Metallica: Enter Night (44 page)

Backstage, there were even greater high jinks taking place. ‘Axl was out to impress Metallica and everyone else,’ recalled Slash, ‘having backstage parties every single night.’ Each day Axl would write large cheques to his step-siblings, Stuart and Amy, and instruct them to put together something ‘special’ for that evening’s after-show entertainment. ‘We’d spend a hundred thousand a night on parties,’ recalled drummer Matt Sorum. One night would be ‘Greek night – four greased-up, muscle-bound guys [carrying] in a roast pig’. Another night might be Sixties night, replete with lava lamps, psychedelic lightshows and slogans spray-painted everywhere: ‘Acid is groovy’; ‘Kill the pigs’. The only constant was the presence of a free bar, several pinball machines, pool tables, hot tubs and strippers dancing on tables. According to Roddy Bottum, keyboardist for Faith No More, who opened the show on a handful of dates, ‘There were more strippers than road crew.’

For a while, Lars was in his element. Still doing large amounts of cocaine most days, sporting the replica of Axl’s white leather jacket he’d had made, his was a regular face at these after-show parties. ‘It was like, we’re in Indianapolis,’ he recalled, ‘so there were Formula One cars everywhere, with all the girls dressed up in pit-crew uniforms. It was decadence at the highest level I’d ever seen, a Caligula kind of outlandishness. There were orgies, sure. Was I involved? Yes. Well, I was in the same room – we’ll leave it at that.’ Ross Halfin recalls taking the band for a photo-shoot in Jacksonville, where Lars wore the white leather jacket ‘and the band stood behind him making signs of the cross’. James, in particular, was getting seriously bugged. The GN’R tour ‘was very extravagant, which was so un-me. The hot tubs backstage. I’d go back and drink their beer and shoot pool, that’s what I’d do. By the time they’d come offstage I’d be gone so I didn’t have to hang out with them.’ For non-drug-taking James, Guns N’ Roses ‘were part of the enemy. Lars was out there in the white leather jacket and all that, posing up a storm. Lars is that way. He will be infatuated with certain people in his life and need to get into them. That’s just part of him, I guess. He likes learning things from people who have that something. Axl had that.’ As if to underline that fact, when the tour was over, Lars would not see Axl again for nearly fifteen years. ‘Axl was two people,’ said Lars, looking back later. ‘You were truly left wondering what the fuck was going to happen next. When he was in a good mood, he was the sweetest guy, and when he forgot to take his medicine or decided to go off, he was kind of a freak. He was the last person I’ve ever seen, though, besides maybe Bill Clinton, that when he walked into a room every single person was drawn to him. That’s a rare thing.’

Meanwhile, over a year on from its release, the
Black Album
was still selling hundreds and thousands of copies each week all over the world. Boosted by no less than five back-to-back hit singles – ‘Enter Sandman’ had been swiftly followed in the charts by ‘The Unforgiven’ (released in eight different formats in the UK alone), ‘Nothing Else Matters’ (also eight UK formats), ‘Wherever I May Roam’ (six formats) and, finally, at the end of 1992, ‘Sad but True’ (a further eight formats) – by the tour’s end in the summer of 1993, the album had sold nearly seven million copies in the USA, and a further five million abroad. It had become one of those albums no self-respecting record collection did not include, eventually notching up more than fifteen million US sales, to date, and nearly twenty-five million worldwide, making it one of the biggest-selling popular music albums of all time, in any genre.

The final money-spinning leg of the world tour was dubbed the Nowhere Else to Roam tour, another large outdoor co-headlining stint, this time in Europe with Lenny Kravitz. Its crowning glory was Metallica’s own headlining festival show back in England, in June, at the 55,000-capacity Milton Keynes Bowl. ‘Obviously it’s a great ego kind of thing to do it,’ Lars had said over the phone prior to the band’s arrival. ‘But it’s got to be right. I think Iron Maiden, when they did their first Monsters of Rock stadium tour probably did it better than anyone else; you’ve got to wait till the time is right. Now, all of a sudden this seems like the right thing for us to do.’

It certainly looked that way as I walked around the backstage area that afternoon. Lars was as friendly as ever, arriving at the festival site hours before he actually needed to, bounding around saying hello to friends old and new. The only difference, one couldn’t help noticing, was the gaggle of MTV crew members who followed him everywhere, cameras and mikes lapping up every scrap of attention that came his way, including scenes of themselves filming…themselves. The concert itself was flawless, with James now very much the star of the show, the archetypal metal frontman, intense, uncompromising, tall, thin, completely in control of the stage, a million miles and several lifetimes removed from the acne-ridden bundle of insecurities who had spent years trying to wriggle out of the frontman role. His bond with the audience now seemed unbreakable, complete, as though when he looked out at the thousands he saw a mirror image of himself looking back, fists raised. You could tell the audience, his people, felt they knew this man more intimately than they did their best friends. The hard-drinking, headbanging, woman-devouring, gun-toting, icon of good-(and bad-) time rock, of heavy fuckin’ metal, as he called it, raging from the stage. And yet, for all that he projected and made them think this way, they didn’t know the half of it – that even now James Hetfield was still only pretending, only doing what he thought he was obliged to do.

There were already signs of the change that was coming, but Metallica’s fans had been too busy multiplying and worshipping to read into them. ‘Having money, being part of all this freaks me out,’ James had said in the band’s first
Rolling Stone
cover story. ‘I like being where most people can’t find me, doing things by myself, or just being with good friends in the wilderness, camping or drinking or whatever. I get a lot of time to think about what this shit is really about and what makes you happy…Looking good, being seen in the right places, playing the fucking game. I get real sick of that shit. That has nothing to do with real life, with being alive.’

The truth of that, though, would only be revealed later. Much later, and only then when it was all but too late to do anything good – anything real – about it.

It was a phone interview. Where once phone interviews had been the option of last resort, by the mid-1990s they were increasingly becoming the norm. The recession of the early Nineties had forced record companies to cut back on their budgets; overseas trips were not as common as they had been. More to the point, the advent of grunge had killed off so many of the old Eighties-style rock stars, magazines such as
Kerrang!
were also now starting to suffer, caught between dramatically reduced circulation and the fact that grunge stars like Nirvana and Pearl Jam simply didn’t see themselves as
Kerrang!-
type bands. If you weren’t from the
NME
or the
Melody Maker
you were…well, somewhere much lower down the list.

Phone interviews it was then, unless it was a cover story or a similarly multi-page splurge. This was a glorified news story. That is, a feature-length, colour piece at the front of the mag but not yet a cover – that would come later when the band arrived to headline Donington. In the meantime, the record company drone explained, as Lars and the boys were still in America it was the phone or nothing. No biggie, I decided, it wasn’t like I didn’t know what he looked like…

‘Hey, Mick,’ he drawled down the phone that night. ‘Good to speak with you again, man, what’s up?’

I explained the deal, like he didn’t know already, and we got straight to it. I was spending the evening at home in my one-bedroom loft apartment in London. He had just gotten out of bed at his mansion in the plush Marin County part of northern San Francisco, where it was now early afternoon.

‘Hey, I’m sorry we couldn’t do this in person,’ he said. ‘It’s just our schedules…’

‘Not a problem,’ I said. And it wasn’t.

We chatted for twenty minutes, did our stuff, then said our goodbyes.

‘Hey, good talking to you,’ he said, ‘let’s have a beer or something when we next come over.’

‘Absolutely. And if I don’t see you before, see you at Donington!’

‘Cool, man. Bye.’

I hung up. Nice guy, I thought. Despite…everything.

The next day I was chatting on the phone to someone who still worked closely with the band. I told him about talking with Lars the night before.

‘Why did you interview him on the phone?’ he said. ‘Why not just wait and see him when he’s here?’

‘Because they need the story in time for the Donington announcement next week,’ I explained.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but he’s here tomorrow.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s here in London tomorrow.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah. He’s coming in to buy some antiques. Wants to keep it quiet, though, doesn’t want to get hassled by the usual…you know…’

We paused as what he was saying sunk in.

‘I don’t think he’s staying for long, though,’ he said, running to catch up. ‘Probably only a couple of days or so…’

‘And of course he’ll be busy.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Buying antiques…’

‘Mmm…don’t say I said so though.’

If the story of Metallica had ended with those final grand stadia shows in the summer of 1993, nobody could have complained. Over the past decade they had gone from LA outcasts – runts of the Sunset Strip litter, forced to try their luck elsewhere – to the very biggest, possibly even best, heavy metal band in the world. From the high-spirited but cringingly clichéd riffage of
Kill ’Em All
to the panoramic, calculated cool of the
Metallica
album, so mind-bogglingly popular they named it twice, where they went next, what they did from now on no longer mattered, not really. Certainly not to James Hetfield. As long as the band continued to make music, James didn’t really care how many nights they now played in a row at Madison Square Garden or whether
Rolling Stone
put them on its cover again, they were Metallica and you weren’t and that’s all there was to it, fucker. Not even Jason Newsted felt able to complain. Or rather he did, but not about that. ‘I never thought it was possible to have a Number One record with the kind of music we played,’ he’d said, genuinely taken aback. But then Jason had never thought it was possible to do a lot of things until he’d joined Metallica.

The only person left who still demanded yet more was the boy for whom nothing was ever quite enough: Lars Ulrich. Indeed, if the first decade of Metallica’s incident-filled career had been testament to his drive, his ambition and – not to be underestimated – his ability to accommodate the increasingly forceful personality of James Hetfield, even, for a short time, that of the mercurial Cliff Burton, the next ten years would say even more about Ulrich’s fathomless desire to lift the whole enterprise still higher. Higher than anyone, perhaps not even Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch, would have been able to dream possible. Certainly further than Metallica’s own fans could have imagined; so much so, the very concept of Metallica – all the old notions of what they stood for – would become stretched so thin that many older fans would follow them no further, disillusioned by what they saw as the band’s ultimate sell-out. Not the making of an ultra-commercial album like
Black
, but, conversely, the conception of albums that, in their own hazardous way, ran against the grain more wilfully than anything they had managed in even their earliest, fiercest days. What James later called, with more than a hint of sarcasm: ‘The great reinvention of Metallica.’

And so it was. Not just in the Metallica sound, either, but in the actual look of the band – most symbolically, their suddenly much-shortened hair. ‘It’s not like we all went out together for a group haircut,’ said Lars, when I teased him about it in 2009. But in many ways that’s exactly what they did do – or certainly appeared to have done, when the first publicity pictures of the ‘reinvented’ Metallica were published in the summer of 1996, in time for the release of their new album,
Load
, the much-anticipated, utterly unexpected follow-up to
Black
. There was also the equally sudden appearance of piercings, tattoos and – most shocking of all for hardcore metal fans – make-up. It was one thing seeing Kirk Hammett – always the most (comparatively) effeminate of the group – posing in mascara, showing off his new body tattoos and face piercings, including a labret (a small, silver spike) dangling below his lower lip, camping it up for all he was worth in order to alter the public perception of who the people in Metallica really were. Seeing Lars imitating him, though stopping short of the extravagant tattoos (Lars was game, not reckless), was also strangely digestible, knowing what lengths Lars would go to in order to keep Metallica in the public eye. Looking at James Hetfield, however, in his newly pompadoured hairdo and thick black eyeliner, sitting there in a white vest smoking a cigar, it seemed momentarily as though the world had gone mad. (The only one somewhat off the pace, as usual, was Jason, who had cut his hair short some months before and was actually in the process of growing it back when the first
Load
publicity pictures were taken.) There was pushing the envelope and then there was tearing it to pieces and tossing it in the air like confetti. Suddenly in 1996, Metallica – in the shape of Lars and his new closest ally in the band, Kirk – seemed perilously close to doing the latter. It was as though Lemmy had suddenly walked onstage in a long evening gown and tiara. Actually, it was more shocking than that. Lemmy would clearly have been joking. Metallica clearly were not. As one magazine editor within my earshot put it, when first perusing the
Load
promo shots, thereby summing up the reaction of a generation, ‘What the fuck is this?’

The answer, in a word: survival. Just as Lars had been shrewd enough in 1990 to grasp that Metallica risked getting left behind if it didn’t get with the programme and produce an album as commercially viable as less-credible-but-more-successful contemporaries such as The Cult and Mötley Crüe, so in the mid-1990s he saw the world had changed again and that if Metallica didn’t change with it they might perish – just as almost all their contemporaries from the 1980s now had. The arrival of grunge and the ground-zero approach it engendered had seen to that.

In 1992, the
NME
had pronounced new boys Nirvana ‘the Guns N’ Roses it’s okay to like’. It was a superbly telling phrase that Lars, although he initially railed against it, had quickly taken onboard, as first Nirvana, then Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains and countless other, lesser lights that trailed in their blaze changed the face of rock so dramatically it became virtually unrecognisable to all but its newest followers. While on the surface albums such as Nirvana’s
Nevermind
and Pearl Jam’s
Ten
sat easily in the same collections as
Appetite for Destruction
and
Black
, beneath the surface it was clear something entirely different, something radical and new was now going on. This was rock but no longer with a capital ‘R’. As if to emphasise its essential difference from what had immediately come before, most of the grunge bands had short hair and sported goatees, eschewed the costumed glamour of Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard
et al
in favour of genuinely battered old jeans and ill-fitting plaid shirts; the whole thrift-store look as down-tuned as their guitars. Most bizarrely, they all came not from New York or LA, or even London or San Francisco, but from a rainy north-western outpost named Seattle, famous previously for nothing much bar its micro-breweries and coffee bars and its thriving Boeing factory (soon to be overtaken as the number one local employer by the fast-emerging Microsoft industries). The kind of conferred exclusivity it was, literally, impossible to emulate, unless you too came from Seattle, which of course none of the Eighties’ rock goliaths did. Paradoxically, however, hard rock and heavy metal in general, and Metallica in particular, had always been huge there, in the same way it had always been a core musical component of the similarly rainswept and industrially bleak English Midlands. Indeed, Kurt Cobain once described Nirvana’s music as ‘a cross between Black Sabbath and The Beatles’ – exactly the kind of musical marriage, ironically, that Metallica might be said to be now aiming for.

There any similarities ended, though, with Metallica viewed from a grunge perspective as being very much in the older brother’s camp. Impossible to compete with, the birth of grunge spelled the death of metal as they knew it till then, as overnight million-selling bands like Mötley Crüe and Poison, Bon Jovi and Def Leppard, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, and, yes, Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, looked seriously out of whack. In many ways, Metallica was fortunate its tour ended when it did in 1993, just as the grunge wave was peaking. After nearly three years on the road, a long break had always been on the cards. Now it would also serve as time away from a scene that was in such rapid transition it was like the precipice of a cliff crumbling beneath them.

As Lars said in 1996, on the eve of the release of
Load
, the album he prayed would spare Metallica from the same sorry fate that had claimed the careers of everyone from Iron Maiden to Ozzy Osbourne and Mötley Crüe, ‘When we put out the
Black Album
, nobody knew who Kurt Cobain was. It’s mind-boggling.’ By then, though, grunge was all but over and Lars could afford to be kind. Speaking with him back in 1993, at the height of its influence, he was sounding distinctly threatened, angry even. ‘I think the whole thing has more to do with an attitude than anything musical,’ he told me tetchily. Pressed further, he admitted that ‘Soundgarden made a great record and I think that Alice In Chains made a great record. But this whole thing about Seattle this, Seattle that…I’m not really sold on the whole thing, you know? I wouldn’t go out and wave any flags for it.’

What about Nirvana? I persisted. What did he make of them? His voice became cold. ‘Erm…what do I think about Nirvana?’ he stalled, trying to think of the right thing to say, rather than show his real feelings. ‘I don’t mind Nirvana. They don’t really do very much for me, but I don’t mind them, you know, they have very nice, hummable pop metal anthems.’ I laughed at that one and he went on, encouraged. ‘Some of their attitude annoys me a little bit, though. Because they’re so…I dunno, they just seem really contrived to me, somehow.’ It offended him in some way? ‘No, just that whole attitude they have. “Oh, we don’t wanna be a big band. We don’t wanna sell a million records.” If you don’t want to sell any records, don’t release any records, you know what I mean? They should just be glad there’s a million motherfuckers that wanna listen to their stuff.’ I had never heard him sound so old, so off the pace. He sounded like Dee Snider seeing Metallica onstage for the first time all those years before, then turning to Jonny Z and asking: ‘What is
that
, Jonny?’

Eventually, though, Lars would come to terms with the whole thing, once it had been tamed in his mind. Meanwhile, others had also tried to keep up. Judas Priest singer Rob Halford, whose homosexuality had been no secret in the business but largely been kept from the fans for the past twenty years, chose this moment not only to leave Priest for a solo career, but also to publicly come out, live on MTV, where he appeared in his new Nineties guise of make-up, black fingernail polish and a flurry of black feather-boas. None of this inflamed the interest of the grunge generation, who merely tittered. Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson also read the runes and left the band for a solo career, recording two self-consciously ‘different’ albums, neither of which was a hit, and soon found himself back playing clubs – neither fish nor fowl in the new post-grunge era. Others, such as Mötley Crüe and Poison, merely grunged-up their acts, shedding important members and losing countless fans. Others still, like Maiden and Priest, simply carried on as they always had, King Canute stoically commanding the tide to turn even as their careers were being washed away, bringing in new, copycat singers and merely delaying the inevitable. (All would later revert to previous, more conspicuously successful forms in order to forge new careers in the coming classic rock era, but that was still some years away and could not have been anticipated back in the grunge-is-all killing fields of the mid-1990s.)