Metallica: Enter Night (46 page)

James Hetfield, meanwhile, was involved in less cerebral pursuits but more challenging emotional issues. In common with both Lars and Kirk, his longstanding relationship – with Kristen, subject of ‘Nothing Else Matters’ – had not been able to survive the ravages of the three-year
Black
tour. His way of dealing with it was not to seek out new pleasures, or more esoteric forms of self-expression, but to re-immerse himself in some of the old ways. When he wasn’t drinking beer, watching the Oakland Raiders, he was working in his garage, customising cars and motorcycles. After his ’74 Chevy Nova there had been his all-terrain four-wheel-drive Blaze, which he nicknamed The Beast. He was also building himself an impressive collection of vintage guitars, with special emphasis on those from 1963, the year of his birth. Going out, he liked to stay hidden, either choosing country and western bars or restaurants where he knew he wouldn’t be hassled. He rarely went to rock gigs and when he did, he would become so ill at ease he would have to get seriously drunk to face it.

Mainly, when he wasn’t working, Hetfield liked to go hunting. Like Lars, he’d bought a big spread in Marin County. Unlike Lars, he’d turned his into what the drummer only half-jokingly characterised as ‘the biggest hunting lodge in the universe, with dead deer coming out of every wall and rifles hanging everywhere’. Hanging out at a friend’s place outside San Francisco where it was ‘tough to get to without a four-wheel drive’, James could ‘just sit there on the porch, drinking, playing music’. Now a member of the National Rifle Association, he kept a growing collection of guns, was a good shot, and saw himself as an environmentalist, belonging to Ducks Unlimited, an organisation dedicated to the preservation of US wetlands. His dream, he told
Rolling Stone
, was to own his own ranch ‘somewhere out in the middle of nowhere’. He loved nature, he said, being out in the wilderness. ‘There is not much more of it left. It makes me hate people. Animals, they don’t lie to each other. There is an innocence within them. And they’re getting fucked.’

The most significant event in his life in this period, though, was meeting up again with his father, Virgil, who he had not spoken to for over ten years; an unforeseen occurrence that would have long-lasting repercussions for him, as both a son and father in his own right. An intimidating presence, Hetfield knew his own outwardly taciturn personality stemmed from the strained relationship he’d had with his father. ‘A lot of it had to do with me proving manhood to myself. A lot of the things that I felt my dad didn’t teach me, like working on cars, hunting, survivalism. Things like that. I really felt that I had to go and learn those things and prove to myself that I’m okay, that I can do it. My dad was like that.’

This, then, was to be a one-step-at-a-time reconciliation, not a total embrace. ‘There’s still a lot of unanswered questions,’ he said at the time. ‘You could hate someone like that for ever.’ At least, though, they were able to spend time together again, ‘hunting, things like that’. Father and son also shared a love of country music. When a college radio station invited James on to appear side by side with country star Waylon Jennings – ‘to get the two outlaws together of certain different styles of music’ – they suggested James might like to conduct a mini-interview with Jennings. ‘I guess Dad helped me out with a few of the questions,’ he later recalled. ‘It’s funny ’cos my dad wanted me to get a CD signed for him and then Waylon brought some Metallica stuff to get signed for his son. So it was completely cool.’

After so many years apart, James confessed: ‘I saw a lot of myself in him.’ Not that they discussed the past in any detail still, ‘because there’s no doubt that we’d argue about things’. He didn’t want to ‘stir the water up’. The past, he’d decided, ‘just fucks things up – always’. These would be issues between father and son that would remain unresolved, and that Hetfield would later be forced to return to – after his father’s death. Already seriously ill at the time of their brief reconciliation, Virgil Hetfield died on 29 February 1996, after a two-year battle with cancer. James was with him at the end and got the chance to say goodbye. Like his mother, his father had stuck to his terrifyingly rigid Christian Science principles. Although he still found himself struggling with the concept, James looked on his father’s way of dealing with his illness – eschewing regular forms of medicine in favour of rising at dawn each day, doing his daily lesson – with a much greater degree of admiration this time. ‘He stuck with it to the very end. And that, I think, helped him keep his strength – his knowledge that he did it his way.’ They had spent hours discussing not just his family’s religion but faith in general, ‘and I let him know there were no bad feelings…I had sorted out a lot of my anger in his departure, his never being around.’

Four days after Virgil died, James Hetfield flew to New York to finish off the recording of
Load
. ‘I kind of went back to when Cliff died,’ he told
Rolling Stone
. ‘We got back to work and got some of the feelings out through the music.’ Not in the angry sound of apocalyptic songs such as ‘Dyer’s Eve’ from
Justice
or ‘The God That Failed’ on
Black
, but in the more resigned melancholy of dramatic tracks like the brutally frank ‘Until it Sleeps’, with its haunting ‘So hold me, until it sleeps…’ refrain. The achingly sad, country-tinged ‘Mama Said’, with its wincingly honest reflections: ‘Apron strings around my neck / The mark that still remains…’ Most bleakly, ‘The Outlaw Torn’, where the targets are blurred between mother, father and son, but utterly specific in the desolation left behind: ‘And if my face becomes sincere / Beware…’

If the
Black Album
had been the first Metallica record to contain truly personal, adult insights into the scarred emotional landscape of its principal lyric-writer, the songs on
Load
would take the whole game forward several more steps. Hetfield would insist later that the lyrics were meant to be ‘kept vague’ to allow others their own interpretations but it was clear from tracks such as ‘Poor Twisted Me’ (‘I drown without a sea’), ‘Thorn Within’ (‘So point your fingers…right at me’), ‘Bleeding Me’ (‘I am the beast that feeds the beast’) and others, that James was addressing his true feelings to only one ‘other’: himself. There were songs that appeared to be directed at the outside world with the old familiar pathos – ‘Cure’ (drug addiction as metaphor for moral ‘sickness’); ‘Ronnie’ (based on the real-life shootings in Washington, in 1995, by schoolboy Ron Brown) – but essentially this was a one-way trip to the dark centre of the Hetfield psyche. As such, ‘King Nothing’, ostensibly about the kind of king-size egos he had sneered at on the Guns N’ Roses tour, became in reality a song about the so-called anti-star James now saw in his own dressing room mirror. Similarly, ‘Hero of the Day’, not really about ‘them’ but ‘us’, and ‘Wasting My Hate’ – ‘I think I’ll keep it for myself’. This was Hetfield not being vague but disturbingly open and, for the first time, sounding utterly unsure, almost pleading for help.

Musically, there were now even greater revelations taking place – an area where James suddenly had far less to say than the newly ‘reinvented’ Ulrich and Hammett. Ironically, in fact, James suddenly had more in common, musically, with Jason, now living with a new, post-
Black
girlfriend in a quiet East Bay suburb, playing basketball with the neighbourhood kids: ‘I come home from a tour, I’ve got a box-load of shirts for them.’ By default, both James and Jason had become the metal purists of the band. Neither had felt particularly moved or threatened by the grunge years. Neither even knew of Britpop. And neither would be over-impressed by the musical – and/or sartorial – expositions of latter-day MTV sinners such as Marilyn Manson or The Prodigy, although Jason was more open to at least learning about these phenomenon, becoming most fascinated by the advent of funk-metal evangelists such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More, with particular reverence for the flamboyant bass playing of Chili Pepper co-founder Michael ‘Flea’ Balzary.

All of this had almost no bearing whatsoever when it came time to record the
Load
album. More influential than ever, Kirk would share credits with James and Lars on seven of the album’s fourteen tracks. But Jason didn’t even get one co-credit this time, so firmly was he excluded from the process. This was particularly galling as he had ‘submitted more material than ever before for a Metallica record’. They had tried out some of his ideas, he admitted, but ‘James writes this shit that is just so good, it’s hard to compete with it’. Hiding his real feelings, he would only say, ‘I feel more satisfied putting my bass parts on James’ cool writing than I would getting five of my songs on the record.’ In truth, however, it was eating Jason up and he began working on a variety of extra-curricular projects, recorded in his home studio. Even that avenue of expression was closed to him, though, when Hetfield decreed he should not be allowed to release any of this music, lest it weaken Metallica’s own fan base. This situation turned ‘pretty ugly for a while’, according to Lars, when a demo Jason had made with friends under the band name IR8 was played on a local San Francisco radio station. ‘I was fucking pissed,’ snapped James. ‘I always thought that when one guy jams with somebody else, that will fuck with Metallica. The fist is no longer four fingers. It’s not as strong. But he was strangled. He wants his music to be heard.’

Even working on
Load
, Jason could fall foul of James’ temper: ‘There were times on this record when I’d walk into the control room while he was doing his bass thing. He’d be doing some Flea funk part, and I’d count to one hundred before exploding.’ James would laugh it off later, start to see Jason’s side of things. ‘Why did we get him in the band if we didn’t like him?’ But that was one question never answered quite adequately enough. According to Jason at the time, ‘I said, “You guys are always getting to be out there doing your thing. And I always want to back you up. But somehow, somewhere, I gotta let my shit out.”’ Or as he put it wearily eight years later: ‘James has the last word on everything.’ The day of reckoning, though, was coming.

They had started out with thirty tracks, demos recorded over the last couple of months of 1994, in Lars’ basement studio, The Dungeon, then begun the serious work with Bob Rock at The Plant studios, in Sausalito, in March 1995, where they would continue off and on for most of the next year, with a break for the summer festival season. By the start of 1996 the band was in New York, working out of three studios at once: Right Track, in Manhattan, where they were finishing up recording overdubs in one room while mixing proceeded in another; and Quad Recording, across the street, where additional mixing took place. In the end they would have nearly all thirty tracks fully recorded: in effect, enough material for at least two, possibly three albums, although nobody outside of the band knew quite why yet.

In their determination to save Metallica from post-grunge obsolescence, Ulrich and Hammett had combined to create what, in retrospect, was Metallica’s boldest, if not always their most likeable, move yet. It wasn’t that they had left thrash far behind; it was as if they had tried to shrug off the very sound of Metallica itself; a self-conscious reconfiguration that had begun with the haircuts and tattoos, the make-up and piercings, and now found its apotheosis in the kind of bluesy, far-out rock ’n’ roll that liked to shimmy and shake where once it had preferred to shatter and explode. ‘When someone says “Metallica”, they think heavy metal, thunder and lightning, long hair, drunk kids,’ explained Kirk. ‘But times have changed and the kind of person who listens to metal doesn’t necessarily look like that. And why should we? Why should we conform to some stereotype that’s been set way before we ever came into the picture?’ There were a couple of long tracks – ‘Bleeding Me’, over eight minutes, and ‘The Outlaw Torn’, over nine – but these were exceptions. The rule of thumb was now to keep things tight, rhythmic, or ‘greasy’ as Lars and Kirk liked to describe it in the studio – a move that Bob Rock was more than happy to facilitate. It was, he said, ‘a chance for them to kind of look at what they had done and to try some different things’, although, ‘when you’re as big as Metallica you do that out in the open and you may not get everything right’.

As if to try and compensate for the continued emphasis on shorter, catchier songs,
Load
was actually Metallica’s longest album yet, with a total running time of 78:59. To ram the point home, initial pressings even had stickers that boasted its extra-long playing time – another odd throwback to the days when Lars would sit there timing each track in order to make sure they were long enough. Then, embarrassingly, the final track ‘The Outlaw Torn’ had to be shortened by a minute to fit.

Mostly, they got it right. ‘Ain’t My Bitch’ (a Mötley Crüe-style title for a song not about ‘chicks’ but someone with no concern for anyone’s problems but his own, replete with Kirk on slide guitar, another first for a Metallica album), which opens, is as roaring and anthemic as anything from their immediate past. Everything else, though, is so shiny-new at first it’s hard to see past the dazzle – what James would later call ‘the U2 version of Metallica’. In fact, for many Metallica fans, then as now,
Load
was the beginning of the end. It wasn’t just the music. It was what it stood for. For a band for whom one of the foundation stones of its reputation had been its apparent disregard for current trends, the new sound of
Load
was outrageous, beyond the pale. Even the album sleeve seemed designed to get up as many noses as possible. Where once there had been lyric sheets, now in the booklet that came with the CD – designed by Def Leppard favourite Andie Airfix – there was a postmodern clutter of snatches of lyrics, Rorschachian inkblots and a dishevelled spread of pictures that would have fitted perfectly in the pages of a fashion mag.

Most controversially, the front sleeve was built around a detail from a picture titled
Semen and Blood III
– an abstract, fiery-coloured, cauldron-splash set against a mottled black background not a million wavy lines away from the kind of languid psychedelia of a gig poster from the 1960s – by New York artist Andres Serrano. Originally created, in 1990, by Serrano mingling his own semen with bovine blood and placing the messy results between sheets of Plexiglas, it was Kirk who first suggested the image as the album cover after coming across it in a photo-book of Serrano’s work,
Body and Soul
, which he’d bought during a visit to San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. ‘When I first saw the picture, I thought it looked like hot-rod flames, because I have a hot-rod-flame tattoo,’ he recalled, blandly. It didn’t hurt either that Serrano’s art was well known for courting controversy. His 1987 image
Piss Chris
t, a cloudy amber rendition of a crucifix submerged in Serrano’s urine, had attracted predictable opprobrium from the Church, with the Revd Donald E. Wildmon launching a public campaign against it. Republican senators Jesse Helms and Alfonse D’Amato also denounced Serrano from the Senate floor, the latter tearing a photo of
Piss Christ
in two, while Helms publicly branded Serrano ‘a jerk’.