Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (41 page)

This may have been so, but to those less indefatigable than Ulrich, the tour was tough. As Hetfield himself would confess, there were evenings where ‘after all the hoopla-bullshit after a gig and everything’ the front man would ‘go back and sit in [his] hotel room listening to [his] ears ring’.

‘I dunno, you sometimes wonder to yourself, “Just what the fuck am I doing this shit for?” When [the touring has been] going on a long time, you think, “Fuck, we could just go home right now.” But there’s always something the next day that spurs you on and keeps you goin’.’

Almost eighteen months after it had begun, Metallica’s Damaged Justice tour drew to a close on October 7, 1989, with the second of two appearances at the Projeto SP in Sao Paulo. Returning home to the Bay Area, the quartet afforded themselves the time needed both to draw breath and to cast their gaze over the remarkable successes of the preceding months. As the sun set on the commercial cycle for …
And Justice for All
(at least for the time being), its creators were able to look upon not one but two framed platinum discs equating to sales in the United States alone of more than two million copies, plaques which Ulrich
chose to hang on the walls of his home and which Hetfield did not. The pair also shared different opinions with regard to the amount of time their band would require in terms of shore leave: Hetfield believed that a period of six months’ rest was needed, while Ulrich thought three weeks should do the trick. Unusually, the two men compromised: Metallica stalled their engines for three months.

As a new decade dawned, the band once more began to stir themselves awake. In a move that spoke of hastily convened meetings in corporate boardrooms, on February 21, 1990, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded the quartet a Grammy in the category of Best Metal Performance, for ‘One’. This time, the band declined to attend the ceremony. Instead Hetfield and Ulrich busied themselves preparing the ground for what would eventually become Metallica’s fifth album. As if upending a box featuring the pieces of a vast and complex and jigsaw puzzle, the pair began to listen to riffs recorded on cassette tapes in hotel rooms and backstage utility rooms since the first days of the Monsters of Rock tour.

With no album to promote, in the spring the group took the unusual decision to head back out on the road, thus beginning what has become a long-standing Metallica tradition, that of touring for reasons other than simply to sell what some in the music industry call ‘product’. But with just eleven concerts on the docket for the whole of 1990, in terms of live appearances this was the quartet’s quietest year since the days before its members had ferried themselves and their belongings north on Interstate 5 in order to make a new home in Northern California.

In May Metallica arrived once more on British soil in order to embark on a tour that officially comprised just three dates. But in order to tune their engine in preparation for a European excursion that would include appearances at London’s Wembley Arena, Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre and the
Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow – on May 23, 25 and 26 respectively – the group once again performed in the English capital under an assumed identity. On a balmy spring evening on May 11, those waiting in line outside the Marquee club (at this point no longer situated on Wardour Street but on nearby Charing Cross Road) to see a performance by Metal Church learned that the support that night would be provided by a group named Vertigo. Unlike Metallica’s appearance at the 100 Club in 1987, the quartet’s set at the Marquee remained a closely guarded secret. This, combined with the fact that Metal Church were hardly a household name, meant that the support band’s nine-song set was witnessed by a venue barely half full.

The same, however, could not be said for Metallica’s triumvirate of billed appearances in England and Scotland’s only three arena venues at the time. And while in 1988 the quartet’s show at the National Exhibition Centre had attracted a crowd of 6,000 people, by May 1990 an audience of double this number arrived to fill the venue to capacity. In suburban north-west London, Wembley Arena also placed a ‘Sold Out’ sign above its front doors.

For anyone gathered in these vast rooms, the sight was of a powerful, muscular rock band that looked and sounded entirely at home. Whereas on the main body of the Damaged Justice tour Metallica had shared their stage with a towering ‘Lady Justice’ – a physical representation of the image from the front cover of …
And Justice for All
(nicknamed, inevitably, ‘Edna’) – that would collapse at the end of each set, for the handful of dates commissioned in 1990 the band performed without recourse to any visual embellishments. On a stage adorned only with a symmetrical backline of amplifiers and the centrepiece of Ulrich’s drumkit, the performers no longer appeared to be ‘hairballs strapped with guitars’ or boys with ‘teeth in need of a good dental plan’ – as had been the opinion of the
St Petersburg Times
,
following the quartet’s Monsters of Rock appearance at the Tampa Stadium – but were instead men who had learned to harness their collective power in a manner both efficient and economical.

As Metallica bid Britain farewell in 1990, a new process of simplification had already begun.

10 – NOTHING ELSE MATTERS

It was in an anonymous hotel room that Metallica’s fifth album first flickered into life. On the road as part of the Damaged Justice tour, Kirk Hammett found himself occupying the dreaded hours between curtain call and sleep by loudly playing his guitar in yet another identikit bedroom – ‘I was,’ he recalls, ‘all fired up.’ To help while away the time, Hammett regarded the instrument in his hands and decided to try ‘to write the heaviest thing I could think of’. In doing so, and in committing the result of this endeavour to tape, Hammett placed his fingers on the chords and notes of what would become the spine of Metallica’s most widely recognised song, ‘Enter Sandman’.

Lars Ulrich first heard these building blocks following his band’s appearance at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow on May 26, 1990. The chord sequence was just one of scores contained on a cassette known as the ‘Riff Tape’. Fortunately for the drummer listening to this tape, the riff that caught his ear just happened to occupy pride of place as the first recording on ‘Side A’ of the home-made cassette. This first impression was not one that Ulrich would quickly forget.

As the drummer listened to Hammett’s riff, his mind went to work. He was the one responsible for placing the component parts of Metallica’s music into structural form, and he recognised not only the fact that a song equated to more than its central riff – a point of view not universally shared by metal acts of the time – but that these riffs themselves could amount to more than a sequence of chords repeated as many times as was required before giving way to a chorus. The piece of music
submitted by Hammett, however, differed significantly from the song that would be presented to listeners as the curtain raiser for Metallica’s fifth album some fourteen months later. Instead of a riff that was repeated three times and then completed by what is known in songwriting circles as ‘a tail’ – in the case of ‘Enter Sandman’, a sequence of power chords the crunch of which was accentuated by the palm of Hetfield’s right hand – Hammett’s original submission took the more symmetrical form of one rendition of the first part of the riff –
der ner, der ner ner
– followed by the tail. To Ulrich his band mate’s idea sounded great. What it did not equate to, however, was the door-smashing hit single cum statement-of-intent that the drummer envisaged by the time he had pressed the ‘Pause’ button on his tape deck. But with an ear for song structure that was both pronounced and sophisticated, Ulrich knew just how to transform a fine idea into a song that would be worth its weight in platinum.

‘There was something about this record [even] from the days that we started writing “[Enter] Sandman” that sounded like a motherfucker,’ recalls the drummer.

Rather than pretend that the group was some kind of working democracy, in preparation for the recording of their next studio album, Metallica divided itself into two halves. Jason Newsted and Kirk Hammett formed one camp, and were placed on shore leave; James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich comprised the other, and this pair went to work. Flush with the fruits of success from …
And Justice for All
, Ulrich had finally bid farewell to suburban Carlson Boulevard and had relocated to a home amid the vibrant boulevards and suspension bridges of San Francisco proper. As befitted a wealthy musician, the drummer’s new address included as part of its facilities an eight-track recording studio the space for which was carved into the rock of one of the city’s many vertiginous hills. Metallica’s days of soundproofing
garages with pieces of two by four and rows of empty egg cartons were officially now behind them.

Each day Hetfield and Ulrich would convene in this home studio and knit together pieces of music. Whereas this job of work as it related to …
And Justice for All
was a process as complicated as locating ‘the God particle’, in the summer of 1990 the pair’s approach to making music had undergone a deliberate transformation. In place of musical wanderings the technical specifications of which were, as Jason Newsted memorably put it, ‘double-black diamond’, the guitarist and drummer concentrated on two qualities largely unheard on their band’s previous album: simplicity and groove.

‘By the end of the last tour “Seek & Destroy” had practically become my favourite song in the set,’ recalls Ulrich. ‘It had so much bounce and groove [that I] could really just sit there and play it without worrying about when the next
quadruple-backwards
-sideways paraddidle came in.’ Conversely, the drummer remembers that ‘about halfway through the [Damaged] Justice tour I was sitting there playing these nine-minute songs thinking, “Why am I sitting here worrying about how perfect these nine-minute songs have to be when we play stuff like ‘Seek & Destroy’ and ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and [both songs] have such a great fucking vibe?”’

One aspect regarding the material heard on …
And Justice for All
that has largely gone unexamined, is the physical and mental toll of playing these songs live. Throughout the sixty-five minutes of the group’s fourth album, Metallica had gone to extraordinary lengths to make life difficult for themselves. Even by the standards of modern metal, passages of music such as those heard prior to the final chorus of ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ or at any point in the bewildering ‘Dyers Eve’ pushed the group towards the limits of each member’s technical abilities. In addition this music then had to be performed to vast numbers of people gathered together
not so much to hear a concert as to see a show. At the time the band embarked on the Damaged Justice tour, Metallica were known for live performances that were interactive rather than passive experiences, demanding connections both emotional and physical. The group onstage were more than performers, they were ringleaders. For the quartet to have appeared before their audience only to then stare fixedly at the fretboards of their guitars while playing ‘… And Justice for All’ or ‘One’ would have seen energy levels in the room fall to an unacceptably low wattage. That Metallica learned to project themselves to those in the cheapest seats of North America’s largest indoor arenas while playing songs of fiendish complexity is an achievement for which the group has never quite received adequate credit.

‘Halfway through the [Damaged] Justice tour, we came offstage one night,’ recalls Ulrich. ‘We’d just played “Blackened”, “One”, “Eye of the Beholder”, “… And Justice for All’ and “Harvester [of Sorrow]” – and we were, like, “This shit is fucked up to play.” It was really difficult. Every night became an exercise in not fucking up – our whole purpose was not to fuck up. We just decided it was stupid. It was our first go-round in the arenas, and we were playing with our minds, not with our bodies or our guts. It wasn’t physical; it was mental … So we were, like, “Enough of this.” We’d taken that side of Metallica to the end – there was no place else to go with it … When me and James started writing [material for the group’s fifth album] we listened to the Misfits, the Rolling Stones, AC/DC – all these bands that wrote three-minute songs.’

For Metallica such thinking amounted to a root and branch reform of the group’s entire modus operandi. Everything in which the quartet had previously believed was placed under scrutiny. Musicians whose talents had previously been dismissed – in Ulrich’s case, economical drummers such as Charlie Watts from the Rolling Stones and Phil Rudd from AC/DC – were
re-evaluated, this time correctly. Whereas previously Ulrich had been so keen to establish a style that was different from other players of his type as to become the world’s fussiest musician, in 1990 the Dane relaxed his grip and learned to place himself at the service of a song. In the drummer’s new home studio, Hetfield proved willing to do the same, authoring a fresh batch of riffs more aerated and thus even more powerful than any to which he had attached his name before. Things that had previously seemed important were suddenly rendered impossibly insignificant. For all four of his band’s previous albums Ulrich had taken a keen interest in the duration of each song – the implication being that the greater a composition’s length, the better – to the extent that the running time of each track was featured on the back cover of every release.

‘I used to be really proud of it,’ explains the drummer. ‘In the past we’d do a rough version of a song and I’d go home and time it and go, “It’s only seven and a half minutes!” I’d think, “Fuck, we’ve got to put another couple of riffs in there.” Now I’m not bothered either way.’

In time a number of those who would hear the results of Metallica’s re-imagined approach to songwriting would conclude that the results had become corrupted by compromise and contrivance. What is odd, however, is that few of these people seem to recognise the contrivance inherent in the desire to write a song of as great a length as possible simply for its own sake. Within the strictly codified metal world, when a band states in an interview that their latest album is the result of their attempts to write the heaviest music possible, overwhelmingly their audience will regard this as artistically honourable. Conversely, were a group to announce that their latest LP showcases their efforts to write the catchiest collection of songs ever heard, noses will concertina with distaste. In eschewing convolution and seeking to focus upon simplicity of purpose, Metallica were viewed by many as
being guided by commercial expediency for the first time in their career. But while it was the case that the new aerodynamic sound the band was set to unveil did play more easily on the ear than much of the material of the past, such a circumstance did not render the enterprise inherently dishonest. In fact the manner in which Metallica manoeuvred themselves from the corner into which …
And Justice for
All
had painted them was as artful as it was natural.

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?”’