Metallica: Enter Night (36 page)

Metallica, self-styled dwellers of a permanent midnight world where clean-cut early risers such as Bon Jovi were considered the enemy, had been put in their place it seemed. What neither James Hetfield or Jon Bon Jovi – nor even Lars Ulrich, for all his secret dreams – could have foreseen was how drastically their positions would change over the next five years, and that it would be Metallica, bad boys dressed in black, who would ascend towards the heart of the sun, while Bon Jovi, once so untainted, would plunge like Icarus into the raging sea below, a reversal in fortunes so improbable that not even Peter Mensch could have considered it.

Or could he?

‘Hey, man,’ said Kirk, ‘you can do something about that, you know?’ We were standing in the dressing room at the Newcastle City Hall. Onstage, Glen Danzig, once of The Misfits, now fronting his new self-named band, was doing the crowd a big favour by playing for them.

‘About what?’

‘Your hair. You’re receding. Do something about it now, though, and you can fix it.’

I stared at him. He had caught me off guard. My hair? We were talking about my hair? I tried to play it cool, like who cares?

‘Uh huh, and what’s that?’

‘Rogaine, man,’ he smiled. ‘You know it?’

I did actually. That is, I had heard of something similar: Regaine.

‘Same thing, man,’ he said. ‘Minoxidil, right?’

My hairdresser had mentioned it to me the last time I’d had my hair cut but I was so taken aback I’d pushed it to the back of mind. Now this. Was my hair really doing that badly people were now just coming up to me and mentioning it?

‘No, man,’ said Kirk, ‘I just see it because I see it in me, too.’

I looked at his hair. Long, black, curly, kind of a high forehead but otherwise…what the fuck was he talking about? And to me?

‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘you should try it. Before it’s too late…’ He walked off.

Later that night, over a beer and a spliff, I mentioned it to Big Mick the sound guy. Mick and I often ended up together whenever I was with Metallica. He couldn’t get good black hash in the USA, and I could rarely get good strong weed at home in London, not in the late Eighties. So we helped each other out. Somehow in Newcastle we’d both got what we were looking for. It was a day off the next day so Mick and the crew were holed up at the hotel with the band.

‘What’s this Kirk’s going on about,’ I said, ‘Rogaine? Regaine? Do you know it?’

‘Oh, Christ,’ he said. ‘It’s Kirk’s new thing. We’re carrying fucking truck-loads of it on this tour. Between that and the fucking statue there’s hardly any room for the equipment.’

Mick, with his thick, shoulder-length hair, wasn’t the kind of guy who needed to trouble himself with the ins and outs of this one so he made a joke about it instead, in lieu of changing the subject to something – anything – else. Still, I was intrigued. The next time I saw Kirk, I asked him about it.

‘Sure, man,’ he said, ‘you just rub it into your scalp like every day. You have to do it every day or it won’t work. But it’s cool. You should really try it,’ he said again. ‘Before it’s too late…’

In the careers of the most successful rock artists, certain albums become such landmark releases they afford them a certain leeway with whatever they decide to do next. When that album comes near enough to the start of an artist’s career, however, to constitute a significant breakthrough – commercially or artistically, or best of all both – if they are savvy, the logical next step is to make the follow-up along similar lines, thereby cementing their growing status among both their core constituency of fans, and keeping faith with the record company they depend on to work hard for them, plus promoters, agents, and their various media partners. Once that job is done, their fan base substantial and secure, they can then wrestle with the formula if they want to on subsequent releases. What they aren’t advised to do is risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater by trying something completely different with their breakthrough follow-up.

This was the position Metallica found themselves in 1987 when it came to planning their fourth album: not just the follow-up to their breakthrough hit,
Master of Puppets
, but their first without Cliff Burton. The logical, safe option would have been to make a conscious sequel, in effect
Master II
; to both cash in on their now-established winning formula and prove that Burton’s replacement by Jason Newsted had been achieved seamlessly. When, however, Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield came to sit down and talk about it one afternoon in October 1987, while winding through the
Riff Tapes
– the compilation of bits and pieces they routinely compiled between albums, little ideas that had emerged at soundcheck maybe, or odd musical movements Lars would hum and James would turn into chords on his guitar – they decided not to follow any of these rules and instead go for broke with something so completely different from what had come before as to be virtually unrecognisable from the Metallica template as established over their first three albums.

Or rather, Lars did. High on the million-selling success around the world of the
Garage Day
s single EP and mini-album CD, and unduly taken with the rule-breaking sound of the debut album from a bunch of LA ne’er-do-wells called Guns N’ Roses, he felt the time had come for Metallica to jettison the thrash lifeboat completely and go for a whole new approach. James, inured after years of putting up with Lars’ non-stop talk of world domination, yet still lost and unsure how to proceed without Cliff’s bullshit-o-meter to guide them, merely nodded his head. What did it mean anyway, all this talk of ‘adding new elements to the sound’ that Lars was so fond of expounding on? They would just put the songs together as usual and see what came up, right?

Certainly there was nothing new to their approach in that respect, the two working from home alone on a four-track, with Kirk invited down at a later stage to consider his guitar parts, and Jason not invited at all on the pretext that, with only four tracks to work with, there was no room for bass at that stage anyway. As a result, of the nine tracks eventually slated for the album – all essentially Hetfield/Ulrich compositions – just three would also bear Kirk’s surname, just one Jason’s, plus one Cliff’s, a posthumous work melded from ‘some bits and pieces’ the bass player had left on tape, over which James intoned a four-line poem the bassist had also left behind entitled ‘To Live is to Die’. In fact, the only big difference initially was the decision to record the album closer to home this time, in Los Angeles, a choice rooted, paradoxically, in a newfound conservatism – at least, away from the stage – and their sudden desire to be close to their various partners.

This was one aspect of their lives the young Metallica went out of their way to keep off-limits from the press, even the almost venally loquacious Lars, who became uncharacteristically tongue-tied the first time he introduced me to his English-born wife, Debbie. A fun, fair-haired, plain-talking girl from the Midlands, the two had met during the band’s stay in London in 1984 and married early in 1987, during the brief hiatus when James was still nursing his broken wrist. It wasn’t that Lars hid his wife from the press, it just happened to be one of the very few things he didn’t talk at length about. Plus, ladies’ man Lars didn’t like to think of anyone cramping his style and while he clearly loved being around Debbie, the marriage was doomed to end just three years later. These, after all, were Lars’ wild years and, with the band finally taking off, no time to be married to its principal party animal. As he later said, for a while they had considered naming their next album,
Wild Chicks, Fast Cars and Lots of Drugs
, such was the state of play in Metalliworld at the time. How could any homespun, working-class English girl hope to compete with that?

Kirk, too, had chosen just this moment to marry his pretty American girlfriend, Rebecca (Becky), the two tying the knot in December, just a few weeks before the band began work on the new album. From the outside, Kirk and Becky looked like the perfect couple, almost a mirror image of each other, with their long curly hair, elfin faces and large brown eyes. Becky was ditzy, airy-fairy, and fitted in neatly with Kirk’s own public persona as the roach-sucking, comic-book-collecting, easygoing hippy minstrel. In fact, there was a new edge starting to emerge in the guitarist’s character as he began living out his own rock star fantasies, sometimes involving Becky, sometimes not, and cocaine began to take preference over marijuana as his drug of choice. Their marriage, too, would end after just a few short years.

Jason, who had split from his longstanding girlfriend Lauren Collins, a college student from Phoenix, shortly after joining Metallica, now became involved with a new girlfriend, Judy, who would become the first Mrs Newsted over the coming year, although they got divorced even quicker than Lars or Kirk, deciding they’d made a mistake almost immediately. The only one who didn’t get married at this point was James, and he, ironically, was the one perhaps most deeply in love. Indeed, his girlfriend Kristen Martinez would later inspire one of Metallica’s best-loved songs and one of the cornerstones of their far more widespread popularity in the 1990s, ‘Nothing Else Matters’. That was the only time James even semi-acknowledged his affair with Kristen publicly, even going as far as to later claim not to have written the song about her at all, so deep was his hurt when they too broke up in the wake of Metallica’s now rocketing success.

That, however, was in the future. There were no love songs planned for the fourth Metallica album. Instead, Lars was determined to place the emphasis on a new, harder edge, and he wanted to record quickly, unlike
MOP
, which even he agreed had taken too long. Besotted with the Guns N’ Roses album,
Appetite for Destruction
, which contained so many swear words radio wouldn’t play it, most of all he wanted to ensure Metallica didn’t get left behind by what he called ‘the new dicks on the block’. He later recalled listening to the first single from the
Appetite
album, ‘It’s So Easy’, on a flight home to San Francisco and being unable to believe the unashamed misogyny of the line, ‘Turn around bitch, I got a use for you’, nor the pay-off at the end of the final verse when singer W. Axl Rose yells ‘Why don’t you just…fuck off!’ ‘It just blew my fuckin’ head off,’ Lars excitedly told James. ‘It was the way Axl said it. It was so venomous. It was so fucking real and so fucking angry.’ It was the start of an obsession with Axl and Guns N’ Roses that would eventually see both bands touring together, although it would not be one shared with James.

When it became apparent that Flemming Rasmussen, their nominal choice to record with again, would not be available as quickly as they would have liked, Lars, secretly delighted, seized on the situation to put forward a more exciting alternative: Mike Clink, the Baltimore-born producer who’d overseen the recording of
Appetite for Destruction
. Clink had begun his career as an engineer at New York’s Record Plant studios, assisting producer Ron Nevison on hit albums by soft rock giants such as Jefferson Starship, Heart and, most notably, Survivor’s huge 1982 hit single and album,
Eye of the Tiger
. Clink’s main attributes, according to GN’R guitarist Slash, were ‘incredible guitar sounds and a tremendous amount of patience’. Smart enough to realise the records he’d made before were essentially ‘pop albums’, he’d listened carefully when Slash had played him Aerosmith albums in preparation for the
Appetite
sessions. Interestingly, the album Axl had asked him to take special note of had been Metallica’s
Ride the Lightning
.

With One on One studios in North Hollywood booked for the first three months of 1988, Lars asked Mensch to put a deal together that would bring in Clink as producer of the new album. Clink, a shrewd operator looking for a project that would extend his newfound reputation as the go-to guy for cutting-edge rock bands, was intrigued enough by the approach to accept at first time of asking. Nevertheless, on the surface it seemed an odd fit: Clink was known for capturing a looser, bluesy, as-live feel in the studio, while Metallica were known more for their almost icily precise sheet-metal riffs and machine-like rhythms. Somehow it would be Clink’s job to marry the two. As he says now, ‘They hired me because they enjoyed [and] really liked the Guns N’ Roses records.’ However, the message he got in his initial conversation with Q Prime, ‘was that they do things the Metallica way. And I didn’t really know what that was until I got into the middle of it.’

James was even less sure. No fan, he, of the GN’R record, as far as James could see, Clink wasn’t anything special, just another of Lars’ passing fancies. He watched patiently while they searched for a drum sound that seemed to match whatever requirements were going through both Lars’ and Mike’s heads, then lost patience when it came to his guitar sound. Although they managed to do what they always did at the start of an album and lay down a couple of rough-hewn covers in order to iron out any potential problems – in this case, Budgie’s ‘Breadfan’ and Diamond Head’s ‘The Prince’, tracks so rough they made the material on the
Garage Days
EP sound polished – instead of smoothing out their differences, it only highlighted how far apart their thinking still was, especially between Hetfield and Clink. ‘I just flipped out,’ said James, ‘couldn’t hang with it any more.’

Says Clink now, ‘As much as I believe they wanted me to put my magic on the tracks, I think that they were used to doing things on their own and doing it their own way.’ He adds, pointedly, ‘I always felt that I was in the wings, waiting until Flemming got free or they could convince him to work on the record [because] at that moment in time it just wasn’t working…they bristled at the fact of someone trying to tell them what to do. And I think it was as much my fault as their fault. You know, I had just come off of the Guns N’ Roses record and doing things my way, and having my say. And I kind of ran into a bit of a brick wall and it was difficult for me.’ Clink also felt that ‘the absence of Cliff was a little unsettling to them – in the back of their minds maybe they wanted something more familiar, because that was a big step without him’.

Whatever the real problem was, by the end of the third week of recording, Lars was on the phone to Flemming, virtually begging him to rearrange his schedule and fly out to rescue the sessions. ‘Lars called me [and] said they were going nowhere and they were getting fed up with it and asked if I was available just in case,’ says Rasmussen. ‘I told him I had a lot of gigs booked and if he needed me there I should know pretty fast. I got called up the next day and he said come on over. Like, “When can you be here?”’