Metallica: Enter Night (57 page)

At the opening show in Warsaw, the massive airfield seemed to be all horizons and sky, apart from the stage itself, which stuck out like a giant monolith, surrounded by people. The backstage area comprised a few tents stuck together with buses parked behind them. Only a few people walked around, including the bands. Golf carts zipped off to the stage every now and then, taking the musicians the 200 yards or so to the rear of the stage. There was very little to keep the handful of British journalists present entertained, just the occasional bored security goon and bus driver, but no managers, certainly no groupies or other obvious revellers. Lars was hanging out with some people; Rob, too. Tom Araya stepped off the Slayer tour bus in his bedroom slippers. Dave Mustaine wandered around with his grown-up son. It was all quite weird and deserted, the emphasis on keeping things low-key. The only rock ’n’ roll element was a stall giving away free local vodka, staffed by big-boobed models in air-hostess uniforms – a nice touch laid on by the local promoter, presumably.

Onstage, Anthrax did exactly the same show they played when they reunited in 2005 – mostly
Among the Living
-era material (‘Anti-Social’, ‘Got the Time’) and a smidge of Black Sabbath’s ‘Heaven and Hell’ in passing tribute to the recently departed vocalist Ronnie James Dio. Megadeth were on fire. The recent return of bassist David Ellefson to the fold after a five-year exile seemed to have revitalised them. The set was a run-through of
Rust in Peace
– in preparation for a twentieth-anniversary version of the album about to be released – and some greatest hits. Lots of ‘we love you’s from Mustaine. Slayer did their 2010 show, which is to say no headbanging from Araya as his neck was still out of whack following an injury, but still a powerful set. As Joel McIver, who was also there, says, ‘Metallica really did reign supreme, with a much longer set – the others had between forty minutes and an hour – plus pyro, a bigger production and of course the fact that it was night-time helped.’

But then, Big Four or not, this was only ever going to be about one band. As Ellefson says now, ‘Every time a new Metallica record would come out, [Megadeth guitarist] Marty Friedman would go, “Well, one more time, that’s why they are the kings.” You know, they talk about the Big Four. Quite honestly, there was a Big One, and that was Metallica. They were
miles
and
miles
ahead of all of us – they’re the U2 of heavy metal. They kind of transcended everything. They are true royalty. As far as the rest of us, there’s a Big One and then quite a ways behind them there’s the other three of us.’

The question is: where do Metallica go from here? Well, that depends, as ever for a band with antennae as long and sensitive as this, on the zeitgeist. No longer the musical adventurers they first became famous as, they have spent the vast majority of their career successfully co-opting whatever the prevailing musical trends are into their own unique story, their real genius not for having invented the last great truly influential musical genre in rock, but for having so stealthily and successfully ridden the waves that have ebbed and flowed like a torrent these past near-thirty years. The Big Four festival tour has been another shrewd move and a resounding sales success, with the tour now set to resume across the USA in the summer of 2011, and permutations thereof slated to follow in subsequent years, modelled along the lines of Ozzfest or Lollapalooza. Peter Mensch also let slip in a 2010 interview that the band would be undertaking, as he told
Classic Rock
, ‘a Metallica tour that will blow your mind. They will only play in ten cities but it will be a huge undertaking.’ He likened it to ‘Metallica’s equivalent’ of Pink Floyd’s famously theatrical early Eighties live show for
The Wall
. Furious at his slip, the Q Prime manager has refused to say any more but it’s believed the show will feature huge back projections and that, musically, it will look back on the band’s entire career with special guest appearances from some likely – and not so likely – guests, and that the cities will include London, New York, San Francisco, Paris, Berlin, Sydney and Tokyo.

What is more certain is that right now, with the record industry on its knees and new ways of delivering music constantly being investigated, there is no compelling reason for them to release a new album, although with the numbers for
Death Magnetic
so overwhelming – more than five million worldwide sales and still counting, as I write in the late summer of 2010 – they will presumably do so, maybe even another self-styled sequel of sorts. All we can be really sure of is that the platforms on which their music will be delivered will be various and absolutely up to the minute. As another champion of theirs, former
Kerrang!
and
Metal Hammer
editor – now Universal Records executive – Dante Bonutto says, ‘I think they’ll give people a choice of how they want to buy their music. And I think they’ll create formats that will reward fan loyalty. I think the vinyl thing will stay important to Metallica, the box-sets, the whole area of collectability. And bundling all these formats together will probably be an important part of what they do now as well. ’Cos why not? Choice right across the board will be the thing to do.’

Only seven artists have sold more albums in America than Metallica. Three of them – The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd – are officially defunct. Of the others – the Eagles, Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones and Van Halen – while they still tour and record sporadically, all can now be considered nostalgia acts, great to see, but no longer considered in the vanguard when it comes to making new music. Until recently Metallica was the sole exception. Not just touring and recording but still considered vital, even important. For how long that will continue, however, only time will tell. At this stage, it hardly matters. Their appeal will remain undimmed. Will there ever be another band like Metallica, or is that world gone for ever now? ‘That’s a very, very good question,’ says Bonutto, ‘and I think as time goes on the answer to that is looking increasingly like a no, and that the real rock monsters, of which Metallica are a latter example, just aren’t being replaced.’ Because of that, Metallica ‘are becoming increasingly valuable as festival headliners, and album makers, because there’s people that want to buy it and there’s a lot of them. And that’s increasingly rare in the music industry. The industry’s now working against bands like Metallica existing and creating what they’ve done over that long a period of time. So this may well be the thing that’s not going to be replaced, which makes them like an endangered species and hence incredibly special.’

And what, one wonders not for the first or probably the last time, would Cliff Burton have made of his band’s travails in the wake of his unexpected leave-taking? Received fan wisdom has it, of course, that Cliff would have been outraged by some of the changes Metallica has been through; that he was a musical fundamentalist who would have kept the band artistically pure and that there would have been many more albums as wonderfully unique to the band’s original vision as
Master of Puppets
and
Ride the Lightning
. That is to overlook the fact that Cliff’s own musical tastes were always so much broader than the heavy metal – let alone the even narrower thrash – spectrum allowed. That he was a lover of Lynyrd Skynyrd and R.E.M., Kate Bush and the Velvet Underground. That he worshipped at the vocally harmonic temple of Simon & Garfunkel and was still a devoted student of the most godlike musical genius of them all, Bach. Cliff was no fool, either, and had been thrilled to pieces when the band finally began to make money, immensely proud of that success and as hungry and determined to sustain it as the rest of them. Ultimately, we will never know what Cliff Burton would have made of the way their worlds changed after the
Black
album. It might just as easily be argued that he would have been the first to embrace the massive changes they made, encouraging them to even greater feats of musical cross-pollination. Metal bands aren’t supposed to evolve: AC/DC, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden sound basically the same now as they did on their earliest (still best) recordings. One gets the feeling Cliff would have railed against that idea even more strongly than Lars and Kirk, and to a lesser but no less significant extent James did. All we can be sure of is that, as James told me the last time we spoke, ‘he had such a character to himself, and it was a very strong personality, he did creep into all of us eventually. And he’s missed greatly from this guy sitting here.’

And if Metallica never again quite matched the peerless beauty of the work they did while Cliff was still around, they have other, equally great achievements with which to assure themselves. Back in 1988, a twenty-five-year-old Jason Newsted – still smarting from the bum behaviour dished his way but better placed than anybody to see how the band really worked when the doors to the dressing room were closed shut – told
Rolling Stone
: ‘Metallica is going to be one of the bands you look back on in the year 2008 that people will still listen to the way I still listen to Zeppelin and Sabbath albums.’ The stats certainly back up that prediction. Sales of Metallica’s albums currently stand at a little over 100 million copies worldwide (sixty-five million in North America alone), earning them gold and platinum certifications in more than forty countries. The
Black Album
earned the prestigious RIAA Diamond Award (for sales of ten million copies in the USA) and sold more than twice that overall. There have been numerous awards: nine Grammys and dozens of other prestigious awards.

More importantly, just like Zeppelin, Metallica have skated on thin ice with practically every album they’ve made, risking alienating die-hard fans by attempting something new and interesting, even when it nearly killed them. ‘I know, I know,’ said Lars, ‘and, listen, hey, that will forever be part of our legacy.’ Putting out another one a bit like the last one has never been their way, I said. ‘That to me would have just killed this band because that was not who we were as people. And if the band is an extension of who you are as a person, then it wouldn’t have been right. It just would not have been right.’

As Dante Bonutto says, ‘Any band that’s gonna have a long career – and that’s the hardest thing in this business ever to achieve – your career has to be a journey, it can’t be a plateau. You have to have the ups and downs. If you have those moments you’ve got somewhere to come back from, something to react against. It’s very important to create those dynamics in a career and Metallica succeeded in doing that. Lars always had the vision that Metallica could be as big as Led Zeppelin or whoever. He also had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of rock, knew what went wrong with groups and what went right with them. With Metallica you could argue that what originally was their weakness – being so extreme – ultimately became their strength. So they were always the cool band that was heavier than anyone else and were coming from left-field. And of course, what’s left-field today is now the mainstream of tomorrow. But if you start in the middle you’ve got nowhere to go. You have to start at the perimeter, and they were right on the edge with their first album.’

So is Metallica set fair now for the next few years? I asked James the last time we spoke. Will you be thinking along the same lines for the next album, doing it the same way, with Rick again? ‘We don’t know. We don’t know what the future holds, and that’s the beauty of the artist’s part of being in a band. What we’re playing right now, the stuff from
Death Magnetic
, what we’re playing onstage, it fits right in with the stuff that we love doing. And it feels right. It’s really, really easy to bash your last record. It’s almost a cliché. I’m not bashing
St. Anger
at all. It was exactly what it needed to be. It was perfect. But playing those songs live right now don’t fit into the set so much. Not that they won’t later. But the direction we’re on right now with
Death Magnetic
, it feels really good. And I like the potency of this record. I like the way we’ve gone back to the
Lightning
,
Puppets
, where you’ve got a less amount of songs but they’re all really good. We’re all really into playing every single one of them live. They fit right in. It’s effortless.’

For Kirk Hammett, ‘It was absolutely important that we went through all this bullshit that we had to go through, because when it spit us out at the end, we were better people; better, wiser, and more aware of just how fragile the Metallica thing really is – fragile as hell. We have a saying that we used to kick around HQ: you’re never more than thirty seconds away from total and utter complete chaos and disaster. I mean, in thirty seconds everything could fall into shit. So it’s taught us to learn how to appreciate all that we have so much more than how we used to just take it for granted. It’s a great place to be and we went through the meat grinder but we’re still together we’re not just a fucking quivering piece of hamburger in the corner.’

The last time I spoke to Lars Ulrich I asked him how his relationship with James had changed over the years. ‘A lot of the basic elements are still the same,’ he insisted. ‘Instead of it having changed, it’s expanded. And that’s obviously a kind of a different thing. The one thing that me and James do share is a love for music – a love for hard music and an unparalleled love and passion for all things Metallica. It’s been twenty-eight years now and obviously the glue that holds us together is Metallica. The other thing that’s happened in the last ten years or so is that we have another element to our relationship, which is the whole thing with the children. We have kids. I have three kids, he has three kids. They’re all sort of the same age, they all hang out together. So obviously being parents of similar age kids has brought a whole other dimension to our relationship. And nowadays we sit around and talk a lot about other things than music, you know, our lives out in the suburbs of San Francisco, about, you know, carpooling and soccer games and fucking lunchboxes and homework and all this stuff. You know, obviously we have very different personalities, but in some way I think we’ve realised over the years our different personalities really complement each other and really are sort of necessary for both of us to have in order for both of us to feel complete, in order for both of us to feel like we have something to offer. [We have had] ups and downs. But when I look back on it, it’s never derailed to the point of not functioning. Both me and him, we’re pretty responsible. We answer phone calls and we show up more or less on time, when we’re supposed to. We hold up our end of it, and the great thing about it is that we realise that what we have between us is greater than the individual parts. And that, I think, has always been kind of the unwritten, underlying message of Metallica, and the relationship. We do love each other and we cherish each other, and we’ve had problems maybe explaining that or vocalising that in the past. But, you know, as we get older and we have more and more cool moments, I think we also share a similar journey in that we spent a lot of our young years really worrying mostly about two things, about getting drunk and getting laid. We were sort of oblivious to most other things. Then as you turn the corner of forty and all of a sudden you start sitting there, opening your eyes and realising how awesome a lot of these things are around us.’