Metallica: Enter Night (50 page)

The zeal with which Lars was pursuing the Napster situation was becoming out of proportion to other previous legal actions. Suddenly there appeared to be a very personal dimension. This only worsened as criticism against Metallica began to build in the media. At the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards Lars famously scored another own goal when he appeared in an anti-Napster video skit with the show’s host, Marlon Wayans. Wayans played a college student downloading ‘I Disappear’ in his dorm when Lars suddenly appears, demanding an explanation. When Wayans’ character explains he’s not stealing, only ‘sharing’, Lars proceeds to demonstrate the error of his ways by first drinking his Pepsi, then getting the Metallica road crew to empty his room of all his stuff, slapping Napster stickers on everything first. The video caused a certain amount of mirth from the industry guests in the room. But Lars’ appearance onstage later that evening was greeted by much more voluble booing from the public-admittance section of the audience. Despite looking decidedly uncomfortable, Lars later claimed he was ‘unaware of it’ until he got offstage. When Shawn Fanning appeared to respond by presenting an award while wearing a Metallica shirt, announcing pointedly, ‘I borrowed this shirt from a friend. Maybe, if I like it, I’ll buy one of my own,’ he received unreserved cheers. Again, Lars later brushed it off, claiming ‘the whole thing was planned’, and that the organisers had originally asked him to co-present the award with Fanning but that ‘Napster’s lawyers pulled him out of it’ at the last minute, concerned Lars would use the occasion to worsen the situation with their client. Talking to
Playboy
just a few weeks later, however, Lars made a point of saying he thought ‘It was the worst awards show, hands down, that I’ve ever been to’ and that he had left early to have dinner with friends.

Portrayed as the greed-driven villains of the piece, even James – who’d taken a back seat while his wife, Francesca, gave birth to their second child, a son, Castor, in May 2000 – admitted he had ‘cringed at certain interviews: “Oh, dude, don’t say that.”’ Lars, however, while also shuddering at some of the unexpected positions his hard-line stance put him in, ultimately remained unrepentant: ‘If you’d stop being a Metallica fan because I won’t give you my music for free, then fuck you.’ It seemed the feeling was mutual, however, and to this day the Napster debacle has hung like a shadow over everything Metallica has tried to do, their various attempts to make amends – including the cringe-making vision of Lars taking part in an internet interview explaining why file-sharing was actually good for fans, particularly in places such as Saudi Arabia where downloading tracks was the only way they had of accessing music they could not buy on CD. ‘I think it’s great,’ he said. ‘Obviously it’s the way to share this stuff and I think it’s awesome. I think that we were somewhat flabbergasted at some early internet things that were going on a few years ago but we’re at peace with that.’

Far less public but even more immediately damaging was the long-predicted meltdown of Jason Newsted, whose official departure from Metallica was announced in January 2001. Ostensibly the split had come about because James wouldn’t let Jason release an album by his side-project band Echobrain. In reality, the split had been coming almost since the day Jason had joined. ‘During the last couple of tours he was totally withdrawing from everything,’ James told
Classic Rock
in 2003: ‘Going into his own little world, wearing headphones all the time, never communicating, and we certainly weren’t kings of communication, either. We were just four guys who would shut up, play and let the beast roll on.’ More to the point, as Lars recalled the last time we spoke in 2009, Jason was ‘intense, very serious…he joined as a new member, obviously, and I think sort of stayed a new member, pretty much for all the fourteen years that he was in the band’.

At the time, though, Lars was too distracted with his own problems. Now separated from Skylar and their two-year-old son, Myles, he was living temporarily in a hotel suite in New York while mixing the debut album by Systematic,
Somewhere in Between
, for the Elektra-backed boutique label TMC (The Music Company) he had recently formed with record exec Tim Duffy. (The label would later run aground amidst personal animosity between the two co-founders.) Lars couldn’t have cared less just then what Jason was up to. Kirk, meanwhile, thought the Echobrain album was ‘great’ and was happy for him to release it. Jason had been quick to point out how many other artists’ records James had appeared on – including vocals for the track ‘Hell Isn’t Good’ on the
South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut
movie soundtrack; cameos on two Corrosion of Conformity albums; and playing guitar on a Primus album track. But James wasn’t ‘out trying to sell them’, he replied, and compared Jason’s working on a side-project to ‘cheating on your wife’. Reflecting on the situation two years later, Lars felt free enough to admit the reason for James’ hard-line stance was down to ‘control issues’. He said, ‘James has his vision of the perfect family, and it’s almost kind of mafia style. You’re part of the family and if you step outside of the family you’re betraying the family, and you’ll get ostracised. And that is at the heart of a lot of the stuff that we’ve tried to work through in the last couple of years.’

There had reportedly been a nine-and-a-half-hour band meeting at the RitzCarlton Hotel in San Francisco, which had followed an equally intense get-together a week earlier. Newsted was given the choice: forget Echobrain and stay with Metallica, or release the Echobrain record – and forget Metallica. Jason resigned the same day. His official statement referred to ‘private and personal reasons, and the physical damage I have done to myself over the years while playing the music that I love’. Behind the scenes, however, he admitted he had felt ‘almost stifled’. What hurt most was that Jason had always looked up to James, in much the same way as James had once looked up to Cliff. ‘[James] taught me determination and perseverance,’ Newsted would recall. ‘People have tried to burn him and break him, but he’ll always jump right back up. And kick your ass. No matter what differences we’ve had…I’ll always regard him as one of the best musicians ever.’

James, too, would come to look back on the whole episode with regret as the years passed. Speaking in 2003 with the newfound clarity that sobriety had brought him, he admitted it was his own ‘fears of abandonment and control issues’ that lay behind the way Jason’s desire to record his own music had been mismanaged: ‘It makes sense that I would…try to grip harder to keep the family together, that no one would leave, for fear that they might find something better somewhere else, when initially all [Jason] had to do was go jam with some other band and find out that, you know, Metallica is home. You don’t know what home is until you leave, and he’d maybe have become more grateful to be in Metallica. That’s certainly one ending to that story.’ He was honest enough to admit, though, that Echobrain ‘wasn’t the only reason that he left. A lot of other things combined and caused him to escape into a future of his own elsewhere, and search for happiness, and we’re all hoping that he finds it.’

In the meantime, Metallica had a new album waiting to be delivered. With Jason out and the will to find an immediate replacement simply not there, Bob Rock offered to play bass on the album and the others gratefully accepted. More badly scarred from the huge dent the Napster fracas had left in their reputation than they were ready yet to admit and still reeling from the psychic wounds Jason’s unhappy departure had reopened, for the first time the band was entirely unsure as to which direction their music should take. Rock and metal had undergone a huge renaissance in public taste since the last time Metallica had entered a recording studio seriously in 1995. Nu-metal, as evinced by rap-rock crossover stars such as Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park, had replaced them at the cutting edge, but there was no way they were going to convince James Hetfield to try competing as a rapper, while the classic rock market – although undergoing its own resurgence in the shape of zillion-selling reunion tours by the original line-ups of Kiss, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Iron Maiden and others – was not yet seen as a comfortable fit for the band.

Pragmatism was now the order of the day and, unable to suggest anything more concrete, they were happy to take Bob Rock’s lead in proposing a more collaborative approach, going into the studio empty-handed and literally seeing what happened, an idea previously considered anathema to the controlling Hetfield and Ulrich. Taking a six-month lease on an old army barracks just outside San Francisco called the Presidio, at Rock’s suggestion the sessions would take on a far more ‘free-thinking’ aspect than on previous Metallica albums, with lyrics for once being worked on by everyone – quite literally, as they all sat together in a room and took turns writing down lines, Rock included. ‘We’ve really kind of changed our process in the way we’re approaching this [album],’ said Rock. ‘We loaded in a lot of my equipment from my studio [and] we recorded there for two months, and we put down about eighteen kind of song ideas. It’s definitely a different approach. The whole thing [has] a very live feel…almost like a garage-type band atmosphere, only with great recording equipment to capture at the moment of conception so to speak.’ He predicted, ‘What this album is going to be like is…what they are as people, what they’re thinking and where they’re at.’ It would certainly become that, though not remotely in the way Bob or indeed the band had originally conceived.

There would be another, entirely unexpected ingredient this time: the addition to the day-to-day team of a $40,000-a-month ‘performance-enhancement coach’: Dr Phil Towle. A former sports psychologist who had worked, most famously, with the Tennessee Titans’ defensive lineman Kevin Carter and the legendary NFL coach Dick Vermeil, Towle’s first foray into the music business had been with Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello. Hired by Q Prime to try to bring the remaining members of Metallica – and Bob Rock – back to some sort of emotional tempo that would permit them to work well again in the studio, despite their recent setbacks, Towle not only instigated intensive two-hour daily sessions, he stayed around for the rest of the day and night, becoming increasingly more involved in the actual making of the album.

In their attempt to reinvigorate their music, post-thrash, post-grunge, post-reinvention, post-orchestras, post-fame and fortune and, clearly in subtext, post-Napster and post-Jason – and now group-therapy – the band would create a new form of Metallica music whose most immediate feature would be a complete dearth of guitar solos and an unlikely, cut-and-pasted drum sound; a genuinely distressed, fiercely antagonistic package, reflected in song titles such as ‘Frantic’, ‘St. Anger’, ‘Some Kind of Monster’ and ‘Shoot Me Again’. How happy the rest of the world would be with the end results, however, would prove to be a matter of the utmost debate, more so even than on
Load
and
Reload
. But that discussion was still some considerable way off when, after just three months of working like this at the Presidio, James arrived one morning with unexpected news. He was checking himself into rehab, effective immediately, and all other plans would have to be put on hold – indefinitely.

‘When we started playing music after Jason leaving,’ James said later, ‘the music was not all it could have been. We started to write and then as we were going deeper into ourselves, and exploring why it was that Jason left – what it meant to us, and all of that – it started stirring up a lot of emotions and a lot of stuff about how we could better ourselves as individuals. So I made the decision to go into rehab.’ Jason’s departure may have been the spark that finally lit the fuse but the reality was that Hetfield had been questioning his own mental and emotional state since the days when he would plan his week around whatever days he was going to have a hangover on. He’d first given up drinking back in 1994, when – in recovery terms – he ‘white-knuckled it’ for almost a year, not drinking alcohol but not feeling any happier with his choice. He was soon back drinking again throughout the years of the
Load
and
Reload
world tours.

Since the death of his father and then his marriage in August 1997 to Francesca Tomasi – a former Metallica crew member – he had been swinging back and forth between on-the-wagon sobriety and on-the-road hell-raising, even after the birth of their children Cali (in June 1998) and Castor. Happy to play the gentle giant family man at home, away from home – not just on tour but on his frequent, all-male hunting trips – James was still the same short-tempered human grizzly he’d always been. When, during a short vacation during those initial months working on the new Metallica album, he found himself away for his son Castor’s first birthday – hunting bear and drinking double-strength vodka on the Kamchatka peninsula in Siberia, a four-hour helicopter ride from the nearest small town – he finally began to crack. When Francesca then confronted him, threatening to leave with the children if he didn’t do something about his monstrously selfish behaviour, ‘That was the end for me,’ he confessed.

The upshot was an eleven-month programme of rehab – ‘a nice little cocoon’, he called it. Not so nice to begin with, though, during those earliest, most painful days of recovery: ‘I realised how much my life was fucked up. How many secrets I had, how incongruent my life was, and disclosing all this shit to my wife. Shit that happened on the road…Women, drink, whatever it is.’ Making a clean breast of things had a knock-on effect with the rest of the band, too: ‘Like I’m this whistleblower and then all of a sudden: “Er, wow, isn’t it terrible, honey, that he did that?”’ Yet, as far as James could see, looking back almost ten years later, ‘it was the saving part of Metallica, there’s no doubt. It had to come to an end a certain way.’ Tormented by the thought of losing both his wife and his band, he decided: ‘I’ve got to get it together or they’re both going to go away and then what?’

It also had an immediate effect on another, more tangential project that would now blossom into one of the most fascinating of the band’s career. A month before arriving at the Presidio, they had agreed to allow New York-based film-makers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky to make a documentary about the recording of the album. Best known previously for their collaborative 1992 debut,
Brother’s Keeper
(an acclaimed examination of the murder trial of Delbert Ward) and, four years later,
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hills
, Berlinger was also known, less flatteringly, for his solo fictional debut,
Book of Shadows
, the critically derided follow-up to
The Blair Witch Project
– such a disaster that Berlinger went into hiding for a period. Now back working on documentaries with Sinofsky again, their first major project would be the Metallica documentary.