Metallica: Enter Night (45 page)

The only survivors were those few Eighties stars who had always exhibited as much brains as brawn, and even they had to work out their strategies carefully in order to successfully pull it off. Smart cookies such as Bon Jovi and Def Leppard, both of whom conspicuously amended their public image, cutting their hair, ditching the metaphorical shoulder pads, even sprouting semi-convincing facial hair, temporarily ditching the big rock anthems for less showy but more easy-on-the-ear power ballads, hoping no one would notice the incredible lengths they were prepared to go to in order to keep their careers alive. Things were moving fast again now, though, and even they were sent scurrying back to the drawing board as grunge was suddenly holed beneath the waterline by the grim suicide, in April 1994, of Kurt Cobain, putting a shotgun in his mouth after pulling a syringe from his arm. Within months the emphasis had switched in the UK to something called Britpop – indie bands with suddenly loud guitars and nicely contrived bad attitudes that made the grunge stars seem over-earnest, musically flatulent and – biggest crime of all – badly dressed. Bands such as Blur, Oasis, Pulp and the usual gaggle of slipstream followers were the new music-mag messiahs whose artful mien reached back to a time before hard rock and heavy metal, to the pre-dawn days of The Beatles, The Kinks, The Who and the Small Faces. In the summer of 1995, in fact, Lars had become so infatuated with Oasis – to Britpop, what Metallica had been to thrash – he actually began following them around on tour, the unashamed superfan again, hanging out with twenty-three-year-old Liam Gallagher and sharing a gram or two with his older but not necessarily wiser brother Noel.

As he later told
Mojo
, ‘I’m the one who will go and find out what goes on in Oasis-land or Guns N’ Roses-land or Alice In Chains-land. I’m so curious to see how other bands do things. It’s fun to sit down with Liam Gallagher and talk complete and utter nonsense about music.’ Had Liam ever heard of Metallica, though? Did he even know who the motormouth with the funny name and weirdly mangled accent was? Or why he kept turning up at gigs on their US tour that year? It didn’t matter, not to Lars. Just as he had done with Diamond Head all those years before, he really was there as a fan, to look and to listen and maybe learn. Just as with Diamond Head, he probably didn’t even get round to mentioning he actually played the drums, sometimes, you know, a bit.

If the music was changing around them, so was the business. In 1994, Metallica filed suit in a San Francisco court against Elektra, seeking to be released from their deal. Their original contract had been for a fourteen per cent royalty rate, for seven albums. They had never renegotiated, not even after they first hit Top Ten pay dirt with
Justice
, as would have been the norm for most groups in that position, looking instead to put together a new, partnership-based deal when the current one ended. In 1993, they were alarmed to discover, however, that none of the various video, DVD and box-set compilations they had released counted as one of the nominal seven albums stipulated by their original Elektra contract – not even the
Garage Days Re-Revisited
mini-album. They considered this particularly unfair as the original drafts of their contract were still based on the conventions of the 1970s when artists routinely released two albums a year, and video, DVD and boxed sets did not exist.

As a result when they came to renegotiate their deal in the wake of the huge success of the
Black Album
, they did so from the ground up, putting together a new joint venture/partnership agreement with Elektra president Bob Krasnow, in April 1994. The new contracts were still being drawn up when they were then cancelled in the wake of Elektra’s takeover by the Time Warner Music Group that summer. TWG chief Bob Morgado appointed Doug Morris, president of Atlantic, as the new president and head of Warner Music US (which included Elektra, Atlantic and Warner). Subsequently, Krasnow resigned at Elektra, as did Warner’s chief, Mo Ostin. Lars wasn’t underselling the situation when he described them as ‘the two most music-oriented company bosses…We’ve had a great thing going for ten years but it’s a very different situation, a different set of rules than a few years ago.’

Metallica’s lawsuit demanded that they be released from what remained of their original Elektra contract so they could sign with another label ‘free and clear of any interference from or obligation to Elektra’. In response, a Time Warner statement claimed the suit was ‘without merit. The contract is a valid and binding document and Elektra will vigorously enforce its rights to the fullest extent of the law.’ The result was a declaration of war by the band. It wasn’t just about the money, Lars insisted: ‘We were more interested in the long-term outlook.’ They had deliberately not renegotiated in the wake of their success on the basis that ‘Bob [Krasnow] would make it up to us later.’ More specifically, they wanted more control over back catalogue and a larger share of bottom-line profits. ‘There would be a greater gain in the long run only if we made good records people were buying,’ Lars told the
Washington Post
. ‘The beauty of the partnership is it’s down to us.’

Morgado, however, ‘preferred a more traditional risk/reward structure where the label takes a risk by paying substantial advances’, explained Metallica attorney Jody Graham, ‘which are then recoupable by artists’ royalties. Then they get the rewards for risking that money.’ Unusually, however, Metallica had never been in an unrecouped situation, so there was no basis for Elektra constructing a deal based on ‘risk’. The success of the band had effectively eliminated any element of risk for years to come. As Lars astutely pointed out, ‘We’re a record company’s dream because we don’t require radio promotion or marketing. We don’t go out and make million-dollar videos. We tour until we fall on our faces and that buzz generates word of mouth. We’re as low maintenance a group as you can get.’ He may have been overstating the case somewhat – the expensive videos and promotion were very much becoming the norm even for Metallica – but the principle still held. Moreover, according to Metallica’s legal argument, in recent years it had accounted for up to twenty per cent of Elektra’s domestic billings, generating more than $200 million in revenues in the USA alone. The fly in the ointment, and the straw that Elektra clung to, was that the band had officially still only recorded four of the seven albums it had originally contracted for. The counter-argument: that aside from the albums, Metallica had also released the
Garage Days
EP – regarded as a Top Thirty mini-album in the USA – and a special deluxe edition box-set in 1993 titled
Live Shit: Binge & Purge
, containing three live CDs and two live concert videos, which retailed in the USA for $100 (where it sold over 300,000 copies) and in the UK for £75. There had also been the release of two platinum long-form videos with
Cliff ’Em All
and
A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica
(detailing the recording of the
Black Album
), ‘despite having no contractual obligation to do so’.

By December, Lars was in New York, where depositions for the looming court case were now in process, sitting in the same room as Robert Morgado, ‘him nervously smiling over at me. It was quite funny being in a room with twelve lawyers. And me sitting there after sleeping three hours, still drunk from the night before, with my shades on, not having showered in a week.’ Eventually, a new agreement was reached when Burnstein and Mensch accompanied Lars to a meeting with Doug Morris and his advisers. ‘We said, “All the people who can fix this are in this room. We don’t need to deal with lawyers, with the food chain. Let’s talk this through.”’ Two hours later they ‘came to an agreement that everybody felt comfortable with’. Lars stuck his hand out, Morris shook it, ‘and there was the deal’. Metallica hadn’t walked away with an unequivocal victory. They would still need to deliver three more albums, but under much improved financial terms and conditions, in regard to how they chose to deliver material for those albums, the impact of which would be felt over the next five years.

The other members of Metallica, meanwhile, were undergoing their own re-education – literally, in the case of Kirk, who actually enrolled for a semester at the City College of San Francisco, where he took classes in film, jazz and Asian studies (the latter reflecting his mother’s Filipino heritage) and came away with straight ‘A’s. Now divorced from Rebecca, who got a sports car and a significant financial settlement, and living back in the heart of the city – modelling his home as a Gothic retreat full of long, candlelit corridors, the walls covered in rare Hollywood posters for the original
Frankenstein
and
Dracula
movies, its vast ceilings hand-decorated in paintings of moon-bathed night scenes full of forked lightning and thunderclouds – Kirk was suddenly part of a younger, more boho crowd. This was something that became a huge influence on his metamorphosis into the make-up-wearing, pierced and tattooed character we would meet for the first time on
Load
. Musically, he had also moved on, although, unlike Lars, not into the emotional quicksand of grunge or self-referential peacocking of Britpop, but towards more left-field musical innovators such as Nine Inch Nails, Aphex Twin and The Prodigy, groups who positioned themselves as musical emissaries of the near-future, subverting their guitars with the greater intelligence of computers. He was also greatly impressed by outré image-mongers like Marilyn Manson and Perry Farrell, with their portrayal of a neo-Gothic, quasi-religious image that owed something to piercings and make-up and even more to the twisted ideals of self-immolation.

‘You can only be what the public thinks you are for so long before it becomes boring,’ Kirk said in 1996. Since the phenomenal success of
Black
, he had ‘begun to feel quite objectified’. Going to college helped reconnect him with reality, albeit a more select version of it: ‘When I met people, they’d go, “Wow, I always thought you were this big mean person. But you’re really very nice – and kinda short.” A lot of people get fixated on what they need [Metallica] to be – appearance-wise, how we should sound.’ None of this frankly interested either Kirk or, he was pleased (though not entirely surprised) to discover, Lars. It would become this mutual desire to multiply the range of Metallica’s inspirations and thereby increase its influence, both musically and otherwise, along with their mutual fondness still for experimenting with drugs, as ecstasy now joined cocaine and (in Kirk’s case) marijuana as recreational drugs of choice, that would draw the drummer and guitarist closer together in the mid-Nineties. Both divorced, having rejected the straight life, and more intent than ever on ‘seeing what’s out there’, as Lars put it, their newfound bond also had the side effect of making James feel more isolated from the group’s central purpose than he ever had been, putting him at a certain remove and continually on his guard – the two allowing themselves to be photographed kissing each other, knowing the uptight Hetfield would find such images infuriating – as the two sought to challenge his leadership again and again over the coming years. ‘I know he’s homophobic. Let there be no question about that,’ Lars would later claim in
Playboy
. True to form, James took exception to the pictures of Lars and Kirk kissing – which circulated briefly in 1996 – but understood the motivation. ‘Totally,’ he said in 2009. ‘I’m the driving force behind their homosexual adventures. I think drugs had something to do with it too,’ James laughed. ‘I hope!’ Kirk would later disingenuously characterise this period as ‘playing referee’ between Lars and James, but the fact is he was never closer to Lars – or further away from James – than now.

If these misadventures were meant to make a point to Hetfield, it was one that was lost on rock fans who remained largely unchanged in their own views. Either they were already okay with their own sexuality and that of others, or they were the type of young dolts to write ‘Lars is gay’ posts on veracious Metallica chat-rooms, the remnants of which still crop up today across the internet whenever anyone has anything derisive to say about the band. Lars, though, was merely role-playing. Determined as ever to keep Metallica relevant, turned on by the newfound freedom his wilful abandonment of the band’s old image had allowed him, behind closed doors he still preferred the straight, conservative life of the millionaire businessman. His new hilltop home in Marin County came replete with indoor racquetball court, home movie theatre, rec-room with pool table, CD jukebox and a patio view of San Francisco that was like a map splayed out before you, all guarded at its electronic gates by a matching pair of cannons. Away from home Lars liked to go scuba-diving. He was also about to get married again. After Deborah there had been a significant affair with Linda Walker, a former leading light at Q Prime who’d left her marriage and given up her job to live with him. But the fall-out from the success of
Black
had taken its toll there, too, and Linda had eventually moved out. Now Lars began an affair with Skylar Satenstein, an emergency doctor and former girlfriend of actor Matt Damon, who had been the inspiration for the ‘Skylar’ character in his breakthrough hit movie,
Good Will Hunting
. Lars and Skylar would eventually marry in 1997, later having two sons: Myles, born in 1998, and Layne, in 2001.

Lars now had the money and wherewithal to begin a serious art collection: a passion, like music, inherited from his father. As he told me in 2009, ‘For many years it became really the only area where I felt I could express myself creatively outside of Metallica. And that it was a place where I was on my own. When you spend as much time in a gang like Metallica, once in a while you need to just do stuff on your own. And you need to feel that you have an identity that’s you and who you are and not you as part of something else.’ He laughed self-consciously. Talking about being the biggest metal stars in the world, that was kids’ stuff. But talking about his art collection…‘For many, many years that was the place where I really needed solitude and some sort of creative sanctuary. That’s where I would go.’ He liked to collect ‘schools’ of art: abstract expressionism; the COBRA movement; art brut. And prized individual works by modern painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, the black American former graffiti artist who produced neo-expressionist classics in the 1980s before his death of a heroin overdose at just twenty-seven; Jean Dubuffet, the French painter-sculptor who pioneered the concept of ‘low art’ before his death in 1985; and Willem de Kooning, the Dutch-American abstract expressionist who had been one of the original ‘action’ painters. Lars also had ‘the best collection of Asger Jorn [Danish painter, sculptor] on this planet’.