Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (40 page)

On being shown the finished video for ‘One’, however, Metallica were worried about putting their name to a music video that did not feature much music. Michael Salomon remembers that the band were ‘taken aback by how much of the movie I put in there’.

‘It’s a complicated story and to do it with just one or two sound bites here and there really wouldn’t have made it,’ says the film-maker. ‘Basically every time there was an extended intro or solo I covered the whole thing up. The musician side of them said, ‘That’s not cool, we don’t get to hear the music.’ I think they realised, though, that the story element was more important.’

‘We managed to avoid the bright-lights shit,’ recalls Lars Ulrich. ‘The focus was to have something with a strong storyline running through it as opposed to us running around with lights and ramps and shit. It just seemed that we had to do something radically different. We decided that if [the video clip] was not what we wanted we’d throw it in the garbage can. [But] Pretty early on we felt we had something special on our hands; whether it was great or shit, it meant something.’

After viewing the clip MTV were of a mind to bury the thing under a rock. Speaking to Cliff Burnstein – the man who had introduced Hetfield to the book
Johnny Got His Gun
in the first instance – a representative of the then all-conquering music channel told the band’s co-manager that the only way the clip would be viewed on television was on the news, whatever that meant.

Metallica would eventually edit the video clip for ‘One’ to a length more manageable than its original eight-minute duration (in fact ultimately the clip would be cut into three different versions). The film in its original (and best) form, though, made its world première on MTV’s
Headbangers Ball
on January 22 1989, an appearance which, despite the forewarnings of the representative that had spoken to Cliff Burnstein, had been heavily trailed so as to attract the attentions of the band’s ever-growing fan base. Once aired, the video quickly became the most heavily requested item on the programme’s roster. This allowed Metallica to escape the confines of the weekly two-hour slot occupied by
Headbangers Ball
and to make their break for the wider waters of MTV’s evening playlist. Within weeks, the song found itself occupying the no. 1 slot on MTV’s weekly video countdown, the first time such a feat had been achieved by a metal band.

‘I remember watching the video for the first time and thinking, “Wow, this is like nothing else that’s on MTV right now. I can’t believe they’re actually playing it,”’ recalls Kirk Hammett. ‘That was mind-blowing to me. I remember sitting there one night, watching MTV and all this crap they were playing, and then our video came on. When it was over the VJ [Video Jockey] came on and said, “Wow, that’s depressing. On a happier note, here’s Huey Lewis and the News!”’

With a Top 10 album and a promotional music video that was both a creative and commercial smash, Metallica were
beginning to take on the appearance of a band that belonged in the mainstream. Yet if this were the case, the quartet occupied a space
in
the mainstream without remotely conforming to the tides emanating from it.

But if the band did not think much of the esteemed company with whom they now brushed shoulders, the feeling was mutual. In a manner that would exceed the flourishes of the pen of even the most daring of dramatists, this impasse of mistrust was given full expression live on American network television. The occasion was the 31st Grammy Awards, held on February 22, 1989 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. A gathering of the music industry’s most (commercially) successful acts as well as the power-brokers and kingmakers in operation away from the spotlight, ‘the Grammys’ was the Super Bowl of the record business, the evening when the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences handed out sashes and gongs to what it believed to be its most deserving of subjects. 1989 was the first year this body recognised the genres of heavy metal and rap, and it was in the former category that Metallica were nominated. Along with this, the quartet were invited to perform ‘One’ live from the stage of the Shrine Auditorium.

That Metallica were offered such a berth was a remarkable concession on the part of a body that had certainly never before given house-room to a group of this kind. The quartet’s place in the running order was as unlikely as the Sex Pistols being offered the chance to perform at the Royal Variety Performance a decade or so earlier. As with the English group, the Bay Area band were in large part defined by the things against which they stood in opposition. The invitation from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences offered the first hint that Metallica were soon to run out of avenues for rebellion.

‘It was a new thing for us,’ recalls Hetfield. ‘I remember our manager coming and saying, ‘They want you to play the Grammys.
I thought, “Oh man, I don’t wanna fuckin’ be a part of this crap.” But then [again] it was, like, hey, this is an opportunity. You don’t get to do this every day, a chance to get on national TV and show all these boring fucks what we’re all about. So we kinda turned the whole thing round to our advantage, instead of kinda running away and hiding from it.’

It was in this spirit of open-armed embrace that Metallica arrived at the Shrine Auditorium in order to sound check in preparation for their first ever appearance on network television. Amid the flurry of runners with clipboards and producers with schedules buffeted by the countless commercial breaks seen on American TV, the band were issued with a list of things prohibited by the live broadcast. This news warily digested, the musicians proceeded to position themselves on the stage and in front of 6,300 empty seats began to play ‘One’. Thirty-three seconds into the song, as Ulrich’s drums punctured the tranquil soundscape established by Hetfield and Hammett’s guitars, Metallica were forced to abandon their efforts as a functionary stormed their stage and told the band that there was no way they would be permitted to make that kind of racket on a prime-time television show.

Come the evening of the performance itself, Metallica proved willing to cut their cloth to the demands of the occasion. Appearing on a stage designed as if to resemble an alleyway behind the kind of hotel to which the police are called on a regular basis, the group performed a number truncated by more than two minutes from its original length. Neither the sight nor the sound of the performance is particularly edifying. Throughout the song’s two verses and three choruses, Hetfield’s vocals drift in and out of tune, while behind him, illuminated only by gloomy back-lighting, a topless Ulrich flails around like something that lives in a bin on Sesame Street. Most striking of all though is the impression that the musicians are playing for the benefit of
a brick wall. Throughout the performance, the camera declines to transfer its attentions from the people onstage to those in the audience, an editorial decision that lends the clip a functional quality shorn of human emotion.

‘Looking out there and seeing people’s faces, and all these black and white tuxes [was strange],’ remembers James Hetfield. In words dismissive even by his own standards, the front man recalls how ‘everyone had rented their nice fuckin’ suit, and were sitting down and were expecting some nice little awards show. It was like, “Oh, we’ll have a cocktail,” all this kinda crap. “Ahhhh, terrific, let’s do lunch!” All that crap. Then we got up there and just started bashing away. [The audience] basically had to clap. I’m sure if they were sitting there by themselves, there’s no way they would have clapped. They would have got up and left!’

When it came time for Metallica to leave, they did so
empty-handed
. Nominated alongside AC/DC, emerging alternative rock pioneers Jane’s Addiction, English folk-rock eccentrics Jethro Tull and Ann Arbor proto-punk icon Iggy Pop, the award for Best Hard Rock [and] Metal Performance (Vocal or Instrumental) was presented by veteran Michigan shock-rocker Alice Cooper and former Runaway-turned-power rock bombshell Lita Ford. As Cooper opens a cream-coloured envelope inside which is written the winner’s name, even years performing to the unflappable standards of vaudeville cannot fully prevent the briefest look of shock from troubling his face. Immediately, though, the showbiz troubadour gathers himself and speaks to the audience.

‘And the winner is … Jethro Tull.’

Moments before, as the nominees were listed by the presenters, the camera fell upon Metallica. With just two acts present at the Shrine Auditorium – Iggy Pop being the other artist in the category that deemed the ceremony worthy of his time – the viewer’s attention is captured by a manic Lars Ulrich, grinning expectantly like a child at the first light of Christmas morning.
As the winner is announced from the stage, the camera remains fixed on the podium rather than returning to afford the audience at home the chance to pity or savour the reaction on Ulrich’s face. As for Jethro Tull, neither they nor their label Chrysalis accepted the Academy’s invitation to attend that year’s ceremony, convinced that they would not win.

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.’