Metallica: Enter Night (54 page)

Musically, what really sealed the deal in terms of Metallica’s public rehabilitation was their decision to turn their summer 2006 festival appearances into a twentieth-anniversary celebration of
Master of Puppets
, performing the album for the first time in its entirety, track by track. They were getting in on the classic rock market somewhat belatedly but now they’d got there they were making the most of it, as always. Speaking with Kirk at the time, he described
MOP
as ‘my favourite Metallica album. I really felt we gelled as a band and we gelled as people, and that’s what
Master of Puppets
became. And that only ended because we lost a dear friend and we had to pick up the pieces and start again.’ Looking back now, he said, he felt that
Master
and
Black
were still the band’s best albums: ‘We had this vision. For
Master
we just wanted to make the heaviest, most consistent album we could; with the
Black Album
it was more about spreading the Metallica gospel – and still being heavy at the same time.’ It was the making of
MOP
that still stood out most in his memory, though, because ‘it was just an amazing time for us. We were putting all the right notes in all the right places. But we didn’t set out to make something that would stand the test of time twenty years from now. That wasn’t on our radar at all. We just wanted to make the best possible album we could make at the time. We really just set our sights to that and buckled down. And we always felt that if we did indeed give it all we had and it didn’t pan out the way we wanted to, at least we could say we tried our best. That was our attitude. Frankly, I’m amazed it still sounds so fresh. I put it on the other day, just to give it a listen ahead of talking to you, and my thought was: if you released
MOP
today it would be right up there with all the newest releases – you know, sound-wise, quality-wise, recording-wise, concept-wise – it’s still relevant today. Even the lyrical content, the things James was writing about back then, it’s still relevant today. The music, the sounds, the attitude, the approach, it’s all still relevant today ’cos people are still using those techniques today that we kind of forged. We were aware of how much people expected from us. We were a different band, we were an extreme band and we were aware of the fact that we had a very unique sound, and we were just very bent on expanding upon that sound. And it all just went right for us…’

Entitled the Escape from the Studio 06 tour (where they had been working on ideas for their next album), they first performed the album all the way through at the giant Rock am Ring festival in Germany on 3 June. Including the first-ever complete performances of ‘Orion’ (in the past, only highlights of the middle section had been performed as part of either Jason’s bass solo or impromptu instrumental passages within other numbers). As well as
MOP
in its entirety, it was notable that only one number – ‘Fuel’ – from the
Load/Reload
era was included and none at all from
St. Anger
. The usual three numbers from
Black
– ‘Enter Sandman’, ‘Nothing Else Matters’ and ‘Sad but True’ – formed the backbone of the encores and the usual three from
Ride the Lightning
(‘Creeping Death’, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and ‘Fade to Black’) were all played at the start of the show. Plus, just ‘One’ from
Justice
, and only ‘Seek and Destroy’ from
Kill ’Em All
, Kirk playing his Boris Karloff guitar; James with extra-long goatee; Lars, hair thinning but stamina still high; Rob gurning through ‘Orion’ while channelling the spirit of Cliff. It was an amazing spectacle that would be repeated later that same month at the Donington festival in England – now rebranded as the Download festival – and again over the remaining dates in Ireland, Estonia, Italy and, in August (after another break), for two shows in Japan and a final climactic performance at the Olympic Main Stadium in Seoul, South Korea on 15 August.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, plans were already being laid for an even more surprising, if typically shrewd, return to their roots with their next album. Halfway through recording
St. Anger
, Phil Towle had told them: ‘All this work you’re doing right now is not for this record, it’s for the next one.’ And so it proved. Reading the runes as wisely as ever, the band had gone out on a limb and decided not to include Bob Rock in the new project. Coincidentally – or perhaps not – there had been an online petition that included the virtual signatures of more than 20,000 fans calling for Metallica to jettison Rock as producer. His crime: too much influence on the band’s music. Or, more accurately, scapegoated for all the years of tinkering with the formula; metaphorically blamed for the shortened hair, make-up and unsettling scenes of self-doubt and therapy-speak in
Monster
. It was as if he had never been fully forgiven for being the guy who came in and transformed Metallica from a thrash metal caterpillar into a squillion-selling mainstream rock butterfly with the
Black Album
. Now he never would be. Someone, it seemed, had to take the rap for
Load
and
St. Anger
. Rock affected a public nonchalance at odds with his real feelings, saying only that the petition was hurtful for his children. ‘Sometimes, even with a great coach, a team keeps losing,’ he said, as if in apology. ‘You have to get new blood in there.’

The band agreed and in February 2006 it was announced that the next Metallica album would be produced by Rick Rubin. Metal fans cheered. Rubin was the man who had signed Slayer and produced
Reign in Blood
, still regarded as the greatest thrash metal album of all. But while Rubin’s grass-roots credentials were impeccable, the real reason he was chosen had as much to do with his more recent and much more widespread reputation as the producer
de jour
who had single-handedly rebuilt the career of Johnny Cash, saving it from the ignominy it had fallen into, with his series of
American Recordings
albums that utterly transformed his fortunes, artistically and commercially, in the 1990s, to the point where Cash was bigger than ever at the time of his death in 2003. That Rubin had just done an almost identical job on Neil Diamond with his remarkable 2005 comeback album
12 Songs
– rescuing a once-great songwriter from the creative purgatory of Las Vegas residencies and media scorn – was not overlooked, either. Nor, more to the point, that at the same time Rubin had been helping Cash reignite his career he had done a similar job for AC/DC, insisting that the original line-up be reinstated before shepherding them through their best album for decades in
Ballbreaker
, in 1995.

A large man generally dressed in billowing shirts and khaki camouflage trousers, with his enormous scraggily beard, trademark wraparound shades and chubby features, Rubin resembled a hippy-ish Orson Welles, and certainly there is something of the musical auteur about him. Rubin liked to go barefoot to meetings, espoused a Zen philosophy of vegetarianism and karmic law, fingering a string of lapis lazuli Buddhist prayer beads as he talked, closing his eyes and rocking silently back and forth as he listened intently to music, before pronouncing gnomic judgement. His voice surprisingly soft and always reassuring, many of the artists he worked with called him The Guru.

As an overweight Jewish boy growing up in Lido Beach, on New York’s Long Island, music had been a passion for as long as Rubin could remember. Interestingly, considering the career he was to have, he loved The Beatles but ‘never really liked the Stones’. Whatever the musical medium – from heavy metal to country, from hip hop to pure pop, all of which he has put his hands to at some point – it was always the strength of the songs that mattered most, he said. Hence his inspired suggestion to Cash, then in his mid-sixties, to cover rock songs such as ‘Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails, ‘Personal Jesus’ by Depeche Mode and ‘Rusty Cage’ by Soundgarden. (He also suggested Cash try Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’, but that proved to be one postmodern experiment too many for the sexagenarian.) ‘I have no training, no technical skill,’ Rubin insisted, although he could play guitar and plainly knew his way around a recording studio, ‘it’s only this ability to listen and try to coach the artist to be the best they can from the perspective of a fan.’

Along the way Rubin had produced crucial career-defining albums for the Beastie Boys (
Licensed to Ill
), LL Cool J (
I Need a Beat
), The Cult (
Electric
), the Red Hot Chili Peppers (
Blood Sugar Sex Magik
) and many others. Yet despite his background, melding rock with rap – as well as his groundbreaking work with the Beastie Boys and LL Cool J, Rubin had also produced ‘Walk This Way’, the first major rock-rap crossover hit, for Run-DMC and Aerosmith in 1985 – Rubin’s first love had always been rock and heavy metal. Working with Metallica would be a unique opportunity to bring all his considerable talents to the table.

‘He’s all about the big picture,’ said Lars of the earliest sessions with Rubin. ‘He doesn’t analyse things like drum tempos or tell James to play something in F sharp. He’s more about the feel: is everyone playing together? Rick’s a vibe guy.’ Or, as Rubin put it: ‘The right sound reaches its hand out and finds its way. So much of what I do is just being present and listening for that right sound.’ Quick to praise, he was also swift to pass judgement. ‘There’s not a lot of grey with him,’ said Lars. ‘He really speaks his mind. Either something’s great or something sucks.’

Rick had known Lars, James and Kirk for years, but they had never worked with him before and came new to his methods. ‘Imagine you’re not Metallica,’ Rubin had told them early on. ‘You don’t have any hits to play, and you have to come up with material to play in a battle of the bands. What do you sound like?’ This was the sort of statement, James decided, that gave the project instant ‘focus’. According to Lars, ‘Rick said he wanted to make the definitive Metallica record.’ For Rubin – a true metal fan who’d once turned down the opportunity of working with Ozzy Osbourne, he told me, ‘because I’m only really interested in making a classic Black Sabbath album that tries to recapture that golden era’ – that was code for making the sort of Metallica album that had only previously been thought possible during the Cliff Burton era. Or as Lars put it: ‘Every time there was a fork in the road, we said, “In 1985, we would have done this.”’ Rob Trujillo, from his more typically down-to-earth perspective, had simply remarked on the fact that Rubin insisted they stand up in the studio while playing ‘and rock out, like we would live’.

The end product, as promised, harked back explicitly to the band’s 1980s albums – now, a generation on, considered classics of the genre – even down to the new album’s pre-CD choice of just ten tracks. All but one was over six minutes long – another clear sign of the album’s focus – and all were credited equally to all four members, something that had decidedly
not
happened back in the Eighties. Any hope that this might really be some sort of return to the golden era of Metallica is quickly extinguished, however, with the opening brace of tracks, ‘That Was Just Your Life’ and ‘The End of the Line’. Both over seven minutes long; both, on first listening at least, plucked wholesale from the top deck of the
Ride the Lightning
chocolate box; both all but forgotten minutes after they have juddered to their predictably explosive climaxes – like most of the album, in fact. This is not to say that tracks such as ‘Broken, Beat & Scarred’ (over six minutes) or ‘The Day That Never Comes’ (almost eight) aren’t solid, full-on Metallica recordings: the latter is redolent of some sort of built-in-the-laboratory
Load
-meets-
Justice
hybrid that starts off relatively quietly then takes off halfway through into an all-out Iron Maiden-style freak-out; the former is like a more conventional, if much better mixed, outtake from
Justice
, down to its pillaging of the guitar solo from ‘One’. It’s just that there is little that lingers in the memory in the same way ‘Creeping Death’ or ‘Leper Messiah’ did the first times you heard them.

The dreadfully titled ‘All Nightmare Long’, another near-eight-minute old-school thrash epic shot through the prism of Rubin’s 21st-century production values and the best track on the album, finds James downstroking his guitar with genuine ferocity as Kirk seems to make up for all the solos he never got to play on
St. Anger
by jam-packing them in here. The formidably bouncy ‘Cyanide’ which follows (over six minutes) sounds like something from
Master
via the best of
Load
, if that’s possible, and it dawns that for the first time since the 1980s Metallica are allowing the songs to go where they will, not completely into the big ‘movements’ of yore, but certainly abandoning the commercial template that had served them so well with Bob Rock. None of the tracks fade out, either, but simply vanish into flames. The other stand-out moment is ‘The Unforgiven III’, a moving piano soliloquy, with strings and horns, extemporising over the atmospheric intro of the original, before moving into a song nearly eight minutes long, like ‘Nothing Else Matters’ meets ‘Orion’; the only self-consciously slow track on an album determined to complete the circle, rather than break the mould, including the most enormous guitar-fest three-quarters of the way through; a real love-it-or-hate-it moment, and better for it. After that, however, the album rather plunges, beginning with ‘The Judas Kiss’, eight more minutes recalling the band that recorded ‘Sad but True’
and
‘Disposable Heroes’, with more-frantic-by-the-moment soloing from Kirk, which, rather than galvanise the listener, has the opposite effect of making them wonder if this doesn’t smack too much of box-ticking; painstakingly putting Humpty Dumpty back together again only to find his oval arse where his pointy head had once been, and vice versa.