Metallica: Enter Night (42 page)

Another concession to the forthright commerciality of the new album was in its title – simply
Metallica
, eponymous titles being every major record label’s preferred option: uncontroversial, uncomplicated and easy to remember. It was ironic then that the album would quickly become known not by that name but for the nickname given to it because of its forbidding, all-black sleeve –
The Black Album
. It was like the photo negative of The Beatles’
White Album
(itself actually titled simply
The Beatles
, but renamed by fans after its similarly featureless, all-white cover).

‘It was one of our first days in the studio,’ Lars explained, and he was browsing through a typically colourful heavy metal mag, noticing how the ads for various albums all looked the same. ‘All these cartoon characters and all this steel and blood and guts. It was like, “Let’s get as far away as possible from this.”’ As far away as they could get, they decided, was to have a completely bare, monochromatic sleeve, with no information whatsoever on the front, save the barely discernible image of a serpent coiled in one corner. (A symbol, perhaps, of the forbidden fruit they had now bitten into?) The colour they chose was inevitable. ‘The fact is that we all like black as a colour.’ Lars shrugged. ‘Sure, there have been some people who’ve thought it was rather Spinal Tap, but if it came down to a choice between black and pink, you know what I mean? People can throw all this Tap shit at me all day, it just reflects off me. I don’t give a shit.’ Or, as James put it: ‘Here it is, black sleeve, black logo, fuck you.’

Another, albeit more oblique, reference to the altered perspective of the new album, along with its more pronounced choruses and shorter tracks, were the bare minimum credits on the sleeve. Where in the past Metallica album sleeves had been crammed with credits and thank-yous – even occasional fuck-yous – the
Black
sleeve contained the lyrics to the songs, the names of the four band members and their instruments, and the barest production details.

Lars was sure, he said, that ‘we’re gonna get a lot of people saying we’re selling out, but I’ve heard that shit from
Ride the Lightning
on. People were already going, “Boo! Sell-out!” even back then.’ Just because the tracks were shorter ‘doesn’t mean they’re any more accessible’. It was already clear, however, that increased accessibility was the whole point. The subject matter may have been as dark as ever – ‘Sad but True’, he said, was ‘about how different personalities in your mind make you do different things and how some of those things clash and how they fight to have control over you’, while ‘The Unforgiven’ was about ‘how a lot of people go through their life without taking any initiative. A lot of people just follow in the footsteps of others. Their whole life is planned out for them, and there’s certain people doing the planning and certain people doing the following’ – but the music was now of many colours, all of them supremely eye-catching.

The best example of this was the track already designated the album’s lead-off single: the enticingly named ‘Enter Sandman’. ‘That song has been on the fucking song titles list for the last six years,’ Lars said in an attempt to waylay any suggestion it had been written specifically as a single for this album. ‘I’d always looked at “Enter Sandman” and thought, what the fuck does that mean? Me being brought up in Denmark and not knowing about a lot of this shit, I didn’t get it. Then James clued me in. Apparently the Sandman is like this children’s villain – who comes and rubs sand in your eyes if you don’t go to sleep at night. So it’s a fable [which] James has just given a nice twist to.’ He added: ‘Six years ago I looked at “Enter Sandman” and thought, “Naw, let’s write ‘Metal Militia’…Metal all the way, you know?”’ Not any more.

The most important thing now would be what their various record companies thought of the finished product. Elektra was ecstatic. This would be the kind of Metallica album the company could really get its teeth into – one with multiple hit singles, great production, broad-scale ideas; in short, something with what the business called ‘legs’. Working off that giant buzz, Mensch scheduled meetings with various heads of department at Phonogram across Europe, beginning with Dave Thorne and the team in London.

‘I don’t think anybody can honestly say that when they listened to that album they thought, “This is going to be the biggest-selling metal album in the history of music,”’ says Thorne now. But when Mensch first played them the album ‘we were just gobsmacked because it was an absolute quantum leap on from anything that we’d ever heard anybody do, frankly, on the metal scene. And I remember him saying, in typical Mensch style, “Elektra got this fucking crazy idea, you know, going on about three singles, maybe four singles, I don’t know what you guys think.” Then he said, “I don’t know which track you think should be the single.” And I can remember saying, “
That’s
the single, that track there – ‘Enter Sandman’.”’

Thorne was spot-on. Released in the UK ahead of the album, backed with a suitably phantasmagorical video (actually, a fairly ordinary, literal depiction of a ‘sandman’ haunting a sleeping child intercut with a band performance that made ‘One’ look like
Gone With the Wind
) and available in as many formats as Phonogram could devise – including regular seven-inch vinyl in black sleeve, with and without logo sticker; twelve-inch vinyl; three different CD versions; cassette-tape version; even box-sets, including limited-edition twelve-inch folder, plus the twelve-inch vinyl record and four ‘exclusive’ autographed Metallica photos, one of each member – ‘Enter Sandman’ reached Number Five, becoming along the way one of the best-selling singles of the year. The US release of ‘Enter Sandman’ was staged differently, timed to come after the album’s initial sales burst, helping push it back up the charts as the single broke into the Top Twenty, reaching Number Sixteen, the video becoming a regular feature of daytime MTV for months to come.

Aware more than most of the power of word of mouth, the band also made sure their fans got a chance to judge the new album’s merits ahead of release, holding special ‘listening parties’ in London, at the Hammersmith Odeon, and, most spectacularly, in New York at the 20,000-seater Madison Square Garden. Admission was free to Metallica fan club members and with the band also in attendance to introduce the album personally and sign autographs, both venues were packed. At the New York playback, James actually snuck into the audience during ‘Nothing Else Matters’ and was relieved to find ‘They were really attentive…really listening to what it said.’ In America it was also arranged for certain stores to open their doors at one minute past midnight on 12 August – the official release date of the album. Queues formed outside, in some cases, for up to eighteen hours before. A week later,
Metallica
– or the
Black Album
as it was already becoming known – debuted at Number One in both Britain and America. It also topped the charts in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland and Norway.

The band was already out on tour in Europe when they got the news, at a hotel in Budapest, where they were appearing as ‘special guests’ – second on the bill – to AC/DC at that year’s travelling Monsters of Rock festival. Lars said he read the fax from Q Prime and for a moment wasn’t sure how to react. ‘You think one day some fucker’s gonna tell you, “You have a number one record in America” and the whole world will ejaculate. I stood there in my hotel room [and] it was, like, “Well, okay.” It was just another fucking fax from the office.’ At least, that’s what he later told
Rolling Stone
. In truth, this was the moment he’d fantasised over since his days of chasing around after Diamond Head records and reading about the NWOBHM in
Sounds
. Complete validation for the years when he was a tennis loser; an LA reject, with a funny accent who never quite belonged anywhere.

Reviews were also more positive, and widespread, with the album subjected to the glowing critical spotlight not just in the metal press but across the board, as
Rolling Stone
,
NME
,
Time Out
, the
Village Voice
, the
LA Times
, the
New York Times
and others around the world lined up to sing its praises. This was the double-whammy Q Prime had banked on: commercial success on a scale previously thought beyond the reach of a ‘genre’ act such as Metallica, while still miraculously building on their critical profile. Suddenly, no one was using the words ‘thrash metal’ anywhere in Metallica articles. The subsequent
NME
cover story may have owed something, as Dave Thorne suggests, to ‘the fact that Steve Sutherland was the editor and was married to the head of press at Phonogram, Kaz Mercer, who remains to this day Metallica’s press officer’. But as he also points out, ‘It was the right thing to do, obviously. Even the broadsheet newspapers were [now] writing about the band. They genuinely were taking it to the masses, as they say.’

‘I think also the reason we went next-level was because we knew we were on to something,’ said Lars, ‘that somehow when James and me had written these songs [we knew] there was a batch of songs that deserved that kind of level of work and that level of attention to details…that were worth fighting for.’ It was also, he realised now, ‘the element of the time, the element of the scene, the element of the temperature in music at the time’. That ‘this was the beginning of the Nineties and all the pop stuff, the hair stuff, the whole LA thing was coming to an end. There was about to be a changing of the guard. There was a bunch of things brewing up in Seattle. There was a whole new kind of thing going on, and the whole music mainstream audience had been shifting very subtly further and further left over the course of the Eighties. All of a sudden all of the sixteen-year-old kids were ready to embrace different things. So you can’t take out the sort of way the planets are aligning analogy. And the planets just aligned in ’91, ’92 when that record came out, it all just came together at the right time, with the right songs, the right producer, the right attitude and the right temperature on the music scene to create this absolute fucking monster that that record then became, for better or worse.’

It was, as Lars suggests, simply one of those once-in-a-lifetime albums: good for Metallica, who were now considered one of the most important bands of the coming decade. But beneficial also for the music scene in general, helping thrust open the door for alternative, underground rock to be accepted as a staple of American radio and TV, something then-unknown new names such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden would take full advantage of before the year was out. The backdraught of this was that Metallica would no longer be considered cutting-edge. But that, Lars pointed out astutely, was because ‘the mainstream has moved a lot closer to the new left edge than they were five years ago. To that bank clerk, Metallica’s still the most fucking extreme thing he could get into.’

Not that it made them immune from criticism – writers who had been impressed by Hetfield’s unflinching portrayal of the war victim in ‘One’ railed in the post-Gulf War atmosphere against the overt patriotism of the unapologetically flag-waving ‘Don’t Tread on Me’. But even here, the band had an answer: James, they pointed out, had written the song many months before the invasion of Kuwait, the flag he was flying not the Stars and Stripes but the one carried by the Culpeper Minutemen of Virginia during the revolutionary war, its coiled-snake banner – à la the
Black Album
sleeve – carrying the motto ‘Don’t Tread on Me’. (Indeed, a replica of the flag hung in One on One throughout the recording sessions.) ‘America is a fucking good place,’ James responded defiantly in
Rolling Stone
. ‘I definitely think that. And that feeling came about from touring a lot. You find out what you like about certain places and you find out why you live in America, even with all the bad fucked-up shit. It’s still the most happening place to hang out.’

Hetfield also, briefly, got into hot water over comments he made in the
NME
, characterising rap music as ‘extra black’, adding that it was ‘all me, me, me, and my name in this song’. Again, he was unapologetic: ‘Some of the stuff, like Body Count, our fans like because there’s aggression there. I love that part of it. But the “Cop Killer” thing, kill whitey – I mean, what the fuck? I don’t dig it.’ It reminded him, he said, of ‘the Slayer thing with Satan and tear-your-baby-up. Like going out and shooting cops. Hopefully, no one’s going to go out and do either. People like it, it’s fine. Whatever blows your skirt up, as my dad would say. It just don’t blow mine up.’

Although second to AC/DC, everywhere Metallica went that summer they were the most talked about band on the Monsters bill. ‘We’ve been very lucky with critical acclaim from a lot of fashionable magazines,’ Lars acknowledged when we spoke. ‘All these writers who would spew about Bruce Springsteen or Prince, usually. Metallica’s kinda been lumped into that crowd in America.’ Why them, though? Why not, say, Slayer? He took a deep breath as he tried to keep the condescension out of his voice. ‘I think a lot of it has to do with our approach lyrically, and about wanting to confront issues that were more realistic and had more to do with things that were happening around us. I’m the first to line up for a Slayer record when it comes out, ’cos I think Slayer are the best at what they do. But lyrically, it’s a whole different kettle of fish. We’ve always been very adamant about shying away from the metal clichés – one of them being the whole sexist, satanist crap. And as a consequence it seems all the trendsetting journalists have been throwing acclaim at Metallica right, left and centre…’

As Lars had predicted, there was, however, a significant shaking of heads among certain older Metallica fans. Accusations of sell-out were rife, justifiably so, from a certain old-school perspective. Even two decades on, it’s a subject that polarises even their staunchest allies. The normally outspoken Robb Flynn, who had been such a big fan as a teenager, and whose band Machine Head was actually supporting Metallica on tour when we spoke in early 2009, managed to change the subject when I asked for his specific views on
Black
. As Joey Vera puts it, ‘The
Black Album
was
never
in the cards…But they were very smart in what they did. And Lars probably had a lot to do with that, working with the management company. They made some really, really, really smart decisions, albeit maybe some of them questionable to some of the fans. But in the end they made very smart decisions all along the way.’