Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (37 page)

Elsewhere the job of Rasmussen was to divine a path along which Hetfield – a man whose creativity is fuelled by the conflicting elements of a personality that is both progressive and reactionary – was comfortable traversing. The producer attempted to convince the front man to sing rather than merely to bark in key, only to be told that singing ‘is for fags’.

‘He was,’ recalls Rasmussen, ‘a very angry young man.’

Along with the rest of the band, Hetfield was a young man under increasing pressure. This came in the form of an imposing deadline: a place on the bill of that summer’s most prestigious stadium rock tour. The Monsters of Rock tour would be headlined by Van Halen. It would also feature Scorpions, Los Angeles power rockers Dokken (who, much to the astonishment of all, appeared on the bill in the slot immediately above Metallica) and German–American Led Zeppelin clones Kingdom Come. The caravan would begin its twenty-six-date run through the largest venues in America on May 27, with the first of three performances at the 37,000-seat Alpine Valley in East Troy, Wisconsin. In order to shake off the studio dust and re-engage their stage chops for a tour that would be witnessed by more than a million people, Metallica booked themselves into the Troubadour as Frayed Ends for a pair of performance on May 23 and 24. That they also chose to schedule interview time with Jon Pareles of the
New York Times
on the same days signifies
that even in the pressurised environment in which they found themselves, Metallica had their eyes firmly fixed upon expanding their constituency further.

‘It’s gotten so safe,’ determined Ulrich, speaking to Pareles about the state of metal. ‘You put on some make-up, you spike your hair, you go out and sing about sex and driving fast cars and off you go, two million records.’

This from a man who had recently been involved in a high speed car crash en route to a party populated by porn stars.

With their noses pressed against a tour itinerary that stretched until the end of July, the group could also feel on the back of their necks the breath from another pressing concern. Rasmussen was contractually obligated to return to Sweet Silence Studios in the first week of May. As days drifted by, Metallica’s workload increased in a manner in inverse proportion to the time the group had left in which to record.

With just ten days before the end of the studio sessions for …
And Justice for All
, the nine songs that had been committed to tape were complete save for one detail: not a single note of music had yet been played by Hammett. In spring 1988 modern metal was a genre defined in large part by the dexterity of a group’s lead guitarist, a definition by which Metallica rated highly. Along with Hetfield’s forensic rhythm playing, the talents which lay at the fingers of Hammett were one aspect of the group’s sound that could plausibly be described as being world class. Despite this, the manner in which lead solos were enticed from the strings of Hammett’s guitars was yet another example of the Metallica operation defying convention, if not logic itself. Each note the musician played was subject to the scrutiny of Ulrich, a man viewed by many as being deficient on the one instrument he himself played.

With the drummer’s eyes upon him, and to Hammett’s dismay, the seconds on the clock sped by faster than the notes he was trying to place together on top of …
And Justice for All
’s most
frenetic songs. Towards the end of his time at the plate, the guitarist found himself eschewing sleep in order to meet the approaching deadline. Fatigue was such that it became increasingly difficult to physically bend the strings in the manner required to access the notes the musician could hear in his head. The frustration from this process led to exasperation and ill-temper, ingredients that lent Hammett’s contributions an emotional intensity that negated any suggestion of the kind of glib flamboyance often associated with the trade of the heavy metal lead guitarist. With an invention born of necessity, Hammett’s contributions on …
And Justice for All
can be said to resonate with the one ingredient least often associated with the kind of music played by a band such as Metallica: soul. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the lacerating solo that accompanies ‘To Live Is To Die’.

‘It was very, very hard work,’ remembers Rasmussen today. ‘It was long hours and a great deal of intensity. But although we worked hard I’ve got to say that I always enjoyed working with Metallica. The reason for that is because you could always see a progression. A much more difficult thing to do is work hard with a band and not see anything happening at all. When that happens, it’s hell. But with Metallica you can see the progression and you could see that if you just kept going then soon enough you would be finished. And even though some of the tracking took days to complete, some of the bits were played in just one take. For example, Lars’s machine-gun double bass runs in [the middle section of] “One” were done in one take. He just nailed it.’

The recording sessions for …
And Justice for All
ran so close to the producer’s deadline that on the day before his flight to Copenhagen departed, Rasmussen entered One On One Studios and did not leave for more than twenty-four hours, his shift ending only as a taxi carrying his wife and their two children arrived to ferry the family to LA in time for their plane journey home.

Once fastened in his seat aboard the aeroplane, Flemming Rasmussen closed his eyes and did not open them again until he was awoken by the sound of rubber wheels screeching on the concrete surface of a Danish runway. At the time he did not, and could not, know that his association with Metallica had come to an end.

9 – THE FRAYED ENDS OF SANITY

Metallica had a name for them: tub tarts. The description wasn’t of their own invention, but had been supplied to the band by their tour manager, Ian Jeffrey. Prior to joining the Bay Area quartet for the start of the Van Halen-headlined Monsters of Rock tour in May 1988, Jeffrey had been employed in the same capacity by Def Leppard. As the Sheffield band conquered America not once but twice in the Eighties with 1983’s
Pyromania
album and its expensive successor, 1987’s
Hysteria
, a trail rampaged across the country that befitted a working-class band with red-blooded appetites and a blue-chip profile. One of the road crew’s
non-contractual
daily tasks was to find audience members of the opposite sex who were willing to express their appreciation for the Yorkshire band in ways that went beyond a round of applause.

In the years that preceded rock music shedding its skin and changing at least its outward appearance at the start of the Nineties, the culture of ‘the groupie’ was one that was often celebrated in the most gratuitous manner. This culture took the
Zeitgeist
of the age and distilled it down to its most carnal and logical elements. Success and celebrity were seen as forces deserving of physical rewards; for both the boys in the bands and the girls in their company, humanity counted for little.

The premise of the ‘tub tart’ was simple: each night on tour members of the road crew were sent out to find attractive women in the audience who might enjoy the company of the members of the band after the show had finished. The exact nature of such encounters would not be stated explicitly; instead, euphemistic propositions such as ‘Would you like to come back and party?’
were used. But as imprecise as the language employed may have been, for the most part the invitee understood that the provision of a laminated backstage pass was a privilege that came with clearly defined, if not loudly spoken, responsibilities.

So it was that following the first date of the Monsters of Rock tour, Metallica bid good day to the thirty-odd thousand people gathered to see them at Alpine Valley in East Troy, Wisconsin, returned to their dressing area and were greeted by the sight of a room full of naked strangers.

‘We came offstage and there were ten girls in the shower with soap and shampoo, ready to wash us,’ recalls Lars Ulrich. ‘It was like, we could probably get used to this and do it every night.’ This the band tried to do. ‘Let’s cut to the chase, once they’re naked in the shower getting their hair wet you don’t have to go very far to [take] the next step – “a home run”, as the Americans call it. That was good fun.’ In answer to the question, ‘Were any of the young women standing around fully clothed?’, the drummer replies, ‘Not for long. They were either asked to vacate [the area] or get busy.’

In the twenty-first century the first two components of the Ian Dury-coined phrase ‘sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll’ have shrunk from view. The last mainstream rock band to embrace this most giddily hedonistic of philosophies were Muse, who did so with a gusto that was more cheeky than chauvinistic in intention. Elsewhere the tone that greets the kind of behaviour celebrated a generation ago (at least in the rock press) is one of prissiness. In an age that is at once more accessible and more suspicious than those of the penultimate decade of the twentieth century, few journalists would dream of asking a modern metal band the last time they were fellated by a stranger while wearing the clothes in which they had just performed onstage.

But while in 1988 Metallica made music that stood in diametric opposition to the kind of rock fare otherwise beloved
of mainstream audiences, only one member of the union saw fit to demur at the kind of activities indulged in by groups who looked like girls.

‘Jason Newsted might have been slightly less involved … than the other band members,’ is Ulrich’s recollection.

For his part, the bassist is of the rather sweet belief that ‘people aren’t going to like’ the fact that, when it came such pleasures of the flesh, he was ‘a little too righteous, maybe’.

‘Those guys really went for it, James and Lars especially,’ is Newsted’s memory. ‘Lars would probably be the king as far as that crazy promiscuity [went]; blow jobs under the stage during the bass solo, kind of stuff. That’s definitely Lars’ territory. I definitely had some beautiful models and wonderful relationships with actresses. I remember their names and still talk to them.’

That Newsted believes the fact that he can recall the name of someone with whom he has kept intimate company to be a measure of virtue does not speak highly of the standards of the age. But perhaps this is understandable, given that each evening while on tour the bassist would stand onstage and play to the beat kept by a drummer of whom it was said would not leave the venue until he had received oral sex from a stranger in the audience.

‘No, that’s not true,’ says Ulrich, while at the same time admitting, ‘It was rare that [this] didn’t happen.’

‘It was amazing,’ he says, ‘this American thing with blow jobs. It was a cultural phenomenon. I don’t know what it is about a tour bus that makes a girl want to suck a guy off, but apparently tour buses had that effect on a certain part of the population of America in the mid-Eighties. When you’re twenty-one years old and full of spunk, that’s okay.’

Not that Ulrich could really be blamed for allowing success to go to his head in more than one sense of the term. Despite a position on the bill that underestimated his group’s standing to the point of being negligent, the heaviest and most uncompromising
group on the Monsters of Rock roster were busy making friends in large places. Despite a shift that began at the not exactly rocking hour of 2 p.m. and which lasted for a mere sixty minutes, Metallica’s appearance underneath the punishing sun of the American summer was proving a huge financial success. As scores of thousands of fans were permitted entry through the turnstiles of such venues as New Jersey’s Giants Stadium, the Silverdome in Detroit and the Coliseum in Los Angeles – the latter being the centrepiece of the Olympic Games four years earlier – the second band on the bill made a mockery of the conventional wisdom that the larger a crowd the more simple the music being played must be in order to keep its members entertained. At the merchandise stands, the only item of apparel to sell in quantities greater than Metallica’s own garments was the official Monsters of Rock T-shirt, a fact that did not go unnoticed further up the event’s supposed chain of command.

Such was the demand for the band’s apparel that Hetfield was moved to tell an acquaintance, ‘Dude, we made a million dollars today – in cotton.’

‘[Metallica will be] the new kings of rock, just you wait and see,’ commented Van Halen front man Sammy Hagar, apparently oblivious to the fact that for an increasingly large number of people this wait was already over.

Of course, Ulrich knew the truth of Hagar’s prediction long before ‘The Red Rocker’ (or anyone else, for that matter) had ever heard his band’s name. Aside from a handful of concert dates in the north-eastern states of the United States, this was Metallica’s first US tour since the group opened and then stole the show from Ozzy Osbourne two summers previously. While on the road with Van Halen, the Bay Area quartet were once more partaking variously in sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll and the evidence before their eyes from the stages of the country’s largest stadia suggested yet another Ian Dury-authored idiom: reasons to be cheerful.

‘Obviously there’s some kind of buzz on us and from Van Halen’s point of view I guess it seemed like a good idea to take us out [on tour] because we’re different from the other bands,’ was Ulrich’s opinion, sounding only slightly too big for his basketball boots. Elsewhere, though, with his working day finished just sixty minutes after it began, the drummer had the rest of each day in which to join his band mates in the pursuit of getting as drunk as was humanly possible.

‘Basically, at that time, we used to start drinking when we woke up,’ he remembers (which, on the Monsters of Rock tour was eleven o’clock in the morning). ‘We’d get the gig over by three o’clock, and then we’d have eight or nine hours [in which] to drink. It was awesome. That was our first exposure to big crowds, like 50,000 people every day. We were just drunk basically all the time. The not-giving-a-fuck meter was peaking.’

Ulrich’s memories of Metallica’s summer as part of the Monsters of Rock caravan concur with those of Hetfield, who recalls that his band ‘were drunk the whole time’.

‘We were very much into drinking and having a good fucking time,’ reveals the front man. ‘That was the pinnacle of all the debauchery, drinking, fucking and general insanity.’ Elsewhere, the front man would recall that ‘after that tour, I went back to a lot of cities, when we went out on our own, and people, uh, kind of didn’t like me, and I didn’t know why. People would come up [and say], “Yeah, you don’t remember grabbing my girlfriend’s tits?” or something really rude I’d done when I was really fucked up and basically didn’t remember what was going on. You’d come back into town [and say], “Hey, how’s it goin’?” and people would give you the evil eye.’

As ever, though, Metallica’s energies as they were applied to the business of bending the elbow, or someone’s else’s waist, were equalled by their creative energies. Given that the culmination of the recording sessions for …
And Justice for All
had buffeted
so tightly against their two warm-up concerts for the Monsters of Rock tour that the four musicians might as well have caught a cab straight from the studio to the nightclub’s stage door, at the start of the Monsters of Rock tour this was a unit that was sorely under-rehearsed. This state of affairs, though, escaped mention amid the fervour that surrounded the group’s return to the live arena. But even the rapture of this most compelling of groups appearing before a most committed of audiences could not obscure the fact that Metallica were caught in the headlights of yet another fast-approaching deadline.

With a release date scheduled for August, as spring became summer …
And Justice for All
’s nine songs were as yet unmixed. Despite his exceptional work on
Master of Puppets
, the services of Michael Wagener were deemed surplus to requirements. Instead, the task of setting the levels for Metallica’s latest recording was handed to Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero, who had worked on material as varied as Guns N’ Roses
Appetite for Destruction
and Whitney Houston’s ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’. Yet despite engaging these two expensive studio technicians, Hetfield and Ulrich once again proved unwilling to delegate and instead occupied much of their time attempting to impose their own vision upon the two men. Whenever the Monsters of Rock tour rested in order that the vast bulk of its equipment might be transported across city and state lines, Metallica’s front man and drummer would journey to the studio at which their forthcoming album was being mixed with the aim of retaining absolute control of the proceedings.

For the vast majority of bands, this workload would have proved intolerable. For Hetfield and Ulrich, however, such an intense schedule was a fair price for men intent on having their beer and drinking it, en route to demanding a double vodka.

‘You have to keep in mind that we were continuously inebriated from ’87 through ’89,’ remembers Newsted. ‘It was
mostly drinking – I know that Kirk and Lars got into some powders and stuff like that, and I used to smoke some herb back then, but mostly [it was just] drink. And that was part of the deal – we were pretty wasted and [Hetfield and Ulrich] were trying to burn the candles at both ends, mixing the record and doing the shows at the same time.’

…
And Justice for All
was mixed at Bearsville Studios in Bearsville, a picturesque town situated amid the postcard vistas of the Catskill Mountains in Upstate New York. Opened in 1969 by Albert Grossman, the manager of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and the Band, in the intervening years the studio has been the site for music recorded by such artists as the Rolling Stones, REM and Patti Smith. With its high ceilings and wooden beams the facility is well-suited to the aesthetic of rural Upstate New York; what it is not, however, is easily accessible.

In order to reach Bearsville Hetfield and Ulrich were required to fly in to one of the three airports serving New York City and then drive for two hours towards the Catskills. With time as an enemy, the only plausible reason for situating themselves in such a remote location – and by doing so eschewing the facilities provided by the dozens of recording studios in both New York City and Los Angeles – was the belief that Bearsville Studios would enable the group to release an album the sound of which would be unlike any other album of its kind. In this they were right: it sounded worse.

In the years that have elapsed since the recording and release of what was for the longest time Metallica’s most divisive collection, few topics have been as widely discussed as to the nature of the sound heard on …
And Justice for All
. Many have glared in the direction of producer Flemming Rasmussen. The journalist Xavier Russell is not alone in his opinion that ‘the production on that record really let them down’ to the point where the writer believes the release amounts to nothing more than ‘one of the
worst-produced records I’ve ever heard – I just didn’t understand what they were trying to do. They lost me on [that album].’