Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  In the late summer of 1990 Hetfield and Ulrich’s new instincts guided them to assemble a fresh collection of songs with incredible speed. On September 13 the pair convened at the drummer’s home and recorded rough demo versions of four of these new tracks. Joining ‘Enter Sandman’ on cassette were the compositions ‘Sad But True’, ‘Wherever I May Roam’ and ‘Nothing Else Matters’. Just three weeks later a rough version of ‘The Unforgiven’ was committed to tape.

  As the music on which Hetfield and Ulrich were collaborating began to coalesce into form, the search began to find a technician capable of assuming production duties. As was their initial intention in regards to the recording of … And Justice for All, the quartet desired to enter the studio under the guidance of a producer other than Flemming Rasmussen, but following the failure of their union with Mike Clink, lessons had been learned. Minded not to make the same mistake twice, Metallica instructed Q Prime to place the producer on a retainer while the group sought his replacement, just in case the Dane’s services might once more be required to undertake a second salvage operation.

  Oddly for a man who held in his mind’s eye a resonant vision concerning every aspect of his band’s next album, Ulrich initially miscast the man who would step into the role of Metallica’s producer. Having been impressed by the crisp sound and low-end heft of two of 1989’s biggest hard rock releases, Mötley Crüe’s fifth album Dr. Feelgood and Sonic Temple, the fourth LP from the Cult, Ulrich discovered that the studio sessions for both recordings had been overseen by the fabulously named Bob Rock. Ulrich decided that this was a man who could be trusted to mix the next Metallica record. Rock responded to this proposition by saying that he would be more interested in producing the group from scratch than entering the process at the mixing stage.

  ‘Peter [Mensch] called up and said, “He wants to produce you, too”,’ Ulrich recalled. ‘I’m like, “Yeah, sure, we’re Metallica, nobody produces us, nobody tells us what to do.” And then after a while, like, we kinda got the guard down a little bit and said, “Well, maybe we should go hang with this guy.”’

  So in the summer of 1990 Hetfield and Ulrich flew to the Canadian producer’s home in Vancouver to break bread with Rock for the first time.

  ‘We were sitting there saying, “Well, Bob, we think that we’ve made some good albums, but this is three years later and we want to make a record that is really bouncy, really lively, [and which] just has a lot of groove to it,”’ recalls Ulrich. ‘We told him that live we have this great vibe, and that’s what we wanted to do in the studio. He was brutally honest with us. He said he’d seen us play live a bunch of times and [then told us that] “You guys have not captured what’s live on record yet.” We were, like, “Excuse me? Who the fuck are you?”’

  Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on April 19, 1954, Robert Jens Rock began his musical life as a member of the Canadian group the Payola$, who scored a minor-league hit with the 1982 song ‘Eyes of a Stranger’ – nominated for a Juno award as ‘Single of the Year’ by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences – a track which also appeared in the Nicolas Cage film Valley Girl, released the following year. With the group’s commercial fortunes on the decline, the Payola$ would first change their name to Paul Hyde & the Payola$ – Hyde being the stage name of Paul Nelson, the group’s front man – and then, latterly, to Rock and Hyde, a titular pairing of the outfit’s two permanent members. But while an accomplished musician and a capable songwriter, it was away from the limelight that Rock’s talents truly began to take off. Employed at Little Mountain Sound studios in Vancouver, Rock began learning his trade as a recording studio technician with a position as assistant engineer. Following his promotion to chief engineer, in 1986 the Canadian joined forces with his countryman and fellow Little Mountain alumnus Bruce Fairbairn to record Bon Jovi’s blockbusting third album Slippery When Wet with Fairbairn as producer and Rock as engineer. Propelled by the emphatic clarity of that album’s lead-off single, ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’, Slippery When Wet would smash its way across the divide that separated rock and pop and make its way into the record collections of 28 million people. And although in the Eighties Bon Jovi were the subject of much derision from audiences partial to rock music of a heavier mettle, no detractor was quite deranged enough to suggest that the sound of the New Jersey quintet’s third album – as opposed to the songs contained therein – was less than sparkling.

  But it was with his promotion to the producer’s chair that Rock’s most valuable asset became apparent – an ability to identify each band’s strengths and the capacity to harness these to create the most successful recordings of their careers. The producer was the perfect person to transport Metallica to the airwaves of American radio – and from indoor arenas to outdoor venues. The only obstacle that stood in the way of this elevation was whether Metallica themselves possessed the courage to embark upon such a journey.

  Rock was no one’s fool, least of all the fool of presumptuous and self-satisfied rock musicians. The producer had been known to listen to demo tapes presented to him by bands with whom it was proposed he might collaborate, and in the company of the songs’ authors to press the ‘Stop’ button on the tape machine and bluntly ask the musicians if they truly thought their music to be of any genuine worth. A producer who believed that great albums were born of hard work, Rock was also notorious as a man who possessed not only a keen musical ear but also an equally industrious whip hand. Speaking to Metallica ahead of their proposed union with the Canadian, Nikki Sixx warned the quartet that under Rock’s tutelage his own group had been worked ‘like galley slaves’.

  But as the producer met the most recalcitrant rock band since Led Zeppelin and instantly disarmed his guests with his matter-of-fact analysis of the disparity between their sterile studio recordings and their visceral live shows – an observation that no doubt stung Hetfield and Ulrich to the quick simply because they themselves recognised its truth – elsewhere Rock appeared uncommonly effusive. As the three men listened to the demo of ‘Sad But True’, Rock found himself unable to contain the kind of excitement he was normally well used to keeping under the counter. As Ulrich recalls, the producer exclaimed, ‘Wow! This could be the “Kashmir” of the Nineties,’ a reference to Zeppelin’s 1975 masterpiece, the main riff of which is regarded by some as being the greatest ever recorded. ‘He’s saying all this stuff,’ the drummer remembers, ‘and me and James are looking at him and thinking, “He’s listening to one guitar and one set of drums and a vocal melody that goes na-na-na-na-na …?”’ (Hetfield’s unusual habit of establishing vocal melodies on his and Ulrich’s demo tapes by singing ‘na-na-na’ and adding lyrics at a later date explains fully the perfect balance of syllables in Metallica’s music.)

  As Ulrich and Hetfield flew out of Vancouver International Airport the following morning, the drummer reminded his friend of a conversation the pair had held with Cliff Burnstein in Canada earlier that same summer. Following Metallica’s early evening support set to Aerosmith at Toronto’s CNE stadium on June 29, the three men had settled down in the grandstand to watch the New England quintet’s performance, just as Hetfield had done back in the summer of 1978. On this particular evening, looking out at a crowd of 60,000 people, Burnstein turned to his companions and noted, ‘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.’

  ‘They had broken through to one level, but they still weren’t on mainstream radio,’ says Rock. ‘When they came to me, they were ready to make that leap to the big, big leagues. A lot of people think that I changed the band. I didn’t. In their heads, they were already changed when I met them.

  ‘They were two determined individuals. They wanted to be the biggest band in the world and they were driven by that. That was the goal.’

  ‘The idea,’ admits Ulrich, ‘was to cram Metallica down everybody’s fucking throat all over the fucking w
orld.

  ‘We went all out because there was nowhere else to go.’

  The Eighties and the early years of the following decade were a period that gave birth to the cult of personality of the record producer. In the Sixties fans of such fabled groups as The Who and the Rolling Stones would struggle to identify the names of the men who had recorded those acts’ earliest vinyl outings. Even the pairing of George Martin with The Beatles was a union recognised most clearly in hindsight. In the Seventies the identities of the technicians who plotted the studio course of such albums as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti were unknown to young men who studied with care each album’s artwork on bus journeys home from the local record shop. By the Eighties, however, teenagers who had no real clue as to the actual role of the record producer – as has been examined, often much of the credit afforded to this task should be directed towards an album’s engineer – were fully cognisant of the fact that Rick Rubin had taken the helm of Slayer’s pivotal Reign in Blood album and Mutt Lange was the architect of Def Leppard’s expansive sound. In the case of Flemming Rasmussen, as unassuming a presence and (in the days before the advent of the Internet, at least) as remote a figure as could be imagined, he was for the period of Master of Puppets and … And Justice for All seen as being nothing less than the group’s fifth member.

  Despite there being little sonic correlation between the three albums to which the Danish producer lent his talents, the notion that Metallica might move their forces against Rasmussen struck many of the group’s supporters as being anathema. When word broke in the news section of Kerrang! that not only had the group done just this but they had replaced their erstwhile collaborator with Rock, it caused a minor scandal. Great umbrage was taken that Metallica were working with ‘Bon Jovi’s producer’ (that Rock had served time as Bon Jovi’s engineer rather than producer was a fact disregarded amid the clamour of angry voices) and not for the first time – and certainly not for the last – the inference in the statement being passed around in pubs and noisy rock clubs, at places of work and at colleges and schools was that once again Metallica were embarking on an adventure which would ruin their music for those who purported to love it the most: the fans. The most striking thing about this position is its tribal nature: those who were most opposed to the union between Rock and Metallica viewed themselves as owning the moral copyright on the music the group had recorded to date. As with the owners of a football club, Metallica were cast in the odd position of being mere custodians of the art to which they put their name. More than this, they were custodians the judgement of whom was not universally trusted. For those who bristled with suspicion at anything the group attempted that deviated from a norm the boundaries of which they themselves defined, Metallica were seen as being their own worst enemies. Even without having heard a single recorded note a sea of listeners feared that in choosing to work with Rock the group had taken all that was good about their music and had put it to the sword.

  Such concerns naturally filtered through to the members of the fourth estate.

  Each music journalist to whom Ulrich deigned to speak would ask, ‘So, what is the deal with working with Bob Rock?’ They would do so in tones that suggested that while the rest of the world were privy to this folly, the only ones sitting behind a stanchion were Metallica themselves. It was, if nothing else, an ungracious line of questioning. Though Ulrich has surely sat for more interviews than any other musician of his kind, and in doing so shows a willingness to talk about his band until every glass eye in the world has fallen asleep – even he appeared to be a little exasperated by the limited imagination of those to whom he was speaking.

  ‘It’s funny because everyone I talk to goes, “What’s the big deal about Bob Rock?”’ the drummer revealed. ‘But it just seems like everybody sits around and works each other into a frenzy or something. Everyone in England’s really freaking out over it. It’s like, put some fucking valium in the drinking water or something. What’s the big fucking deal? Don’t people realise that this guy wouldn’t be doing this record if it wasn’t because we fucking wanted him to? What’s the big deal? I don’t get it.’

  ‘Where does all this big fuss come from?’ wondered the drummer in a rare rhetorical flourish. ‘It comes from all the people who take three key phrases like “Bob Rock”, “shorter songs” and “mid-tempo” and conjure up all these horrific images. It seems like one guy says something to somebody who relays it themselves. It’s the snowball effect. By the time it comes out, everything is distorted beyond belief. I should be used to the fact that Metallica and rumour always go hand in hand, but it never ceases to amaze me.’

  ‘The fact of the matter is, Bob Rock’s got an incredible ear for attitude and feeling. Now that we’ve worked with him on pre-production, he’s got us kicking ourselves for not doing certain things sooner. Bob’s convinced that the four of us playing together had a certain magic.’

  While the heavy metal community agonised over the potential ramifications of the collaboration between band and producer, sessions for Metallica’s fifth album began in earnest at One On One Studios on October 6, 1990.

  ‘We knew that the parameters had changed for us,’ says Jason Newsted. ‘We had a big studio, big money and a new producer. We all felt expectations that we hadn’t felt before. But no one knew exactly how things would work out.’

  Whereas two years previously the quartet had gathered at the same North Hollywood facility to record … And Justice for All and named their work-in-progress ‘Wild Chicks and Fast Cars and Lots of Drugs’, their fifth album was given the working title ‘Married to Metal’. As befits men living lives the details of which were not always subject to the highest specifications of moral scrutiny, three-quarters of the group found themselves thrown together in the studio at a juncture when their marriages were falling apart almost as quickly as they had been put together.

  Lars Ulrich first met Debbie Jones, a young lady from Diamond Head’s home town of Stourbridge, in a London rock club in August 1986. The pair had become ‘good friends’, the drummer revealed and had started ‘hanging out’. He added that after the death of Cliff Burton the following month, his new friend ‘came to [his] side’ and had ‘stayed by [his] side through some difficult times’. The pair were married in the spring of 1987 but divorce proceedings were initiated in the summer of 1990, just as songwriting sessions for Metallica album number five began.

  Kirk Hammett had married fellow San Franciscan Rebecca Kestelyn in December 1987. In Bay Area metal circles of the early to mid-Eighties, Rebecca was almost as well known as her future husband, the reason for this being that she was one of the few female devotees of the nascent thrash scene. Their union also lasted no more than three years.

  ‘I remember going to the studio [during the making of Metallica], sitting down in the lounge and thinking, “I’m fucked,”’ recalls the guitarist. ‘Lars walked in, same face. Then Jason came in and I’m, like, “What’s wrong with you?” He just shook his head. I said, “Uh-oh, well for me, my marriage is on the rocks.” Lars said, “You too?” Jason said, “I’m there also!” [Newsted would divorce Judy, his wife of two years, during the same period.] We all realised that we were going through the same thing, all within that five-minute window. Working so hard, partying a lot. We were all really young too, all in our mid-twenties. I think it’s all right for women to get married in their mid-twenties because they’re a bit more psychologically mature. Men in their mid-twenties might as well be sixteen.’

  The only member of Metallica not yet wed was Hetfield. At the time that he and his band mates were compiling the songs that would comprise their fifth album, the guitarist was, though, keeping company with a young woman by the name of Kristen Martinez. It was Martinez who would become the muse for Metallica’s first conventional love song, the opening notes of which landed literally in the author’s lap. Absent-mindedly plucking at a guitar laid on his lap during a phone conversation with a friend,
Hetfield realised that the sound emanating from his guitar held greater possibilities than the voice on the other end of the line, and hung up on his caller. As the sequence of notes coalesced into the now instantly recognisable form of ‘Nothing Else Matters’, its author declined to believe that this was a piece of music suited to Metallica’s cause, a certain indication that his group’s fearless sense of artistic open-mindedness often appeared a good deal more convincing to outside eyes than it did the members of its inner core. But certain in the knowledge that it matters not how one feels, but rather how one acts, Hetfield married this delicate new piece of music to lyrics the like of which he had never previously written. A sentiment such as ‘Never opened myself this way, life is ours, we live it our way’ may not dazzle with flirtatious brio or pulsate with sexual tension, but the words are nonetheless remarkable as representing a strident leap from Hetfield’s natural habitat. More remarkable still is the duality of purpose of ‘Nothing Else Matters’ as a song that can be read in two different ways. The most commonly accepted interpretation is that its lyric is a paean delivered to a lover. The song, though, works equally well if one imagines that its sentiment is intended for the men with whom Hetfield shares the name Metallica. If such a subtext was intentional, however, it went unnoticed by the rest of the band.