Metallica: Enter Night (40 page)

As Mensch later put it, Metallica were ‘like the Grateful Dead of heavy metal. They can sell so much on their own, as they are. To take it further, it means edit a song for a single, do a video – all the usual stuff. And they realise that’s the only way to expand the audience. It’s not like the Sixties, when something really outside could make a mainstream impact.’ Or as Lars commented: ‘My whole view is that if taking the last guitar solo out could get the song out to more people who would hear, then buy the album, hear a fuller version and get turned on to Metallica music, then fine. “One” is nearly eight minutes long and has twenty-three guitar solos, so we could trim it a bit.’

Released in February 1989, in the middle of their first arena headline tour of America, what would really turn ‘One’ into Metallica’s first really significant singles success, however, was not the radio-edit, although that played an important part; it was their agreeing finally to make a video to go with it. Another former hard-and-fast rule broken, it came with another plausible bit of Lars philosophy to explain it. ‘If it had been crap, we wouldn’t have put it out,’ he said simply. ‘That was the deal. But it worked so well, we thought, sure, why not?’ Filmed in what looks like an underground bomb shelter – actually a disused warehouse in Long Beach – in December 1988, for a first video ‘One’ was a stunningly accomplished piece of work. Built around actual footage from the movie version of
Johnny Got His Gun
, starring Jason Robards, intercut with stark, strobe-lit shots of the band performing the song, the ‘One’ video would do for Metallica what none of their records or live performances, with or without Cliff, had yet been able to: both enhance their reputation as musical innovators and reposition the band centrally as mainstream rock stars.

It almost didn’t happen, though, after the band was turned down by a succession of top-drawer video directors, before coming to an arrangement with Michael Salomon, best known previously for his work with Dolly Parton and Glen Campbell. The major issue for Salomon was finding the right balance between band performance and film footage. ‘It’s a complicated story and to do it with just one or two sound-bites here and there really wouldn’t have made it,’ he later reflected. In the end, Salomon decided to go with his gut instincts and simply make the best video he could, putting the band’s vanity second, covering almost every solo with film footage, including snatches of dialogue occasionally obscuring the music. ‘The musician side of them said, “That’s not cool, we don’t get to hear the music.” I think they realised, though, that the story element was more important.’ This was an important lesson they would learn well. All their best future videos would relate back to the risks they took with ‘One’, all becoming mini-features in their own right, intercut with all sorts of images, of war, of prisoners, of nightmares, road trips, dreamscapes, white horses…eventually even girls.

Bill Pope shot the black-and-white performance footage at the same Long Beach warehouse where he had previously shot videos for Peter Gabriel and U2. Here, the band did put its foot down, insisting that the video showed them playing exactly the right notes, singing the right words, everything synched as though they were really playing, not just miming. ‘We decided if it was not what we wanted we’d throw it in the garbage can,’ said Lars. However, ‘Pretty early on we felt we had something special in our hands. Whether it was great or shit, it meant something.’

The full, unedited video was nearly eight minutes long. Like the single, however, it was also made available to TV in edited form, minus the film footage, with a fade on the final couple of minutes of music. ‘They never really objected,’ said Salomon. ‘They held off their judgement until they saw the final piece. By that point, three or four weeks later, they had gotten used to the idea.’ Even then it was so at odds with prevailing trends in Eighties rock video, one MTV executive told Cliff Burnstein the only place ‘One’ would be seen was on the news. Undeterred, Q Prime applied its customary behind-the-scenes muscle and the full ‘One’ video was premiered on MTV on the night of 22 January 1989, on that week’s edition of
Headbanger’s Ball
. It instantly became the most requested video on MTV.

Smelling a hit, both Elektra and Phonogram prepared to issue the single in multiple formats, along with the specially edited versions for radio. By February, ‘One’ had become the first Metallica single to reach the US Top Forty, peaking at Number Thirty-Five; while in the UK it reached Number Thirteen. Dave Thorne, who became ‘very involved’ in the UK and European campaign for both the
Justice
album and, specifically, ‘One’, immediately grasped its potential for changing the whole perception of Metallica: ‘I did some research and discovered that the book had been banned under the McCarthy era and was still unavailable in the UK or Europe. So I went to the publisher in America and we bought like five hundred copies then distributed them to the media so they could read the story and understand what the song or the video was all about. That had an enormous latent impact in getting people to realise that this was a band that wasn’t just about noise and speed and headbanging. There was a deep, meaningful side to it.’

Under Thorne’s aegis, Phonogram sent out the ‘One’ single with the book and a VHS cassette of the video as a press pack to shrewdly targeted music press people on
Sounds
,
NME
,
Melody Maker
,
Q
and numerous broadsheet newspaper critics, plus key figures at Radio 1, and all the commercial networks that aired weekly rock shows on their stations. ‘It was a watershed moment. We definitely felt that.’ ‘One’ single-handedly moved Metallica out of the same bracket in people’s perceptions as Iron Maiden or Black Sabbath, and closer to that elevated realm of mainstream rock stars who actually had something to say: ‘Metallica became the band that everybody revered because they just seemed to be able to take things to a level that the other [thrash] bands couldn’t, and also do it in a way that was just so cool and understated really.’

‘One’ also achieved another landmark for Metallica when it attracted the attention of that year’s Grammy academicians, the band becoming shortlisted for the newly created award: ‘Best Hard Rock / Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental’. ‘“One” proved to us that things we thought of as evil aren’t as evil as we thought,’ said Lars, accommodatingly, ‘as long as we do it our way.’ The Grammys show took place at the Shrine Auditorium in LA on 22 February, where the band was invited to perform their much-discussed new song. It was a momentous occasion, the first time an unashamedly ‘heavy metal’ band had actually played live at the Grammys – even though it was the truncated, five-minute version of the song. Shrouded in shadows, colours muted so that they looked almost black and white, it was a stupendous performance from a band that Kirk later admitted was ‘very nervous’ playing for all the suits and ties. ‘We were like diplomats or representatives for this genre of music.’ There was a sense of outrage, however, when the band missed out on the award itself, that honour inexplicably going to Jethro Tull for their
Crest of a Knav
e album – a decision so unexpected that none of Jethro Tull was there to accept it. Metallica put a brave face on it, like the whole thing was beneath them – they even suggested adding a sticker to the
Justice
album with the words: ‘Grammy Award Losers’. But privately Lars was seething. ‘Let’s face it, they really fucked up,’ he told me. ‘Jethro Tull best heavy metal band? I mean, fucking come on!’

They didn’t have time to stew on it, the US tour resuming just three days later. Along for the ride as support act was another up-and-coming Q Prime act, Queensrÿche, who had just released their own break-out album,
Operation: Mindcrime
. Although the two bands got on well as people – ‘We drank a lot,’ laughs singer Geoff Tate – musically, Queensrÿche saw themselves as occupying higher intellectual ground than the likes of Metallica, and while they were appreciative of the boost being offered such a high-profile tour would give them, having to win over Metallica’s hardcore crowd each night was an exceptionally difficult proving ground. ‘We were playing to a predominantly male audience,’ says Tate, ‘usually people of lower income, not a lot of education, heavy drinking, you know, heavy drug use…go to the show and get violent and rage against society, kind of thing, you know? My world is not good and so I’m gonna take it out on the guy standing next to me, kind of person…we met with a very violent resistance at first…every night it was like going out to battle. There were bottles flying and projectiles. I still have many scars from that tour. I think everybody in the band does, yeah.’ He laughs again. ‘You’re talking about a bunch of idiots as an audience. I mean, really people that are uneducated. The way they react to anything new, of course, is with fear. That’s a very typical human reaction but again as our forty-five-minute show progressed I think we won over a lot of people.’

There were other concerns, too; two occasions where young Metallica fans had committed suicide; in one instance, leaving a note requesting ‘Fade to Black’ be played at their funeral; in another, leaving a suicide note in which the lyrics to the same song were quoted. ‘It’s not something that brightens your day, but what can you do?’ said Lars, pointing out that they had also received ‘thousands of letters from kids telling us how that song gave them the will to live’. Then, on arriving for a show at the Memorial Coliseum in Corpus Christi, Texas, they awoke to a call from Mensch ‘who said there’s some shit going on – the local TV station is making a big deal because this kid apparently took some acid or other fucked-up drugs and went on a killing rampage, and the one thing that stuck in this witness’s mind when he shot someone at point-blank range was that he was quoting one of our lyrics – “No Remorse”.’ Lars shook his head, disbelievingly. ‘He got sentenced to death and there was this big yahoo when he stood up in the courtroom and quoted the lyrics again. But believe me,’ he added nonchalantly, ‘it’s not something I have a day-to-day interest in.’

Having a ‘day-to-day interest’ in anything outside of the tour’s own dizzying momentum was becoming impossible. After this leg of the US tour ended in April, it was off to New Zealand and Australia for the first time: the start of the biggest and most exhausting leg of the entire Damaged Justice tour, six months that would take them to Japan, then on to Hawaii, Brazil, Argentina, and back for another swing through North America. Support on most of these shows came from The Cult, another band with a substantial back catalogue now on the cusp of multi-platinum success, thanks to the elevated production work on their latest album,
Sonic Temple
, by producer of the moment, Bob Rock – a fact not lost on Lars Ulrich, in his never-ending quest to keep up with the rock Joneses.

I caught up with the band again during their May 1989 five-date tour of Japan, where I saw them play two shows at the Yoyogi Olympic Pool arena in Tokyo. They had been on the road for the best part of a year by that point but apart from James’ stomach problems, which he appeared to be trying to alleviate by downing as much Sapporo beer and hot flasks of sake as he could, they seemed to be holding up well and in generally good humour. Money had come in and they no longer lived together as one, but they still went out together as a gang – when they were on the road, at least. All except for Jason, whose time in the shadows seemed not quite to be over yet, although the hazing had spread out more, aimed as often now at Lars or Kirk, but never at James – or not to his face, anyway.

Late at night they went to the Lexington Queen, a well-known hang-out for rock bands since the days of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, where it was said you could get a free drink just by mentioning guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s name. Strangely, the place seemed to be home also to several dozen beautiful young American models, dancing around in negligees, flown in apparently for regular work in Japanese TV ads and glossy magazines. There were also hundreds of young female Japanese fans who followed the band wherever it went, screaming out their names and begging for a chance to present them with the numerous gifts it is the Japanese custom to give. ‘Kitten toothbrushes, Snoopy towels [and] pictures of yourself stumbling drunk into the hotel from the night before,’ as James ungallantly put it. As Lars and I walked back to the Roppongi Hotel late one night, a gaggle of young female fans suddenly sprang out at us from where they’d been hidden in the bushes, crying and screaming, ‘Rars! Rars!’ One lucky girl got her wish and would not be returning to the bushes – not that night, at least.

At another, more private moment, I sat with the band having a meal, and listened as they talked about the new houses they had all recently purchased, or were in the process of procuring, on the solid advice of their accountants, ready for their return home as millionaires for the first time later that year. They were still new enough to wealth, though, to feign indifference, Lars protesting that he drove around in ‘a piece-of-shit Honda’; James in a truck. Yet all I saw them in were limos and the private jet they travelled in while on tour in America – the same one previously used by Bon Jovi and before that Def Leppard. ‘We put some money back into how we travel while we’re on the road,’ said Lars, ‘because we’re out there a long time and it just makes the whole thing easier.’

The more he went on, however, the more the others sniggered and made faces. ‘How about that house you just bought?’ teased Kirk. ‘Where is it, like on a mountain?’

Lars looked at him, like shut the fuck up. It turned out the house he’d bought was situated so high on a hill that he was considering having an elevator built just so people could get to his front door.

‘Do it,’ I said. ‘If you can afford it, why the hell not?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you’re right. I will…’

And he did.

One on One studios, North Hollywood; late afternoon sliding slowly into evening; everybody’s thoughts now turning to dinner.

Bob Rock and I sat together in a side leisure room chatting idly about a new vegetarian restaurant I’d discovered on Sunset called The Source. The sort of place where dudes wearing hemp shirts and knee-length shorts showed up with chicks in no shoes. Way too cool for school but the food made it all worth the while.

I was telling Bob about the grilled tofu, to die for, I said. He smacked his lips. Then James walked in and the atmosphere instantly changed, like the bad guy entering the saloon via the swinging doors, the piano player stopping mid-song, the guys at the poker table staring but pretending not to.

He didn’t acknowledge us, just grabbed a seat and sat looking at the TV, the volume turned low.

‘Red meat,’ he said suddenly, in that deep slaughterhouse voice so familiar now from the records. ‘White bread…’

We got the message. Bob, already more used to this than me after months holed up in the studio with him, switched gear immediately.

‘Nothing beats a good burger, though,’ he said. ‘You know, you can give the kids all the vegetables and good stuff in the world but if you really love ’em you just gotta take ’em out for a good burger once in a while.’

‘Golden fuckin’ arches,’ growled James, still not looking at us but apparently tuned in.

‘Yeah!’ said Bob enthusiastically. ‘They do a great deal at weekends now, too. Like a kids’ burger and fries meal, with a Coke for like a buck and a half.’

‘Fuckin’ A,’ said James, reaching for the remote. He began zapping through channels till he came to the news. Bush was on talking up his victory in the Gulf.

‘I don’t get it why he didn’t just keep going till he reached Baghdad,’ I said, just throwing it out, like one of the regular guys.

‘Yeah,’ said Bob. ‘Like finish the job…’

‘Nuke ’em till they glow,’ said James.

Oh god, I thought. I can’t keep up with this. I can’t tell any more who’s joking and who’s not. Red meat, I thought. White bread…Jesus, where am I?

The summer of 1990 found Metallica at another crossroads. On paper, they were now one of the biggest, most fêted heavy metal bands in the world. Earlier that year they had won the Grammy they should have picked up a year before, this time for ‘One’. They would also win a second Grammy in 1991 for their cover of Queen’s ‘Stone Cold Crazy’, bashed-out as-live,
Garage Days
-style, for the double
Rubáiyát
album, a compilation of cover tracks to mark the fortieth anniversary of Elektra Records. ‘Let’s put it this way,’ Lars told me at the time, ‘if we release anything for the rest of the Nineties, every year we’ll get a Grammy for it just because they fucked up that first year.’ It was a prediction that turned out to be remarkably prescient. In terms of where Metallica went next, however, in reality their options had narrowed so dramatically in the wake of the one-dimensional
…And Justice for All
album that their choices were suddenly few. They could carry on the way they were going, make ‘another Metallica album’, sell another couple of million worldwide, and settle for being their generation’s Iron Maiden, who had settled for being Judas Priest, who had settled for being Black Sabbath, who had settled for never being quite as important as Led Zeppelin, who were still not, in the Nineties, regarded as being remotely as interesting as Cream or even Jeff Beck, who, let’s face it, were never going to be as highly regarded by history as Jimi Hendrix or The Who, both of whom lagged behind the Stones, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and so on back into rock antiquity. Or Metallica could do what they had always insisted they would when the time came and do something utterly unexpected and fabulous. Rewrite the rulebook.

Easier said than done, of course, in an era when it was already felt that it had all been seen and heard before. There was, however, one area left that a band as defiantly uncommercial – on the surface, at least – as Metallica might aim for, which could not have been foreseen. To make the one record – the one outrageous move – they had sworn as kids they would fight to the death not to make. Yet the one, as men, they were now swiftly coming to realise their musical lives might depend on. That is, something so blatantly, unprepossessingly commercial no one – not even Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield – could have seen it coming.

First, though, like reluctant virgins on their wedding nights, the boys in the band would have to be wooed. Whatever else it was,
Justice
was a hit. Yet they would not be able to get away with making another album as ponderous and unfriendly to newcomers as that. Not if they wanted their career to continue on its upward trajectory. The question was: did they have the courage to try and take Metallica to the next level? Or had they, perhaps, already reached their highest plateau? How, in fact, did Lars and James see the story of Metallica panning out now that they had reached this point? The person who would put these questions to them was Cliff Burnstein.

Lars later recalled what he characterised as ‘a very famous meeting in Toronto’ in July 1990, at a festival where Metallica was appearing second on the bill to Aerosmith: ‘Me, James and Cliff Burnstein sat down and Cliff said, “If we want to really go for it, we can take this to a lot more people. But that will mean we have to do certain things that on the surface seem like the same games other people play.” But we were the ones playing that game, which makes it us, Metallica, just doing something else. And it was nothing to do with the music, it was the way we handled everything outside the music. The idea was to cram Metallica down everybody’s fucking throat all over the fucking world.’ Or as Kirk Hammett put it to me in 2005: ‘We said, okay, we’re gonna make an album, we’re gonna put a lot of shorter songs on it, we’re gonna get these fucking songs on the radio and we’re just gonna indoctrinate the entire universe with Metallica. That was our goal and that’s what we did! And it took everyone as a big surprise…’

It certainly did. What were these ‘certain things’ Burnstein spoke of, though; what ‘games’ would they need to play? Top of the list was finding a producer who could drag Metallica out of the heavy metal ghetto
Justice
had left them to rot in. Someone who understood the rock genre intimately enough to deliver an album that would retain the credibility the band had painstakingly built up over the years, but for whom the words ‘hit single’ were not some form of blasphemy. Someone, above all, with a proven record of mainstream success but who also had a detailed enough knowledge of what Metallica’s music was at least supposed to be about. In the summer of 1990, there were very few names that sprang easily to mind able to fulfil such a remit. The biggest, most fashionable rock band in the world was then Guns N’ Roses, whose
Appetite
album had now sold nearly ten million copies worldwide, and Metallica had already tried – and failed – working with their producer Mike Clink. The only other rock album in recent times that had emulated those numbers and made any sort of statement musically had been Def Leppard’s
Hysteria
. But the producer of that album, Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, was a genius-perfectionist who used the studio like a blank canvas upon which he ‘painted’ his own highly evolved spectrum of sounds. A brilliant multi-instrumentalist in his own right, ‘Mutt’ was the kind of producer who insisted guitarists strike one string at a time, over and over again in order for him to build up the sound of the chords himself on computer; whose intricately layered vocals – lead and backing – comprised dozens of voices in harmony and counterpoint, interwoven and spun like silk; the sort of visionary technician who had long since abandoned the idea of using a ‘live’ drummer in the studio – years before it became the norm – so he could create more persuasive percussion sounds himself; a maverick conductor directing queer lightning. The idea of putting ‘Mutt’ together with Metallica was like asking a Formula One racing champion to pilot a chariot of horses, albeit highly trained thoroughbreds whose odds on winning were now seductively short, but animals nonetheless. Lange had also recently made it clear to Q Prime that he felt he had taken Def Leppard – until then, their best-selling, starriest clients – as far as he could and that he was now looking for something new, something more demanding from whatever project he next took on. Not remodelling Frankenstein’s monster to look like Marilyn Monroe.

Q Prime did have one suggestion, though: a Canadian producer named Bob Rock, whose stock was riding high for the incredible jobs he had done on two of the biggest-selling rock albums in America of the past year: The Cult’s
Sonic Temple
and Mötley Crüe’s
Dr Feelgood
. James, true to his nature, was sceptical: ‘No one fucks with our shit.’ And months later, when I paid a visit to One on One studios to interview Lars about how the new album was coming along, he would tell me they had ended up working with Rock almost by accident. But the truth was Lars had needed little persuading, having become enthralled by the volcanic drum sounds on both Cult and Crüe albums.

‘We’d never really liked the mixing on
Justice
,
Master
or
Lightning
,’ he told me earnestly. ‘So we were thinking, who can we get in to do the mixing? We felt it was time to make a record with a huge, big, fat, low end and the best-sounding record like that in the last couple of years – not songs, but sound – was the last Mötley Crüe album. So we told [Peter Mensch], “Call this guy and see if he wants to mix the record.” He came back and said not only did Bob want to mix the record, but he saw us live when we played Vancouver, and really liked us and would like to produce the album. Of course, we said, “We’re Metallica, no one tells us what to do!” But slowly, over the next few days, we thought maybe we should let our guard down and at least talk to the guy. Like, if the guy’s name really is Rock, how bad can he be?’

This was disingenuous, to say the least. Lars had been as intrigued by the prospect of possibly bringing in Bob Rock as he had been previously with Mike Clink. Hanging out with The Cult on tour the previous summer, the
Sonic Temple
album had been a favourite on his Walkman, as had
Dr Feelgood
. He was also big rock star buddies now with both Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and The Cult’s Matt Sorum. He had been awestruck by what Rock had done for them in the studio. Plus, and most importantly, if Metallica was to go ‘next-level’, as Lars put it, with their next album it was clear they could no longer go it alone in the studio with Flemming Rasmussen. They just needed coaxing in the right direction. Shrewdly, Q Prime agreed to put Rasmussen on retainer for a month, in case things with Rock didn’t work out, à la Clink, but from the moment Lars and James – alone – agreed to fly up to Vancouver and meet with Rock at his home, in the wake of their ‘very famous meeting’ with Burnstein just weeks before, the scene was set for Metallica to make what would be the most radical move of their career: go for broke with a big hit-making record. ‘We told [Bob] that live we have this great vibe and that’s what we wanted to do in the studio,’ Lars said, ‘It’s really funny ’cos he turned around and said, “When I saw you guys live and then heard your record I thought that you hadn’t come close to capturing what you do in a live situation.” He basically said the same thing as we had and from then on we thought that maybe we shouldn’t be so stubborn and maybe see where the fuck this would bring us.’

Where it brought them to was a place where James, who had once written ‘Kill Bon Jovi’ on his guitar, was now ready to spend months in the studio with one of the chief architects behind Bon Jovi’s biggest hits; the place where Mötley Crüe, leaders of the selfsame scene Metallica had originally fled LA to escape, had made their biggest-selling album. What they hadn’t bargained for was how hard Rock would make them work for their money.

Like all the best producers, Bob Rock was himself a more than able musician, adept on guitar, bass and keyboards. He had started out in his own band, The Payola$, who had a hit in Canada with the single, ‘Eye of a Stranger’. The band later metamorphosed into Prism but it was his work as engineer with Prism producer Bruce Fairbairn at Little Mountain Sound studios in Vancouver that really made his name in the music business. Fairbairn’s big break came through his work in the early 1980s on behalf of another, more successful Canadian band, Loverboy, who enjoyed a number of hits there and in North America with Bruce as producer and Bob as his engineer and point man. Working together and separately out of Little Mountain, they had created platinum-selling albums for second-division leaders such as Survivor, Loverboy and Black ’N Blue, before really hitting the big time in 1986 with Bon Jovi, whose
Slippery When Wet
album – and attendant hit singles ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ and ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ – had single-handedly saved the band’s till-then faltering career. (They had been on the verge of being dropped by their label – Phonogram, the same label Metallica was now signed to – when Fairbairn worked his magic, turning it into the biggest rock album of the year.)

Since then, Fairbairn had also helped rescue Aerosmith’s career with the hit-laden albums
Permanent Vacation
(1987) and
Pump
(1989). By the summer of 1990,
Pump
had been on the charts for almost a year, had housed four chart singles, and was on its way to selling four million copies in the USA – exactly the kind of album, in short, that Metallica now set their sights on having. These achievements came at a price, though. As Aerosmith bassist Tom Hamilton later recalled, the positives of working with Fairbairn were that he was ‘a very big, no-bullshit, in-focus, demanding producer who made sure the conditions were right to let the creativity happen. I mean, this guy had the ability to make us play better than even we thought we could play.’ The price: ‘A lot of it was painful because we gave up some control, big-time.’