Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  Yet Metallica took defeat with the kind of grace befitting men who have been snubbed by a body the opinion of which they respected not at all. So certain were Elektra Records that their charges would emerge victorious from the Shrine Auditorium that the company had taken the trouble to have printed up stickers announcing the group as ‘Grammy winners’. With a chutzpah that was fully irresistible, Metallica insisted that this notice be affixed to the packaging of … And Justice for All with the word ‘winner’ replaced by the word ‘loser’. Just as delectable was Jethro Tull front man Ian Anderson’s verdict on his band’s unlikely coronation as kings of metal. Following the anointment, the group’s record company, Chrysalis, paid for a full-page advert to run in the subsequent issue of the trade publication Billboard. Accompanying a picture of Anderson’s flute lying atop a pile of iron bars was a statement from the front man which read, ‘The flute is a heavy, metal instrument.’ Elsewhere, when asked for his thoughts regarding the Shrine Auditorium rhubarb, the Englishman answered that Jethro Tull ‘do sometimes play [their] mandolins very loudly’.

  Rather than grieve over a snub made by a body of men and women – mostly men – that saw fit to award Bobby McFerrin’s grandly irritating ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ the accolade ‘Song of the Year’, Metallica once more turned their attention to ploughing their own furrow. This they did with an eye for detail attentive even by the standards of the hardest-working of showbusiness troubadours. Despite having blossomed into the kind of act who could fill any indoor arena in North America, the band continued to hustle as if its members were unsure of the source of their next meal. The difference now was that they had swapped their chromium steel tour bus for a sleek private jet.

  ‘It’s nice to be able to make your own schedules and not be at the mercy of a timetable for travel,’ explains Lars Ulrich. ‘That freedom allows you to have time to do what you do in a day [and] without the plane it couldn’t happen. Plus on this tour, we’re not just doing the sixty-date arena circuit, we’re also doing the secondary towns and then a bunch of places that no fucker’s ever heard of.’

  Propelled by jet fuel and a work ethic befitting men long used to making their own luck, the Damaged Justice tour saw Metallica stare into the mirrors of dressing rooms of such minor-league venues as the Cumberland County Auditorium in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the Buckeye Lake Music Center in Hebron, Ohio, and the Center Georges Vezine in the town of Chicoutimi (population, 60,008) in the Canadian province of Quebec. As if to prove to people who required no convincing that this was a union willing to exert itself to exhaustive lengths, each night the group would convene onstage for sets that would last in excess of two and a half hours. Offstage Ulrich would bibble into the recording devices of no fewer than eight different music journalists each and every day. If by this point the drummer was growing tired of the sound of his own voice, it was one of the few things he kept to himself.

  ‘The theory behind [Metallica’s work ethic] is that we didn’t want to rely on radio or video to keep us going,’ he revealed. ‘So in true European style we decided to play every town that has an arena and [which] wants us. By the time this tour is over in the US we’ll have done nearly 200 shows, so you’re effectively letting people know all over [the country] what you do.’ As for the toll such an approach might take on the members of the touring party, Ulrich was nonchalant, saying that ‘I have to be honest about this and say that I think the whole “mega-tour” thing has been blown gloriously out of proportion. Iron Maiden – who are one of the bands that I respect the most and one of the bands that opened more doors than they [are] ever [given] credit for – are a prime example of taking a tour and going overboard about what a pain in the ass it is to play for a long time … You obviously have to take breathers here and there, a few days off here and there to keep it from getting too monotonous and to allow you to clear your head. But I haven’t found anything objectionable about these mega-tour things as long as you take the right precautions … [But] we’ve shown once again that I think we can do this whole thing without depending on the radio [and] video medium, which to us is very, very important.’

  This may have been so, but to those less indefatigable than Ulrich, the tour was tough. As Hetfield himself would confess, there were evenings where ‘after all the hoopla-bullshit after a gig and everything’ the front man would ‘go back and sit in [his] hotel room listening to [his] ears ring’.

  ‘I dunno, you sometimes wonder to yourself, “Just what the fuck am I doing this shit for?” When [the touring has been] going on a long time, you think, “Fuck, we could just go home right now.” But there’s always something the next day that spurs you on and keeps you goin’.’

  Almost eighteen months after it had begun, Metallica’s Damaged Justice tour drew to a close on October 7, 1989, with the second of two appearances at the Projeto SP in Sao Paulo. Returning home to the Bay Area, the quartet afforded themselves the time needed both to draw breath and to cast their gaze over the remarkable successes of the preceding months. As the sun set on the commercial cycle for … And Justice for All (at least for the time being), its creators were able to look upon not one but two framed platinum discs equating to sales in the United States alone of more than two million copies, plaques which Ulrich chose to hang on the walls of his home and which Hetfield did not. The pair also shared different opinions with regard to the amount of time their band would require in terms of shore leave: Hetfield believed that a period of six months’ rest was needed, while Ulrich thought three weeks should do the trick. Unusually, the two men compromised: Metallica stalled their engines for three months.

  As a new decade dawned, the band once more began to stir themselves awake. In a move that spoke of hastily convened meetings in corporate boardrooms, on February 21, 1990, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded the quartet a Grammy in the category of Best Metal Performance, for ‘One’. This time, the band declined to attend the ceremony. Instead Hetfield and Ulrich busied themselves preparing the ground for what would eventually become Metallica’s fifth album. As if upending a box featuring the pieces of a vast and complex and jigsaw puzzle, the pair began to listen to riffs recorded on cassette tapes in hotel rooms and backstage utility rooms since the first days of the Monsters of Rock tour.

  With no album to promote, in the spring the group took the unusual decision to head back out on the road, thus beginning what has become a long-standing Metallica tradition, that of touring for reasons other than simply to sell what some in the music industry call ‘product’. But with just eleven concerts on the docket for the whole of 1990, in terms of live appearances this was the quartet’s quietest year since the days before its members had ferried themselves and their belongings north on Interstate 5 in order to make a new home in Northern California.

  In May Metallica arrived once more on British soil in order to embark on a tour that officially comprised just three dates. But in order to tune their engine in preparation for a European excursion that would include appearances at London’s Wembley Arena, Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre and the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow – on May 23, 25 and 26 respectively – the group once again performed in the English capital under an assumed identity. On a balmy spring evening on May 11, those waiting in line outside the Marquee club (at this point no longer situated on Wardour Street but on nearby Charing Cross Road) to see a performance by Metal Church learned that the support that night would be provided by a group named Vertigo. Unlike Metallica’s appearance at the 100 Club in 1987, the quartet’s set at the Marquee remained a closely guarded secret. This, combined with the fact that Metal Church were hardly a household name, meant that the support band’s nine-song set was witnessed by a venue barely half full.

  The same, however, could not be said for Metallica’s triumvirate of billed appearances in England and Scotland’s only three arena venues at the time. And while in 1988 the quartet’s show at the National Exhibition Centre had attr
acted a crowd of 6,000 people, by May 1990 an audience of double this number arrived to fill the venue to capacity. In suburban north-west London, Wembley Arena also placed a ‘Sold Out’ sign above its front doors.

  For anyone gathered in these vast rooms, the sight was of a powerful, muscular rock band that looked and sounded entirely at home. Whereas on the main body of the Damaged Justice tour Metallica had shared their stage with a towering ‘Lady Justice’ – a physical representation of the image from the front cover of … And Justice for All (nicknamed, inevitably, ‘Edna’) – that would collapse at the end of each set, for the handful of dates commissioned in 1990 the band performed without recourse to any visual embellishments. On a stage adorned only with a symmetrical backline of amplifiers and the centrepiece of Ulrich’s drumkit, the performers no longer appeared to be ‘hairballs strapped with guitars’ or boys with ‘teeth in need of a good dental plan’ – as had been the opinion of the St Petersburg Times, following the quartet’s Monsters of Rock appearance at the Tampa Stadium – but were instead men who had learned to harness their collective power in a manner both efficient and economical.

  As Metallica bid Britain farewell in 1990, a new process of simplification had already begun.

  10 – NOTHING ELSE MATTERS

  It was in an anonymous hotel room that Metallica’s fifth album first flickered into life. On the road as part of the Damaged Justice tour, Kirk Hammett found himself occupying the dreaded hours between curtain call and sleep by loudly playing his guitar in yet another identikit bedroom – ‘I was,’ he recalls, ‘all fired up.’ To help while away the time, Hammett regarded the instrument in his hands and decided to try ‘to write the heaviest thing I could think of’. In doing so, and in committing the result of this endeavour to tape, Hammett placed his fingers on the chords and notes of what would become the spine of Metallica’s most widely recognised song, ‘Enter Sandman’.

  Lars Ulrich first heard these building blocks following his band’s appearance at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow on May 26, 1990. The chord sequence was just one of scores contained on a cassette known as the ‘Riff Tape’. Fortunately for the drummer listening to this tape, the riff that caught his ear just happened to occupy pride of place as the first recording on ‘Side A’ of the home-made cassette. This first impression was not one that Ulrich would quickly forget.

  As the drummer listened to Hammett’s riff, his mind went to work. He was the one responsible for placing the component parts of Metallica’s music into structural form, and he recognised not only the fact that a song equated to more than its central riff – a point of view not universally shared by metal acts of the time – but that these riffs themselves could amount to more than a sequence of chords repeated as many times as was required before giving way to a chorus. The piece of music submitted by Hammett, however, differed significantly from the song that would be presented to listeners as the curtain raiser for Metallica’s fifth album some fourteen months later. Instead of a riff that was repeated three times and then completed by what is known in songwriting circles as ‘a tail’ – in the case of ‘Enter Sandman’, a sequence of power chords the crunch of which was accentuated by the palm of Hetfield’s right hand – Hammett’s original submission took the more symmetrical form of one rendition of the first part of the riff – der ner, der ner ner – followed by the tail. To Ulrich his band mate’s idea sounded great. What it did not equate to, however, was the door-smashing hit single cum statement-of-intent that the drummer envisaged by the time he had pressed the ‘Pause’ button on his tape deck. But with an ear for song structure that was both pronounced and sophisticated, Ulrich knew just how to transform a fine idea into a song that would be worth its weight in platinum.

  ‘There was something about this record [even] from the days that we started writing “[Enter] Sandman” that sounded like a motherfucker,’ recalls the drummer.

  Rather than pretend that the group was some kind of working democracy, in preparation for the recording of their next studio album, Metallica divided itself into two halves. Jason Newsted and Kirk Hammett formed one camp, and were placed on shore leave; James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich comprised the other, and this pair went to work. Flush with the fruits of success from … And Justice for All, Ulrich had finally bid farewell to suburban Carlson Boulevard and had relocated to a home amid the vibrant boulevards and suspension bridges of San Francisco proper. As befitted a wealthy musician, the drummer’s new address included as part of its facilities an eight-track recording studio the space for which was carved into the rock of one of the city’s many vertiginous hills. Metallica’s days of soundproofing garages with pieces of two by four and rows of empty egg cartons were officially now behind them.

  Each day Hetfield and Ulrich would convene in this home studio and knit together pieces of music. Whereas this job of work as it related to … And Justice for All was a process as complicated as locating ‘the God particle’, in the summer of 1990 the pair’s approach to making music had undergone a deliberate transformation. In place of musical wanderings the technical specifications of which were, as Jason Newsted memorably put it, ‘double-black diamond’, the guitarist and drummer concentrated on two qualities largely unheard on their band’s previous album: simplicity and groove.

  ‘By the end of the last tour “Seek & Destroy” had practically become my favourite song in the set,’ recalls Ulrich. ‘It had so much bounce and groove [that I] could really just sit there and play it without worrying about when the next quadruple-backwards-sideways paraddidle came in.’ Conversely, the drummer remembers that ‘about halfway through the [Damaged] Justice tour I was sitting there playing these nine-minute songs thinking, “Why am I sitting here worrying about how perfect these nine-minute songs have to be when we play stuff like ‘Seek & Destroy’ and ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and [both songs] have such a great fucking vibe?”’

  One aspect regarding the material heard on … And Justice for All that has largely gone unexamined, is the physical and mental toll of playing these songs live. Throughout the sixty-five minutes of the group’s fourth album, Metallica had gone to extraordinary lengths to make life difficult for themselves. Even by the standards of modern metal, passages of music such as those heard prior to the final chorus of ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ or at any point in the bewildering ‘Dyers Eve’ pushed the group towards the limits of each member’s technical abilities. In addition this music then had to be performed to vast numbers of people gathered together not so much to hear a concert as to see a show. At the time the band embarked on the Damaged Justice tour, Metallica were known for live performances that were interactive rather than passive experiences, demanding connections both emotional and physical. The group onstage were more than performers, they were ringleaders. For the quartet to have appeared before their audience only to then stare fixedly at the fretboards of their guitars while playing ‘… And Justice for All’ or ‘One’ would have seen energy levels in the room fall to an unacceptably low wattage. That Metallica learned to project themselves to those in the cheapest seats of North America’s largest indoor arenas while playing songs of fiendish complexity is an achievement for which the group has never quite received adequate credit.

  ‘Halfway through the [Damaged] Justice tour, we came offstage one night,’ recalls Ulrich. ‘We’d just played “Blackened”, “One”, “Eye of the Beholder”, “… And Justice for All’ and “Harvester [of Sorrow]” – and we were, like, “This shit is fucked up to play.” It was really difficult. Every night became an exercise in not fucking up – our whole purpose was not to fuck up. We just decided it was stupid. It was our first go-round in the arenas, and we were playing with our minds, not with our bodies or our guts. It wasn’t physical; it was mental … So we were, like, “Enough of this.” We’d taken that side of Metallica to the end – there was no place else to go with it … When me and James started writing [material for the group’s fifth album] we listened to the Misfits, the
Rolling Stones, AC/DC – all these bands that wrote three-minute songs.’

  For Metallica such thinking amounted to a root and branch reform of the group’s entire modus operandi. Everything in which the quartet had previously believed was placed under scrutiny. Musicians whose talents had previously been dismissed – in Ulrich’s case, economical drummers such as Charlie Watts from the Rolling Stones and Phil Rudd from AC/DC – were re-evaluated, this time correctly. Whereas previously Ulrich had been so keen to establish a style that was different from other players of his type as to become the world’s fussiest musician, in 1990 the Dane relaxed his grip and learned to place himself at the service of a song. In the drummer’s new home studio, Hetfield proved willing to do the same, authoring a fresh batch of riffs more aerated and thus even more powerful than any to which he had attached his name before. Things that had previously seemed important were suddenly rendered impossibly insignificant. For all four of his band’s previous albums Ulrich had taken a keen interest in the duration of each song – the implication being that the greater a composition’s length, the better – to the extent that the running time of each track was featured on the back cover of every release.

  ‘I used to be really proud of it,’ explains the drummer. ‘In the past we’d do a rough version of a song and I’d go home and time it and go, “It’s only seven and a half minutes!” I’d think, “Fuck, we’ve got to put another couple of riffs in there.” Now I’m not bothered either way.’

  In time a number of those who would hear the results of Metallica’s re-imagined approach to songwriting would conclude that the results had become corrupted by compromise and contrivance. What is odd, however, is that few of these people seem to recognise the contrivance inherent in the desire to write a song of as great a length as possible simply for its own sake. Within the strictly codified metal world, when a band states in an interview that their latest album is the result of their attempts to write the heaviest music possible, overwhelmingly their audience will regard this as artistically honourable. Conversely, were a group to announce that their latest LP showcases their efforts to write the catchiest collection of songs ever heard, noses will concertina with distaste. In eschewing convolution and seeking to focus upon simplicity of purpose, Metallica were viewed by many as being guided by commercial expediency for the first time in their career. But while it was the case that the new aerodynamic sound the band was set to unveil did play more easily on the ear than much of the material of the past, such a circumstance did not render the enterprise inherently dishonest. In fact the manner in which Metallica manoeuvred themselves from the corner into which … And Justice for All had painted them was as artful as it was natural.