Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (39 page)

One key distinction between Metallica and even the heaviest of metal bands plying a trade in 1988 was the gravitas of the group’s lyrics. For most acts of the type in the late 1980s, the words
printed on a lyric sheet were merely an afterthought. Whether it be Iron Maiden spinning yarns of prophets peering into crystal balls in ‘Can I Play with Madness’ or Slayer revelling in the topic of abortion – ‘extraction, termination, pain’s agonising stain’ – on ‘Silent Scream’, the words sung were tailored to the bespoke specification of the music rather than from any kind of personal investment on the part of the lyricists themselves. For James Hetfield, though, the more words he wrote the more he revealed of his complex and troubled inner self. As these primal screams were hurled into the darkness, a sea of restless and disenfranchised listeners stirred with an attentiveness unreserved for other groups of their type.

There were, though, exceptions to this rule. With a body of work featuring songs about such topics as the desire to escape from a mental hospital and a toll placed upon Egyptians levied in the form of a first-born son, it would be folly to suggest that Hetfield was not above dirtying his hands with heavy metal clichés. Worse yet, on some parts of …
And Justice for All
the writer appears to be suffering from a tin ear. Not for one moment of the nine minutes and forty-four seconds it takes for its authors to slog their way through the album’s title track does one believe that Hetfield is ever fully engaged with the subject about which he is singing. With its title cribbed from Norman Jewison’s 1979 film of the same name, as a sentiment expressed in song ‘… And Justice for All’ is as compelling as a legal argument filibustering its way from the floor of the House of Representatives. Brittle and artless, Hetfield sings of the ‘halls of justice [being] painted green’ and of ‘money talking’ before concluding that ‘justice is lost, justice is raped, justice is gone’, a ruling that fails to examine the plight of those who suffer from this state of affairs, or how. ‘It was,’ remembers Xavier Russell, ‘like Ross Halfin used to say: “Justice is this, Justice is that, Justice is nine and a half minutes long.”’

‘I call […
And Justice for All
] the complaining album,’ recalls Hetfield. ‘Lyrically, we were really into social things, watching CNN and the news all the time, and realising that other people really do kinda control your life. The movie …
And Justice For All
turned our heads a little bit. We discovered how much money influences certain things, and discovered how things work in the United States. How things might seem okay on the outside, but internally, they’re corrupt.’

Elsewhere, though, the front man’s recollections regarding his thoughts as expressed on …
And Justice for All
take a different form. ‘It’s not me sitting and reading the paper, going, “Oh, I have to write about terrorists; it’s a good subject, real popular now,” he says, before identifying ‘drinking’ as being the muse from which the album’s many bitter fruits would blossom.

‘Really [it was] drinking and thinking, [just] seeing what’s going on around me,’ Hetfield recalls.

What is most striking, however, is not that Metallica chose to author songs concerning the environmental plight of the planet, or against those who should choose to attack one’s personal liberty, but how such topics should be articulated by a lyricist whose point of view was grim and tenaciously pessimistic. By the time the album’s opening song, ‘Blackened’, has drawn to a close, Hetfield has had cause to employ the words ‘death’, ‘dead’ and ‘dying’ no fewer than ten times.

Despite all this, or because of it, …
And Justice for All
flew out of the world’s record shops in numbers normally associated with albums propelled by hit singles. A week after its release, Metallica’s latest album debuted at no. 6 in the US
Billboard
Hot 200 and at no. 4 on the UK album chart. By the end of the year, the nine-song set would have found its way into the homes of 1.7 million listeners in the United States alone.

‘I can remember being pretty shocked when I was talking to a record company person after […
And Justice For All
] was
finished, right before it was actually released,’ remembers Kirk Hammett. ‘He was like, “Yeah man, it’s probably going to sell a million [copies] in the first couple of weeks.” And I was like, “No way.” And he was like, “Yes, way.” I thought it was too heavy and too progressive and there was no way it would sell that much. But you know what? It sold more in those first two weeks than he even talked about. We were [touring in] Europe when it was released, and it charted really high – the highest we’d ever charted in the States. It was insane. We just couldn’t believe it … it all just came together. All the right things happened at the right time. It was just our time, I guess.’

Elsewhere, one of Hetfield’s most vivid memories of his group’s first million-selling album came when ‘some friends of mine called me up and went, “Hey man – I hear you went platinum!” [They said] “Just quit and come home, give up and start a new thing. The new thing is to quit.” Can you imagine [the headline]? “Metallica goes platinum and quits!”’

Metallica, of course, were about to do no such thing. Propelled by unflinching music and the attentions of a fan base that was already beginning to take on the appearance of one of the most dedicated in modern music, the quartet merrily kicked and punched their way through walls with an ease that suggested no obstacle was sufficient to detain them. On September 24 the quartet arrived in Scotland for the first of two appearances at the Playhouse Theatre in Edinburgh in what would be the opening night of a fourteen-date tour of Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland. Supported by the muscular yet ominous thud of Danzig – the titular group founded by former Misfits and Samhain front man Glenn Danzig – the excursion saw the headliners improve their station by performing their first arena show on English soil (a date at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre on September 29) as well as finding themselves embedded beneath the Westway in London for a three-night stand at the Hammersmith Odeon,
a venue no better suited to a band of Metallica’s hue than it had been two years earlier.

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.