Metallica: Enter Night (48 page)

But perhaps their most radical move was the announcement the following summer that they would be releasing a sequel to
Load
– smugly titled
Reload
and comprising those tracks that remained from the original
Load
sessions. The idea of recording two albums’ worth of material and releasing the second CD halfway through a lengthy world tour a year later was one Axl Rose had told Lars about back in 1990 – had been the plan, in fact, before record company compromise meant that Guns N’ Roses eventually released their two
Illusion
albums on the same day. Lars had always kept the idea in the back of his mind, though. The fact that it also helped service the new deal with Elektra, in terms of delivering another album quickly, could not have hurt either.

If only the album itself hadn’t been such a let-down. From its bland, uneventful cover – another Andres Serrano painting, this time titled
Piss and Blood
– another red-tinged amber landscape, with only one central swirl this time, resembling, perhaps, a woman’s vagina, to its copycat inner booklet – more Rorschach inkblots and snatches of lyrics in lots of daintily distressed fonts – to its similarly copycat music,
Reload
looked and sounded exactly like what it was: leftovers from the main course. Beautifully played, beautifully produced by Bob Rock, beautifully photographed by Corbijn and designed by Airfix, but as remarkable as a faded piece of fax paper.

There were highlights but they were few: the ferociously catchy opening track, ‘Fuel’, would have sounded at home on any previous Metallica album, its lyric a wonderfully concise metaphor for those who drive their lives like their cars: too fast. ‘The Memory Remains’, released as the first single, was another fine moment, on the surface an old-fashioned riff-heavy metal song, about the perils of stardom, only let down in its overcompensating desire to snazzy things up by featuring Marianne Faithfull in a completely perfunctory rasping cameo, da-da-da-ing to no discernible effect, other than the principal aim of making the band seem cool, even Hetfield getting sucked into the postmodern mire with his throwaway line: ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust, fade to black…’. The band would perform the song with Faithful on both
Top of the Pops
and
Saturday Night Live
, the latter helping push the single into the US Top Forty – their last appearance there for twelve years. The single of ‘Memory’ also contained the full 10:48 version of ‘The Outlaw Torn’, retitled ‘The Outlaw Torn (Unencumbered by Manufacturing Restrictions Version)’ along with an explanation on the single’s back cover of why the ‘cool-ass jam at the end of “Outlaw” got chopped’ from
Load
. Still wanting to have their cake and eat it, the ‘M’ from the original Metallica logo was now used to make a shuriken-like symbol known as the ‘Ninja Star’, which became an alternative logo on this and other future releases and merchandising items.

Less interesting but still somehow a cut above the rest of the album is ‘The Unforgiven II’, which comes with the same
Few Dollars More
intro as the original but then gives way to a plodding riff, although Hammett’s guitar almost saves it, the whole echoing the original melody and its restrained vocal, but ultimately collapsing under its inability to come up with something new and genuinely different. The only other half-decent track is ‘Low Man’s Lyric’, which at over seven minutes is far too long for this funereal-paced dirge, but does at least start out more interesting, the hurdy-gurdy (by Bernado Bigalli) and violin (by David Miles) adding a relief texture, with lyrics which appear to find James begging forgiveness for what sounds suspiciously like the infidelity of the long-distance rock star. It was like a bizarre sea shanty in which the captain begs not to go down with the ship.

Elsewhere, however, it was truly turgid fare such as ‘Devil’s Dance’, a poor attempt at stoner rock – then the coming thing – with lots of brilliantly played but pointless guitar; ‘Better Than You’, which sounds like it could have come from an inferior Nine Inch Nails or possibly Marilyn Manson session. ‘Can’t stop the train from rolling,’ James intones solemnly, like a sleepwalker. When the single version won the 1998 Grammy for ‘Best Metal Performance’ it was a toss-up between who was most sick: the group who recorded it to prove there was more to them than just metal, or the genuine metal fans who wouldn’t have been seen dead listening to it. Then there was the generic rock of the interchangeable ‘Slither’ and ‘Bad Seed’, the dreadfully titled, musically uneventful ‘Carp Diem Baby’, and, worst of all, the even more dreadfully titled ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, stolen from the children’s book but, unlike ‘Enter Sandman’, with nothing whatsoever added to it, musically or lyrically, to make you feel they’d enlarged or reconfigured the story, rather than just swiping the title ’cos it sounded ‘cool’. This last, also, tellingly, was the only track on
Load
or
Reload
where Jason gets a co-credit. Then just when you think it can’t possibly get any worse, there is ‘Prince Charming’. How low on inspiration, one wonders, did they have to be to come up with this melange of triteisms and factory-fodder riffs? ‘Attitude’ was another bottom-of-the-barrel title, presumably about James’ hunting fetish, but sounded more like Ratt in their heyday. ‘Whatever happened to sweat?’ James bellows. Whatever happened to riveting riffs and impassioned lyrics? Then finally ‘Fixxxer’, a monumentally awful title for a monumentally irritating song which goes on for an incredible eight minutes, convinced that it’s some sort of ‘Voodoo Chile’ for the pierced-labia generation. Perhaps it is.

Released onto an all-too-suspecting world on 18 November 1997,
Reload
did as it was supposed to and went straight to Number One in America, but only got as high as Number Four in the UK. It also did less well in Japan but just about managed to equal the success of
Load
elsewhere, in terms of chart positions. Overall, however, it barely sold half of what
Load
had done, which had sold less than half of what
Black
had done. Speaking in 2003, Bob Rock said he thought ‘people really recognise that era for their haircuts more than anything and you know it’s just like anybody, you want your bands to stay the way you love them and the way you want to hear them. It’s like I had the same thing when Led Zeppelin did
Led Zeppelin III
, it was mostly acoustic and I hated it; now it’s one of my favourites. People want bands to represent something and they want them to stay there. But I think history will show that those are really great albums and especially in the lyric department.’

While Rock was right about the extent to which more experimental albums, while not necessarily selling as well, are key components in extending the lifespan of a group’s career, it doesn’t alter the fact that musically
Reload
represents the nadir of Metallica’s recorded career. As grand experiments go, had they stopped at
Load
, history would now applaud them. As it stands,
Reload
stained that achievement considerably. Although they may not have realised it yet, Metallica – now the most famous, all-conquering heavy metal band in history, whatever clothes they wore – was about to enter the bleakest period of its career. A time of albums full of covers and rehashed old stuff; even an album of classical music versions of their greatest hits. A period when Lars would reveal himself to be a business-savvy, number-crunching brand-protector who would risk alienating his fans – to the point of actually prosecuting them, if needs be. When James’ demons would finally come home to roost to the extent he would need to rethink his role in life – and whether that included room for a group like Metallica. When Kirk would retreat back into the shadows, happy once again to settle for being the musical lynchpin between James and Lars, if only James and Lars would agree on anything at all; and in which Jason would finally tire of being the Newkid and do something about it, the only thing, in fact, he could: leave.

All of it, to a lesser or greater degree, was perfectly understandable, yet all of it was in danger of pulling the group apart as never before. Indeed, it would be another six years before Metallica was able to write and record a wholly new album and by then it was almost too late to save them.

From the first time I saw him – in London, at the 100 Club in 1987, the place so hot and crowded the sweat peeled from your face like old skin – to the last – turning up like a ghost in
Some Kind of Monster,
soft, sensitive eyes still full of anger, still trying to make the others see what only he could have seen – it seemed Jason was never entirely happy. He was just one those guys, big long face, taking everything so seriously, taking it all on his unhappily jutting chin. Not the kind of guy you’d ever see just cracking up laughing, not even after a doobie. One of those guys who meant well, who you just didn’t wanna be around for long, knowing you’d always fall short of his excruciatingly high expectations, like some never-grown character left behind from
The Catcher in the Rye.

It wasn’t just being in Metallica and what it had done to him; it seemed to be something that had been there long before that. An itch you couldn’t quite scratch. That was the feeling I got anyway whenever I saw him – either up-close, frowning about something, or entirely impersonal, far away on some stage that always looked just that little bit too big for him.

That first time at the 100 Club you couldn’t really tell anything, except that it wasn’t Cliff up there any more. Occasionally there would be a break in the human tide and you got a glimpse, a quick Polaroid flared around the edges…James, hunched over the mike, his right arm blurring away at the battered face of his Flying V…Lars at the back, furiously pumping arms and legs, a drowning man trying somehow to climb from the sea…Kirk in brief silhouette, his shadow, as always, appearing to flit in and out of sync with the rest…And the other one, the new kid, the only time you really noticed him was when he collapsed from the heat and the roadies rushed to try and revive him. Later – many months later – when we finally met, at the restaurant at the hotel in Miami, he’d snarled when he heard my name and denied anything of the kind had ever happened, and, who knows, maybe I did get it wrong, me and all the other people yelling and pointing. I had never experienced the 100 Club like that before. Not even during the punk years, at the club’s worst, had I witnessed scenes like that. The way the rest of the band shushed him down, though – laughed over the top of his protestations, like saying they didn’t care whether it had happened or not, just don’t blow our good scene – made me feel for him. Just another one of those accidental things that only mattered to him, the new kid, they seemed to be saying, the sense that things like that were happening to him all the time, that my inaccurate review had been just one more pin in his voodoo doll.

Then, years later, watching him in the movie, seeing the hurt in his face still so raw like he was on the verge of tears – angry, self-righteous tears – talking defensively about how his music was ‘my children’, in that way people who don’t have kids tend to do, I felt sorry for him all over again, in the way one does when one sees an animal in pain, the lack of a common language making the offer of comfort impossible, wanting to offer your hand but afraid it might get bitten.

Fourteen years, six albums and just three miserable co-write credits later, the impossible shadow of Cliff Burton looming ever larger with every year that passes, if joining Metallica was still the best thing that ever happened to Jason Newsted, then leaving them finally in order to regain control, some vestige of self-respect, was at least the second-best thing that ever happened to him. Truthfully, I only met him a few times, spoke to him even less often, and barely knew him at all, just read the signals he was constantly sending out, loud and clear, the same as everybody else. And now he was gone I wouldn’t miss him at all. Nobody would. Not like they still did Cliff. And that was the real nub of the problem right there. Nothing Jason Newsted did or does or will one day do can ever compare to all the things Cliff Burton didn’t live long enough to do or not do…

For Metallica, the years between
Reload
in 1997 and their next full-bore album,
St. Anger
, in 2003, were a wasteland. There were records and tours aplenty, endless news items and high-profile events, but essentially, when you got right down to it, there wasn’t anything great or new to say, few positive vibrations, very little upward trajectory. Just a long time staring down the barrel of a gun, as if daring the worst to happen; for someone to come along, as indeed they duly did, and point out that the emperor’s new clothes were, in fact, made of nothing more substantial than hot air. Having won over the music business by proving they weren’t such freaks after all, that they could happily coexist within the mainstream, retain credibility and still make hundreds of millions of dollars for everyone involved – shedding the thrash stigmata before beating the grunge hordes at their own game – the one enemy Metallica could not finally overcome, it seemed, was itself. No longer young, never remotely pretty, bloated by fame and success and full, suddenly, of the kind of hubris that had destroyed the original rock giants at whose feet they had once worshipped, Metallica now appeared more dead than alive, existing off past glories, one of the all-time greats, but of increasingly less relevance to those who would own the new century about to dawn.

In November 1998, exactly a year after
Reload
, had come the double CD,
Garage Inc
., its first disc comprising eleven newly recorded cover versions, its second disc a sixteen-track compilation of the original
Garage Days Revisited
EP/mini-album, plus all the covers recorded for their various singles’ B-sides over the years. With the new tracks recorded in the same spirit as the old – laid down as-live in the studio, warts and all (or as many as producer Bob Rock could, in all conscience, allow) – both CDs absolutely crackled with energy, providing a fine counterpoint to the airlessly manicured sound of
Load
and
Reload
, as though Metallica had rediscovered its inner animal. Yet there was a heavy air of contrivance hovering over the package like a bad smell. Released, in part, to combat bootleg sales of albums containing such relatively rare material,
Garage Inc
. was also an attempt to claw back some of the credibility with the metal community Metallica had sacrificed in its mid-1990s ‘reinvention’, while at the same time retaining the extra dimension of the band’s image Lars and Kirk had worked so hard to stimulate. So while the original Metallica logo returns to the front cover, the band shot – once again by Anton Corbijn – has them posing as grease monkeys outside their ‘garage’, with Lars, who doesn’t smoke, holding a cigarette, and Kirk still trying to look cool in eyeliner and sculpted tash, brandishing a stogie and a bottle of beer, odd accoutrements for a working mechanic. The accompanying booklet is once again designed by Andie Airfix and retains the same fashionably distressed look and feel as the
Load
and
Reload
designs, although its design places one foot deliberately in the past by reproducing the original artworks for the
Garage Days
and ‘Creeping Death’ twelve-inch vinyl sleeves, along with a series of chronologically arranged pictures and memorabilia from the archives going all the way back to the Mustaine era.

The choice of material on Disc One also reflects the desire to keep faith with the past while retaining their newly
à la mode
edge. Among the inevitable Diamond Head cover (‘It’s Electric’) and nod to the 1980s hardcore metal scene (a medley of Mercyful Fate songs), the whole thing is book-ended by covers of
two
songs by early Eighties Brit-punks Discharge (‘Free Speech for the Dumb’ and ‘The More I See’). There are also no less than five covers of signature tunes from 1970s bands that either directly influenced Metallica (‘Sabbra Cadabra’ by Black Sabbath; ‘Astronomy’ by Blue Öyster Cult; ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ by Thin Lizzy) or had had some impact since (‘Turn the Page’ by Bob Seeger, heard for the first time on his car radio as Lars was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge en route to his mansion in Marin County). There are also two indirect acknowledgements of the influence Cliff Burton had on the band in ‘Tuesday’s Gone’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd and ‘Die, Die My Darling’ by The Misfits. And, finally, one overt example of aligning themselves with the present generation of invulnerably credible rock goliaths in a commanding version of ‘Loverman’, from the 1994 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album,
Let Love In
.

Released in time for the Christmas gift-buying market,
Garage Inc
. satisfied the needs of a market geared to greatest hits packages, without the album actually being labelled as one, while at the same time both extending and consolidating the cross-promotional demographic of the now vastly disparate Metallica fan base. Fun but not too frivolous, lightweight but loaded with historical import, it was a credible stopgap to keep the band working out on the road while fulfilling its obligations to Elektra, Phonogram and Sony. Something for everybody, in fact – except perhaps the serious Metallica fans still waiting for the real follow-up to
Load
. As the
NME
noted in its review, Metallica may have grown up ‘on a diet of spandex, studs and the long-lamented New Wave of British Heavy Metal…speeding all that up and thrashing it around to the nth intense degree’, but on
Garage Inc
. ‘they come unstuck when they try to be trad, as with their sludge-boogie-plus-indulgence reading of Black Sabbath’s “Sabbra Cadabra”, or pub rock chug through “Whiskey in the Jar”. Meanwhile Blue Öyster Cult and Bob Seger covers, not to mention a sing-along Lynyrd Skynyrd power ballad, suggest middle-age spread affects the most terminally adolescent minds in the end.’

The result was yet another Number One hit in the USA, but a decidedly less successful release everywhere else, not least in the UK, where it scraped to Number Twenty-Nine – Metallica’s lowest chart position for a new album since
Master of Puppets
nearly thirteen years before. There were also three singles issued from
Garage Inc
. – ‘Turn the Page’, ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ and ‘Die, Die My Darling’. None of them even made the US Top 100, while only ‘Whiskey’ made the lower reaches of the UK Top Thirty. Even so, their version of a song that had been a Top Ten hit in Britain, in 1973, was derided for Hetfield’s misinterpretation of ‘
Wake for my daddio
’ as ‘
Whack for my daddio
’, due to Lizzy singer Phil Lynott’s Irish accent, thus rendering a key line of the chorus insensible. He was forgiven, though, if for no reason other than nobody really takes these cobbled-together packages terribly seriously. So it was – and remains – with
Garage Inc.

It was, however, a
tour de force
compared to what came next: another double CD, released just twelve months later, this time of a live orchestral performance, punningly titled
S&M
[Symphony and Metallica]. An ambitious collaborative project with celebrated classical composer Michael Kamen and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, recorded over two nights at the Berkeley Community Theater in April 1999, it presented a selection of Metallica songs rearranged for group and orchestra. This had been done before, of course, notably by Lars’ beloved Deep Purple, whose 1969 performance with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at London’s Albert Hall resulted in the
Concerto for Group and Orchestra
album. Since then, the idea that rock – that most grandiose and self-regarding of all pop idioms – might be wrought even larger by the addition of an eighty-piece symphony orchestra and conductor had been explored in several ways by various different artists; from the neo-classical stylings of progressive rock colossi such as Rick Wakeman, whose 1974 album
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
combined band, symphony orchestra and choir, to Emerson, Lake & Palmer, who performed regularly in America in the late 1970s with a full orchestra, and Roger Waters performing Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
in Berlin in 1990 with an East German symphony orchestra; via the less serious guitars-meets-cellos of the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) and the post-punk modernism of Malcolm McLaren and his 1984, proto-techno version of ‘Madam Butterfly’. Even the Scorpions had recorded an album with the Berlin Philharmonic,
Moment of Glory
, which followed just months, in fact, after Metallica’s.

Hardly a new idea then, Kamen, a fifty-year-old American orchestral composer, conductor and arranger mainly of film scores, had also worked previously with Pink Floyd, Queen, Eric Clapton, David Bowie and several other high-profile rock artists. It was in the wake of his original introduction to Metallica in 1991 by Bob Rock, who’d invited him to write an orchestral arrangement for ‘Nothing Else Matters’, that Kamen first suggested ‘some sort of collaboration’ on a grander scale. Eight years later he got his wish. According to Kamen, the idea was ‘to create a dialogue between two worlds that celebrate the power of music’. Aside from the financial motivation, which was significant – the chance to record another five-million-selling album out of essentially two nights’ work, along with the attendant redirection of buyers once again towards the band’s back catalogue – it was never really clear what Metallica actually hoped to demonstrate with the collaboration.

Kamen studied Metallica’s music for six months – the equivalent, he reckoned, of completing three movie soundtracks – scoring arrangements for twenty-one of their songs, including two new Hetfield/Ulrich compositions, ‘No Leaf Clover’ and ‘Human’. There had been an initial rehearsal with the SFSO’s principal players, followed by two lengthy rehearsals with both band and full orchestra, for which harpist Douglas Rioth arrived on a motorcycle, his tattooed arms clutching some Metallica CDs he would ask them to sign. ‘There’s also [some] snotty old bastards giving you the evil eye, like, “Fuck, you guys are cavemen. Your music sucks,”’ complained James. ‘But there were others that understood what we were trying to do; they could see that we fucking mean this shit, man. We have a passion in our music and our music is our life. They just grew up learning it different. They studied theory and we studied
UFO Live
.’ The show itself was also filmed, and later released on DVD. To promote the album and DVD, Metallica also performed single concerts with orchestras in Berlin and New York. Questioned after the Berlin show, however, James laughed it off. When they were first presented with the idea, he said, ‘We thought, “Fuck, that’s got failure written all over it. It’s like fucking in church. Let’s do it!”’ Playing down the whole thing still further, he added: ‘It would be fun to take [the orchestra] on tour and watch them fall into the debauchery hole and completely turn into rock ruins. Taking them on the road and watching one beer turn into five beers and all of a sudden they’re in jail, divorced and hooked on heroin and smashing their cellos onstage.’