Metallica: Enter Night (52 page)

Born in Santa Monica, California, on 23 October 1964, Roberto Agustín Miguel Santiago Samuel Trujillo Veracruz had learned bass at fifteen. Growing up listening to the snapping rhythms of James Brown and Parliament but playing Black Sabbath and Van Halen songs at backyard parties, he was studying jazz at college when he dropped out to join Metallica’s contemporaries, Suicidal Tendencies, whose punk-metal crossover became absorbed into the proto-thrash scene (and who supported Metallica on tour in 1993). More recently Trujillo had been in Ozzy Osbourne’s backing band, appearing along the way on albums by funk-metallists Infectious Grooves, a solo album by Alice In Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell, and other one-off projects. Then thirty-eight and married with two children, a bulky, surfer dude rarely seen out of calf-length shorts and cut-off tee, unlike the men of Metallica he had never contemplated cutting his waist-length hair. But then Rob Trujillo was not a man lacking in knowledge of his own self-worth. He was vacationing in Tahiti when he got the call. ‘Well, come on over to the studio, we’ll hang out,’ he recalled being told by Kirk. With ‘zero time to learn songs’ he began by playing ‘Battery’, which he already ‘kind of knew’, followed by ‘Sad but True’, ‘Whiplash’ and ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’: ‘They don’t tell you a film crew is going to be there, and they’re making a documentary – until twenty minutes before – “You’re okay with that, right?” It’s funny. Prior to that, I was always trying to hide from the cameras Ozzy had following him around for his TV show. This was obviously going to be different.’

The mixture of competing emotions on his face when they make him the offer is evident in the film, placing his head in his hands and groaning, ‘I don’t know what to say,’ when they inform him he will receive ‘an advance’ of $1 million just for joining. ‘There’s this whole mystique about what they’re like, you know, the evil Metallica. I didn’t see that. Actually, at first, not seeing that evil Metallica kind of made me uncomfortable.’ Rob Trujillo joining ‘had a pretty calming effect on the band’, observes Alexander Milas. ‘He wasn’t just a lapdog. He had this incredible pedigree. Rob wasn’t going to be overawed or overwhelmed by Metallica. And he brought so much. He described himself as like “a Samurai whisky warlord”, which I think pretty much sums up his stage presence. He’s just so fun to watch. An electrifying bass player – how many of those can you name?’

When, towards the end of
Some Kind of Monster
, James learns of Towle’s plans to relocate his family to San Francisco then accompany the band out on tour, he becomes concerned that the good doctor ‘thinks he’s in the band’. Trying to discuss this with him provides one of the most awkward moments in a stupendously awkward film, the therapist clearly squirming at any suggestion that he might have finally outstayed his welcome, and in so doing appearing more conflicted and needy even than Jason. He talks of having ‘visions’ as a ‘performance coach’ and making sure the new bass player is ‘right’.

Looking back on the movie five years later, Lars told me, ‘They started filming us in the studio and all of a sudden fucking hell broke loose, and then it turned into something else. And so I’m proud of the fact that we let it become what it became, and I’m proud of the fact that we didn’t stand in the way of it. It sort of turned into its own thing, and Joe and Bruce felt that they were witnessing something special with their cameras and they asked us to trust them and kind of go on this ride with them because they felt there was something truly unique happening. And we trusted Joe and Bruce enough to let them kind of do their thing. In some way there was something quite liberating about that. Because once you free yourself to that point, then you stop being self-conscious…very quickly it stopped being us and them and became all of us together.’

Had it actually aided the process they were going through?

‘I do think that in some way one could argue that the cameras, certainly with some of the more therapy stuff that we were doing when we were really trying to come clean with each other, I think the presence of the cameras helped us not in any way filter or censor ourselves…there was a vulnerability and a nakedness there that was probably complemented by the presence of the cameras – in those moments when we were sitting in front of each other and saying pretty much what we were really thinking and feeling.’ He laughed, still conscious of just how ‘naked’ they had allowed themselves to be.

The other thing we get to see close-up in the movie, of course, is the tortuous conception of the most controversial, certainly the hardest to listen to, of all Metallica’s albums. In among the anger and frustrations, the perceived betrayals and emotional backdraughts, the songs on
St. Anger
reflect Lars’ personal travails with Napster, the loss of Jason, the ghost of Cliff, and the people they had become in Metallica, conflicted, overstretched, insanely rich, and now, suddenly, immensely self-doubting. Musically, the results are far from pretty. Not only are there no guitar solos, but the drums sound machine-like, like an anvil being pummelled. And there are no quieter moments, no ballads, no instrumentals, no place to escape the fearful maelstrom of crazed guitars, rubber-band bass and utterly pained vocals. Taken piece by piece, tracks such as ‘Dirty Window’, ‘Invisible Kid’ and ‘Shoot Me Again’ were some of the fiercest, most convincingly honest, if musically disjointed moments the band had laid down since the sonically disfigured but brutally forthright
Justice
fifteen years before; certainly more original and heartfelt than the lacklustre ‘I Disappear’, which directly preceded it. Taken as a whole, however, which is clearly how
St. Anger
is meant to work, it is a bitter pill to swallow. ‘I’m madly in anger at you!’ Hetfield wails on the title track; ‘My lifestyle determines my deathstyle’, he earnestly exhorts on ‘Frantic’. When the final track, ‘All in My Hands’ ends with him repeatedly screaming, ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill!’, the silence at the end leaves you staring into yourself.

Conceived by committee, not even the band liked all of it. According to Kirk, only four songs got all four votes (including Bob’s) to be on the record. Rock’s anti-production hardly helps, the various sections of each song shuffled and reshuffled before being cut-and-pasted together on a computer screen. Later, Kirk would complain that he had recorded over a hundred guitar parts in the course of the album, but had no idea where each had been used, or why most hadn’t. Rob Trujillo, he added, was not the only one who had to learn the songs from scratch before they could play them live. David Bowie and Brian Eno may have done similar things with their music in the past, U2 and Radiohead also. But this was musical experimentation on a level previously unknown in hard rock.

As if to somehow sugar the pill, when
St. Anger
was released in June 2003, it came in a bewilderingly naff Pushead-designed sleeve – a comic book image of a bunched fist with a rope knotted around the wrist. This only served to further confuse critics already hostile to its self-conscious attempts at radicalism. Reviews were almost uniformly sour.
Rolling Stone
called it ‘a mea culpa to long-time devotees as the now Newsted-less trio crafted a complex riff marathon once more, this time accompanied by cathartic lyrics from a newly sober, therapy-suffused Hetfield. But production oddities – such as a drum sound that makes Lars Ulrich sound like a two-year-old banging pots and pans with a spoon – are jarring. And poor Kirk Hammett, the band’s soloist and a man who has weathered the squabbles of the two figureheads for twenty years, is rewarded with no solos. Now there’s something to be angry about.’ For most first-time listeners, says Alexander Milas, ‘
St. Anger
was an absolute mess’.

Metallica’s marketing director told Kirk the album was ‘a fucking commercial disaster’. Relatively speaking, he was right. Although it reached Number One in America and another dozen countries, and Number Three in the UK, overall
St. Anger
sold approximately half of what
S&M
had done and remains probably their most unpopular album, more so even than the obsequious
Reload
. ‘It still annoys me to this day,’ says writer and long-time Metallica chronicler Joel McIver, ‘because the band regard it as a symbol of rebellion and a catalyst for change when in reality it’s just a collection of dull riffs and puerile lyrics.’ For the first time since
Master of Puppets
, however, Metallica weren’t out primarily to make an album that pleased fans or critics, but to please themselves; an album that spoke to them on the deepest level, come what may. In this regard, it could be argued, they succeeded completely; that
St. Anger
should be viewed in the same historical light as equally personal, often misunderstood, even loathed albums as Neil Young’s
Tonight’s the Night
, Bowie’s
Low
, John Lennon’s
Plastic Ono Band
; as feral as the demented
Funhouse
by The Stooges; as self-pitying as its other blood cousin,
In Utero
by Nirvana; as off-putting as Lou Reed’s
Berlin
. Albums that reflected the huge personal crises the artists had gone – or were still going – through but which everybody else originally found impossible to listen to without wincing, or simply taking them off, infuriated that they didn’t fulfil their remit and entertain in the conventional manner.

‘It’s [about the] deep-seated anger that’s deep within our personalities,’ said Kirk. ‘We’ve been exploring our inner personalities and discovering that there’s a lot of fucking residual anger there that came from our childhoods and it’s something that fame, money and celebrity is not an antidote for.’ On
Kill ’Em All
, he said, ‘we were very angry young men and now we’re very angry middle-aged men. What happened in our childhoods is part of our mental foundation, and tapping into it in a positive way is something we’ve found out how to do in the last two years, and that is the sound of
St. Anger
.’

Would purging their anger affect their creativity now, though?

‘I can see how someone could get caught up in that fear of running out of creative juice,’ allowed James. ‘But I truly don’t believe that. Music was a great gift for me and I discovered that somewhat early, but I don’t need alcohol, I don’t need anger, I don’t need serenity, I don’t need any of those things to be creative.’ All he needed now, he said, was ‘life – I’ve been trying to dump everything else: sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll; chocolate’s a real struggle these days – or work. You know, in rehab I saw it all, people taking certain behaviours to extremes to where it becomes an addiction; compulsive activity that just started to ruin their lives. So anything can really be taken to that extreme, but I’m comfortable with the unknown right now, and trusting of it, so life is filling that hole. Life on life’s terms is okay for me.’

The reason the album sounds so fragmented, James told me, was because that’s ‘exactly where we were at that point. For me,
St. Anger
kind of stands alone. It’s more of a statement than an album to me. It’s more of the soundtrack to the movie, in a way. Here’s what’s going on in our lives and documenting it, you know? But in that fragmentation it brought us together. So it was a very necessary piece of the puzzle to get us where we are today.’

Even
Some Kind of Monster
– now regarded as a high-tide mark in the band’s career – attracted mixed reviews when it was first released. In the
Observer Music Monthly
, Charles Shaar Murray called it ‘primo car-crash stuff, replete with moments of the Higher Bathos’. The
Village Voice
, once art-encrusted champions of the band, described it as ‘a two-and-a-half-hour puff piece about how “important” Metallica are and, worse, how much “integrity” they have’. Over the years, however, this often cringe-inducing movie has proved to be a more inviting entry point into the Metallica story for people new to the band than any of their albums. Like all great art, its appeal has proved universal: you don’t have to know Metallica or like heavy metal to relate to what’s going on there, or to be shocked and amazed by it.

‘It’s funny,’ says David Ellefson, ’cos you watch
Some Kind of Monster
and people are talking about, “Oh and then they had a therapist.” I’m like, gimme a fucking break! [In Megadeth] we had, like,
four
therapists!’ He laughs. ‘I’m like, fucking been there, done that, lived that movie. In fact, that’s the one thing we
beat
Metallica to. We fucking beat ’em with group therapy!’ Says Alexander Milas, ‘I remember when I first watched it, getting really emotional. Metallica by that point had become such a pinata, for me as a journalist but also as a fan, it was always that thing of: oh, it was all better before the
Black Album
, that’s where it ended – with Cliff. All of a sudden they were revealed to be human beings with flaws and emotions. And I actually began to like Lars Ulrich again. It resurrected my love of Metallica, as a band of the present and not just as a relic of the Eighties. At the same time, I was pretty shocked that they did it. It was almost like they were committing an act of supreme penance toward their fans.’

For James Hetfield it was about far more than that, though. Before the events shown in the movie, ‘Things weren’t working for me; it affected family life, it affected band life, it affected everything that went on around us.’ It wasn’t merely a case of now he was out of rehab things could go ‘back to normal’. From this point on, there was no ‘normal’. Life in and out of Metallica would be ‘a work in progress’. He loved being in Metallica but he was no longer the titty-squeezing, vodka-guzzling twenty-something dude with the long straggly hair and beer-stained Misfits T-shirt. He had allowed the real James Hetfield – whoever that was – to disappear. Now he wanted him back: ‘Not just within the band or on tour, but at home. You’d try to escape that feeling but no matter where you went you were identified as that guy in Metallica, and as corny as it sounds, you take that on. You kind of submit to it, and you’re signing autographs when you’re trying to eat dinner with your kids, or having photos taken when you’re on vacation. But you don’t have to do that. Any human would say, “Can you leave me alone for a second?” And in all of that attention, how lonely I was and how lost I was, and in a lot of denial about it. Of course, it happened for a reason and there’s some good things that I take from my past, but I’ve found a new love for life as me instead of the guy in Metallica.’