Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (27 page)

As was inevitable, much has been made of the musical progression evident throughout the release. Anchored by a riff that is not so much a signature as it is a leitmotif, the album’s title track manages to find the space to stretch its limbs from the kind of chorus that begs to be sung by an arena full of faces to an unhurried and even hushed middle section that is progressive to the point of seeming classically trained. In this vein, more
impressive still is the defiantly restrained ‘Orion’, an eight-minute instrumental piece comprising an opening act that throbs like the banks of a swollen river and a middle section of such restrained and melodic beauty that its template is one that seems to have been set by Pink Floyd more than it does Black Sabbath.

Metallica’s forward strides were not merely musical, either. In 1986 metal was a genre whose lyrical quality was rarely considered, often for good reason. But listeners minded to pay attention to the words being sung would have noticed James Hetfield’s continued emergence as a lyricist. On occasion the subject-driven nature of the
Master of Puppets
lyric sheet did carry with it a note of convenience, or even of contrivance. As beloved of its audience as the album’s title track quickly became, nonetheless as a lyric the portrait of an individual’s free will broken on the wheel of drug addiction is not wholly convincing, not least because at the time Metallica were a band familiar with the smell of cocaine. The line ‘chop your breakfast on a mirror’ is in fact directly inspired by their old friend Rich Burch’s morning routine on the many occasions he woke up on the floor of 3132 Carlson Boulevard. Elsewhere, themes such as the pernicious influence of TV evangelists (‘Leper Messiah’) and the futility of war (‘Disposable Heroes’) may have been shop-worn metal favourites, but at least in Hetfield’s hands such topics were examined with bite and an uncommon degree of articulation. The same could be said of the feelings of entrapment and control inherent in ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’, a song inspired by Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, which revisited many of the themes explored on
Ride the Lightning
. On the occasions when Hetfield’s developing sense of wordplay is afforded free rein, the results are magnificent. The most impressive example of this is the lyric that accompanies ‘Battery’, an examination of a tsunami-like force the exact nature of which remains undefined. Taking as its starting point the not entirely promising premise of the sight of a Bay
Area Metallica concert – the title comes from the Old Waldorf club being situated on Battery Street – the subject is given flight by words that are both powerful and poetic. ‘Smashing through the boundaries, lunacy has found me, cannot stop the battery,’ sings Hetfield, over music that sounds like life being spirited away amid rapids of foaming water. Inevitably, the song quickly becomes a matter of life and death, with its narrator unable to ‘kill the family battery is found in me’.

Master of Puppets
stands comparison not just with albums of a similar genre released during the same period of time, but with any collection of music released in the Eighties. Gauged by such exacting standards however, it would be incorrect to describe the work in a musical sense as being flawless. For example, an attentive ear will identify the grinding gears that separate the middle sections of both the title track and ‘Orion’ as belonging to a band whose technical vocabulary was not yet fully equal to their artistic vision. But such criticisms are as nothing compared to the achievements to which Metallica’s third album can lay claim. The release displays a strident forward propulsion, in its creators’ ability not merely to write songs but also to balance these songs together in a collection that, as with all great albums, appears to be more than the sum of its parts. Alongside this, the group’s 1986 release also carries with it a willingness to fly in the face of mainstream commercial wisdom that is more strenuous and far bolder than heard on its predecessor.

‘
Master of Puppets
is definitely a more uncommercial album than
Ride the Lightning
,’ believes Flemming Rasmussen. ‘Definitely.
Master of Puppets
is Metallica celebrating that they’ve got a major label deal and that they no longer give a shit. It was them saying, “We’re just going to do the stuff we like and if the record company doesn’t like it, then fuck them.” I think that was the attitude. And it worked too. There’s not one bad song on the album, not a single one. It is just fabulous from start to finish.

‘They had that youthful attitude of “We’re better than everybody else in the whole world” and they were just out to kick some ass.’

For his part, Lars Ulrich merely adopts his best what-can-I-tell-you? voice, and says that ‘
Master of Puppets
is a motherfucker of a record.’

In the month that followed its release,
Master of Puppets
gatecrashed the US
Billboard
Top 200 album chart at no. 29. In a barbed dig both at radio programmers who had thus far ignored the band and also at the right-wing pro-censorship lobby, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), who were starting to demand that albums be labelled for ‘explicit material’, second pressings of the now hit LP came bearing a sticker that read ‘The only track you probably won’t want to play is “Damage, Inc.” due to multiple use of the infamous “F” word. Otherwise, there aren’t any “shits”, “fucks”, “pisses”, “c**ts”, “motherfuckers” or “cocksuckers” anywhere on this record.’ In subsequent years the ground broken by Metallica has allowed albums as uncommercially minded and even as extreme as Pantera’s 1994 release
Far Beyond Driven
and Lamb of God’s 2009 outing
Wrath
to appear not just in the US Top 30 but even in the top three, a state of affairs that attracts very little comment. But in 1986 Metallica’s appearance on the lower rungs of the American Top 40 album chart represented the crossing of a Rubicon. Without doubt
Master of Puppets
was the heaviest album ever to have found itself in such a setting; the fact that it did so propelled by word of mouth rather than radio or television airplay served only to make the reality of Metallica’s surroundings all the more remarkable.

‘With the tour bus, the girls, the room service, the big halls,’ wrote
Spin
magazine journalist Sue Cummings in a 1986 feature that can be remembered as being one of its subjects’ first
printed profiles in a mainstream magazine, ‘it has just dawned on Metallica that they are making it in rock ’n’ roll.’

The band’s appearance in the
Billboard
Top 30 coincided with the Californians embarking on the most significant heavy metal tour of the American spring and summer. Beginning on March 27 at the Kansas Coliseum in Wichita, Kansas, Ozzy Osbourne’s Ultimate Sin tour was the kind of caravan that travelled to the kind of cities to which other excursions of its size did not care to journey. Comprising no fewer than seventy-seven dates and with an itinerary that stretched into the dog days of August, as well as appearing at such established and prestigious rooms as the Long Beach Arena in Los Angeles, the Cow Palace in San Francisco and the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, the tour also spent the night in such one-horse-or-fewer towns as Chattanooga, Binghampton and Bethlehem, to name just three: proof positive that when it came to heavy metal audiences were often to be found in towns of rust rather than cities of neon and chromium steel. Managed then as now by his wife Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy was the public face of an operation that had become shrewd when it came to ensuring that its figurehead continued to appear relevant amid the churn of modern rock music. One means by which this aim was realised was by associating the former Black Sabbath singer with younger, emerging groups. Two years previously, Sharon Osbourne had invited Mötley Crüe to join her husband as the support act on the tour in support of his
Bark at the Moon
album. Twenty-four months on it was Metallica whose name sprang from the lips of anyone in the know asked to nominate the genre’s most vital new act. Hence the pairing of one of metal’s original architects with the form’s most strident young group seems not just logical but inevitable.

From the headliners’ point of view, the mid-Eighties was not a golden age. Released in February 1986
The Ultimate Sin
album saw its author’s thin voice stretched over many a weak chorus
presented within songs that had been overproduced to the point of being rendered sterile and impersonal. Propelled by the hit single ‘Shot in the Dark’, the parent album was not so much the work of an artist once so pioneering as to have provided heavy metal with its original voice but instead the sound of a man who was attempting to catch the flavour of the age with the minimum of risk. That said, Osbourne’s less than grand design yielded a dividend:
The Ultimate Sin
found its way into the homes of a million listeners in the United States within two months of its release.

But if Ozzy Osbourne had reached the point in his artistic life where risk was to be averted – as these related to his music – the same could not be said for his decision to tour with Metallica. Each night for almost five months, the support act were permitted a generous fifty-five minutes’ stage time, an allowance that exceeded the courtesy normally afforded a band whose name appears in the smallest print on a ticket stub. With the audience for the group occupying the ‘special guest’ slot multiplying like chromosomes in the womb, fans of the American band infiltrated each arena to such a degree that the tour quickly came to resemble a co-headline event. Illicit video footage shot by Metallica fans from various positions front of house – itself no mean feat when one considers that in 1986 hand-held camcorders resembled toilet cisterns with a camera lens stuck on the side – showcase a band whose efforts are greeted by the animalistic roar of an audience the energies of which seem both vibrant and raw. Such was the extent of this adoration that in numerous cities Metallica found themselves summoned back to the stage by an audience demanding not one but two encores.

‘That’s when it kicked in in terms of exposure,’ remembers Lars Ulrich of his band’s five months on tour with Ozzy Osbourne. ‘It was the funnest [time] of my life. We only had [fifty-five] minutes a night – not like the two-plus hours we play as headliners
today. That was the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll tour – we were only twenty-two back then and drank a bottle of vodka a day. We’ve never hidden the fact that we like to indulge. We have this nickname “Alcoholica”. But we can all control what we do.’

The same could not always be said for members of Metallica’s audience. On April 21 at the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the crowd in the two-tier arena found themselves sufficiently lost in the moment to cause $125,000 worth of damage to the venue’s inner bowl, a level of destruction described by the room’s president of operations, Bob Karney, as being ‘entirely without precedent’. Worse yet, when Metallica arrived in Corpus Christi, Texas, on June 4, they were met by the camera lenses and questions of a local television news crew, on hand to revisit a grisly incident to which Metallica were unwittingly aligned. In 1984 eighteen-year-old Troy Albert Kunkle and three companions drove from San Antonio, Texas, to Corpus Christi. En route, the party offered a lift to Stephen Horton, a stranger the party encountered as he walked along the side of the road. Daylight soon fell on this apparent act of kindness when Kunkle demanded Horton’s wallet; when he refused, Kunkle placed a gun to his victim’s head and told him, ‘We’re going to take you back here and blow your brains out.’ The car was driven behind an ice-skating rink, at which point Kunkle shot Horton in the back of the head. The dead man’s wallet was stolen and his body pushed out of one of the car’s doors. Subsequently arrested for this crime – a crime for which he would be executed by lethal injection some twenty-one years later – Kunkle quoted James Hetfield’s nihilistic refrain from the song ‘No Remorse’, ‘another day, another death, another sorrow, another breath’. For those naive enough to attempt to make narrative sense of just one of America’s numerous random acts of senseless violence – as well as those seeking to demonise heavy metal – Metallica were judged guilty by association.

‘We pulled into Corpus Christ, Texas, and woke up with a call from our manager who said, “There’s some shit going on,”’ remembers Lars Ulrich, with a not wholly reassuring handle on the facts of the story. ‘[We were told that] 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”. He got sentenced to death and there was this big yahoo when he stood up in the courtroom and quoted the lyrics again.’

‘On the news the next day they had the headlines that this guy got convicted while singing a Metallica song,’ added Hetfield. ‘They showed our
Kill ’Em All
album cover and they even interviewed me. It was weird. We do write about some sick stuff, but we’re not trying to promote violence. It did give us some publicity, but the wrong kind.’