Metallica: Enter Night (41 page)

When Rock ventured out as a producer in his own right – his first international success came with the debut Kingdom Come album in 1988 – he was determined to do things his way. Yet it was Fairbairn’s uncompromising methods he employed to reach his goals. ‘With Bruce, we kind of grew up together,’ said Bob. ‘Bruce’s style of production is so different to mine, though. But the one thing I really got from him was about really concentrating on the performance end of it rather than a perfectionism kind of thing, which may sound bizarre coming from me but that’s what I really try and concentrate on. I really try to facilitate musicians to be comfortable and really fill in the blanks when it comes to their needs, to get what they want accomplished.’ Or as Mötley Crüe bassist and band leader Nikki Sixx later recalled of his time with Rock: ‘Bob whipped us like galley slaves. His line was, “That just isn’t your best.” Nothing was good enough.’ Rock would make guitarist Mick Mars spend weeks doubling a guitar part over and over again until it was synchronised to perfection. As for the lead vocals, some days singer Vince Neil ‘would only get a single word on tape that Bob liked. Bob was critical, demanding and a stickler for punctuality.’ He went on: ‘No one had ever pushed us to the limits of our abilities before or kept demanding more than we thought we had to give until we discovered that we actually did have more to give.’ He admitted ‘the process was the antithesis of every punk principle I had held fast to as a teenager’, but concluded, ‘at the same time, I wanted an album I was finally proud of’.

Similarly, Metallica. Although they already had albums they were fiercely proud of, not least
Master of Puppets
, what they now craved – needed – was an album that opened their music up to the same audience that bought The Cult, Mötley, Guns N’ Roses and, yup, even Bon Jovi. They wanted it all and Bob Rock was to be the one to help them get it, they decided. The only snag – on paper – was Rock’s well-known reluctance to record anywhere but Little Mountain. However, as Lars told me, ‘We really didn’t want to do it in Vancouver – everyone comes to him. For a while I didn’t think it was going to work out. Bob’s got a big family and he wasn’t that keen on coming to LA. Then when we played him the stuff I could see his eyes light up. We’d built a little eight-track studio in my house and made some rough demos; just me on drums and James.’ The clincher was when they played him the roughs of an epic new track called ‘Sad but True’: ‘It was like, boom! From there it was pretty much a done deal.’

Recording had begun the first week of October, 1990. By the time I caught up with Lars again at the start of 1991, he was obviously thrilled with the way it had been going. ‘Looking back on our last four albums, they were great records. I’m not going to say anything bad about them. But we never thought that we’d done one where you think, there it is. That one album is it. You’re never gonna be able to make a record like that but as close as you can get to that one album, this is fucking it,’ he enthused. ‘The new stuff that we’ve been writing is like a breath of fresh air. We’re just really excited in a way that I don’t think we’ve been excited before. Bob says he thinks it shows we’ve got a lot of soul…a lot of emotions that we don’t let out easily, ’cos we’re very guarded as people. He says that he could see through that right away. He says that one of his things on this album was to try and let us take down our guard and let out the shit that’s in there.’

It was also, Lars confessed, ‘us getting pretty bored with the direction of the last three albums. They were all different from each other, but they were all going in the same direction. You know, long songs, longer songs, even longer songs…It was time to take a sharp turn. The only way to do that would be to write one long song to fill the whole album or write songs that were shorter than we had done before. And that’s what we did. I don’t need to tell you again how I feel about being pigeonholed with the whole thrash metal thing. But the new shit’s just got a whole new vibe and feel that I never knew Metallica were capable of.’ The key was to begin by making sure the songs stayed focused. Consigned to the bin were numbers that lasted nine and ten minutes and went through several ‘movements’: ‘I used to think it was cool, a sign of our fuck-you attitude to being commercial. Now I realise it was just basically because we couldn’t play. It wasn’t until we started with Bob that we really learned how to nail a riff or a rhythm or whatever. It’s actually a lot harder to do but you don’t know that until you finally try.’

Lars, in particular, would discover just hard that was when Bob insisted he simply wasn’t up to the job and should take lessons in order to bring him up to speed. A room at the studio was set aside for Lars to spend several hours a day ‘practising’, upon which James pinned a handwritten sign: ‘LARS’ CLOSET’. Getting the drums ‘right’ would, in fact, set the project back several weeks. In the meantime, Bob worked with James on getting the best of the near two-dozen songs he had written with Lars – and occasionally Kirk (as with
Justice
, Newsted would achieve only one co-songwriting credit on the album) – into what the taskmaster producer considered recordable shape. Initially, this proved almost as arduous as coaxing a decent drum track out of Lars. For the first time in his life James, who had never been told his lyrics were not good enough, found himself rewriting verses, sharpening up choruses. In particular, Rock worked hard on getting it into the singer’s head that it was easier – and better – to use one word where previously he’d been used to using several. Single words could be broken down into syllables that sufficed for entire lines in a song, as with the chorus of one of the potential singles, ‘Enter Sandman’, on which Hetfield’s original lines were broken down into single words, using the syllables to stretch and tease the melody out of them.
En…ter…night…/Ex…it…light…

James also came armed with something he never had before: an actual from-the-heart love song. Written while on the road and missing Kristen, the key line ‘Never opened myself this way’ summing up a musical moment unlike any one might have expected from Hetfield or Metallica, even as they strived for a hit. Suddenly, it seemed, Everyteen had turned into Everyman.

Speaking of it nearly twenty years later, James admitted that at first he ‘didn’t even want to play it for the guys. It was so heartfelt, so personal to me. I thought that Metallica could only be these songs about destroying things, headbanging, bleeding for the crowd…I certainly did not think it was a Metallica song. When the guys heard it they were amazed at how much they, I guess, related to it. It turned out to be a pretty big song on that record [that] touched a lot of people.’ It was also, he reflected in another interview around the same time, more than the usual confessional power ballad. It was ‘about a connection with your higher power, lots of different things’. He recalled being invited to a Hell’s Angels Clubhouse in New York where ‘they showed me a film that they’d put together of one of the fallen brothers’ and the soundtrack for the film was ‘Nothing Else Matters’: ‘Wow. This means a lot more than me missing my chick, right? This is brotherhood. The army could use this song. It’s pretty powerful.’

Powerful yes, but made even more so by Rock’s last-minute addition of an orchestra, its score arranged by Michael Kamen. A production touch the band would never have considered themselves, their first reaction to it was negative. Listening back to it late one night, however, they suddenly saw the light. ‘I used to call James Dr No,’ Rock recalled. ‘Whenever I was about to make a suggestion that seemed even a little off the wall, he’d say no before I’d even finished the first sentence.’ It was the same when he also created a subtle bed of cellos for another sweepingly balladic track, ‘The Unforgiven’, underpinning the obvious Morricone influence with something even more impressive. Or the sitar-like guitar intro to ‘Wherever I May Roam’; the bugling refrain from Leonard Bernstein’s ‘America’ at the start of ‘Don’t Tread on Me’; the marching-band drums and bagpipe guitar at the start of ‘The Struggle Within’. Even on the more obvious thrash-derived numbers such as ‘Holier Than Thou’, ‘Through the Never’ or ‘The Struggle Within’, Rock’s influence meant the band now sauntered into view where previously they had simply battered at the door until it splintered; pedestrian thrash-templates transformed by the imaginative sum of the production into something greater than their otherwise predictable individual parts.

At other times, the producer simply insisted that they play together as a band live in the studio, as on the rhythm track to the monumental ‘Sad but True’. Recalled Kirk: ‘The energy coming off all of us playing was so intense and so locked into the groove, with so much attitude, that Bob Rock said, “We could take this track right here off the floor and put it straight on the album because all you guys played your asses off.”’ It was a musical adventurousness mirrored by Hetfield’s new boldness with his lyrics. No longer did the words come from watching CNN, as they had for much of
Justice
. Now they came from somewhere much closer to home. In ‘The God That Failed’, he addressed specifically his mother’s unnecessarily agonising death due to her devout, to the point of perversity, religious beliefs. ‘Don’t Tread on Me’, a ‘God Bless America’ for the Nineties, seemed shocking coming so soon after the anti-war stance of their till-then most famous song ‘One’. ‘Of Wolf and Man’, meanwhile, gloried in his love of the outdoorsman’s life, fishing and shooting: ‘I hunt / Therefore I am…’ Tellingly, the album’s weakest track is its longest and the one which harks back most to the band’s earlier days: ‘My Friend of Misery’, a mid-paced, blustering meditation on the ego-ravages of stardom. Buried at the back of the album, this was the only track on which Jason Newsted was given a co-credit, and it was saved only by its Who-like mid-section where Hammett’s guitar at least brings to it a certain poise. The bullying may have subsided now the band was off the road, but Jason’s part in the creative process was still extremely limited. He hoped this would change as time passed and his role naturally grew. He hoped in vain.

In fact, all the playing on the album – including the vastly improved drums – excels on every level but Hammett’s guitar, in particular, is exquisite throughout. Again, though, the biggest surprise comes from Hetfield, whose vocals take a quantum leap forward from the macho posturing of even his best
Master
- and
Justice
-era efforts, towards a more sensitive (his almost spoken-word outro on ‘Nothing Else Matters’), even sweet (his high vocals on the chorus of ‘The Unforgiven’) quality unheard of before in his work. Even his guitar playing betrays a tinkling, newfound delicacy, as on the superb acoustic and electric playing on ‘Nothing Else Matters’, including the achingly searching guitar solo – so much so, indeed, that Hammett does not feature anywhere on the track.

The stand-out tracks, however, are its opening brace: ‘Enter Sandman’ and ‘Sad but True’. The latter – a monolithic musical statement whose juddering rhythm had come suddenly while recording ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ for
Rubáiyát–
was destined for greatness from the moment an awestruck Rock, listening for the first time to the demo, told Lars and James he thought it could be ‘a “Kashmir” for the Nineties’. The former, an even more crowning jewel and the must-have moment of all such classic albums, was another first for Metallica: an old-fashioned, born-lucky hit single. Based on the same little cartwheeling riff as other rock classics such as ‘Smoke on the Water’ and ‘All Right Now’, Kirk later recalled how he’d been listening to
Louder Than Love
, an early album by a then-unknown Seattle band called Soundgarden, ‘trying to capture their attitude toward big, heavy riffs. It was two o’clock in the morning. I put it on tape and didn’t think about it.’ When he later played it to the others, however, Lars told him, ‘That’s really great. But repeat the first part four times.’ It was that suggestion, said Kirk, ‘that made it even more hooky’.

In the end, it took more than ten months to complete the album, would cost them than over $1 million, and sent them all, at various times, so crazy that nearly fifteen years later Rock would still describe it as ‘the hardest album I ever made’. The band felt the same way. ‘It was difficult with Bob,’ said Lars. ‘It was the hardest record to make with Bob because we didn’t know each other and there was no trust yet. So we were very wary of each other.’ They had pushed themselves so hard, ‘we all started hating each other by the finish’. When I visited, halfway through, I noticed a boxer’s punch-bag and gloves hanging up in one of the rooms. ‘For fucking tension!’ Lars guffawed when I pointed at it. ‘You know that shit, you’re trying to get something down and you can’t get it down right and you just need to hurt something. Then you receive the bill for it next week. You can hurt that and not have to pay for it.’ James, he added, had been using it a lot of late: ‘But now that Jason has started doing his bass he uses it a lot, too.’ It was, Rock concluded, ‘a very tough album to record from the point of view of what they were trying to achieve and where they had come from and where I had come from. So it took a while to work out the way it was to be done.’ More than just trying to make something accessible, this album was simply ‘the first time you really felt that there was some real human emotion behind the music’.

Speaking with Lars at the studio while James sat on the other side of the glass, guitar cradled on his lap, working through the cyclical guitar part to ‘The Unforgiven’, it was clear they had been working towards a very specific agenda from day one. He talked of how, when the band had started out, his favourite drummers were technically gifted craftsmen such as Rush’s Neil Peart and Deep Purple’s Ian Paice: ‘So for the next eight years I’m doing Ian Paice and Neil Peart things, proving to the world that I can play.’ Now, after absorbing the lessons their new father-figure producer had instilled, Lars’ two favourite drummers were Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones and Phil Rudd of AC/DC – unflashy, solid as rock, foundation-builders. ‘I used to think that stuff was easy but it’s not, it’s hard…fucking hard.’