Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  With … And Justice for All’s place as the most gruelling and unlikely platinum rock album of the Eighties secure, its creators found that their uncooperative approach was fast approaching its logical conclusion. The group now faced a choice. They could continue upon the path they had trod since the release of Master of Puppets, a proposition which promised a significant level of success but not of a kind that could be described as being ‘mainstream’. Were the group to choose such a course, Metallica could lay claim to being the ideological heir-apparent to another of the Bay Area’s most significant and outstanding acts, the Grateful Dead. The second option, however, required that the quartet permit themselves to be presented in a manner that had to date been viewed as being anathema to their spirit. In order for the commercial momentum of … And Justice for All to continue to prosper, they would be required to make a promotional music video.

  Given that in the Eighties virtually all hard rock and metal videos aired on MTV were facile and interchangeable, Metallica’s decision to eschew the form was entirely sensible. Furthermore, the group consisted of a union of musicians, not film-makers; in order to make a promotional clip the band would be forced to collaborate with directors and editors, a process which by definition amounted to a surrender of control. Yet, despite this resistance, the fact that it took the band until their fourth album – three of which had emerged in the United States on a major label – to even consider the notion that the qualities inherent in their music might be translated to film is something of a curiosity. If Metallica were so fearful of the kind of cliché and stupidity associated with a certain kind of music, the group’s members would surely never have united to form a heavy metal band in the first place.

  ‘We never said that we wouldn’t do [a music video],’ recalls Hammett. ‘That’s often misperceived. Our attitude was that videos sucked and we weren’t going to make some fuckin’ thing with a bunch of chicks dancing around and us driving Ferraris down Sunset Strip. There was a lot of [those kind of clips] at that time. But it came to the point where we could either make a video that wasn’t that, or we could not make one at all. So we ended up making a video that was just so much not that.’

  The song Metallica chose to accompany their first music video was ‘One’. Despite being some distance from the prototypical hit single, the track at least began in a manner sufficiently tranquil as to suggest the possibility of it remaining in the VHS recorders of TV executives long enough for James Hetfield to sing the song’s opening line. This too seemed innocuous enough, with the narrator revealing ‘I can’t remember anything, can’t tell if this is true or dream.’ From here, though, the horror of the subject’s surroundings begins to unfold in the story of a man whose experiences at the front line of human conflict have rendered him a ‘war-time novelty’ condemned to spend the rest of his life wishing for death.

  Within weeks of the news that this was to be the song to which Metallica would marry their first music video, ‘One’ became the most widely discussed of all of the authors’ creations. Tellingly, the topic of discussion concerned an aspect of the song most commonly overlooked by fans of modern metal: the lyrics. By the winter of 1989 no Metallica fan worthy of the name was ignorant of the fact that the composition took as its inspiration the 1939 Dalton Trumbo book and 1971 film Johnny Got His Gun, the centrepiece of which featured a soldier who had returned from the First World War a hospital-bed-ridden quadruple amputee with no sense of sight, taste, hearing or smell. Along with this, the band’s audience were also informed that Trumbo had himself been a victim of the kind of blacklisting profiled in ‘The Shortest Straw’, a fact that was giddily repeated by English teenagers who days before had never heard of people hunting communists as if they were witches.

  It may have taken Metallica more than five years to consent to making a music video, but once the group had decided upon this course of action they were quick to marshal their forces. Keen to the point of obsession to avoid the kind of clichés common at the time, Q Prime were instructed by their charges to buy the rights to the film version of Johnny Got His Gun, a brilliant and unconventional idea. Licence secured, the group turned their attentions towards finding a film-maker capable of marrying the images from the motion picture with yet-to-be-shot footage of Metallica performing as live musicians.

  The group opted to hire the services of directors Michael Salomon and Bill Pope, the latter of whom would go on to work as the cinematographer on pictures by Evil Dead director Sam Raimi as well as The Matrix film trilogy. This choice of collaborators, though, was informed not so much by the lofty ideals of a unified creative ‘vision’ but rather by the need to secure someone, anyone, willing to accept a commission from the band.

  ‘At the time there wasn’t much interest among big directors to get involved with Metallica,’ recalls Michael Salomon. ‘They were thought of as a fringe group. They brought me in to give the whole thing shape. They realised the project was an editorial job because they wanted to use so much of the movie. They probably saw it as a logistical nightmare that they could just dump in my lap.’

  A clip was needed that would be as much a trailer for a film as a promotional tool in the conventional sense of the term. Metallica therefore consented to the idea that part of the video for ‘One’ would show the group performing the track live, playing their instruments together as for a live performance. With MTV at the time lousy with long-haired Americans playing loud guitars and beating drums in a manner befitting Captain Caveman, it would be this aspect of the video’s production which would require the most careful navigation in order that its subjects avoid comparison with the kind of groups they otherwise wished to destroy. In order that this aim might be realised, Metallica chose to be filmed performing not on a sound stage dolled up to resemble the stage of an American ‘enormodome’ but rather on the concrete floor of a disused warehouse in the Long Beach area of Greater Los Angeles. As the group convened at this location, the men responsible for operating the cameras were told that their subjects would be playing ‘One’ live rather than simply miming to an audio track, a trick that was to prove harder than it looked.

  One of the remarkable aspects of the video that accompanies ‘One’ is just how well the footage of Metallica themselves has aged. Captured in a gentle monochromatic wash rather than the soda-pop Technicolor preferred at the time, the band perform their composition dressed in street clothes that whether by luck or design have stood the test of time. Yet despite their ‘everyman’ appearance, the quartet perform with an aplomb that belies the fact that this was the first time any of the musicians had been asked to play for the attentions of a film crew rather than a live audience. Aside from being occasionally met by Hetfield’s baleful gaze, the camera is at best tolerated and often ignored by the musicians upon whom its lens is trained. Instead Metallica set about their business with a grim determination. The players’ eyes decline to make contact with other figures in the frame, choosing instead to fixate on some point in the middle distance. With seemingly little in the form of human emotion to command its attention, the camera shifts its focus from the musicians to the instruments the men are playing. Such is the combined unity of purpose on display that when a member of the group does deviate from the norm of collective determination – as when Hetfield angrily twitches his head in order to shift errant hairs from his face – the effect is like lightning fracturing the calm of a midnight sky.

  The clip, though, is set apart not by Metallica but by the carefully appointed segments seconded from Johnny Got His Gun, moments which are deposited so as to slowly heighten the sense of horror regarding the plight of the song’s subject. Attended to in his hospital bed by representatives of the armed forces and the medical profession, the torso of soldier Joe Bonham is seen on film with his disfigured face obscured by a crude mask, his head moving only to tap out on the pillow on which it rests a request in Morse code that his life be ended. The video’s final scene sees the forcible removal from the hospital room of a nurse
who had attempted but failed to comply with this request. As if this were not all quite grim enough, the short film also features fragments of an ‘inner monologue’ from the stricken patient, his voice pitched to a level of pathetic hopelessness that is as persistent and discomforting as white noise.

  On being shown the finished video for ‘One’, however, Metallica were worried about putting their name to a music video that did not feature much music. Michael Salomon remembers that the band were ‘taken aback by how much of the movie I put in there’.

  ‘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,’ says the film-maker. ‘Basically every time there was an extended intro or solo I covered the whole thing up. 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.’

  ‘We managed to avoid the bright-lights shit,’ recalls Lars Ulrich. ‘The focus was to have something with a strong storyline running through it as opposed to us running around with lights and ramps and shit. It just seemed that we had to do something radically different. We decided that if [the video clip] was not what we wanted we’d throw it in the garbage can. [But] Pretty early on we felt we had something special on our hands; whether it was great or shit, it meant something.’

  After viewing the clip MTV were of a mind to bury the thing under a rock. Speaking to Cliff Burnstein – the man who had introduced Hetfield to the book Johnny Got His Gun in the first instance – a representative of the then all-conquering music channel told the band’s co-manager that the only way the clip would be viewed on television was on the news, whatever that meant.

  Metallica would eventually edit the video clip for ‘One’ to a length more manageable than its original eight-minute duration (in fact ultimately the clip would be cut into three different versions). The film in its original (and best) form, though, made its world première on MTV’s Headbangers Ball on January 22 1989, an appearance which, despite the forewarnings of the representative that had spoken to Cliff Burnstein, had been heavily trailed so as to attract the attentions of the band’s ever-growing fan base. Once aired, the video quickly became the most heavily requested item on the programme’s roster. This allowed Metallica to escape the confines of the weekly two-hour slot occupied by Headbangers Ball and to make their break for the wider waters of MTV’s evening playlist. Within weeks, the song found itself occupying the no. 1 slot on MTV’s weekly video countdown, the first time such a feat had been achieved by a metal band.

  ‘I remember watching the video for the first time and thinking, “Wow, this is like nothing else that’s on MTV right now. I can’t believe they’re actually playing it,”’ recalls Kirk Hammett. ‘That was mind-blowing to me. I remember sitting there one night, watching MTV and all this crap they were playing, and then our video came on. When it was over the VJ [Video Jockey] came on and said, “Wow, that’s depressing. On a happier note, here’s Huey Lewis and the News!”’

  With a Top 10 album and a promotional music video that was both a creative and commercial smash, Metallica were beginning to take on the appearance of a band that belonged in the mainstream. Yet if this were the case, the quartet occupied a space in the mainstream without remotely conforming to the tides emanating from it.

  But if the band did not think much of the esteemed company with whom they now brushed shoulders, the feeling was mutual. In a manner that would exceed the flourishes of the pen of even the most daring of dramatists, this impasse of mistrust was given full expression live on American network television. The occasion was the 31st Grammy Awards, held on February 22, 1989 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. A gathering of the music industry’s most (commercially) successful acts as well as the power-brokers and kingmakers in operation away from the spotlight, ‘the Grammys’ was the Super Bowl of the record business, the evening when the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences handed out sashes and gongs to what it believed to be its most deserving of subjects. 1989 was the first year this body recognised the genres of heavy metal and rap, and it was in the former category that Metallica were nominated. Along with this, the quartet were invited to perform ‘One’ live from the stage of the Shrine Auditorium.

  That Metallica were offered such a berth was a remarkable concession on the part of a body that had certainly never before given house-room to a group of this kind. The quartet’s place in the running order was as unlikely as the Sex Pistols being offered the chance to perform at the Royal Variety Performance a decade or so earlier. As with the English group, the Bay Area band were in large part defined by the things against which they stood in opposition. The invitation from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences offered the first hint that Metallica were soon to run out of avenues for rebellion.

  ‘It was a new thing for us,’ recalls Hetfield. ‘I remember our manager coming and saying, ‘They want you to play the Grammys. I thought, “Oh man, I don’t wanna fuckin’ be a part of this crap.” But then [again] it was, like, hey, this is an opportunity. You don’t get to do this every day, a chance to get on national TV and show all these boring fucks what we’re all about. So we kinda turned the whole thing round to our advantage, instead of kinda running away and hiding from it.’

  It was in this spirit of open-armed embrace that Metallica arrived at the Shrine Auditorium in order to sound check in preparation for their first ever appearance on network television. Amid the flurry of runners with clipboards and producers with schedules buffeted by the countless commercial breaks seen on American TV, the band were issued with a list of things prohibited by the live broadcast. This news warily digested, the musicians proceeded to position themselves on the stage and in front of 6,300 empty seats began to play ‘One’. Thirty-three seconds into the song, as Ulrich’s drums punctured the tranquil soundscape established by Hetfield and Hammett’s guitars, Metallica were forced to abandon their efforts as a functionary stormed their stage and told the band that there was no way they would be permitted to make that kind of racket on a prime-time television show.

  Come the evening of the performance itself, Metallica proved willing to cut their cloth to the demands of the occasion. Appearing on a stage designed as if to resemble an alleyway behind the kind of hotel to which the police are called on a regular basis, the group performed a number truncated by more than two minutes from its original length. Neither the sight nor the sound of the performance is particularly edifying. Throughout the song’s two verses and three choruses, Hetfield’s vocals drift in and out of tune, while behind him, illuminated only by gloomy back-lighting, a topless Ulrich flails around like something that lives in a bin on Sesame Street. Most striking of all though is the impression that the musicians are playing for the benefit of a brick wall. Throughout the performance, the camera declines to transfer its attentions from the people onstage to those in the audience, an editorial decision that lends the clip a functional quality shorn of human emotion.

  ‘Looking out there and seeing people’s faces, and all these black and white tuxes [was strange],’ remembers James Hetfield. In words dismissive even by his own standards, the front man recalls how ‘everyone had rented their nice fuckin’ suit, and were sitting down and were expecting some nice little awards show. It was like, “Oh, we’ll have a cocktail,” all this kinda crap. “Ahhhh, terrific, let’s do lunch!” All that crap. Then we got up there and just started bashing away. [The audience] basically had to clap. I’m sure if they were sitting there by themselves, there’s no way they would have clapped. They would have got up and left!’

  When it came time for Metallica to leave, they did so empty-handed. Nominated alongside AC/DC, emerging alternative rock pioneers Jane’s Addiction, English folk-rock eccentrics Jethro Tull and Ann Arbor proto-punk icon Iggy Pop, the award for Best Hard Rock [and] Metal Performance (Vocal or Instrumental) was presented by veteran Michigan shock-rocker Alice Cooper and former Runaway-turne
d-power rock bombshell Lita Ford. As Cooper opens a cream-coloured envelope inside which is written the winner’s name, even years performing to the unflappable standards of vaudeville cannot fully prevent the briefest look of shock from troubling his face. Immediately, though, the showbiz troubadour gathers himself and speaks to the audience.

  ‘And the winner is … Jethro Tull.’

  Moments before, as the nominees were listed by the presenters, the camera fell upon Metallica. With just two acts present at the Shrine Auditorium – Iggy Pop being the other artist in the category that deemed the ceremony worthy of his time – the viewer’s attention is captured by a manic Lars Ulrich, grinning expectantly like a child at the first light of Christmas morning. As the winner is announced from the stage, the camera remains fixed on the podium rather than returning to afford the audience at home the chance to pity or savour the reaction on Ulrich’s face. As for Jethro Tull, neither they nor their label Chrysalis accepted the Academy’s invitation to attend that year’s ceremony, convinced that they would not win.