Metallica: Enter Night (53 page)

It was just a shame that it took Jason leaving to set the ball in motion. ‘I think that if Jason had just stuck it out for two or three more days rather than coming to that one meeting and saying, “I’m out of here, no questions asked,” things would have been a lot different in the band,’ said Kirk. ‘It’s been a huge learning experience and something that Jason set in motion for all of us. He was the sacrificial lamb for our spiritual and mental growth as well as our creative growth, and it just sucks. It’s medieval.’

It was years later, another lifetime, more than one, and we were both bullshitting, going through the motions the way old pros do, making with the nice. He was on form – when wasn’t he? – and so was I. An article, not for
Kerrang!
any more but for
The Times;
not about the new album any more, heavy though it certainly was, but about the recession, and how rock had become big again because of it. It was November 2008 and the world’s banks were on the verge of collapse but Metallica was back doing better than ever. Could the two things somehow be linked? Neither of us believed it for a second of course but that’s what the paper had asked for and as we both stood to make something out of it – good promo for him, nice profile for me – we played along. Eminent figures in our fields, talking bollocks and being paid in kind for it as the rest of the world went to hell in an out-of-order ATM machine.

The thing that really struck me afterwards was how surprised I had been, just for a moment, to realise how much he’d forgotten about me…about us. Assuming there had ever really been an ‘us’.

‘Hey,’ he’d said at the start, pleasantly mangled accent still intact, although more Americanised by the years, as you’d expect, ‘who’d have thought that time in Miami, shit-faced, the next time we spoke we would have six kids between us?’

He was talking about that night on the Monsters of Rock tour in 1988, sprawled in his hotel room listening to those dreadful early mixes of the turgid
Justice
album. We had spoken many times since then, seen each other in different places – Tokyo, Los Angeles, London, rapped on the phone, had dinner with friends – and I was momentarily affronted that all that came to his mind was that one distant, drug-encrusted night.

Then I thought about where he had been in the interim, the two-year tours, the $15 million mansions, the second ex-wife and lovers I’d never known, the private art collection so precious and vast it had to be kept hidden in an air-conditioned vault somewhere in the Californian desert, before being sold off, or ‘passed on’ as he now put it – one of those air-conditioned phrases the very rich use to describe something the rest of us struggle to get our heads around. The cocktails with Courtney Love, the tennis matches with John McEnroe, the court cases and life coaches and zillion-dollar merch deals; the endlessly ringing cell phone. The shit that just always happens, wherever you are and whoever you might be, but most especially it must always seem if you are Lars Ulrich, big-brain inventor of the heaviest metal band of them all.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘who’d have thought…’

The real rehabilitation of Metallica began out on the road. The Madly in Anger with the World tour began officially on 30 April 2003, when they gave their first public performance with Rob Trujillo in the band during a video shoot for the ‘St. Anger’ single at San Quentin prison. A remarkable piece of work – not least the moving little speech James gives the menacing-looking inmates before filming starts, unseen in the final video cut but shown in
Some Kind of Monster –
it was still hard not to view it as terribly contrived; all part of the PR campaign to prove they had gotten over their icky make-up and men-kissing phase and gone back to their hard-as-fuck roots. Except, of course, the men in Metallica were never really hard in the first place: Ulrich was a middle-class kid who had identified the main chance and gone for it, wholly and unashamedly; Hetfield the living embodiment of the Wizard of Oz, a small, rapidly beating heart hiding behind a big scary screen, frantically tugging at levers and praying no one would ever glimpse the real him; Hammett the eternal softie who’d managed to keep his head down without entirely losing it, even if it had meant keeping himself nicely toasted for most of it. The only one who exuded any real-life menace was Trujillo, and even he had hardly been born on the mean streets; he just looked like he had. As Alexander Milas puts it, ‘I’m sorry but, you know, there’s just like no credibility in your band doing anything like that [prison video]. How can you believe in a metal band that moisturises? It just can’t happen.’

Nevertheless, it takes balls to come out, as James did, and tell the assembled mass of bald and tattooed musclemen, ‘Anger is an emotion I’ve struggled with pretty much all my life.’ They were at least trying to re-establish their musical identity, and taken at face value the ‘St. Anger’ video is the most hard-hitting thing Metallica had done since ‘One’ nearly fifteen years before. A week later they were the latest subject of MTV’s
Icons
tribute show, where contemporary metal acts that had once stood across the great Napster divide, such as Korn and Limp Bizkit, showed up to pay their respects. It was another significant plank laid in the public re-entry programme they were now embarked on. Metallica also played live, their first live public performance with Rob, and their first since James’ return from rehab. ‘We’re looking forward to spreading this new lust for life we have,’ he told
Rolling Stone
, doing his best to sound confident. ‘There’s a new strength in Metallica that’s never been there before. There are still fearful parts, too. But I’m pretty well set up. And I’m really proud of the new music. I think we did something where the pedal does not let up.’

They knew the real test, however, would come once they returned to the road proper. James, in particular, was anxious, terrified that he might relapse, undoing two years’ worth of work he’d already undergone. Just as with the studio, there would have to be new work rules agreed; the most important concerning the behaviour of those around the singer, rather than Hetfield himself. Namely, the others could drink, could do what they liked, but they would need to be polite about it and preferably out of James’ backstage orbit. ‘Me, Kirk and Trujillo can still throw down, believe me,’ Lars was quick to reassure. ‘There’s no issues. James has been an angel with that. He doesn’t preach, or police, or get up in everybody else’s shit.’ Being sober on the road ‘felt great but scary at the same time’, said James. He wondered ‘how many hours have been wasted sitting in a bar somewhere talking to people you’ll never see again?’ Instead, he tried seeing it all as ‘you would have done if it was your first tour’, going sightseeing and finding out about the various places around the world he now found himself in, rather than just treating it all as one amorphous drunken blur as he might have done in the past.

To ease themselves in, Metallica undertook a four-night run of shows to fan club members at San Francisco’s Fillmore Theater (formerly the Fillmore West). By June they were back in Europe, headlining festivals, their first there for five years. Despite James’ earlier demands about ‘no more two-year tours’ the Madly in Anger world tour ran for nineteen months, selling out venues right through to its final date in San Jose, California, on 29 November 2004. Extra breaks were built in along the way, to allow James, and them all, time back home with their families. But in every other respect, to the outside world it looked like business as usual. In Paris they played three shows in three different clubs in one day.

The rotten album reviews were largely overhauled in the public mind by the reception
Some Kind of Monster
received after it previewed at the Sundance festival in February 2004. ‘We hear a lot from our peers in other bands about how much they’ve seen this movie and how many things ring true for so many [of them],’ Lars told me. ‘It was better received in the film industry than it was in the music industry [and] in the music industry it was better received by the peers than the punters. I think a lot of punters felt that it was like, whoa, maybe this is just a little too much [information]. I think some punters were a little miffed. But the peer group and all the cats in all the other bands were very complimentary and could certainly relate to most of it.’

The same month as Sundance, Metallica won yet another Grammy for Best Metal Performance, this time for the ‘St. Anger’ single. That summer they also completed the second of their US Summer Sanitarium stadium tours, with Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit applying the hip seal of approval as guest supports on the bill. Rob Trujillo took it all in his giant, crablike strides. ‘I ignored the media and even the fans,’ he said. ‘I just told myself, “I’m going to be Robert [and] give one hundred per cent as me.”’ Easier said than done, he later admitted. ‘It was intense. I had to learn the catalogue of music, twenty-two years of music. And I had to learn the
St. Anger
album.’ He also had to learn how to deal with the complicated relationships, strung like an aged web across the stage, between the three main members. ‘You gotta know how to balance each person,’ he said diplomatically, ‘because they’re so different.’

In 2005, they took a year off, the first time they’d done that voluntarily since 1994, the outbreak of peace only interrupted in November when they agreed to appear as special guests to the Rolling Stones – the only group left Metallica was happy to play second banana to – at two massive shows at the AT&T Park football stadium in San Francisco. For a band that counted so heavily on unity and togetherness, on keeping the whole stronger than its sum parts, the three members who had played on every Metallica album also spoke of their need to express their individuality; to seek solitude when the touring was finally over, or the last track finally recorded. At heart, they were all still loners, even if they were all, in their own ways, now making strenuous attempts to integrate family lives into that oneness.

James had fully settled back into his new home life with Francesca and their third child, ‘my little angel’, Marcella. For the first time he had been there for the birth, cutting the umbilical cord: ‘my daughter pretty much glued us back together’. He no longer went hunting, either: ‘Nowadays it doesn’t feel necessary, killing things just to kill them.’ His den was still stocked with the mounted heads of animals he’d hunted, including a boar, an antelope and a 1,600-pound buffalo that took four rifle shots to finally put down. But for kicks, James now preferred to go ‘one hundred and fifty miles an hour in my car’. Certain that both he and Metallica were stronger for having survived their ups and downs, he said: ‘I’ve gone through life trying to avoid struggles, either drink them away or hide from them, but being able to face them and take them on and knowing that you are going to grow after you have walked through the fire and be okay, all of these things that we have been talking about – Napster, Jason, rehab – have made us stronger as people and as a band. We’ve gravitated towards each other and realised the gratitude we have for being alive and in Metallica.’

Lars, meanwhile, was now living with the Danish actress Connie Nielsen, who he’d first met during a break from the Madly in Anger tour at the end of 2003. They would later have a son together, Bryce Thadeus Ulrich-Nielsen, born in San Francisco on 21 May 2007, to go with their other children, Myles and Layne, from Lars’ marriage to Skylar, and Sebastian, from a previous relationship of Connie’s. Thanks to a combination of Metallica, Napster and
Some Kind of Monster
, Lars was now such a household name in America that he even appeared in a special celebrity edition of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
, on which he raised $32,000 for the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic (providing primary care for patients with substance abuse and mental health issues). After selling off most of his art collection, Lars was back to collecting again. As he said, ‘It’s one area where I can go and be myself. It’s not about being the drummer in a rock band. I’m accepted for who I am in the art circles. I love going into artist spaces and galleries and auction houses.’ It was, he said, ‘my place of sanctuary’. Speaking to me from his backstage hidey-hole in Glasgow in 2009, he explained the kind of thing he was into nowadays: ‘Most of the artists that I buy are painters. I’m a little more of a painter guy than a sculpture guy. A lot of contemporary art these days is more about the idea than about the execution. And I’m a little bit more about the execution than the idea. I’m interested in those moments between a painter and a canvas, more so than how clever some idea can be…Pollack, De Kooning, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Rothko, you know, Gorky. And then some European guys like [the painter and sculptor Jean] Dubuffet. But mostly painters…’ He had even begun some canvases of his own, although ‘not enough to warrant talking about. Trust me! Paul Stanley and Ronnie Wood shouldn’t worry!’ he laughed.

Kirk Hammett was also enjoying his version of domesticity, living in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco, in his haute Gothic mansion full of dark oak interiors and opulent crucifixes and stuffed two-headed sheep, with his Hawaiian wife Lani and their son, Angel Ray Keala, born in September 2006, as well as their dogs Darla and Hoku, and various cats. (They would have a second son, Vincenzo Kainalu, born in June 2008.) They had met at the height of the
Load
era and while they also spent time at their ranch, horse riding, or hitting the beach to surf, Kirk was still essentially the same incense-burning, indoors guy he’d always been. He, too, had become a collector, although his art centred as always on old Hollywood movie memorabilia. He still enjoyed reading comic books, old and new. ‘I’m still very much into all that stuff, yeah,’ he told me in 2009. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever grow out of it, you know? I still fucking read comic books, I still watch horror movies, I still buy toys. I’m still that guy; I just have more of it now.’ The original 1931
Frankenstein
movie was still his ‘all-time favourite. It’s a tie between
Frankenstein
and
Bride of Frankenstein
.’ His favourite book was ‘probably the
Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
’. He was into yoga, he said, and reading ‘Buddhist philosophy. Buddhist teachings resonate heavy with me.’ A believer in karmic law, he was vegetarian; his favourite drink no longer beer, but champagne. ‘Classy, yeah,’ he chuckled. And of course he rarely passed a day without picking up his guitar.