedicated their adult lives. In 1997 both James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich became fathers for the first time – the front man to daughter Call Tee and the drummer to son Myles – developments which forced the band to pare back its annual live commitments to a relatively sparse ninety shifts. But despite a smaller invoice for jet fuel, a number of these were of totemic significance, such as a debut appearance at Madison Square Garden and a first outing at the Reading Festival, the original spiritual home of British heavy metal. To complete this set, Metallica were finally able to honour a commitment to appear on NBC’s ground-breaking and prestigious Saturday Night Live that had been on hold since Hetfield broke his arm in a skateboarding mishap more than a decade earlier.
But if the San Franciscans themselves weren’t convening in as many enormodomes as was the norm, at least the band’s music was still being performed live. The Nineties were a period that saw the emergence of a curious phenomenon, that of the tribute act, without which no group can be said to be truly legendary. And Metallica were among the first bands to attract this most sincere form of flattery.
Laurence Langley’s Battery may not have flown by private jet or headlined Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, but the little group named after the first song on Master of Puppets were capable surrogates. Such was the positive word emanating from clubs across the US and Canada that it reached Metallica themselves. Langley was told on more than one occasion that whenever Ulrich happened upon one of the group’s flyers at a club visited after one of his band’s shows, he would without fail carefully fold it and place it carefully into his jacket pocket. The two parties finally found themselves in the same room in 1994, the day before Metallica’s superbly named Shit Hits the Sheds tour began its summer crawl south and west across the US. The San Franciscans and Canadians broke bread by drinking cognac in a club in Buffalo, New York.
Four years later Battery’s course would collide with the band from whom they earned their living in a more sensational manner.
‘I remember it was a Thursday night,’ recalls Langley today. ‘We got a call from our agent at the bar we were playing that night – because we didn’t have cell phones back then – that our road manager took. After he’d finished speaking to whoever was on the other end of the line he waved us all over. He said, “You’re not going to believe this [but] Metallica want you to open for them.” And, of course, we were, like, “What? Why? What do you mean?” And he just said, “All I know is that Metallica is doing a series of shows and they want you to open up for them. I’m getting a call back on Monday with all the details.”’
Langley and Battery spent the weekend longing for this news to hatch, hoping that it was true but fearing ‘that it was a joke’, to such a degree that they breathed not a word of the development to anyone, including their significant others. But by the flipside of that weekend the band would learn that they were to play a fundamental part in one of the most fabulous ideas to which Metallica have ever put their name.
Over the course of just seventeen days, in September 1998 the San Franciscans convened once more at The Plant and, with Bob Rock again cracking the whip, recorded eleven cover versions by artists ranging from English gristle punks Discharge to Middle-American roots rocker Bob Seger, taking in perennial favourite the Misfits and Diamond Head, legendary turns Black Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, Lynyrd Skynyrd, obscurities from Mercyful Fate and curiosities from the hands of Blue Öyster Cult and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Armed with a collection of songs that covered many different styles and techniques, the one overriding quality coursing through the sixty-five minutes’ worth of covered material was a playfulness reminiscent of 1987’s Garage Days Re-Revisited.
On the campaign trail for Reload, Ulrich had let it be known that it was his band’s intention to release ‘four albums in four years’, despite the fact that not a single journalist believed him (‘Lars, it took you months to finish Reload, and half of those [songs] were written two years ago,’ was one writer’s justified response). Just seven weeks after its recording, Metallica unveiled their third album in as many years. Released on November 2, 1998, Garage Inc. included not just its creators’ most recent studio recordings, but also a second CD on which was imprinted every cover version the group had previously committed to tape, from their 1984 version of Diamond Head’s ‘Am I Evil?’ up to and including the four songs recorded for the occasion of Lemmy’s fiftieth birthday in 1995.
As a concept Garage Inc. is both cute and effervescent, a perfectly judged vessel in which to frame a band’s own musical identity. People who work out of corner offices at major record labels would describe the collection as a ‘stop-gap release’. But the loving flourishes with which Metallica stain the canvas of what is in effect a studio album in its own right elevate their creation above such dismissive phraseology.
Even so, with the album finished and soon to be on the shelves, its authors were not beholden to undertake anything more strenuous than a round of interviews and perhaps one or two music videos with which to promote it. But this being Metallica, such minimalism was unlikely to wash.
Instead, when it was suggested by Q Prime employee Marc Reiter (perhaps half in jest) that the band should help push their curious new collection towards the light by performing a short series of club concerts, an idea was suddenly on the wing. It was proposed that in order to promote Garage Inc. Metallica should undertake a tour of the kind of clubs in which they had not appeared for almost fifteen years.
‘Any other band would say, “You’re crazy!”’ recalls Reiter. ‘“I’m going back to that shit hole?” [Instead] They say, “We’re in!” Not only that, but [Ulrich insisted] that it’s the club [at which the group used to play]. I’m surprised he didn’t ask us to track down the bouncers and bartenders that were there then too.’
But there was a problem. In returning to ‘the clubs’ Metallica desired only to perform a selection of the songs from each of Garage Inc.’s two CDs. Those lucky enough to have secured a Wonka-Factory-rare ticket for an audience with the genre’s biggest band in the most reduced of surroundings would justifiably wish to hear songs other than those originally recorded by Budgie and Discharge. Duly, Metallica and Q Prime considered the best way of appeasing the nightly clamour for songs such as ‘Creeping Death’ and ‘Nothing Else Matters’. It was Cliff Burnstein who proposed a most delicious solution: to have a Metallica tribute band as the tour’s support act.
And so it was that on November 17, 1998, Battery crossed Province lines from Quebec to Ontario in order to embark on five-date hop from Toronto to New York City by way of Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia. The venues in which the Canadian and American bands appeared may not have been each city’s most intimate – the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago posted a not exactly bijou capacity of 4,500, for one – but suffice to say that had the excursion taken place in the Internet age resale prices for each ticket would in dollar terms have exceeded the number of people gathered in each venue.
As recalled by Langley, the all-too-short tour sounds like the very best of times. Upon meeting James Hetfield in Toronto – ‘Hey Battery guys! What’s up?’ came the greeting – Langley asked what songs his band was permitted to perform, to which the answer came, ‘anything that’s a Metallica original’. So for five nights Battery would open their set with ‘Creeping Death’ and find themselves received by Metallica’s audience as if they were Metallica themselves.
‘There was an unbelievable feeling of acceptance right away,’ recalls Langley.
On the afternoon of the show at the State Theater in Detroit, the opening act was approached by the ever likeable ‘Big’ Mick Hughes who told them that as he wasn’t ‘getting his fix of old-school Metallica’ for the rest of tour he would personally oversee their sound. Three nights later in Philadelphia Lars Ulrich told a local rock radio station that following that night’s appearance at the Electric Factory they were ‘going to have a little party with Battery’, and that listeners should tune in to the station later that night to learn the location of this happening. As it turned out, the event took place at a two-pump petrol station at which Metallica sat at trestle tables and signed autographs for literally thousands of fans. For their part, the members of Battery were also interviewed for the radio station that broke the news of this most unusual of post-concert activity.
For the final night of the tour, on November 24, Battery found themselves at 209 West 52nd Street amid the chaos of Midtown Manhattan. Better known as the Roseland Ballroom, this was the site where fourteen years earlier Metallica had made their first appearance in the borough of Mahattan and had unleashed upon a capacity crowd of 3,200 people a set of such power and precision that the next day they were offered a record deal by Elektra Records. In the intervening years it is bizarre to think that the band played Manhattan on only two further occasions, once at the Felt Forum in 1986 and then eleven years later at this facility’s larger room, Madison Square Garden. Back at the Ballroom, Metallica made their way to the stage before their allotted hour, in order to interrupt Battery’s set with threats to cut off the tribute act’s long ‘hippie hair’ with garden shears.
Just one week after it had begun, the Garage Inc. Tour (such as it was) was over. With the venue now empty, Battery were invited into Metallica’s dressing room for photographs that each member still cherishes to this day. Ulrich was dressed in the robe he wears after his post-performance shower; Hammett’s torso was naked save for the bandages that he still wore following an operation to remove his appendix shortly before the tour began. As the Canadians were about to leave, Hetfield told his visitors to wait just a moment. He told the group’s front man, Harvey Lewis, that he had something for him, and slid across the floor a hard-bodied guitar case. Unclasping the latches, the singer opened the case and saw inside a James Hetfield signature ESP guitar replete with an autographed certificate of authenticity.
‘That’s for you,’ said Hetfield. ‘I’ve been using that one each night on the tour. Take it and kick ass.’
While the popular narrative of Metallica in their thirties is of a band that could find nothing worthy of their union’s second act, a review of this, the most creatively hectic yet subsequently overlooked period of the quartet’s existence, is essential. With an abundance of creativity, a willingness to explore fresh ideas, a desire to traverse new musical terrain and a devil-may-care attitude o the clamour of voices rising in protest, the San Franciscans shed themselves of old, dead skin. A number of the band’s songs and calculations from this time might be below spec, but their refusal to be pinned beneath glass or preserved in aspic remains remarkable. Many among the band’s audience would have loved Metallica to have conformed to type and ‘gone back’ – ‘Why is it that people always want to “go back”?’ wondered James Hetfield – to refashion ‘The Black Album’ or re-imagine Master of Puppets, but they would not have loved these efforts in the same way, or with the same incandescence as before. And while there were those who hated what Metallica became in the Nineties, this too is no bad thing: because the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.
‘I think the thing about Metallica during this time was that for the first time in their careers they no longer had anything to oppose,’ says Brian Slagel, the LA-based owner of Metal Blade Records and the man whose 1982 compilation album Metal Massacre first brought the name Metallica (or Mettallica as it was misprinted on the sleeve) to the world’s attention. ‘Up until “The Black Album” they always had something that they could stand against and gun for. They were the outsiders, you know. But then they won the war and suddenly there was nothing else in their firing line. In a way I think the music they made in the Nineties is a reaction to this new reality.’
Of course, it wasn’t always fun and games, and it wasn’t often well received. On February 1, 1999, the band released their version of Thin Lizzy’s take on Irish folk standard ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ and for the first time in their career garnered reviews that were not tepid but universally hostile. Faced with such a level of opprobrium, the band simply selected a number of the most vituperative reviews and published extracts from them on the single’s front sleeve. Later that year, the quartet looked out from the stage at Woodstock 1999 in Rome in Upstate New York and saw a sight that looked like the Somme. Headlining the four-day event’s third night, they opened their set with ‘So What’. The chaos inherent in the song’s lyric had already been realised in physical form. Earlier in the day Limp Bizkit had disgraced the stage, with their front man Fred Durst helping raise the temper of a crowd already agitated by poor conditions and extortionate prices for concessions (including a reported $9 for a bottle of water). As the group played songs that were soon to be described by Moby as being ‘rape rock’, even Durst could see that things were getting out of hand. But when he addressed the crowd with the words, ‘Don’t let anybody get hurt,’ it was as if he was unable to stop himself: ‘I don’t think you should mellow out [though],’ he quickly added. ‘That’s what Alanis Morissette had you motherfuckers do.’ (Immediately after his band’s set Durst was arrested but not charged.) Compared to this, Metallica’s rather quotidian headline set could only really register as an afterthought, albeit one for which the group were handsomely remunerated before being spirited away from the festival site minutes after bidding those less fortunate a good evening. Twenty-fours later Woodstock 1999 concluded in a crashingly predictable fashion, with a riot that saw part of the stage set on fire and a number of sexual assaults on female audience members, including rape.
‘I think [Woodstock 1999] was probably the worst gig we played all summer,’ Hetfield would confess at the end of that year. ‘The tempos were all fucked up, vocally there were fuck-ups [and] the stage was a piece of crap.’
But in the year that saw people obsess over a Millennium bug, the computer glitch that might cause aeroplanes to fall out of the sky and cruise missiles to take their place, Metallica once again found new ways of expressing themselves. In this case, they threw a party as though it was 1899.
Despite the assertion of Cliff Burton that ‘[Johann Sebastian] Bach is God’, classical music was one musical genre about which Metallica had otherwise remained silent. This, though, was set to change with the seed of an idea that had been planted nine years previously by a man with whom the San Franciscans had only the slightest acquaintance.
Michael Kamen was a composer born in 1948 in New York City whose music provided the scores for films such as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone and Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd The Wall. Kamen also worked with Pink Floyd on The Wall album in 1979, as well as collaborating with artists such as Kate Bush, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and Herbie Hancock. In 1991 Kamen was invited to oversee the addition of a string section to ‘Nothing Else Matters’, a version of which came to be known as ‘The Elevator Mix’. Assuming that was the end of that, the composer was surprised to discover on meeting the band at a subsequent awards ceremony just how enthused Metallica were about his work on what was already their most gentle song. ‘You know,’ he told them, ‘you guys should really work with an orchestra, your music is really suited to that.’ And then he bid the band farewell. Five years later, in 1997, Michael Kamen heard from Q Prime that Metallica was ready to go to work on his idea. The composer had just one question: what idea?
But Metallica, as Metallica always do, made things happen. Kamen not only scored the orchestral parts that would meld, harmonise and sometimes scrap with Metallica’s own music, but he also assumed the role of conductor of the orchestra with which the three-man string and one-man percussion section would play. The orchestra of choice was the San Francisco Symphony (‘SFS’), a collective that Lars Ulrich was not slow to describe as being ‘one of the most respected symphony orchestras in the world’. These component parts in place, this marriage would come together with a speed and effectiveness that seems extraordinary.
It took just three days to twist the band and orchestra into one cohesive unit. In fact the first day’s preparation took place without the 104 musicians that comprise the SFS, and instead centred around Metallica, Michael Kamen and producer Bob Rock, who by now must have been contemplating just what the band was going to throw at him next. The conductor wondered aloud if ‘So What’ would feature as part of the set list, before improvising his own lyrics for the song. To hear a man with an ear attuned to such a degree that he is able to identify that one musician in an entire orchestra is playing ‘Call of Ktulu’ one half note lower than the others sing ‘so fucking what . . . take your grandmother and fuck her . . .’ is to get a sense of just how far removed from his natural habitat he really was. With a sense of comic timing that suggests he might have made it as a Marx Brother, Ulrich asked ‘Whose fucking idea was this?’
The next day the band transferred their operation to the lovely Berkeley Community Theatre for two days of rehearsals with the orchestra. At first the two parties sound a world apart, but soon enough common ground is found, until, that is, the musicians whose names to date do not appear on the sleeves of a Metallica album are off for a legislated break. ‘I’m joining their union,’ says Andy Battye, James Hetfield’s Rotherham-born guitar technician.
The pressure is enormous. Not only must the band and the symphony learn to play with each other through twenty-one songs – two of which, ‘No Leaf Clover’ and ‘Minus Human’, are brand new – but Metallica must also learn to conform to the timekeeping disciplines required for Michael Kamen to keep the two camps in the same musical bars, a proposition Hetfield admits is ‘difficult’. But despite a ticking clock that must seem as if it has a bomb attached to it, spirits are high. Hetfield, for one, revels in his role as laconic raconteur. He’ll admit that classical music didn’t interest him at all and note that when Michael Kamen ‘makes the sign of a pentagram [with his conductor’s baton] that’s when I come in’.
The next evening 3,491 people (a number of whom had attended specifically to hear the orchestra rather than the band) roar into life as 104 musicians and one conductor walk on to the stage. Thirty-four seconds later and Michael Kamen leads the musicians into a live orchestral rendition of ‘The Ecstasy of Gold’. As the sound from a lone French horn hovers and hangs gallantly in the air, beneath it the other musicians begin the swell of noise that will be joined by those who have paid to be here tonight at the first sight of the four members of Metallica walking onto the Community Theatre’s elegantly dressed stage.
‘With the orchestra you’ve got so many colours with all these cool instruments going on,’ says Hetfield of this four-times-in-a-lifetime experience (the group would repeat their two-night Berkeley performance with different orchestras at Madison Square Garden and Berlin’s Velodrome), ‘You’re creating those crescendos, and the building and breaking of them in there, because live Michael Kamen was doing it. He’s the guy whose [conducting] mixes live, that’s his gig.’ As Hetfield stepped on to the stage in Berkeley, it was to a platform busy with working musicians, a scene unlike anything with which he had previously been engaged.
‘Sonically, I shut [the orchestra] out,’ he says, while adding that ‘visually . . . you had to be a part of that.’
‘We were very adamant on that point,’ he says. ‘Because we didn’t want the orchestra to be some backdrop behind us making noise. We wanted [them] to be part of it. So in certain songs I was sitting in [among the members of the SFS]. Jason was running by knocking music stands over, sheets [of music] flying. You could go into [one of the] sections and rock out with them a little bit.’ But with all this going on, ‘if I’d have [their music] in my ears too, it would have been complete sensory overload. So I didn’t get to enjoy the Full Monty that night. I kind of just had to see afterward how the pieces of the puzzle came together. And it was a puzzle.’
Released just thirty-eight days before the end of the century as both a double live CD and concert DVD, S&M – San Francisco Symphony & Metallica – is a collection that on paper did not threaten much but in reality delivered more than the most optimistic listener might expect. No little credit for this should go to Kamen, a man whom Kirk Hammett described as being ‘for all intents and purposes a member of Metallica’ for the duration of the project. Were his score heard without the accompaniment of four heavy metal musicians it would impress as a creative piece in its own right. Melded to Metallica, the music brings flavour from the band and vice versa.
It isn’t all entirely convincing. The main body of ‘Master of Puppets’ is simply too frenetic and busy to afford the kind of space in which so many musicians might operate with any freedom. ‘Enter Sandman’, ‘Sad But True’ and (surprisingly) ‘Wherever I May Roam’ are little more than the sound of towering hit singles that have been flooded with strings for no real creative advantage. And while these selections are enjoyable enough, there is nothing radical, let alone definitive, on offer during these moments.
The same, though, should not be said of S&M’s highest peaks, the majority of which tend to come during renditions of Metallica’s newer songs. ‘No Leaf Clover’ is a short-form masterpiece, one of the band’s finest songs secreted away on an album that fans have come to think of as existing in a realm separate from other releases. Anchored by a lyric concerning misplaced optimism in the face of inevitable calamity, in sparse verse Hetfield tells of one sufficiently ebullient to ‘pay no mind to the distant thunder’, someone that wiser heads recognise as being a ‘sucker for that quick reward’, who fails to recognise that ‘the soothing light at the end of [the] tunnel’ is in fact ‘a freight train coming your way’. The lyrics offer yet more proof that as the Nineties drew to a close Hetfield seemed some way from running dry of finding good ways to deliver bad news.
Best of all, though, comes midway through S&M’s second half. As heard on Load ‘The Outlaw Torn’ is a song of a determinedly hulking menace that utilises space in a manner new to its authors. Married to Michael’s Kamen’s score, however, the composition assumes a whole new power. Nine years earlier, in Vancouver, Bob Rock had listened to James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich’s early-day demo of ‘Sad But True’, and hearing in it elements of the monolithic power of latter-day Led Zeppelin, declared it ‘Kashmir for the Nineties.’ Here, though, the producer was almost a decade premature. For it is at this point, with the assistance of the San Francisco Symphony, that Metallica finally ascend to such a level, in a song that nudges its way to just seconds shy of ten minutes. The track seems to saunter into focus, later receding into a valley between the first of just two choruses and Kirk Hammett’s squalling guitar solo. At this point, remarkably little is going on as the orchestral score prepares to slowly cause a tranquil sea to bubble and froth. And as ‘The Outlaw Torn’ does bump its way into troubled waters, the violence this heralds is allowed to shoot out in all directions. ‘You make me smash the clock and feel, I’d rather die behind the wheel,’ sings Hetfield, dragging his voice across that ‘die’. As the musicians go smashing into the chorus, the lyric takes the form of a warning: and a plea. ‘If my face becomes sincere, beware’ and ‘when I start to come undone, stitch me together.’
Metallica have never sounded more powerful than this. As S&M closes out with a version of ‘Battery’, the ferocity of which sees orchestra and band duke it out like cobra and mongoose, and with backing vocals from Jason Newsted that suggest he’s caught his hand in a threshing machine, the band triumphantly call time on a most imperious album, and this most unusual decade.