Metallica's Metallica 9781628929300, 9781501305160, 9781628929317

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METALLICA

Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Forthcoming in the series: A Live One by Walter Holland Bitches Brew by George Grella Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts Psychocandy by Paula Mejia Hi, How Are You by Benjamin Shapiro Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic´ Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork Donny Hathaway Live by Emily Lordi The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod and many more …

Metallica

David Masciotra

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © David Masciotra, 2015 “Sad But True”, “Nothing Else Matters”, “Holier Than Thou” and “The God That Failed” written by James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich “The Unforgiven,” “Through The Never,” and “Of Wolf and Man” written by James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, and Kirk Hammett All songs Published by Creeping Death Music (ASCAP) All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-6289-2930-0 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2931-7 ePub: 978-1-6289-2932-4 Series: 33 13 , volume 108 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk, NR21 8NN

Track Listing

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

“Enter Sandman” (5:29) “Sad but True” (5:24) “Holier Than Thou” (3:47) “The Unforgiven” (6:26) “Wherever I May Roam” (6:42) “Don’t Tread On Me” (3:59) “Through The Never” (4:01) “Nothing Else Matters” (6:29) “Of Wolf and Man” (4:16) “The God That Failed” (5:05) “My Friend of Misery” (6:47) “The Struggle Within” (3:51)

This book is dedicated to my father, Lou Masciotra, whose love and respect makes me feel as tough as the hardest and heaviest metal band

Contents

Acknowledgments x 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Introduction 1 Through the Never 11 Enter Night 28 Escape from an Elite Cage 50 Call of the Wild 66 Wicked Game 72 Wherever I May Roam 92 The Fangs of Rage 109

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Acknowledgments

I would like to extend my sincerest and deepest gratitude to everyone with the Metallica organization, most especially Brian Bumbery and Brie Greenberg. I don’t feel as if my main task with this book was sole authorship, but that of a curator. I had to find a way to put together, in addition to my own critical perspective, the deep and profound voices of James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Lars Ulrich, Jason Newsted, and Bob Rock. My interviews with these men were enlightening and entertaining. It was a joy to learn that they are all as kind, generous, and interesting as they are talented and creative. I am immensely grateful and appreciative for their time and conversations Thank you to Ellie Deegan for her friendship, and education in all matters related to Albert Camus. I’d like to thank everyone at Bloomsbury, but especially Ally Jane Grossan, for giving me the wonderful opportunity to write this book. Thank you also to all of my family and friends for their endless encouragement and support. Without your love, the little that I could accomplish would mean next to nothing.  x •

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Introduction

When I asked Lars Ulrich what Metallica means and represents to him, how he would like the world to perceive their contribution to music and culture—he turned toward the open interpretation of democracy. “I’ve stopped wanting people to react to what we do in a particular way. When we walk away from the studio and hand over the record, it is for everybody. If you line up twenty different Metallica fans against the wall, you are going to get twenty different responses about what it means. I don’t have a demand on how people should respond to it. When I see a movie, or read a novel, or look at a great painting, I want to experience it in my own way. I don’t want the painter telling me how I should interpret the painting. So, I’m not going to force an interpretation of James’ lyrics or the music onto anybody. Art is subjective. That’s part of the beauty of art.” The interpretive room for subjective reaction and reflection is what separates art from propaganda. Given that the principle of political and personal freedom has always operated as a motivational and inspirational fuel and tool for Metallica, the freedom their art allows  1 •

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the listener is something every fan and critic must acknowledge and celebrate. I am just one fan of Metallica lined up side-by-side with millions against a wall that stretches around the planet. I’m also a critic with an opportunity to give my response to the question of Metallica’s meaning. As Ulrich would point out, my response is subjective, as it has to do with how I hear Metallica, and the influence their music has on my thinking and living. I am the only person inhabiting my consciousness, and the experiences, memories, and thoughts that shape my consciousness determine how I receive and perceive anything, including Metallica. Another essential element to the beauty of art is its gift of approximating the experience of receiving and perceiving the world through someone else’s consciousness. The experience of accessing Metallica’s consciousness through their records embeds itself into my consciousness, and not only makes an impact on how I think about music, but also makes a dent in how I think about life. The relationship that the artist and audience enjoy, varying with each individual, is another quality that contributes to the beauty of art. This book navigates that relationship, and through my own personal access to Metallica, I am able to offer a detailed and deep look at one of my favorite albums, as subjective as that seems. It is also an album that, in terms of Metallica’s career, hard rock and heavy metal music, and music culture, since its release in 1991, is objectively important. The Black Album does not exist in a cell of confinement, but it communicates with its culture, just as its creators hoped it would communicate with their culture. An examination of the album’s evolution,  2 •

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inspiration, and ideas offers insight into heavy music, but also topics that reach far beyond the studio and stage. American pop culture has steadily become a behemoth candy store, dishing out pure sugar and syrup in quantities so large the container sizes are outdone only by the frivolity of their content. It is the nature of American culture to take what was once a force for rebellion, and transform it into a vehicle for commerce. Eventually, the whimpering voices of the moralists in politics and religion are impossible to hear over the deafening chorus from business that asks, “Why spend time fighting something when we can make money off it?” Rock ‘n’ roll, from the censorship of Elvis Presley’s hips to product placement in slick music videos, captures the triumph of the market over morality better than most cultural developments. Everyone who loves living in a wild and fun culture full of variety should applaud whenever business and consumers are able to silence the moralists. The only problem is one of dilution. How does a countercultural force, born and raised on the edges of American life, keep its power when it moves into the mainstream? In the 1980s, rock ‘n’ roll, led by bands like Bon Jovi and Poison, was about big haired heartthrobs in eyeliner singing saccharine ballads to excitable high school girls. Meanwhile, Michael Jackson was doing commercials for Pepsi, and Bruce Springsteen was lip-syncing to Courtney Cox with less sexual intensity than a castrated corpse. Heavy Metal, the loud, thick, distorted, and fast form of rock ‘n’ roll universally ignored by radio, MTV, and  3 •

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“respectable” music critics throughout the 1980s, was in the parking lot of the candy store pouring bottles of acid and serving them up with sneers and middle fingers to anyone whose minds were brave and throats were strong. It began in the 1970s, with bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple steering the flagships, and by the 1980s, due to the influence of Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and other British metal bands, ripped out its blues roots, becoming more obsessed with velocity and aggression. Metallica, along with the other “Big Four” bands, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax, helped create a new form of metal called thrash. Eventually, Metallica would separate themselves from their three early allies in ways musically and substantively significant, but even at day one there was divergence. With cult classics like Kill ’Em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, and …And Justice For All, Metallica were the ones making the most lyrically complex and sonically progressive music of the heavy metal rebels. Their revolt was not only one of ballistic artillery, but also brainpower. Their bottles of acid might cause the regurgitation of weakness, but they would also strengthen the spirit. Kill ’Em All, released in 1983, announced the arrival of a new band in American music with the subtlety of newly docked Vikings raiding a tiny village. Powerful assaults on sonic and social limitations like “Hit The Lights” and “Seek and Destroy” doubled as Metallica’s invitation to join them at a destruction derby where the softening sensibilities of American music would sit right at the center of violence. Ride The Lightning showed that in addition to thrashing loud and hard, Metallica had important things to say. “For Whom The Bell Tolls”  4 •

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and “Ride the Lightning,” fan favorites that have now become concert staples, are, respectively, inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s novel of the Spanish Civil War, and the story of a wrongfully convicted man’s appointment with the electric chair. Metallica’s third album, Master of Puppets, is a stunning achievement of musical virtuosity. It fully displays Metallica’s ability to write complicated music. Largely influenced by bassist Cliff Burton’s fascination with classical music, Master of Puppets broke the barriers of not only heavy metal conventions, but also those that governed all of rock ‘n’ roll. The tragic death of Burton in a tour bus accident led Metallica to enlist Jason Newsted as the new bassist, and their first record as a new band, …And Justice For All, offered a lyrical indictment of American foreign policy and criminal justice system with high-powered rage. It is at that point that James Hetfield, Metallica’s lead singer, rhythm guitarist, and co-songwriter, and Lars Ulrich, drummer and co-writer, believed that their sound was growing stale—that the band’s steam engine had begun to stutter and was pulling its freight of dirt and iron too slowly. The musical quality of Metallica’s first four albums makes them, in the words of Stereogum, “untouchable classics.” They are the organic, somewhat accidental, product of the greatness within the band’s players. Talent will produce greatness, but undirected talent might not reach its full potential. Metallica was a working hard, playing hard, drinking hard garage band from California that started to make it big. They knew how to make great music, but they didn’t necessarily know how to  5 •

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make great-sounding records. “After listening to the Justice album, it was pretty apparent that we needed guidance,” James Hetfield once said with a laugh. Ulrich best captured Metallica’s “stiff” and uncertain approach to record making, “It was always about not fucking up. It wasn’t about letting the music carry you to some place.” For their self-titled, fifth album—better known as The Black Album—Metallica set out to write “simpler songs”, in the words of Ulrich. They conscripted Bob Rock, one of the best producers in rock to help them more clearly define their sound—maximizing its power, while also giving it the living room that brings out the best in musicians and attracts the most attention from listeners. The result was the transportation of Metallica to a place Hetfield called “magical,” and the ushering of the world to the hell side of hard rock heaven. The Black Album has sold thirty million records, making it the highest selling album of the SoundScan era. It won a Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 1992 and received rave reviews from Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and the Chicago Tribune, among others. Metallica’s tour subsequent to its release had the band live out the words of their metal anthem, “Wherever I May Roam.” “The road becomes my bride,” was not only a good lyric, but a manifesto for the modern pirate. Metallica imported their brand of defiant sludge around the world for nearly three years, selling out hundreds of shows, and even fighting to prove that their metal was heavier than the iron curtain. They played the first free outdoor Western rock concert in Soviet Union history to a crowd of nearly one million people. The captives of  6 •

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the communist prison reacted with predictable fervor, intensity, and excitement to Metallica’s display and soundtrack of freedom. Before the release of The Black Album, Metallica was a rising star in American music. After its release, the star burned hot enough to melt most of the musical competition. Metallica was not only a popular band within the countercultural scene of heavy metal, but it was a superstar band on the stadium scale of U2, The Rolling Stones, and AC/DC. Q Magazine, in 2000 ranked The Black Album as one of “The Best Metal Albums of all Time,” saying that it “transformed Metallica from cult metal heroes into global superstars, bringing a little refinement to their undoubted power.” They certainly did not look refined at the Grammys, wearing black leather and denim, hair over their shoulders, thrashing and snarling through the lighting fast rendition of “Enter Sandman.” They also didn’t seem refined that night when, during their acceptance speech, they mocked the Grammys for, in 1989, bizarrely and illiterately awarding Jethro Tull with the Best Metal Performance for that category’s Grammy debut. “We want to thank Jethro Tull for not releasing an album this year,” Lars Ulrich said before adding, “And we want to thank the Grammys for giving Jethro Tull the award in 1989. Read between the lines.” Ulrich then made it clear that of all the people to whom Metallica owed a debt, the gatekeepers of the rock establishment on commercial radio and at MTV were not among them, “We’d also like to thank all the people at radio and MTV without whom all of this was possible.” Ulrich has a difficult reputation, but his remarks were clearly made in jest,  7 •

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and his tone was jocular. The sting behind the smile still must have left a mark on those who saw the metalheads, on the stage and in the audience, as the unmannered, adopted cousins embarrassing the patriarch at the family reunion. Steven Van Zandt, guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, and Robbie Robertson, legend of The Band, seemed slightly insincere as they read the teleprompter with copy complimenting the nominees. The question of “refinement” is one that would begin to dog Metallica following the success of The Black Album. While they were still too tough for the likes of Van Zandt and MTV VJs, many thrash metal loyalists, who wanted Kill ’Em All parts six, seven, eight, and nine, were angry over what appeared like the assimilation of their allies and commanders—outsiders, rebels, misfits—into the mainstream of glamour, success, and popularity. Suddenly, the criminals in the cafeteria were sitting with the “cool kids.” When Metallica reemerged four years later with short hair, stylish outfits, and a new album that many fans derided as “alternative rock,” the fear that the metal monsters had “sold out” grew in power, and the fearful grew in number. Most bands, and most people for that matter, live in the center and occasionally flirt with the edge. Metallica lives on the edge, and perhaps after tasting the sweet sundae of success, flirted with the center. Looking back on the alleged alternative rock albums—Load and Reload—it is clear that “Ain’t My Bitch” and “Fuel” were harder and heavier than most early 1990s radio. Billboard’s Top Ten for 1996, the year of Load’s release, includes “Macarena,” Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, and Toni Braxton, while the top rock hits  8 •

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belonged to The Smashing Pumpkins, Alanis Morissette, and Everclear. Lars Ulrich explained about Load, “This album and what we’re doing with it—that, to me, is what Metallica are all about: exploring different things. The minute you stop exploring, then just sit down and fucking die.” If Metallica are about exploration, then The Black Album allows listeners, along with the band to loot a treasure chest. James Hetfield said that for the album he decided to introspectively turn a flashlight toward the crevices within his own soul, and write lyrics that were more personal and more evocative, while the music that surged Hetfield’s words with electricity became simpler and more accessible. Accessibility, however, does not necessarily mean dilution. The riff on “Sad but True” is one of the heaviest of rock; “Holier Than Thou” is a blast of aggression aimed at the hypocrisy of organized religion; and “Of Wolf and Man” is a bulldozer of intensity celebrating the primal instinct for adventure, bodily pleasure, and power. “Don’t Tread On Me” is an uncompromising manifesto of personal liberty set against a growl of rage; “The Unforgiven” is an unconventional ballad that rips the guts out of anyone who settles for less than what their passion demands, and conforms rather than exercises their ability to live as themselves; and “The God That Failed,” inspired by the death of Hetfield’s mother, who was a Christian Scientist, reacquaints Metallica’s rapid firepower with the flaws of faith-based ideology. The Black Album might have reached unprecedented heights for a heavy metal album, but to play it today is still to revisit the melodic machinery of defiance.  9 •

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Albert Camus wrote that man must live in a state of revolt to battle the absurdity of the world. In The Rebel, he defined rebellion as the “violent denunciation of hypocrisy.” Heavy metal, with its violent assaults on the ear, tuned toward the soft convention of American culture, where classic rock liberals contribute to the soundtrack of cultural commercialization, rappers appeal to the authority of business, and country singers appeal to the authority of the flag, denounces the hypocrisy of Americana and widens its stance, recalibrates its scope, and cuts down the absurdity of authority. Its sound is the sound of warfare, and its target is that which reduces the individual to choosing, in the words of Camus, between the role of “victim or executioner.” “If the rebel blasphemes, it is in the hope of finding a new god,” Camus explains. Metallica had already confronted many gods that failed, and with The Black Album they were preparing to dance with the god of fame. In the service of searching for the god of defiance—the deity of aggression that demands, as offering and ritual, only absolute dedication to freedom, their self-titled and fifth record, bearing only a black sleeve and the universal symbol of liberty over tyranny—the Gadsden snake— became a timeless and holy sacrament.

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Through the Never

It is a rare achievement, universal among only the elite of the world’s greatest and most iconic bands, that unable to find territory vulnerable for conquest, a group of musicians builds their own country, and invites the world to visit. In the early 1980s, there was no place for Metallica in mainstream American music, and there were few bands making music like Metallica anywhere from the coast of California to the mouth of the Hudson River. Commercial radio had no interest in an angry, aggressive gang of Motörhead-worshipping rebels, full of angst, and committed to playing louder, faster, and heavier than the entire world outside of the club. When James Hetfield met Lars Ulrich, it did not go well. Ulrich had put an ad in a newspaper seeking a singer and guitarist for his fledgling heavy metal band, and Hetfield responded to the call only to find that Ulrich was awkward, odd, and overbearing. “There was no vibe,” Hetfield said, but the rarity of an ally— the unlikelihood of finding another brash punk who •

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idolized the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and treasured Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Judas Priest records—was enough to inspire a second chance. Like a snake, slow to wake, but quick to rattle its tail, eventually the band Metallica started slithering through the streets of Los Angeles. James Hetfield, a shy but physically imposing lead singer and rhythm guitarist, Lars Ulrich, a manic drummer from Denmark, Dave Mustaine, a lightning-fingered guitar lunatic, and bassist Ron McGovney rode the Hollywood nights into the alleyways and backdoor exits of rejection. Dominated by the frivolous power ballads and advertisement agency rock of “hair metal,” the rock clubs of LA had little room or understanding for guys in Misfit t-shirts covering Diamond Head’s “Am I Evil?” To the current generation of screen-addicted teenagers, texting away to participate in the coronation of the next pop superstar, it might seem odd, but music was once a blood-soaked stage of battle. Guitar slingers stepped up to the bandstand, and in booze-drenched night after sweatstained night, had to prove themselves to a rabid mob of noisy, mean, and merciless fans. Running hard on the fuel of cheap beer and weed, the fans were as ferocious in their judgments as the musicians were ambitious in their desires. When Metallica’s movement did not meet the expectations of the hurricane blunt force and rapidity of its members, they replaced McGovney with Cliff Burton. A musical wizard, Burton was equally inspired by highvolume velocity as he was by his favorite band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and who he called the “original bad ass,” Johann Sebastian Bach. •

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The enlistment of Burton doubled as the enhancement of their artillery. When he insisted that the band move to San Francisco, Hetfield, Ulrich, and Mustaine unanimously agreed, and soon found themselves within reach of the power source sufficient to energize their mission for world domination. The aptly named Battery Street had The Stone, The Old Waldorf and other clubs where Metallica, already known from the circulation of their cassette tapes in the underground, were suddenly playing for hundreds of screaming fans. The band, through their own strength of will and streams of funding, had made it onto metal compilations, and released their own collection, No Life ’til Leather. Lars Ulrich had already traveled to England where he spent a semester abroad studying under the tutelage of Diamond Head, Budgie, and Deep Purple. When he returned to California, he found that his timing was serendipitous. The general of hard rock, Mister Lemmy Kilmister, had arrived in the Golden State with his army of speedfreaks, drinkers, and womanizers. As Motörhead moved up and down the Pacific coast, so did Lars, riding right behind the bus in his old car, following his heroes from town to town, show to show. The musical education of Lars Ulrich might have begun when he was five years old, and his professional tennis player father, along with the rest of the family, still lived in Denmark. Lars’ liberal, open-minded, and music-obsessed parents took the precocious young boy to a free outdoor concert with the Rolling Stones. One can only speculate as to how much of the sleazy groove of “Honky Tonk Women” or the libidinous rage of “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” hardened like mortar •

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into concrete within the mind of the future drummer. It wouldn’t take long for Ulrich to examine every note of Deep Purple’s live record, Made In Japan, with surgicalstyle precision. The intensity of rock ‘n’ roll provided an escape for Ulrich, as he wrestled with the grueling training of tennis, and came to the painful realization that he would never measure up to the greatness of his father. The escape became the destination, and for decades, Lars has lived in the world of music. Even though legendary jazz saxophonist Dexter Gordon was his godfather, it’s been the world of hard and heavy music—music for people slow to take direction and quick to draw the middle finger. Thousands of miles away, across an ocean and in another country, James Hetfield, the teenage son of strict Christian Scientist parents, while missing his father who abandoned him and the family, was finding peace and comfort in the assault and violence of tough guitar riffs and wailing vocals. He had a poster of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry on his wall, and his mother painted him into the frame, giving him support for his musical dreams and empowering him to envision himself sharing the stage with his rock heroes. He would allow “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” “Round and Round,” and “Rats in the Cellar” to hypnotize him with visions of shaky fingers, banging heads, and flashing lights. Hetfield, looking back on his childhood, calls himself a “really sad kid” living within the walls of familial pain, social exile, and confused anguish. “Music cracked the shell,” he said. “It was my escape, therapy, and savior.” The Rolling Stones sang, “I know it’s only rock ‘n’ roll, but I like it.” Hetfield not only liked it, but would later take a needle •

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of permanent ink to his skin, and animate an angel delivering a single musical note through tongues of flame. An inscription, “Donum Dei”—Latin for “gift from God”— is underneath a tattoo of St Michael, a saint who had the unlikely ushers of Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Scott, and Bruce Dickinson. “Welcome to Hell” was the greeting that Venom—a heavy metal band from England—gave the world in 1981 with their influential album of the same name. The seizure inducing speed of the guitar riffs and drum fills, the growling vocals, and the decidedly anti-social variety of Venom sank and swam into the veins of Hetfield and Ulrich. The tonic had begun to brew, and Metallica was ready to pour it down the throats of anyone who would pay the price of the cover. Metallica added the crucial ingredient of Americana to what Diamond Head, Venom, Motörhead, and punk rock had already dropped in the barrel. The result was thrash, an extreme subgenre of heavy metal characterized by its fast tempo. Keith Richards once said that rock ‘n’ roll is just the blues played faster. Thrash is rock ‘n’ roll played with a rapidity to rival a race car. Mick Wall writes that ten years earlier, Metallica might have sounded exactly like Deep Purple, and ten years later they could have sounded like Alice In Chains. In 1983, no one was prepared for the band’s first album, Kill ’Em All. Originally titled Metal Up Your Ass, when record company executives and marketing directors of the small label, Megaforce, insisted on something tamer, Cliff Burton reacted with anger—“Fuck them. Kill ’em all.” The stars were born. One of those stars was Kirk Hammett, a replacement •

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for Dave Mustaine, whose volatility proved too much for Metallica’s stability. Hammett had already earned his stripes and scars with the metal band Exodus. In the Wild West of heavy metal, Metallica managed to replace Wyatt Earp with Doc Holliday. “Thrash metal? Okay, sounds cool,” Ulrich said, after reading what rock journalists called the in-your-face, ballsy and brawny brand of rock many of them credited Metallica with inventing. Within eight years, the band was already distancing itself from the term, and from what they viewed as its narrow associations. “When journalists call us thrash metal, we just see it as proof of their low intelligence,” Ulrich said in 1991, clearly no longer taking a casual attitude with categorization. Metallica’s resistance to the thrash label, which would only intensify as their career became more experimental, was also an attempt to establish distance between themselves and the other bands of what critics called “The Big Four”: Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax. Its appellation soon proved irrelevant. Reasonable minds should wish that the whole country could take after San Francisco, with its “ahead of the curve” embrace of punk rock, heavy metal, and homosexuality, but America eventually limped its way to the finish line. In terms of metal, Metallica brought everyone to their house. They became ambassadors, but also royalty—managing to simultaneously represent and transcend the genre. Kill ’Em All killed everyone, and the sophomore album, Ride The Lightning, would, like the capital punishment policy that inspired the story of its title track, take no prisoners and leave no survivors. The album gave Metallica new exposure to the world, •

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considering they had left Megaforce for Elektra, a much bigger company with a reach that stretched much further into radio. From the band’s inception, there has always been two Metallicas. Kill ’Em All introduced one of them to the world—the devil-horned ramblers whose ultimate goal is to break the windows and wake up the corpses in the graveyard. Thrash loyalists loved it, and never wanted their heroes to change. Ride The Lightning, with its metal grooves of “Fight Fire with Fire,” “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” and the title track, gave them enough surge to recharge their batteries, but it also showed the second Metallica: the Metallica of “Fade to Black”—an existential ballad of depression with a similar structure to “Free Bird.” It was a song that broke one of the rules of heavy metal—no acoustic guitars. The derogation “sell out”—the most overused of all accusations—began to color heavy metal purist copy. “I played in a heavy metal band to get out of the box—the box that society tries to put you in,” James Hetfield said, “But then I learned that heavy metal can be the smallest box of them all.” The second Metallica is the experimental explorer split side personality to the metal steady side of Metallica. It is the Metallica that wears its Ennio Morricone influence on its tattooed sleeve. It is the Metallica that enlists controversial, profane artists to design their cover art. It is the Metallica that employs U2’s video director to shoot their songs. It is the Metallica that collaborates with one of the late kings of all non-conformists, Lou Reed. When the first Metallica and the second Metallica come together and play with internal, musical unity, they not only stop the cage door from slamming and trapping •

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them inside, they also melodize the sound of the cage door breaking off its hinges. On the map leading Metallica far from the cage, they continued to make metal classics, but only in their own style, and with their own dedication to defiance. Master of Puppets, released in 1986, became an opus of the symphonic rage in Metallica. Theater subscribers in black t-shirts and leather listened as the title track, “Sanitarium,” and the instrumental epic, “Orion,” took them to a hard rock landscape mysteriously familiar and foreign. One could still sense the doom of Black Sabbath, and hear the animalistic guitar of Ted Nugent, but there was also a classical influence. Cliff Burton’s obsession with classic composers began to bleed into the band. The result was heavy metal history, and a perfect format for Hetfield’s increasingly cerebral and complicated lyrics. The personalities of Metallica’s members, musical and social, were beginning to swirl in the creation of a unique sound that, like the most influential of rock from The Velvet Underground to Led Zeppelin, manages to comfort, and challenge—to entertain, but also disturb. Just as Metallica was beginning to build an enormous following around the world, getting more successful and recognizable with not only each record and tour, but with each smoldering set, their chemical balance of creativity, along with their tough, but tender hearts, would suffer a serious breakdown. While touring Europe, on a bus ride in rural Sweden—the home of future Metallica offspring like Meshuggah and Opeth, not far from the Danish home of Lars’ earliest memories—a living nightmare engulfed the band in its unforgiving fire. For reasons still unknown, the tour bus crashed, and Cliff Burton •

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died on impact. A band always obsessed with death was now in a steely and ghastly confrontation with the grim reaper—forced to look at his loathsome handiwork, and live with the results. The band not only lost an essential member—a force of musical power and ingenuity—but also a dear friend. Such a painful void is not one that refills easily, but Metallica proceeded as if by sheer determination and will, they could quickly put the past and the emptiness its memories brought, behind them. Acting on the advice of their record company, which did not want to see the band lose its momentum, and attempting to emulate AC/ DC, who after the loss of their lead singer Bon Scott, moved forward and recruited a new singer with lightning speed, Metallica immediately began holding auditions for a new bassist. Les Claypool from Primus auditioned, and Joey Vera of Armored Saint turned down an offer. One bassist did not even get an opportunity to plug his instrument into an amplifier. When James Hetfield saw that his bass had the autographs of all members of Quiet Riot, he unceremoniously showed him the door. The man who would pass both of Metallica’s tough tests—plugging in and jamming along with “Battery,” “Seek and Destroy,” and other selections from the back catalog, and keeping up with Hetfield, Ulrich, and Hammett’s heavy liquor consumption that night in a dive bar, was Jason Newsted. Originally from Battle Creek, Michigan, he was the bandleader of Flotsam and Jetsam, a Phoenix thrash outfit. His band had regularly performed an encore of the Kill ’Em All cut, “Whiplash,” and the bassist knew he had an advantage going into the audition, because, after years of Metallica fanaticism, •

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he knew how to play every song they had recorded. The talent of Jason Newsted is outmatched only by his avidity. Watching him headbang on stage is watching a man whose music takes on life and death proportions— like watching a soldier shoot and stab his way out of the trenches. Metallica and Newsted courted each other to consummate their musical marriage by recording an EP of cover songs, paying tribute to their rogue’s gallery of heroes. Performing live in an actual garage, Metallica, with their new bassist, ran through raucous, rough, and raw takes on Diamond Head (“Helpless”), Holocaust (“The Small Hours”), Killing Joke (“The Wait”), Budgie (“Crash Course in Brain Surgery”), and the Misfits (“Last Caress” / “Green Hell”). If Master of Puppets showed Metallica’s cerebral and serious side, then Garage Days Re-Revisited showed that the band could still rock with adolescent abandon. In many ways, the loose energy in the garage, and the music it empowered, would forecast The Black Album more than Metallica’s next studio album …And Justice For All. The Black Album was not recorded with loose, teenage jamming improvisation and enthusiasm—far from it—but it was a homecoming to the band’s rock ‘n’ roll roots, and its ability to perform groove maintenance: to keep a song grinding, and giving the body a consistent and pleasant jolt. Before Metallica could call upon their rock ‘n’ roll spirits, along with their heavy metal haunting, to create original music, they had to push progressive metal as far as they could. …And Justice For All, released in 1988, was the first album of original material since the death of Cliff Burton, and the addition of Jason Newsted. Newsted’s •

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bass is barely audible in the mix—a production decision that Hetfield and Ulrich now recognize as erroneous, and many fans have unofficially corrected by bringing up the bass and offering the bootleg download, …And Justice for Jason. Inspired by the aggression of American foreign policy, the horrors of war, and the injustice of the American legal system, Metallica made a challenging record of lengthy epics. Eight, nine, and ten minute songs full of strange chord progressions, multiple tempo changes, and unpredictable bridges, makes listening to the record an exhilarating, but often exhausting experience. …And Justice For All culminated in the creation of Metallica’s first music video—a nine-minute montage of footage from the film Johnny Got His Gun, and clips of the band, dressed in black in an old, empty warehouse, snarling through the song inspired by the film, and novel of the same name, “One.” “One,” because of its musical greatness and its artistically and politically bold video, is the epic with the longest length of survival from Justice. On The Black Album tour, Metallica would often close their shows with an extended version of the song. Its double bass drum ferocity making violent harmony with Hammett and Hetfield’s guitar assault. The rest of …And Justice For All has taken on a popularity it did not have at the time of its release. Many of Metallica’s most committed fans consider it a metal masterpiece, but its creators have mixed feelings about it. At the time, its flaws revealed to them the necessity of a new tactic, a new strategy, and a new style for the continued supremacy of their musical machinery. “You have a honeymoon—a grace period—between when you walk out of a recording studio, album finished, •

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and when you start to have doubts or reservations about it,” Ulrich said before reflecting on the band’s reaction to Justice and concluding, “The Justice honeymoon period was abnormally short.” The questions about the album continued to claw at the band’s musical brain on tour: “Early on the tour we started wondering why the songs were so long, progressive, and all over the place,” Ulrich said. “We felt that the material did not connect well live because it was too introverted and cerebral. We had taken the progressive side of Metallica as far as we could take it.” James Hetfield’s memories of the disconnect between the bodily stimulation of rock ‘n’ roll, the aggressive assault on the senses of heavy metal, and the intellectual high-mindedness of Justice brings him back to the concert stage, standing just a few feet away from Ulrich’s battered and beaten drum kit. “It was most obvious when we were out touring …And Justice for All, and as the front man—the cheerleader of sorts—going out there and trying to get people into a whole album of complicated, nine minute songs, was very difficult. That was the biggest telltale sign that we needed to shorten up and muscle up the songs.” The infirmity of the album—not the songs, many of which are excellent—but its aesthetic and sonic qualities gave it significant garage band at a block party charm, but also reduced its power, and failed to communicate or capture the reverberation of Metallica’s roar. Jason Newsted had a perspective shared by no one on the planet when he settled into the studio for Justice. He was a fan before becoming a member of the band. “We knew what the deal was with Justice. We knew it was thin. •

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We knew it was rat-a-tat-tat,” Newsted said. He then offers speculation into how, by happy accident—by the lack of sophistication that Hetfield and Ulrich admitted to disabling them at the production table—Justice was before its time: “It was a precursor to the Black Keys, only at two hundred miles an hour. It really was an old blues record with the real fast riffs and just guitars and drums going on. Like R. L. Burnside today. It is still that thing. We can still relate it back to that primal thing— those guys being in that tiny room in that basement with the same fucking tape deck on a cassette mastered that thing. It is hard to get over how good it sounded with just those two guys bashing it out in that room.” Metallica never required any ornate decoration or slick embellishment to express something memorable and forceful. Its primal power is its mystery and magic. Enhancement became desirable, however, and one of the ways Metallica needed to enlarge its muscularity was with an injection of the bassist steroid. Newsted was infamously inaudible on the Justice record. The silence from his bass in the mix is something he, like most fans, noticed, but has a different reaction to, especially decades later, than one might expect. “It’s not so much a personal thing as everyone has made it out over the years within the legend. Justice is exactly what it needed it to be at that time. It was perfect for what the band needed to do at that time,” Newsted then moved to the connective tissue that the internet allows between bands and fans. Heavy metal and hard rock, because of their marginal status, and appeal to committed outsiders, possesses populism. Populist collaboration between audience and artist is rare, but in the case of …And Justice For All it acts as a •

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corrective: “Kids have brought up to me this recording called …And Justice for Jason, where someone has finally turned the bass up after twenty-five years. There is something so fucking giant fantastical about that. No one would have ever predicted how it is flipped around, and it will be appreciated more now than it would have then when it was under a microscope.” Among the two Metallicas, there is one obsessed with innovation and driven by experimentation. There is another that, while never pandering or cheap, is able to use the fans—what Hetfield always calls the “Metallica family”—in all of their foaming-at-the-mouth rabidity for heavy-metal mania as a barometer. The audience is able to communicate when they are going too fast and far, and when they haven’t gone far enough. Hetfield knew the songs needed more weight, muscle, and power when he felt too much distance between his delivery and the crowd’s reception. Ulrich said that every night on the Justice tour it was “For Whom The Bell Tolls” and “Seek and Destroy” that the band loved playing the most, and that set the audience into the wildest frenzy of rock ‘n’ roll energy. “For Whom The Bell Tolls” and “Seek and Destroy” are two songs that break the back of any chair, forcing anyone susceptible to the intoxication of hard rock, to rise up and move with the music. They are songs that shuffle the deck of AC/DC, Iron Maiden, and Motörhead, while throwing in the face cards of Hetfield on rhythm guitar and Hammett blazing a lead. They look at the pot, and raise the bet. Flemming Rasmussen, the producer of Ride The Lightning, remembers recording “For Whom The Bell Tolls” in a studio in Copenhagen, •

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Denmark. “The funny thing was that everybody else in the studio came from a jazz background—they kept telling me, ‘They can’t play!’ And I went, ‘Fuck that! Listen to it, it’s brilliant!’” That song, along with “Seek and Destroy,” had what Kirk Hammett would call “soul groove.” The phrase and concept of “soul groove” became especially important during The Black Album sessions. Borrowing terminology from jazz and R&B, Hammett is describing playing by feeling, rather than formula, and allowing that feeling to guide the creation of music. When bands have the “soul groove,” they are making music, naturally and even improvisationally, rather than strategically. During a recent performance of “Seek and Destroy,” when the opening riff fires back into the song like a shotgun blast through a pinewood wall, Hetfield shouts, “Let’s keep this feeling going, baby!” Creating a feeling is tough, but it is the task of the hard rock and heavy metal band, and Metallica is the taskmaster. Kirk Hammett, the eccentrically gifted guitarist, wanted “soul groove,” and Justice, even for all of its strengths, had a different purpose. “There was an emphasis on musicianship,” he said. “We wanted to display our playing prowess, and how flexible we were in terms of song arrangement.” That purpose doesn’t necessarily undermine the purpose of creating a feeling, and keeping it going, but it can. “For Whom The Bell Tolls” and “Seek and Destroy” gave Metallica their own internal compass, helping them find the direction their heavy metal steam engine would power forward next. They also found themselves obtaining inspiration and assistance from familiar heroes, and brand new friends. •

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In the sweaty summer of 1990, Metallica opened for Aerosmith in Toronto, Canada at the CNE Fairgrounds. It had been twelve years, but it had passed in what must have seemed like the time it takes to tune a guitar, since James Hetfield would drop the needle on Toys in the Attic, look at his bedroom wall adorned by Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, and imagine himself on stage, creating the controlled chaos and funneled fury of hard rock. Now, he was the center of posters in air guitar adolescent bedrooms all over the world. He was the idol for other precocious teenagers, and he was sharing billing with his idols. Aerosmith played their seminal tributes to the hedonism and liberation of rock ‘n’ roll—“Walk This Way,” “Dream On,” and “Same Old Song and Dance.” They slithered and slid through the songs from Pump, the album they were there to sell to a lusty public: “Love In an Elevator,” “F.I.N.E.,” and “Young Lust.” As Aerosmith gave visual and aural evidence, for the millionth time, cementing their place in the pantheon of soul groove gods, Metallica talked. Hetfield and Ulrich were sitting in a private area underneath the audience— the “bowels of the stadium,” as Lars put it—listening to Perry’s riffs and Tyler’s shouts reverberating down into their quarters. “We talked about the approach for the next album—shorter songs, simpler songs.” Hetfield might have had memories of his teenage nights, and perhaps Ulrich was going back to a time and place even earlier—a different summer night when he was only five. “The Rolling Stones came up.” Another band, different from the Stones and Aerosmith in speed and style, but sharing the spirit of rock defiance played a part in the conversation—“The Misfits came up.” •

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“I remember us talking about writing edgy and heavy Metallica songs, but referencing people like the Misfits, in terms of the other extreme—the two-minute song,” Ulrich explained. “We didn’t walk out of there with an agenda, but we were inspired to try to simplify.” Kirk Hammett said that Metallica would consistently joke and talk about their “quest for world domination.” Taking over the world of rock, becoming the royal ambassadors of heavy metal, and making and breaking music history might not have been on any agenda either, but when four guys walked out of a Canadian stadium thinking about Aerosmith, AC/DC, The Rolling Stones, The Misfits, and The Ramones, it was about to happen.

•

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2

Enter Night

“What sounds good at two in the morning in your bedroom doesn’t always transfer well into the studio,” Kirk Hammett said, remembering his experience coming up with the guitar riff. While all the neighbors were asleep, Hammett was casting a spell using his guitar. He was an alchemist combining the wraparound riffs of “Smoke On the Water” and “All Right Now” with the heaviness he had heard earlier that evening on the Soundgarden album, Louder Than Love. Too tired to obsess over his latest creation, Hammett captured the riff on tape, and went to sleep. A few days later he played it for Lars Ulrich, who immediately expressed his approval—“That’s great. Try repeating the first part four times.” Hammett activated Ulrich’s advice, and the hook became even deeper and sharper. One year later, it would sink into the minds of millions of metal listeners around the world, and even catch the ears of many rock ‘n’ roll fans. The song that began in Hammett’s bedroom on a sleepless night •

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eventually told the story of a mythical master of sleep. The song was “Enter Sandman.” “Enter Sandman” was the first song that came together for The Black Album. Its promise of a visit from the character of fantasy to sprinkle sand on the eyes and induce slumber eerily captures the mystery of art, and Metallica’s state of surrender to it. Unlike previous Metallica albums, their self-titled record was not the product of painstaking planning. It was an organic result of inspiration. “The songs almost wrote themselves,” Hammett said. It was almost as if all of the members of Metallica had entered a dreamlike state, freeing the subconscious to move through their fingers and lips. When Hetfield sings “Enter night” in the chorus of the album’s signature song, he invites the world to join them in their dream. When Metallica finished writing the songs the world would soon recognize as neo-classics on The Black Album, they had the inclination to do the previously unthinkable—ask for help. After acknowledging the thinness of …And Justice For All, they realized they needed to enlist the services of a new mixer. An experienced, skilled engineer would help give the weight and muscle to their sound that they felt they required to truly capture their power, and in doing so, enlarge their empire in their ongoing quest for world domination. The man with the perfect name, Bob Rock, kept coming up in conversations among the band. Rock had mixed Permanent Vacation—the massive comeback record of raucous rock from Aerosmith, and Slippery When Wet— the bestseller from Bon Jovi. He had also produced the •

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runaway hit from Mötley Crüe, Dr. Feelgood, and the hard rock classic from The Cult, Sonic Temple. The thickness, weight, and volume of those records appealed to Ulrich and Hetfield, even if they belonged to two of their sworn enemies. Early in the L.A. club scene, Metallica had fashioned themselves as the anti-Mötley Crüe. They did not have any of Crüe’s glamour, and they didn’t want it. While Mötley Crüe played songs about living life as one endless party, Metallica played songs about the end of all life. Once while performing live, James Hetfield, juxtaposing his own band with Bon Jovi, which was set to take the stage later, said, “If you came here to see spandex, eye make-up, and hear the words ‘Oh baby’ in every fucking song, this ain’t the fucking band.” Bon Jovi was the pretty, polished, pre-packaged opposite to Metallica’s gritty realism of character, performance, and song. It certainly didn’t help matters when during another music festival, Bon Jovi—to avoid interaction with other bands—had a helicopter chopper them into the fairgrounds during Metallica’s set. Hetfield reacted by returning to the stage for Metallica’s encore performance with the words, “Kill Bon Jovi,” written on his guitar. Metallica might have wanted to kill the corporate heartthrobs of New Jersey, but they were going to take their engineer as a prisoner. When The Cult opened for Metallica at the Seattle Center Coliseum on August 29, 1989, Rock attended and decided to stay for the headliner’s show, and consider the offer to mix their newest album of songs he had yet to hear. “I had bought the Justice record,” Bob Rock said, “and I just didn’t get it. … It sounded very thin, and weird for •

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a band of Metallica’s power. Then when I saw them play live after The Cult, and they walked off stage, I thought, ‘That’s not the band on the Justice record.’ What was that? These guys live have a big, bruising weight to them.” Feeling and experiencing the disparity between Metallica’s live ferocity and their studio infirmity, at least in terms of production technique, moved Rock to propose an all or nothing relationship with the kings of American heavy metal music. “That’s why I cockily said, ‘I don’t want to mix it. I want to produce it.’” Lars Ulrich remembers Rock’s boldness well: “We only envisioned to work with Bob in a mixing capacity, because we were so confident that we were the only ones that held the key to how Metallica should be recorded. When James and I flew up to meet Bob in Vancouver, we played him some songs—demos of the songs we were working on—and when Bob said he wanted to produce us, we were taken aback. We had so conditioned ourselves over the previous decade to keep everyone at arm’s length. We were so scared that someone would fuck with what we believed Metallica was, but we certainly took the dare. We knew the songs that we were shaping were quite different from what we had done before. So, we were ready to give it a shot. We let Bob in, we surrendered, and we were ready to embark on a journey together.” Elektra was more than happy to comply with Metallica’s request for a hotshot, high-priced producer. They had maintained a friendly relationship with Metallica, allowing them to exercise their artistic freedom, but they rightfully saw Rock’s participation in the new project as increasing the likelihood of Metallica moving into the mainstream. •

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Rock now admits that, although he liked Metallica’s music, he was not a fanatic. His distance from the band— in enthusiasm and investment—was much to everyone’s benefit. He claims that had it been Led Zeppelin, his favorite band, he would have been paralyzed by his admiration, unable to contribute anything meaningful to the creative collaboration. Sitting with Metallica, listening to unvarnished, rough-cut demos, Led Zeppelin was not too far from Rock’s spinning mind. “When they played me ‘Sad But True’, I said, Holy fuck, this is the new ‘Kashmir’. I could definitely work with that.” Led Zeppelin was Bob Rock’s favorite band, and “Kashmir” was one of his favorite songs, but “Sad But True” already had the same apocalyptic intensity and bone crushing muscularity of “Kashmir.” Both songs have a riff as large and threatening as any fairy tale monster, and once that monster is on the roam, it sinks its teeth into every form of life falling under the shadow of its gigantic steps. “Sad But True” is heavier, but like “Kashmir,” it has the soul groove—the indefinable mood elevator that immediately puts the listener into a simultaneously stimulative and trance-like state, feeling at once jolted and sedated by the music’s power and rhythm. When Metallica approached Rock, all of the elements of creation were there; they merely needed another chemist to make the mixture. “The funny thing about The Black Album is when some of the fans say I changed Metallica,” Rock said, “I really didn’t. I only enhanced who they were. If they were truly fans of Metallica they would know that I could never change them. I could never make them do •

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anything they didn’t want to do.” Rock is adamant about adhering to the facts of history in the interpretation of Metallica’s writing and recording of The Black Album. “The demos that they played me the first day I met them, they were already moving in a slightly different direction than they had before—more hard rock. I just helped them do it. But I was never in a position to get them to slow down the tempos or simplify the songs. I didn’t direct them. I just tried to help them make the best record they could make.” Rock brought his studio expertise and tenacity to the table of a band whose lead singer admitted that, when it came to record production, “We didn’t know what we were doing.” Lars Ulrich, looking back on the greatness and success of The Black Album, attributes it to more than merely the ability and creativity of Metallica. It was the point each member had reached in his life, empowering his creativity and lending itself to the invention of those songs. It was studio techniques. It was the current state of music in America and beyond. It was the culture. “It was an alignment of the planets,” Ulrich said. Bob Rock was important, but he was only one planet in a solar system that became Metallica’s universe. Rock’s studio techniques were effective because the tempos were not “Whiplash” speed. Lars Ulrich became the foundation of the soul groove emporium because he had lost interest in playing a thousand fills in a thousand different ways. He became obsessed with keeping the rhythm, and providing the big beat. He spent the entire summer of recording The Black Album, listening to AC/DC, studying under the tutelage of the rock ‘n’ roll rhythm master, Phil Rudd. “I listened to AC/DC every •

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day to get into the frame of mind of the drums in the background, supporting the riffs, and having swagger.” Pouring down the foundation in any band is the bassist. Newsted’s presence and personality was essential to the vitality of The Black Album—the maniac energy, the tough mindedness, and the passion. It is impossible to imagine how Metallica’s fifth record would have sounded if Cliff Burton had survived the bus crash in Sweden. He was the one most interested in classical music. He was the musical thinker and songwriter most responsible for the epic instrumentals, “Call of Ktulu” and “Orion.” He was the one whose favorite band was Lynyrd Skynyrd, and who likely took the most joy and pleasure in the similarity between “Fade to Black” and “Free Bird.” Given Burton’s ravenous appetite for the Hell House creation of Ronnie Van Zant, Garry Rossington, and company—the Southern stew of rock ‘n’ roll, blues, and soul—would he have been the most enthusiastic about swirling rock ‘n’ roll together with heavy metal? Considering Burton’s coronation of Bach as the “original bad ass,” would he have objected to the simplification of the songs? Speculation on Burton’s role in The Black Album is equally difficult for the man who replaced him. “It would have been amazing to see what Cliff could have done with the color, knowledge, capability, magic. I get goosebumps just thinking about it,” Jason Newsted said. “It could have gone a few different ways, though. He was at a place where he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with Metallica. Maybe he would not have been in Metallica, or maybe he would have brought all his musicality to those songs, because he was a team •

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player. He might have approached those songs—even if everything else was the same—and those songs could have turned into these Bach-Mozart-oh my God masterpieces, like ‘Orion’. But, at that time and space in music, in radio, in genre, would that have had the appeal of the thud, simple quarter note, me slapping down the bass with my pick?” “Quickly, I realized that James is the man, the creative leader,” Newsted said when reflecting on his role in the band, especially during The Black Album. “Lars is the brain, planning everything out with foresight, and overseeing everything, and then Kirk is artist, pure. Then, I’ve got to be the engine. I had to be the propulsion. I’m the weight behind letting everybody do their thing. Stillwater runs deep.” Newsted’s description of the personalities and roles of each Metallica member during The Black Album era found reinforcements in my conversations with each member. Ulrich has a steel-trap memory for detail, even telling me specific dates that meetings and concerts occurred as if he was a general overseeing battle plans. Kirk Hammett has a calming and nurturing bedside manner, carefully explaining his creativity and contribution in the eloquent articulation of emotion and inspiration, while Newsted speaks with the infectious energy of a heavy metal evangelist, often nearly shouting with passion as he recalled the experiences of music making and road life with Metallica. The creative leader of the band whose depth of thought is matched only by the depth of his voice, James Hetfield is as intellectually precise as a professor, but as tough as an action hero. He explained that he was •

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undergoing his own transformation as he was preparing to step into the Black for the writing and recording of his band’s newest album. On …And Justice For All he showed the courage to think critically about the world in which he lived. He demonstrated a righteous anger and indignation in the face of war, exploitation of the poor for the profiteering of war wagers, and a criminal justice system more criminal than just. The anger and angst of his teenage years had become the political protest of an adult citizen, even if he classifies artists speaking from the stage about their political or religious beliefs as a “misuse of power.” The key word is “speaking,” on Justice Hetfield was singing, allowing the songs of rage, torment, and trauma, in a free society too often indifferent to catastrophe, to speak for themselves, and speak loudly. The power and energy from “One”—like much of Metallica’s music—comes not only from its ferocious dynamism, but also the honesty and specificity of the lyrics. It is not an abstraction of the consequences of war, but a direct confrontation with them. It is the story of a man rendered paralyzed. “Landmine left me with life in Hell,” Hetfield screams with desperation. On stage, the front man appears tough, and his deep voice is the aural essence of strength, but his real muscularity and bravery is his willingness to explore the darkness of the world, and on The Black Album, for the first time, the darkness within himself. William Butler Yeats said that “it takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.” To prepare for writing The Black Album, Hetfield engaged in the inner combat of introspection. •

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“Looking back now, I can see that the songs were even more personal than I thought they were then,” Hetfield said. “With some of the songs, at the time, I thought I was jumping in and out of different characters, but now it is clear that all the characters were me.” Hetfield connects his willingness and ability to write more personal lyrics, with his growth and maturity. “I was influenced by early heavy metal—Black Sabbath, Judas Priest—and those lyrics are very fantasy. The lyric writing went from fantasy to asking, ‘what if this happened?’ So, I’m in someone else’s shoes, almost like a movie. With ‘Ride The Lightning’, it was, you’re falsely accused, and what would that feel like? Then, I cut out a step and got to the core. What is the core of that story? It is fear. So, why not just write about that in a personal way, because it is something everyone could relate to?” Just as Lars Ulrich transitioned from one set of influences to another in the formation of his drumming style, Hetfield looked to different idols for guidance on lyrical creation. “I listened to a lot of punk rock—Discharge, GBH, Anti-Nowhere League, The Ramones—because that’s all about feeling. What are you feeling? Just sing it.” There are three stages of artistic creativity. The first is imitation, and it is merely an attempt at imitating heroes. Next is innovation—building on the work of influences, while adding in a little originality. Finally, and not all artists get to this stage, there is invention. The artist has discovered his own voice and identity, has cultivated a unique style, and is inventing something entirely new. Metallica were and are inventors. Their influences, from heavy metal, rock ‘n’ roll, and punk rock, are important, but only to the extent that Metallica is able to use them •

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as tools to build a musical house of their own architectural design. From the earliest moments of The Black Album— the first steps inside the Metallica music mansion—the coalescence of influences in the crafting of an original masterpiece is as obvious as the music is overwhelming. “Enter Sandman” is one of those rare songs that, even when first hearing it, sounds like an iconic classic. “Sweet Home Alabama,” “All Right Now,” and “Highway to Hell” all have that instantly timeless quality, and it is a quality that emanates from the riff. The smiling seductress of hard rock—the invitational gesture resulting in lifelong love and romance—is the riff. It was Lars Ulrich, however, who immediately detected her psychosexual power. Ulrich understood, before Hetfield, Hammett, Newsted, and Rock, that everyone would fall for her charms, and fight for her affection. Rock admits to “not getting it” in the beginning. He, like the other members of the band, could not read the writing on the wall that “Enter Sandman” would soon become an international hit, and Metallica’s signature song. Lars knew it and convinced the camp of crazed rock addicts to put it out as the first single, and the rest is heavy metal history. Before The Black Album’s release, Metallica hosted a preview party, arranged by Elektra, at Madison Square Garden in New York on August 3, 1991. Without paying any entrance fee, fans could wander into the stadium and listen to the recording of select songs from the album for the first time. The experience began with “Enter Sandman,” and with the opening moments of Hammett’s immortal riff, Lars’ soul groove pounding—at once •

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thunderous and rhythmic, and Newsted’s propulsive bass, the 10,000 metal acolytes who filled the arena, jumped out of their chairs, flashed devil horns, banged their heads, and played air guitar. “Enter Sandman” is a musical virus. It seeps into the blood, demands a physical reaction, and, rather than debilitating, acts as a stimulant. Like the alchemist architecture of Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy Kilmister, it is at once dangerous and comforting—the graveyard meets the amusement park. The album continues to act as usher with the successor to “Sandman”—taking listeners on a journey to the armory. “Sad But True” fires with the heaviest of artillery, terminating any faint heart as collateral damage. Bob Rock heard Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” in the grinding, epic riff. It is “Kashmir” unleashed—transformed from domestic cat to bloodthirsty tiger stalking the night. “As opposed to just metal riffs, the riffs started to get a little more rock ‘n’ roll. They started to get a little more swagger,” Jason Newsted said. The rock ‘n’ roll swagger stampedes out of the speaker and onto the stage with “Enter Sandman” and “Sad But True.” Metallica, putting their own metal touches on rock ‘n’ roll, was playing with the same sexual rhythm that induces grooving and grinding on everything from AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” to Motörhead’s “Love Me Like a Reptile.” The third song of the album, “Holier Than Thou,” originally conceived as the opening single by Bob Rock, comes closest to returning to the old, familiar home of Metallica, just off San Francisco’s Battery Street—the thrash metal headquarters. Suddenly the train is picking up speed. It is full blast and full speed ahead, not at risk •

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of riding off the rails, but more than capable and willing to run over and flatten anyone with soft sensibilities standing in the glow of its headlights. “Enter Sandman,” “Sad But True,” and “Holier Than Thou,” hit the listener with the force of a demolition derby. The opening trio of The Black Album demonstrates a band’s growing confidence and comfort with itself. No longer obsessed with proving its musicality and versatility, Metallica is able to simply show its power, and tear all the paint off the walls in the loud, noisy process. Right away, however, from the first song forward, The Black Album also measures other changes in the band. Metallica sounds similar, but different—familiar, but elusive. There are alterations in style, changes in sonics, and most instantly audible—a new melody and soul in the voice of the singer. “At the time it just seemed natural to sing differently,” Hetfield said, allowing himself the disclaimer that speaking in hindsight gives him an altered perspective on his Black Album vocal. “As a singer, I always felt inadequate, but it was better when the songs were more musical, and the vocals were just there to wrap the theme together.” It might surprise Hetfield’s fans, given the Moses-on-Mt.-Sinai brutality and urgency in his voice, that he suffered from insecurity. He likens his singing technique, up until The Black Album, as “screaming in key.” He also admits that he fell into the huge role of lead singer for Metallica, because “someone had to do it,” and he “was there.” Dave Marsh, a rock critic and Bruce Springsteen’s biographer, correctly explains that rock ‘n’ roll—whether •

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it is the wild 1950s exuberance of Elvis Presley and Little Richard, or the harder Harley-like revving up from the throat of Steven Tyler and Brian Johnson, is really a singer’s medium. The song is about the vocal. One of the ways that Metallica adopted a more rock ‘n’ roll attitude with The Black Album is by embracing the front man as the delivery driver of the musical product. “The Black Album was much more lean in terms of music, so it was centered around the vocal, and the vocal melody and what it had to offer,” Hetfield explains. “So, at the end of the day, if the vocal wasn’t as good as it could be—if the cadence, melody, and phrasing didn’t shine—the song wasn’t going to be nearly as good as it could be.” Hetfield’s challenge was one borne out of necessity, but he felt up to it. “Bob Rock took me to another level. It was a little scary, because there was much more importance placed on me and the vocal. To grow and evolve I had to learn some things about harmony, doubling, and how to take it up another notch at the end of the song— building the vocal, rather than just having it be another instrument in the mix.” “I had to really work to gain their trust, especially with James,” Rock said when thinking about Hetfield’s growth and evolution, “But that’s when our friendship really began, because he wanted to really sing, but didn’t know how to do it.” Hetfield, on the albums leading up to his experience with Rock, had used a technique called doubling. A singer sings the song, sings it again, and then combines it to enhance the size and power of the vocal. “The problem with doubling,” Rock said, “is that there is no nuance in it, because it is blended.” •

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Hetfield gained confidence as Rock worked with his singing technique, and put in the time and energy necessary to prove to him that they could still have a vocal sound that was “big and warm.” They need only to lay down tracks, but also give Hetfield “the freedom to emote.” The songs of The Black Album were the most personal Hetfield had ever written or sung. Giving them an emotional presence, in addition to the muscular presence, helped shape their character and inject them with the vitality of resonance. One of the tactics Rock used to help bring out the best in Hetfield as singer was having him sing through speakers. Rather than wearing headphones, Hetfield stood in a center of a room, and surrounded by the sounds of his songs, felt liberated into becoming a singer. Standing alone in that studio, with the surge of Metallica’s electrified emotion blasting out of the speakers around him, Hetfield transformed into one of hard rock’s best singers. No longer “screaming in key,” he was singing with all the power, anger, and aggression anyone would expect from a heavy metal leader, but he added an essential ingredient rare for his genre: soul. The soulful heavy metal shouter is a new creation, and unique gift, that James Hetfield, with the assistance and friendship of Rock, was able to give the musical world, proving that the boundaries of category, taken for granted by lesser talents and smaller minds, are demarcated in invisible ink. Hetfield, rather than merely screaming or shouting, emotes with nuance in his voice, expressing an emotional range: tenderness in “Nothing Else Matters”; despair in •

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“The Unforgiven”; and rage in “The God That Failed.” Ashley Kahn writes that soul music is about “naked emotion and personal testimony.” While Metallica never made soul music, in his emotive delivery, rare in heavy metal, he brought a more soulful style to his genre. Hetfield’s range, similar to heavy music singers who preceded him like Steven Tyler, Bon Scott, and Glenn Danzig, separated him from his peers, such as screamers like Tom Araya of Slayer. Hetfield was able to use his vocal dynamism and divergence from stereotypical heavy metal singing to periodically experiment in genres different from his own. In 2002, he traded vocals with Warren Haynes, lead singer of southern rock and blues jam band Gov’t Mule, on Mule’s song, “Drivin’ Rain.” A year later, he sang “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand,” for a tribute album honoring outlaw country legend Waylon Jennings. With Metallica’s support, he also gives a nearly superior rendition of Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” for the 1998 cover album, Garage Inc. On The Black Album, Hetfield sounds like doom, but suddenly he was showing Armageddon with a human face. The machinery of metal and the humanity of soul came together to profoundly capture the fragility and flexibility of the human spirit—a contradiction Hetfield chronicles with lyrics of childhood torment, the pain of separation between two lovers, and ravenous primal desire. Hetfield’s voice was no longer one note in its static depiction of rage. It widened to cover the complexities of the entire human experience—the insatiable crave of lust, the splash of tears on the floor, and the good and evil night-rider’s race for property within the soul. •

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Rock also gave Hetfield the energy and engine he needed to drive into previously unexplored parts of his musical mind and personality. Rather than have the rhythm section record their parts separately, and mix them together at a later date, Rock convinced Metallica to play as a live unit inside the studio. When a band plays live together, they play with greater intensity and vitality. They capture a moment, rather than artificially create one. They give the listener the experience of hearing music not as they play it, but as they make it. To many non-musicians, music seems magical: merely the product of inspiration. While the combustibility of creativity contains mysterious chemistry to those not accustomed to working in the artistic laboratory, songs— like anything else—require work. They go through different incarnations, and often, the most talented and inspired bands—like Metallica—are also the most tenacious. “Enter Sandman” demonstrates the musical conception of marrying inspiration with dedication. Hammett wrote the epic and memorable riff in his bedroom after it seemed to channel directly from his brain to his fingertips, but it also took time to develop into the staple song immediately recognizable by fans around the world. “Enter Sandman” is about crib death. The topic is far from pleasant—horrific, actually—but nothing new for Metallica, a band committed to navigating the dark catastrophes of life, from teenage suicide to wartime fatalities. Hetfield’s lyrics were narrowly specific in its description of a nightmare enveloping a family’s life. “Off to never, never land”—the final words of the chorus— were originally “disturb the perfect family.” Before the •

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chorus became an exercise in rock, street slang poetry, it was almost essayistic. Hetfield has a habit of singing vowel sounds over the melody of a song to determine how many syllables in each word, and each line, work best for his vocal. The beginning of the chorus—“Exit light / Enter night”—empowered Hetfield to sing in his new melodic, emotive, and nuanced style by holding out syllables, rather than filling the spaces with more words. It made for a stronger and sharper hook, and also a much more dramatic song. The drama, along with everything else in the song, comes from the riff. “The whole song [‘Enter Sandman’]—the progression, the chords, everything—comes out of the riff,” Lars Ulrich said. “The song is a one track pony in that respect. We jumped into the album by writing and playing the simplest song.” “Enter Sandman” was the first song to come together musically, but the last lyrically, according to Ulrich. Bob Rock remembers the frustration of mediating Metallica’s conflicts. During the recording of The Black Album, the band enforced a rule that no member could directly criticize another member’s work. All criticisms must pass through the producer, who would then act as messenger. Rock’s first task as awkward mail carrier was to tell Hetfield that the rest of the band felt disappointed with the lyrics for “Enter Sandman.” Tapping his feet delicately around the landmine of Hetfield’s temper—something that the singer now admits was once out of control—Rock said that the lyrics were good, but that they “could be better.” They could leave more to the imagination. Subtlety, and the space open for interpretation, often makes a more powerful impact than the obvious. Rock turned to an old lyrical model, •

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probably not too common in heavy metal, but helpful all the same: John Lennon. While playing the best songs of The Beatles, and Lennon’s solo albums, Rock and Hetfield discussed lyricism, and the storytelling electricity that surges when words meet the current of music. Hetfield had already been a great lyricist—easily the best of heavy metal—but, just as he was pushing himself to “grow and evolve” as a singer—he adapted to the environment of leaner songs by shifting into a new shape of lyricist. “Enter Sandman” opens The Black Album with sufficient strength to give the listener blunt force trauma, and right from that impactful opening, the new trappings of Metallica are abundantly clear: the live energy of the rhythm section; the street slang poetry of the lyrics; the nuanced, but brutal singing of Hetfield; and the jam quality of the performances. Even though the band begun with the aspiration to, as Rock would have it, capture the live power of the band, Hetfield believes that, in hindsight, “The Black Album is the most studio of all our albums—more layering, more thickness, more coloration, more experimentation with different sounds and vocals.” Hetfield adds that Rock was correct to claim that no one had captured what Metallica does live, but that it might be impossible to ever capture it. It is equally hard to imagine, however, how anyone could jack up the voltage on what is already borderline explosive when “Enter Sandman” leads into “Sad But True.” The destructive weight of “Sad But True,” most of it concentrated in Hetfield’s gigantic riff, redefines heavy music and reduces to rubble any argument that claims Metallica softened on The Black Album. The •

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intensity of Hetfield’s soulful rage in the vocal perfectly personifies the identity conflict of the lyrics, while introducing the idea of self-discovery and introspection that would run through the reflective musings of the entire Black Album. “You’re not as free as you seem when you are sitting there by yourself—battling yourself, your own addictions, your own temptations,” Hetfield said. “‘Sad But True’ addresses that quite vaguely, but it is about the split personality: yin-yang, the good and the bad. Sometimes the bad can overshadow the good, and vice versa.” In Norman Mailer’s genius novel, Harlot’s Ghost, one of the central characters delineates Mailer’s “AlphaOmega personality theory.” It is the belief that each human psyche houses two separate personalities. It is not the same as schizophrenia or split personality, but that each person is actually two people, both are “as complex and wholly elaborated as what we usually think of as a complete personality.” Each self can borrow properties from the other, and do, because they are wed “like corporal lobes of the brain.” “Sad But True,” without any intention from Hetfield, is the Alpha–Omega personality theory, taken from an 1,100-page novel, and condensed into five minutes of a heavy metal juggernaut. “Hey, I’m your life / I’m the one who takes you there / Hey, I’m your life / I’m the one who care,” Hetfield sings in a threatening shout speaking for one voice of his dualistic personality before continuing, “I’m your dream, make you real / I’m your eyes, when you must steal / I’m your pain, when you can’t feel / Sad but true.” Later in the song, he begins to address the other side, still in •

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full-throated shout with the band maximizing the violent swagger of metal meets hard rock, “You, you’re my mask / You’re my cover, shelter / You, you’re my mask / You’re the one who’s blamed.” The destructive force of “Sad But True” is the machinations of the machinery of warfare for the soul. It is the soundtrack to the internal battle that Hetfield’s lyrics capture and personify. The aggression of Metallica’s music is perfect for effectively expressing the psychological violence of one personality in constant competition with the other. If Mailer and Hetfield are correct, and most people’s personal experiences would indicate that they are, it is a war no one escapes. Metallica’s music was always aggressive, but part of what separates The Black Album from its predecessors is the fluidity and emotional volatility of the guitar solos. Like a jazz musician improvising to capture the feel of the moment and emotion of the song, Hammett, for the first time, played most of the guitar solos on The Black Album by ear. “I gotta tell you,” Hammett offered, “Those guitar solos wrote themselves. It wasn’t that way before, and it hasn’t been that way since. I can remember going to rehearsal and playing ‘Sandman’ as a band, and when it came time for the solo—bam—I played ninety percent of what you hear that first time. It just came out that way.” In “Sad But True” there is a stunning moment of silence. After the second chorus, all the music stops for four seconds. It is a temporary ceasefire in the air strike and bombing brigade. Then with a few pounds of the drums, Ulrich creates the space for Hammett’s scorching solo. It comes in like a flamethrower, and it is the result •

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of sharing the studio, and creating a Metallica musical moment as a singular unit. “The ‘Sad But True’ solo just came out the way you hear it,” Hammett said. “It just felt right from the onset.” “It felt right from the onset” is another way for Hammett to say that he settled into the “soul groove.” He was not merely performing or dictating, but creating, and he was doing so according to the indefinable demand of the moment. With The Black Album, Metallica entered the enterprise of musical moment making, but the lyrical focus, while not as specific as the political protest of …And Justice For All, peered into the past and looked into future. It also surveyed the present with an acidic tongue.

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Escape from an Elite Cage

Simultaneous with the 1980s ascendancy of Metallica was the rise of the religious right. The hideous trio of Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggert, and Pat Robertson led millions of theocratic followers to demand the imposition of narrow Christian moralism on politics. An ally in the White House—Ronald Reagan—gave them an amplifier, if not an unofficial vote on policy. It was the dawn of a dark season in American politics—one that culminated in the monstrosity of the G. W. Bush years. The darkness was far scarier than any Metallica lyric or heavy metal music video, and it wasn’t something that Metallica—a band obsessed with individual freedom and personal liberty—likely missed. They had already indicted televangelists on the nasty, Master of Puppets thrash number, “Leper Messiah,” and they would convict the same ugly forces of hateful division on the third track of The Black Album, “Holier Than Thou.” “There’s an underlying anger to heavy metal, for sure. It’s louder than anything else,” Hetfield said, “We need •

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to be heard, because we don’t feel like we’re heard.” Looking back on his initial infatuation with heavy metal, the front man said, “The main theme of teenagers is that they are not being heard, and by making music so loud, someone has to hear it.” The hand of Christian conservatism is constantly on the mute button, forever ready to silence voices and visions alternative to their doctrinal prescription for life. In “Holier Than Thou,” Hetfield, with a righteously rageful vocal, takes on biblical phrasing and tones in his lyrical destruction of quick and easy judgment “The crap rolls out your mouth again / Haven’t changed, your brain is still gelatin / Little whispers circle around your head / Why don’t you worry ’bout yourself instead.” Metallica continue to direct their melodic assault against those who manipulate religion to dilute the spirits of those who differ from their dogmas, even quoting Jesus Christ’s warning against hypocrisy, “You lie so much, you believe yourself / Judge not, lest ye be judged yourself.” The chorus encapsulates the condemnation into simple phrasing demonstrating how beliefs of superiority are typically the product of ignorance rather than wisdom, “Holier Than Thou / You Are / You know not.” The song has the force—and the volume—that Hetfield claims are elemental to heavy metal. Its guitar riff is like the early work of Aerosmith, after sniffing eight lines of cocaine. It gives a tour of thrash, and of the songs on The Black Album, along with “Through The Never,” it most closely resembles Metallica’s early work of Kill ’Em All and Ride The Lightning. Quickly into the song, Hetfield again lays claim to the title of “riffmaster” with an infectious, Aerosmith-meets-Slayer fast grinder •

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of the guitar. After the second chorus, Hetfield screams defiantly at the “holier than thou” subject of the song, “Who the hell are you?,” and Hammett comes roaring into place with a brief and fiery solo. Then, the guitars temporarily disappear. For a moment, it is just Lars Ulrich keeping the steady and heady beat, and Jason Newsted, acting as the propulsion, slapping away at the bass. It is a fine and early spotlight introduction of Newsted on the album. The bass is audible. Newsted is contributing his significant sound and strength to the weight. Unlike Justice, he is clear in the mix. It was Bob Rock who immediately rectified the bass gap in the mix of Metallica’s recording method: making sure to add Newsted’s propulsion to the force of America’s greatest heavy music band. “I was the new guy, and I had worked with Motley Crüe and Loverboy. So, in Jason’s mind I was a piece of shit,” Rock said, before explaining how quickly the nature of their relationship changed. “He was a bass player playing a guitar, and that was the problem right there. Also, the way Metallica mixed—the way James’ guitar sound was—was to get the bottom in his guitar sound. They compressed the whole mix. So, when Jason’s bass was up, you couldn’t hear James’ guitar, because of the compression. So, they just turned down the bass. That’s the problem I had to solve, and I did it purely by accident. Where we were mixing, there happened to be a console where I could actually get the drum sound, with the bass there, and actually have James’ full guitar without compression. Just by total accident, that console was there, and that’s the sound of The Black Album.” Newsted •

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predictably loved it, as did most Metallica fans, because as Rock points out, “it actually made the riffs bigger.” It was a turning point in the musical education for Newsted: “For the first time I got to play some real bass, and lay it down, with Bob Rock tutoring me how to be the bass of the orchestra as opposed to just thrashing and playing the same guitar parts on bass. It was the biggest learning experience of my career if you were to measure it day for day, hour for hour, how much I had to process, in the time I had, when the red light was on.” With each member playing their part and using their talent and musical attitude to contribute to the excellence of each song, Metallica established cohesion. “Realizing that the bass needed to be the bass underneath, and the drums stayed so simple, and the bass keeps the weight and the concrete in place so that the riffs can be as powerful as possible,” Newsted explains was the big lesson of The Black Album sessions. “Then the guitars jump out. They are pushed out to you, because the drums and bass stay in control.” The cohesion contributed to the creation of Hammett’s criteria of musical excellence: soul groove. Newsted admits that his problem was one of excitement. He had trouble corralling his passion, and would play too fast. “I was so excited to be playing that I wasn’t thinking about the groove. So, I had to have it drilled into my head by Bob and by James, ‘slow the fuck down.’” Newsted also remembers that, even before The Black Album sessions were finished, “We had a focus on what it was going to become—a cohesive package. Each song goes into the next song into the next song into the next into the next. It sounds like one big, long trip.” •

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The trip of The Black Album keeps traveling onward to another battleground for the soul, except at this site of mass casualties, people weren’t laid to waste by the faithbased judgments of others, but by their own capitulation to those judgments. They were quick to conform, and paid an ultimate, spiritual price for it. The song that tells this story would certainly require Jason Newsted to slow the fuck down. It is the ballad— the first of The Black Album—called “The Unforgiven.” James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich developed an unconventional idea for a song. Instead of writing a ballad with the typical dichotomy—melodic verses and heavy choruses—why not flip it around? A ballad with heavy verses and melodic choruses was the genesis for “The Unforgiven.” The Clint Eastwood western of the same name inspired Hetfield in naming his own song, and provided the impetus for his creativity. In order to pay tribute to Eastwood and his Academy Award winning film about a laconic, tormented cowboy avenging the death of his best friend, Hetfield explains that Metallica used a horn introduction from its score, but reversed it so as to hide the source. “‘The Unforgiven’ was the difference in James’s writing and singing,” Bob Rock explains. As Hetfield matured, he became more willing to write songs on an acoustic guitar. Rock had already worked with several rock bands, including some with a hard, heavy sound, who wrote songs with acoustic instrumentation. “I knew how to make an acoustic song sound big. I knew how to help him do what he wanted, and that’s all I did.” After the horn introduction, “The Unforgiven” moves along with an acoustic guitar riff, a countermelody from •

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Hammett on electric, and after a few soldiers-marchingto-war fills, a steady beat on the bass drum from Lars Ulrich. Newsted settles into the slow groove, and then suddenly an explosion occurs. The music is hard and heavy. Hetfield’s voice is acidic as he sings of the costs of conformity. He begins with a birth announcement, but one that despite the joy of new life, already takes on tragic undertones from societal pressure to suppress individuality, “New blood joins this earth / And, quickly, he’s subdued / Through constant pained disgrace / The young boy learns their rules.” As the boys grows older, gaining in knowledge and experience, he also gains reasons to conform to the pressure to assimilate into social expectations, but as Hetfield puts it, he will struggle not to subvert, but save his own will. As Hetfield and Ulrich envisioned, the song slows to a soft, soulful chorus. With an almost tender melody in the music, and in Hetfield’s voice, the story continues to make clear the devastation of an otherwise free individual allowing external people, powers, and principalities to dictate the terrain and totality of his life, “What I’ve felt / What I’ve known / Never shined through in what I’ve shown / Never free … / So I dub thee unforgiven.” America is a culture of profound possibilities for selfactualization. Anyone with the courage to search out and forge an identity of authenticity has an abundance of opportunity. Most people treat the opportunities for liberty and authenticity as a businessman treats graffiti art—something to, perhaps, look at for a few seconds before turning around and reporting straight to work. The psycho-spiritual duopoly of careerism and •

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materialism demand that most people live their lives according to their professions, and live for what those professions enable them to purchase. Many Americans freely and obliviously play the game, and become various versions of Søren Kiekegaard’s allegorical corpse. The existential philosopher once told the story of a man who never realized he was alive until the morning he woke up dead. The music of “The Unforgiven”—as Hetfield and Ulrich conceived it—gives aural evidence of the spiritual battle between rebellion and conformity. “The light and the dark,” as Ulrich calls it, and the multiple shifts in tempo, as if someone’s hand is on the power meter and knows exactly when to turn it, demonstrate the difficulty of individuality. Cultural pressure and forces of compromise surround the individual, and the individual is constantly torn between what is easy—surrender, and what is tough—resistance. There is also the musical matrimony of Hetfield’s voice and Hammett’s guitar, making the song the strange combination of rage and beauty. Like a married couple able to finish each other’s sentences, Hammett and Hetfield seem to bring out the most power, soul, and strength in each other. Hetfield’s vocal goes through several incarnations in “The Unforgiven,” each one able to translate the pain of knowing you can never forgive yourself for auctioning off your own life, while Hammett’s guitar is right there with him. Like a snake charmer of the spirit, with his six strings, he’s summoning the emotional avidity and complexity of the song. The second verse performs an autopsy of Kierkegaard’s allegorical corpse. Instead of singing about a young boy •

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learning how to suffer and settle under the regime of expectation from family and society, Hetfield is now lamenting the tragedy of an old man who, when looking back over the mediocrity of his life, realizes he never truly lived. He merely survived, “They dedicate their lives / To running all of his / He tries to please them all / This bitter man he is …The old man then prepares / To die regretfully / That old man here is me.” “‘The Unforgiven’ is absolutely laced with that struggle,” Hetfield said, referring to the fight for the spirit between the rebel and conformist that lives within everyone. “As a child, you’re raised a certain way—kept in a bubble, kept in a cage—an elite cage. Then, here comes the world, and you’re not ready. You don’t know how to handle it. So, you isolate. You lock yourself away. You blame the world for it, but you never forgive yourself, because you lock yourself away in your own hell. But, you know there is something out there that is the most forgiving thing you can imagine. It has to come from within, though. So, it’s about having that key yourself, but being afraid to acknowledge it.” After the second chorus of the song, Kirk Hammett blasts through the brick barricading the tormented soul of the song in a private hell. The ferocity of the guitar solo comes from several sources, one of them the inner politics of the recording studio. Hammett had written two guitar solos before the recording of the song, and the band, along with Bob Rock, was unhappy with both of them. Rock, in an effective attempt to get into the psyche of Hammett, accused him of not taking his work seriously, and coming to the studio unprepared. Hammett said, “Fuck you. You think I’m unprepared, •

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listen to this motherfucker,” and when the band did another take on the song, Hammett played with the ferocity of the moment. The beastly beginning of the solo was an attack on Rock as much as anything else. It was Hammett announcing his presence with a wrecking ball entrance. The “fuck you” goes beyond just the immediate quarrel on that day, however. It might very well go back to Hammett’s own childhood, and his own search for an authentic identity. “The message of our culture is that you have the right to make your own decisions, and do what you want, but as soon as you learn to walk and talk, society bats that down,” Kirk Hammett said. The guitar master sees himself in juxtaposition with the societal tendency to limit, rather than broaden, identity options. “I’ve always had an anti-authoritarian personality. That attitude plays to my heart. It is in my soul. If everyone is walking on one side of the street, I’m not automatically going to cross over to the other side, but I am going to question— find out why—everyone is on that side, and if I don’t like it, I’m going to look for something else.” Reflecting on his childhood, Hammett is able to excavate the roots of the relationship between his artistry and rebellion. “I’ve always been an independent thinker, even though my parents were not independent thinkers. I had it in me, and it was nurtured, not necessarily by my parents, but by my older brother, and my older cousin, and their friends. It also had to do with the situation I was in growing up in San Francisco in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The culture back then, unlike now, fostered independent thinking. I was growing up with the civil •

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rights movement, the anti-war movement, and people were questioning everything. That was not lost on me, even as a young child. It excited me, but it got me into trouble too, because I would question my parents regularly, and my parents, especially my father, could not understand that attitude. So, I was reprimanded, but the reprimanding made me more of a rebel. When I discovered heavy metal, I recognized the rebel spirit.” Kirk Hammett was born in San Francisco to a Filipino mother and an Irish father. Interracial marriages were far less common in the 1960s than they are now, and that was perhaps the first example of rebellion from which he was able to grow and learn. His father, however, was far from the rebellious role model Hammett would want to emulate once he became a teenager, given that he was a Merchant Marine. In high school, Hammett became obsessive in his drive to become an exemplar of the heavy metal spirit and sound, having many musical conversations with his close friend and classmate, Les Claypool, who would go on to become the bassist and lead vocalist of the rock band, Primus. Hammett, like many budding guitarists, considered Hendrix a hero. The band he helped form out of high school, however, was heavier than Hendrix’s Experience and The Band of Gypsys. Exodus, a thrash band still standing, would become a pivotal part of the Bay Area metal scene. Playing in Exodus was the equivalent of a college education for Hammett, as it would provide him with the experience and accomplishment necessary for landing a job in his lifelong career as guitarist for Metallica. James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, and Cliff Burton had noticed Hammett’s fiery leads, dynamic •

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solos, and blistering work with Exodus, and reached out to him when they decided to replace Dave Mustaine. The stunning skills of Hammett’s guitar artistry were undoubtedly the result of innate talent, but also the tutelage of his guitar instructor, virtuoso Joe Satriani. Hammett gained an actual college experience in the 1990s, when, between The Black Album and Load, he studied Film and Asian Arts at San Francisco State University. In 2012, Hammett released a book of photos depicting his love for horror movies and memorabilia. Jason Newsted described Hammett as “artist, pure.” Throughout his life, Hammett has demonstrated a desire to continue to stretch his own limits creatively, and indulge the affections of his imagination. It is the rock ‘n’ roll and heavy metal spirit of rebellion, recognizable to Hammett as an adolescent, that continues to fuel his independent thinking and artistic engagement with the world, even when that engagement takes him out of the recording studio and off the stage. If there is such a thing as a philosophy of rock ‘n’ roll and heavy metal, it is difficult to delineate, but it is forever inseparable from the elevation and emphasis of freedom—freedom of thought, freedom of pleasure, and freedom of life. The song that follows “The Unforgiven” on The Black Album is a tribute to the freedom of movement—the gift of personal liberty bequeathed to the individual by the old, American idea of restless journeying. “Wherever I May Roam” was one of the first songs Hetfield and Ulrich were able to conceptualize and actualize early in the writing and demo recording process. It was also one of the songs on the cassette tape they used to first •

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introduce Bob Rock to the new music. The song begins with a sitar introduction, giving an international quality to the song, and emphasizing its lyrical celebration of the wayfarer lifestyle. When the full band starts pushing the train down the tracks, with Newsted in the groove, Hetfield hammering down his killer riff, and Ulrich playing with the Phil Rudd intensity of “For Those About To Rock,” the song takes off. It is heavy and slow, like sludge—cinematic in its tempo, and almost frightening in its intensity. The subtlety of Hetfield’s vocal delivery, as displayed on “The Unforgiven,” is gone— buried under the brutality of his animalistic tear through the verses and choruses. “Wherever I May Roam” comes from the voice of an archetypal character—the drifter without attachments and without responsibilities. It is the heavy metal reawakening of the spirit in Lynyrd Skynrd’s superior take on J. J. Cale’s “Call Me The Breeze.” Hetfield announces himself, in full-throated shout, as a “rover,” “wanderer,” “nomad,” and “vagabond.” The “road is his bride,” and the “earth is his throne.” “I’m free to speak my mind anywhere,” Hetfield declares with an impassioned growl during the chorus. So strong and unwavering is his commitment to freedom that not even the grave will hold him down. His spirit becomes Lazarus, reciting the creed of the hard rock drifter dream: “Carved upon my stone / My body lies, but still I roam.” Kirk Hammett’s spirit and fingers roamed, almost according to their own internal map during the guitar solo of “Wherever I May Roam.” Like many of the other Black Album songs, “the level of spontaneity was really high on that one,” he explained. “All of the spontaneity •

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really came out of the songs. It was what served the songs best,” he added. Hetfield’s monster riffs, hard and melodic vocals, and Ulrich’s AC/DC beat picked up on that highway to hell, opened up the Metallica venue for musical exploration like never before. The band’s musicality is the rover and vagabond of the song. They were no longer confined by the limits of thrash. Bob Rock explained that one of the reasons the band was able to experiment with new sounds and singing techniques is because the tempos weren’t so ballistic. They were no longer contained within the complex cell of progressivism. As the band embraced simplicity, they gained in power. “Wherever I May Roam” is one of the most powerful statements of the record. Like “The Unforgiven” it is also the closest to reaching for the “epic” label the band had rejected during the composition of their new material. “They [‘Roam’ and ‘Unforgiven’] aren’t as progressive, obviously, as ‘…And Justice for All’ or ‘Frayed Ends of Sanity’, but there is the light and the dark, and the different shades,” Ulrich said. He also attributes much of the album’s power, especially those thunderous drums on “Wherever I May Roam,” to meticulous labor—plain, old work. Metallica’s talent is enormous, but so is their diligence. Their tenacious attention to detail enhances their innate abilities, demonstrating the relationship between inspiration and perspiration. Greatness requires both. Hammett’s spontaneity—the “soul groove” of jazz meeting metal—had a partner in Hetfield and Ulrich’s assiduousness. “We were obsessed with sounds and sonics,” Ulrich said, “These days people don’t really spend much time thinking about sonics, but we spent a •

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fucking week on the drum sound before we even started recording. We took ten days in the studio, moving everything around, and building fake walls, just to get the sound exactly as we wanted it.” Their labor had the guide of Hetfield’s instincts, according to Ulrich: “James has always had his finger on the pulse of different sounds and instrumentations.” The magical combination of Hetfield’s musical brilliance and impulses, Lars’ commitment to craft, Newsted’s propulsion, Hammett’s unbound artistry, and the entire musical unit’s working habits, along with Bob Rock’s insights and challenges, produced “Wherever I May Roam,” and the songs that surround it. All five men in the room were living freely. They were not only committing to the creation of art, but transforming their lives into art. An artistic life is one lived according to the internal cartographer. The map a free man follows is the one he has crafted out of his own intellectual judgment, heartfelt sense of purpose, and soulful source of meaning. “Free to speak my mind anywhere” is the cry of a liberated man—a man unafraid of the consequences that come with the refusal to conform. The first half of The Black Album ends with Metallica continuing their celebration of freedom, and amplifying their call to live without a harness on the back. “Don’t Tread On Me” employs the American slogan of independence and liberation as its title. The move was a shock to fans and critics who appreciated the sophisticated and venomous political protest of …And Justice For All. James Hetfield said that after traveling the world, he remembered that, despite all of America’s inequities and injustices, it possesses great qualities. He decided to •

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write a song expressing the celebration of those qualities, but as with many of the products of Hetfield’s enormous intellect and imagination, it quickly took on a life of its own. The song begins with a trashy guitar introduction of Leonard Bernstein’s “America.” The patriotism does not counter or cancel the anger and bitterness of Justice. It merely balances it. According to Hetfield, “In any country, even with any person, you have to have the ability to see both sides, and as soon as you do, you are able to take the personal out of it, and not be so set on one way or the other. So, yeah—there’s the failures and horrors of the American government with war and discrimination, and all of that, but there’s also the ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ side—the good side.” “Don’t Tread On Me” follows a thrash template, and rocks with abandon. The simplicity of the melody, and the abrasiveness of the chorus, led Hetfield, years later, to admit that it was far from his favorite musical composition. Among all the songs on The Black Album, it does still sound like the weak link. As far as weak links go, however, it is surprisingly strong and sufficient. Part of the problem is, perhaps, its competition. An average-sized man might look like a giant in a room full of children, but even a tall man looks like a child in a room full of giants. Following “Enter Sandman,” “Sad but True,” “Holier Than Thou,” “The Unforgiven,” and “Wherever I May Roam,” is a tough task for any tune. One of the reasons that The Black Album qualifies as a masterpiece is that, unlike many albums, there are not any filler songs. “Don’t Tread On Me,” as Hetfield explains, is the weakest song on the album, but the •

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definition of “weakest” is dependent upon context. It is a good song, among many stronger songs. Its lyrics, if not its music, flow perfectly with the rest of the record. The slogan, “Don’t tread on me,” is under cooptation from the Tea Party of the far American right in politics, but Hetfield is not preaching politics. When he quotes Patrick Henry—“Liberty or Death”—and boasts of, in the name of defending liberty, showing “fangs of rage,” he is actually singing in the voice of a character. He said that all the characters were an extension of himself, and in “Don’t Tread On Me,” he is taking animal form for the first, but not the last, time on The Black Album. “It was the history of the Gadsden Flag,” Hetfield said. “I wanted to put a voice to the snake of the flag. What did it represent?” The Gadsden Flag was the flag of the American Revolution and, even if wrongly appropriated by the right wing, still represents resistance to oppression in history, and contemporary politics. The “fangs of rage” should threaten any dictator, tyrant, and oppressor, and the love of liberty is something that should engender solidarity among all the free, in service to the bound. As Hetfield put it, “Freedom should be available to everyone.” The creation and mastery of music is how the members of Metallica—a collection of free individuals forming a cohesive unit of artistic expression—exercise their freedom.

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4

Call of the Wild

“The thing that I’ve loved since I was twelve years old— since I’ve been conscious—is records,” Bob Rock said. “I can still remember where I was when I first heard The Rolling Stones, Free, Led Zeppelin, Sly and The Family Stone—just great records. I’m so proud that I make records for a living. How does it get any fucking better than that?” Rock has played a pivotal part in the creation of many great rock records, from The Cult’s Sonic Temple to Aerosmith’s Permanent Vacation, but it is likely that none will have the legacy or longevity of The Black Album. The self-titled record from Metallica is not just a great collection of songs. The best way to understand and appreciate it is to experience it as a cohesive unit. It becomes even more powerful when one considers it as not just a singular album, but a step in the long journey of albums from Metallica. The Black Album makes the most sense if understood as the shift in direction following …And Justice For All, and Load, Metallica’s follow up to The Black Album, makes more sense if •

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understood as a continuation of the exploration that began on The Black Album. The songs of The Black Album connect and build off each other. Listening to the record is not like taking leaps, but walking up a stairwell. The members of Metallica always wanted fame, fortune, success, and wealth, but they also wanted artistry and substance. Album sides and sequencing might not mean much in current music culture, but they are essential to The Black Album experience. “Through The Never” begins the second half of The Black Album, and it if there was any doubt about Metallica’s capacity for blowing the doors down with pure thrash, hard rock, heavy metal mania, the song quickly and fatally destroys it. Its grinding guitar riff— another from the seemingly bottomless mind and hands of Hetfield—would have found a hospitable home on Kill ’Em All. The sonics—with Bob Rock at the production table—and the rest of the band committed to giving their music the weight of an anvil, transform the thrash into the thunder announcing Armageddon. Kirk Hammett’s guitar solo, coming in the middle of the song, is one of the most explosive on the album. It is the fire in the sky, raining down with almost frenetic energy. The foundation of the song—Ulrich pounding in rhythm and Newsted pushing it forward—gives form to chaos. Hetfield’s voice tears away, picking up the same ferocity he used to tell of the rewards of freedom in “Wherever I May Roam” and the battles of internal warfare on “Sad But True.” His lyrics bring to mind the insight of Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard: death is just a “leak in the pipes.” •

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Hetfield sings that “all that is, ever, ever was, will be twisting, turning through the never.” The only certainty in anyone’s life is its ending. Death is all that has a guarantee in a world often given to arbitrary cruelty. The song—in its wrecking ball power—is a venue for James Hetfield’s cerebral investigation of the universe. The biggest questions are not too large for the immensity of Metallica’s music, “Time and space never ending / Disturbing thoughts, questions pending / Limitations of human understanding.” Taking an empathetic look at the religious search and spiritual struggle for meaning in a world of absurdity, the song continues in its investigatory quest: “Gazing up to the breeze of the heavens / On a quest, meaning, reason / Came to be, how it begun / All alone in the family of the sun / Curiosity teasing everyone / On our home, third stone from the sun.” The song ends with Hetfield growling the word “never” before immediate silence. It is almost as if the musical composition enters the void the lyrics try to explore, as Hetfield considers every living creature’s ultimate destination regardless of achievement, personality, or character. “Through the Never” demonstrates that with experimentation and innovation, Metallica’s purer heavy metal performances did not weaken. They gained strength. Having explored their rock ‘n’ roll influences, and spending time with different techniques and tactics of heavy music making, they became more capable of returning to metal with confidence and aggression, not less. The apocalyptic interrogation and conflagration of “Through The Never” was visible and palpable in the •

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Metallica’s 2013 thriller concert film of the same name, directed by Nimrod Antal. For years, according to Lars Ulrich, film studios and production companies had approached Metallica about a theatrical concert film, but the band refused. “The world didn’t need another concert movie with shots of the band getting out of the limo, and eating sandwiches backstage,” Ulrich said. They were open to the idea only if they could imagine a concept that would separate their film from those of other rock ‘n’ roll icons—Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and The Who. “When everyone does something one way, we think, ‘what’s the other way to do it?’” James Hetfield said. The practice of Metallica rebellion remained operational with Through the Never. Just as there are two Metallicas in their catalogue of work and on The Black Album, with “Through the Never”—the song—representing the first Metallica, the heavy metal masters, there are two Metallicas in the movie. There is the Metallica that gave the filmgoing audience a satisfactory version of what they expected—beautifully filmed and intimately captured performances of “Master of Puppets,” “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” “Fuel,” and other favorites. Then, there is the Metallica that insists on giving people the one they never saw coming. “Through The Never” is not merely the documentation of an extraordinary concert experience. It is a film that elevates hard and heavy music to the expression and embodiment of reckless resistance to oppression. It begins with Trip, a roadie for Metallica, riding his skateboard through an arena parking lot in an unnamed city (the movie was filmed in Vancouver and Edmonton). •

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He reports to work for the band, seeing each member rehearse or prepare for the upcoming performance. Robert Trujillo, Metallica’s bassist, is practicing in a room of amplifiers, causing the walls to shake, while Kirk Hammett is trying to figure out why his guitar neck is bleeding. When the concert begins with Metallica’s metal classic, “Creeping Death”—a song about the seven plagues the biblical God visited upon Egypt to issue the demand for emancipation of the Jewish slaves— Trip makes his way into the arena, pumping his fists, and singing along. Before the song ends, a man with a clipboard and headset gives him a special assignment. He is to retrieve a mysterious bag left somewhere in the city, outside the arena. In the bag is an unidentified object that Metallica considers of great importance. The search to retrieve the bag sets Trip on an epic struggle for survival in the middle of an urban Armageddon. Mysterious horsemen are hanging people from street lamps, and burning down everything in sight. Meanwhile, in the arena mere miles away, Metallica is equalling the intensity with their own weapon of mass destruction—“Cyanide,” “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” “Hit The Lights,” etc. Hetfield said that his favorite moment of the film is when Trip, while watching as one of the horsemen attack innocent people, picks up a stone and throws it at him. Knowing he is outmatched and outgunned does not prevent him from taking a stand of courage against an oppressor. It is the defiance of that seemingly small act that represents the movie and takes on life as an embodiment of the Metallica rebellion. Trip also sets himself on fire at one point, when he is surrounded by an •

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angry mob intent on killing him, turning himself into a fireball before surrendering. Peter Travers, film critic for Rolling Stone, captured the profundity and heavy energy of the movie best when he wrote, “Through The Never is a full-throttle expression of rock ‘n’ roll anarchy.” He encouraged readers, rightfully, “not to try to understand the plot,” but to “live it.” Through The Never, because of its unique blend of masterfully filmed musical performance and exhilarating live action story, was not only a groundbreaking and daring concert movie, but also an enhancement of Metallica’s commitment to creatively controlled aggression. It was a statement of their power and purpose—a victory lap and a new trail at once. “Through The Never” would have fit perfectly into the movie bearing its name, but oddly enough, the song never surfaces. Two songs from The Black Album are fully captured in the movie, and three appear on the double live soundtrack album: “Enter Sandman,” “Wherever I May Roam,” and “Nothing Else Matters.”

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Wicked Game

“I couldn’t believe that a human being was singing like this,” James Hetfield once remarked while reflecting on his first experience listening to the acidic tongue of Lemmy Kilmister. The influence is detectable on “Seek and Destroy,” “Battery,” and many other Metallica tracks, as is the mark of Glenn Danzig’s enormous voice, somehow combining warmth and doom. Hetfield adds his own unique gifts, and superior range, as layers on top the macho gravel of Motörhead’s front man, and the immense power of the Misfits’ man in charge. Given his influences and his own style, it is surprising to learn of the vocal inspiration behind one of Metallica’s most popular songs, and at the time, as the eighth song on The Black Album, one of their most surprising—“Nothing Else Matters.” Bob Rock remembers that, “with ‘Nothing Else Matters’, James said, ‘I want the approach to be like Chris Isaak on ‘Wicked Game’, and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s his voice—big, warm—and you can hear the emotion •

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in it. You can have that.’ So, I had him sing through speakers so he can just sing in the room, and that helped him move toward that approach. He became a singer, and it worked with the song.” Playing “Wicked Game” and “Nothing Else Matters” side by side reveals a strange and surprising proximity and intimacy between the soulful crooner’s ballad and the masters of metal’s first love song. Beyond the tender sincerity of the vocal delivery, there was no immediate or direct influence, but both songs possess an unusually brooding romance. They are both at once sweet and tough, loving and dreadful. The effect of both songs on the listener is simultaneously uplifting and haunting. “Nothing Else Matters,” like “The Unforgiven,” is another song that James Hetfield wrote on his acoustic guitar, and benefited from not only the enormous vision of Metallica’s leader, but also the sonic expertise of their then new producer. Even though it is a “love song,” it has a muscularity that few other bands could pull off when expressing such a tender sentiment. For those reasons, among others, it is not only one of their most publicly identifiable songs, but one of their best. More than the Chris Isaak influence, the biggest shock of the song, at least to its creator, was its existence, and subsequent release. “That song, along with quite a few others, came from being on the road, being bored in the hotel room, and writing riffs,” James Hetfield said. “Then I’d start to build on it, by myself—oh, this can be the harmony, and oh, this can be Kirk’s part.” Hetfield recorded that song on a four-track recorder, believing that it would never see the light of day or meet a public ear. “‘Nothing Else •

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Matters’ was one of those songs, and it just came out of the mindset I was in at the time. It was about the girlfriend I had at the time, and just missing her, missing being at home. I was feeling that life was changing really fast, but at the core of it all, nothing else matters because of this connection that we have.” The simplicity, universality, and profundity of the emotive expression of love and longing is, for better or worse, quite common in other genres. Hetfield was, and is, a giant in a genre that doesn’t take too kindly to confessions of vulnerability. “The heavy metal theme is not about love. Love is a four-letter word. It was taboo to write a ballad or write a song with love as the core meaning. It seemed like a taboo feeling to have, especially on the road. We’ve got drinking and drugging, one-night stands, loud music. We’re living the rock star life. So, having tender feelings were foreign, and I was afraid to share it with anyone in the band.” Eventually, he did share it, and Ulrich, along with everyone else, was “blown away.” “It took the veil off the machismo that Metallica had,” Hetfield added. “It was touching on more of a human emotion than anything we had ever done. It made us human, not just demigod like.” Metallica had always expressed desire to become more than the heavy metal cliché. Hetfield’s imagination and vocal enabled them to pull it off. They never wanted to sing about Satan, demons, and blood falling from the sky. They wanted a loud, heavy, aggressive energy that was actually about something meaningful. The underlying emotion, however, was always rage. The political protest of …And Justice For All, the venomous anger at televangelist on “Leper Messiah,” and the stories of war •

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on “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” were full of ferocious indignation. “Nothing Else Matters” has a sweetness one would not expect from Metallica, but the machismo is not entirely gone. Hetfield recalls once receiving a video from a chapter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club that used the song as a tribute to some of their members who had died unexpectedly. The Hells Angels recognized a strength in the sweetness, and a combative streak running through the love. Hetfield’s vocal—a true achievement—manages to convey all of those emotions with conviction. The continuation of the celebration of freedom is what gives the song its muscle, despite its vulnerability. “Never care for what they do / Never care for what they know / Cause I know,” Hetfield sings in both defiance against a world of pressure, limitations, and repression, and in love for a woman with whom he shares an edifying and exciting connection. Hetfield’s soulful and strong vocal, and the no frills toughness and tenderness of the music bring out the sweet sentiment of the lyrics, and emphasize the comfort and thrill of falling in love. The experience allows each person to discover themselves, as they discover each other, “Never opened myself this way / Life is ours, we live it our way / All these words I don’t just say / And nothing else matters.” Vulnerability is necessary for intimacy. As Hetfield sings of overcoming the fear of opening himself up, he also celebrates the trust, affection, and mutual pleasure he enjoys with his beloved partner. The sanctuary they build with the architecture of their arms protects them from the pressures, demands, and expectations of their social surroundings that killed the individual spirit in •

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“Unforgiven.” Suddenly, while in love, all of that ceases to matter, “Trust I seek and I find in you / Every day for us something new / Open mind for a different view / And nothing else matters.” The most moving and intense moment of the song— and one of the best moments in Metallica’s entire body of work—is near the song’s conclusion. Hetfield delivers the vocal with melodic nuance and tenderness, but during the final chorus, he unleashes the primal side. After singing “But I know,” he lets out an impassioned and wild scream—“Yeah!”—before launching into his own guitar solo. The solo bursts through the song with heavy metal intensity, opens it up, and shifts the song into taking on entirely new form. It is the aggression of his commitment, the totality of his defiance, and the full breadth of his love channeled into musical energy. The primal and the spiritual come together in “Nothing Else Matters,” and in that union, they allow for Metallica to more fully explore and express their artistry, creativity, and humanity. One of the disagreements Metallica had with Bob Rock was over the amount of orchestration in “Nothing Else Matters.” Rock believed that a symphony would make the emotions of the song sizzle at the surface. He sent a demo to Michael Kamen, a conductor and composer who had previously worked with Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, and Queen. Kamen was a gifted composer, and he was especially adept at creating orchestration that complemented, rather than reduced, rock ‘n’ roll. “There were parts of The Black Album that I thought had a relation to Pink Floyd,” Bob Rock explained, and went on to offer that when he first suggested adding an orchestra to •

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“Nothing Else Matters,” Hetfield looked at him like he threatened to murder his family. “But because Metallica’s genius and integrity is beyond anyone I’ve ever worked with, they said, ‘Ok, try it.’” “Michael was a genius, and I got his eighty piece orchestra work back, and I’m playing it in the studio, and I’m in tears it is so beautiful, and they fucking hated it,” Rock said. “They made me pull it down so low on the mix that it’s almost a sin.” The orchestration on “Nothing Else Matters” is essentially inaudible. Rock made a mix of the power ballad with only Hetfield’s voice and the orchestra. Metallica has often dubbed this version the “Elevator Mix,” and it, like everything else, is accessible on the internet. One can also hear what Michael Kamen imagined for “Nothing Else Matters” on Metallica’s live record, S&M. The double entendre stands for “Symphony and Metallica,” and the album documents Metallica’s full-length concert performance with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under the conduction of Kamen. The setlist surveyed the entire catalogue and career of Metallica, with the focus on their most recent releases of the time—Load and Reload. From The Black Album, they played “Of Wolf and Man,” “Enter Sandman,” “Sad But True,” “Wherever I May Roam,” and “Nothing Else Matters.” The show is music at high quality, but the problem is that, in most cases, the orchestra adds nothing to the heavy metal aggression of Metallica’s art. In many cases, it actually subtracts—the notable exceptions being “The Call of Ktulu” and “Master of Puppets.” The greatest achievement of the concert is, perhaps, its exemplification of the possibility of unity and the power of diversity. Because tickets were sold •

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to the general public, but symphony subscribers had first opportunity to buy, the performance revealed the true excitement of behavioral and lifestyle diversity in America. Much is made of racial and religious diversity, and while those forms of multicultural integration are of great importance, not enough is said about behavioral difference and the cultural variety that results from divergence in personality. The S&M performance revealed the unique and rare eclecticism of American life, which is most responsible for its enjoyment, by placing together classically trained musicians and rock masters who learned it in a garage off an old Motörhead tape. It united headbangers in combat boots with music readers in wingtips. It is consistent with Metallica’s practice of exploration and freedom. Always men in motion, they push the limits of their music, and the limits of what their audience might expect or accept. The Black Album accomplished just that, while bringing in millions of new fans—a perfect meeting of Metallica 1—the reliable crowd-pleasers—and Metallica 2—the challengers. It is fitting, then, that years later, S&M was one of the many offspring of The Black Album. Another highlight from the S&M performance is the song that follows “Nothing Else Matters” on The Black Album—“Of Wolf and Man.” The lyrics of the song make several allusions to the classic Jack London novel, The Call of the Wild, about a domesticated animal that discovers its beastly, primal, and predatory nature once thrown into the wilderness. James Hetfield, similar to Sigmund Freud whose Civilization and Its Discontents diagnoses the dissatisfaction of man as a result of the •

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repression of basic instincts and impulses, sees a parallel here with humanity. The lead singer and lyricist of Metallica laughed, almost sardonically, when the subject of “Of Wolf and Man” entered our conversation. The inspiration for the song was the “curiosity of the primitiveness that is still within us, especially the male species.” “I relate to the wolf, for some reason,” Hetfield said. “Getting into different ways of thinking, after reading different books on spirituality of the Native Americans, and homeopathy, where different medicines come from, and the possibility of reincarnation, and I became interested in the idea that in a prior life maybe I was a wolf. I’m a lone wolf, very much a loner, but I also run with a pack.” In the Jim Harrison novella, “Games of Night,” the great American author describes the story of a man slowly transforming into a wolf. Unique in the werewolf genre, it is not a horror story, but a fascinating look at the thin line of separation between man and beast—both of which belong to a mammalian species. That thin line is something human beings call “culture” or “civilization.” Harrison writes that, “culture is the layers of paint humans apply over their nature.” The “primitiveness” that Hetfield identifies as the inspiration for “Of Wolf and Man” is ineradicable. Humanity can conduct symphony orchestras, build museums, and strive for creating conditions of equality, but as Freud points out, unbridled sexual lust, along with bloodlust, remain part of the mammalian instinct. Hetfield’s voice—containing rare range in heavy metal—expresses the internal and cultural combat between the primal and the civil. In “Nothing Else Matters,” he sings sweetly and tenderly, •

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managing to evoke the softer side of emotional life— love and trust. “Of Wolf and Man” has him growling and howling—fully and powerfully capturing the words Elvis Presley used in the movie, Jailhouse Rock, to defend himself after taking a woman by surprise with a kiss: “It’s just the beast in me, baby.” “Of Wolf and Man” begins with a revved up riff, and big bass drum. Then, it slips into a grind, backed by Lars Ulrich playing the cymbals—the sound of the mist Hetfield refers to at the onset: “Off through the new day’s mist I run / Off from the new day’s mist I have come.” The song continues, gaining speed and power as it moves forward. The bass is thick, and the song moves with the predatory aggression Hetfield describes in the lyrics. His voice grows more ferocious as he connects with his spiritual ancestry of hunting, pack life, and the day-to-day struggle for survival in the wild. “Shape shift,” he sings, showing his fangs, “nose to the wind … feeling I’ve been / Earth’s gift / Back to the meaning of life.” Kirk Hammett—a prominent member of Hetfield’s earthly pack—fights his way to the leading position, and flashes his teeth. After the second chorus, his guitar cuts through the song with typical intensity, but also a bluesy quality. The meeting he officiates between the blues and the primal energy of metal happens with the help of the ghostly hand of Stevie Ray Vaughan. “That solo came together really quickly,” Hammett said. “I knocked it out within a day.” Similar to Lars Ulrich’s musical addiction of AC/DC, Hammett’s listening consumption fed into his creative production. “The only cassette tape I had with me, that whole time, was Stevie Ray Vaughan,” Hammett said, “and that was fine, because •

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when you are writing heavy metal and playing heavy metal for twelve or thirteen hours a day, the last thing you want to do when you get home is listen to more heavy metal.” The engagement with a different style had fruitful results for Hammett: “Stevie Ray Vaughan was perfect. He was a different flavor for my ears and my mind. His playing had a subconscious influence on mine, especially on ‘Of Wolf and Man.’ In fact, when I started that guitar solo, I was thinking about this one lick that I had noticed for the first time in Stevie’s playing.” Bringing the blues into the hard rock animalism of Metallica works wonders for not only, paradoxically enough, enhancing the aggression, but adding some interesting color and texture, similar to a Stax/Volt riff in a soul song, or a blues progression in a classic rock song. Hetfield’s voice is low and deep when he announces his own transformation, emphasizing the primal aggression no man is able to fully eradicate from his heart, “I feel I change / Back to a better day / Hair stands on the back of my neck / In wildness is the preservation of the world / So seek the wolf in thyself.” In “Of Wolf and Man,” Metallica celebrates and communicates the primal urges and primitive origins of humanity. Lust, aggression, and force are all part of the process—the ebb and flow—of the exchange between culture and nature. “Seek the wolf in thyself” is Hetfield demonstrating—with great vocal intensity and energy— the benefits of not only acknowledging, but accepting the beauty and brutality of one’s own nature. The next song on The Black Album, “The God That Failed,” is about the cruel consequences of denying nature. It begins with Newsted playing a funky riff on his bass. It •

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has a rhythm that could easily begin an old, soul song, but that rhythm is quickly overtaken by a gritty guitar riff— dark and brooding in its size and scale. The Phil Rudd style drumming of Ulrich complements it well, creating almost a bounce that encourages shoulder swaying as much as fist pumping. In the middle of the song comes a fiery guitar solo—one of Hammett’s favorites—that unlike the rest of his almost improvisational work on The Black Album, was the beleaguered result of painstaking labor. Stevie Ray Vaughan was still with Hammett when he originally performed a guitar solo for “The God That Failed” in the studio. The song’s structure of heavy riffing, and chording, did not lend itself to a bluesy solo, and after listening to the playback several times, Hammett reached that conclusion himself. When Hammett proposed a solo with harmonies, Bob Rock objected on the ground that such a melodic effect was “too pretty” for a song of such angry power and enraged sentiment. It took twelve different incarnations for Hammett to finally settle into the soul groove on “The God That Failed.” Ralph Ellison described the blues as “biographical catastrophe expressed lyrically.” In that sense, “The God That Failed” is all blues. It is the lyrical chronicling of catastrophe in the lives of James Hetfield and his mother. Of all the songs on The Black Album, “Nothing Else Matters” and “The God That Failed” are the most personal, but “The God That Failed” might represent Hetfield at his most personal and emotive across the entirety of Metallica’s career. To channel his pain into aggression, he relied on his standard method of therapy. “It is a very nice song,” Hetfield said referring to “The God That Failed,” “Slow, heavy, and ugly.” •

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The story that Hetfield tells in the song, taken from the pages of his own life, is sad and ugly. It involves his upbringing in the Christian Science religion, and how that dogmatic ideology, eventually contributed to the death of his mother. “It is a song about me being forced into a religion at a young age,” Hetfield said, “They raised me as a Christian Scientist, which means you don’t believe in doctors or medicine. There are some good aspects to the religion, but for a child, it was difficult to grasp. It was alienating for me. I couldn’t attend health classes, and I wasn’t supposed to learn about the body. God will fix whatever ails me. So, I had to get up and leave class. I was on the football team, and every year, I had to be exempted from taking the physical. Unlike what religion promises to do, it didn’t make me feel part of this Earth. That’s where ‘The God That Failed’ starts. The title was heavy for some people—Metallica attacking religion, whatever. It really is just my thoughts on my childhood and my life. No one can deny me that.” “The God That Failed” wasn’t the first time that Metallica “attacked religion,” if that simple phrasing is appropriate. “Leper Messiah” and The Black Album’s own, “Holier Than Thou” are certainly tough on the deceptions and delusions of organized religion, but it isn’t as if Hetfield is Richard Dawkins with a guitar. He celebrates the role of the spiritual in a healthy, holistic life. “I have a bitterness that formed around the religious part of my upbringing, but not the spiritual part. Spirituality is free flowing. It is living and everywhere.” Religion becomes destructive, and vulnerable to the kind of criticism Hetfield communicates, when it is the •

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attempt to regiment spirituality and exploit the spiritual longing of people for meaning and transcendence into a doctrinal system requiring submission to authority. “Religion can trap people into a certain type of thinking where they’re not free, or as loving as they can be— putting down people of other religions or of no religion,” Hetfield said. “Christian Science was very limiting. You weren’t able to heal through modern medicine. You had to rely on a god that I wasn’t even sure existed.” Hetfield might have suffered from doubt and disbelief, but his mother—a devout Christian Scientist—was certain in the conviction of her faith. Her loyalty to the church, and its tenet of natural healing, did not waver even in the disaster of her cancer diagnosis. Never accepting medicine, chemotherapy, or any other form of oncology treatments, she refused medicinal intervention or assistance until the end, dying a painful and, possibly unnecessary, death. Hetfield loved her deeply and her devastating departure was horrific, especially given that Hetfield’s father, having long left the family, was absent from his life. It is Hetfield’s mother’s god—or, at least her conception of god—that he condemns as a failure. The hideous and heartbreaking evidence of his beloved mother’s body in a coffin is all he needs to bring down the gavel and announce his conviction. The song marches with militaristic steadiness and solidity—aggressive and consistent—but it also has the funk of the bass, and the emotionalism of Hetfield’s voice, to give it the soul groove. When that voice—angry, passionate—begins to tell the story that ends with his mother’s funeral, it is not primal in its rage, like on “Of Wolf and Man,” but tearful. He is mapping a human wound, and measuring a broken •

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heart, rather than merely rallying a distant protest, or making an abstract point about human nature. Hetfield registers his pain with equal parts rage and despair. His lyrics begin with short, simple phrases. The punch of the phrasing and delivery provide another example of Hetfield’s innovative and effective—emotionally and melodically—method of using sounds to sort out syllables before writing actual lyrics. The words match the syllable count, making the lyrical composition as musically dynamic and consistent as possible, “Pride you took / Pride you feel / Pride that you felt when you’d kneel.” The method continues, with equal power and profundity, as Hetfield describes not the pride his mother’s religion gave her, but the devastating disappointments it helped create, “Not the word / Not the love / Not what you thought from above.” As the intensity of her devotion grew more intense, knowledge and wisdom became inaccessible, most especially that of medical advancement, “It feeds / It grows / It clouds all that you will know.” The faith, made clear even in Hetfield’s forceful brevity and simplicity, is all encompassing, rigid, and totalitarian in its practice, influence, and effect. “It clouds all that you will know” captures the universality of absolute religion devotion. It is both the giver and taker of pride. The music has the same simplicity as the lyrics, and the same “one track pony,” to use Ulrich’s phrase about “Enter Sandman,” as “Sandman,” and “Sad but True.” The entire song comes out of the massive, grinding riff. The bass gives it the soul groove, and the riff moves it along like a juggernaut. The riff has a stop, giving the song an irresistible bounce. With the chorus, Hetfield raises his voice, giving the higher stakes of the message, the musical urgency it demands. •

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The delivery is emphatic in its emotional and intellectual clarity, “I see faith in your eyes / Never you hear the discouraging lies / I hear faith in your cries / Broken is the promise, betrayal / The healing hand held back by the deepened nail / Follow the god that failed.” In an interview with Rolling Stone, a reporter asked Hetfield if he felt particularly proud of the line, “The healing hand held back by the deepened nail.” He said, jokingly, “Move over Bob Dylan.” “The God That Failed” is a provocative and powerful song, capturing both the musical effectuality and intensity of Metallica’s metal, but also their ability to transcend much of metal by making their music just as relevant and relatable as Bob Dylan’s folk-rock, or The Beatles’ anthemic rock. Metallica is not the only heavy metal band to write songs of political protest, religious criticism, or emotional sincerity, but they excel at it like few others, which, in part, explains their mass appeal and success. “The God That Failed,” perhaps just as much as “Enter Sandman” and “Nothing Else Matters,” demonstrates the velocity and value of The Black Album approach to hard rock and heavy metal. It is a song that is difficult to imagine coming into existence on any of the albums that precede Metallica’s self-titled record. Its lyrical content combines the personal touch and focus Hetfield had shied away from on earlier songs, while also bringing in the literary and poetic qualities Rock helped Hetfield cultivate by encouraging him to study the compositions of Dylan and Lennon. The lyrics, in addition to being personal, are also topical, and directly topical, like the punk rock icons Hetfield drew on for inspiration with The Black Album. Its music is not far from the thrash •

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metal days of Kill ’Em All and Ride The Lightning, but it has the hard rock simplicity of AC/DC, Motörhead, and Aerosmith—operating according to the soul groove, and drawing all its power out of a single riff, unlike the complex progressivism of “Master of Puppets,” “Orion,” and “Frayed Ends of Sanity.” “The God That Failed” represents Metallica at its standard level of heavy metal creativity and delivery, but also at the evolved, or at least transformed, state it had reached with The Black Album. The newest member of Metallica during the making of their self-titled record was bassist Jason Newsted. “Blackened” from …And Justice For All was the first song on which he received a songwriting credit. Newsted described that experience as representing a “very special time” in his life. He was first becoming friends with James Hetfield, and he had always looked up to Hetfield, along with the “Bay Area bands” like Testament and Death Angel, as a “special, gifted person.” To collaborate with Hetfield, and gain his approval, was a “big, big moment” for Newsted. That moment would reoccur during the recording sessions for The Black Album. It wasn’t an organic partnership of creativity forming in the “one bedroom apartment” Newsted had during the Justice days. It was another instance of Newsted mapping the trajectory he took from fan to collaborator. “James and Lars listened to the demos that I put together for pieces they can put together in the puzzle of five or six minutes of music,” Newsted said. “They picked up on a two minute thing I put together—all bass, gentle picking—and then glued it together with some other pieces to make the song.” Newsted describes that process as general practice for •

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Hetfield and Ulrich. “What they often do is like with ‘Enter Sandman,’ they pulled that riff from Kirk, turned it around, put a fill in, and there’s the song. Basically, how it sometimes works, is Lars and James take the idea, cultivate that shit, spit the song out, and say, ‘Here you go, guys, put your force on it.’” The result on The Black Album of that meticulous engineering of sounds was “My Friend of Misery.” It begins with Newsted’s bass riff—“gentle” as he describes it, but melodic, especially for a bass riff, and especially for his genre. The soft, but dark melody of the bass quickly receives a full-scale attack from guitars and drums, crashing into the song. When the brooding guitar grind overwhelms the gentle bass, the song, and even its bass foundation, sounds ominous. Hetfield shouts the opening line of the song. Great opening lines—in books or songs—make people curious, and as far as the threat of the song—the promise of destruction it makes in its first thirty seconds—it is hard to imagine a better line than the one Hetfield uses to start the story: “You just stood there screaming.” If it is true, as Hetfield explains, that all the characters of The Black Album represent parts of himself, the subject of “My Friend of Misery”—the “you” he is addressing—is himself. It would make sense, and set up the symmetry of solidarity with his mother. Her allegiance to religious dogma was the object of harsh, but understandable and justifiable criticism in “The God That Failed,” but the friend of misery is also one who voluntarily obstructs his view of the world, straps a stone of burden on his back, and takes perverse and morbid comfort in his own pain and suffering. He is convinced no one hears him, and •

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“the empty can rattles the most.” He is “smothered in tragedy,” but “out to save the world.” “There’s more to life” than what he sees. Hetfield’s vocal goes from soft to hard, and from whisper to shout, in an effective and emotive expression of the conflict of the character. The song’s music captures the internal struggle with the stability and rhapsody of the bass constantly assaulted by the controlled chaos and melodic noise of guitars, drums, and vocal. The assault culminates and climaxes in what is one of the most impressive and electric musical moments of The Black Album—a three-minute jam ending the seven-minute song. Beginning with just the bass, along with a light guitar drifting in and out, the music picks up with a steady drum, and distorted guitar solo. There is an ambivalence to the early parts of the jam, until Hammett plays a second solo—one full of the aggression he’s already injected into “The Unforgiven” and “Sad but True.” Hetfield shouts out the chorus once more, leading into yet another Hammett solo. The third, and final solo, combines the phrasing of the first, lighter solo, with the distortion of the second, heavier solo. It is a jam that reveals the sophistication of the band—though not nearly as complexly as many of the songs on “Puppets” and “Justice”—but also the new simplicity of the band—the soul groove energy, equal parts heavy metal and hard rock. “You’re not as free as you seem when you are sitting there by yourself,” Hetfield said. “When you’re battling yourself—whether it is your own temptations or addictions or fears—and everyone has to do it—you are not as free as you think.” Hetfield’s internal struggle for freedom, independence, and an opportunity to selfengineer identity is the philosophical underpinning and •

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the intellectual anchor for the wild and eclectic heavy energy of melody in The Black Album. The album’s closer, “The Struggle Within,” is the lyrical continuation and culmination of its search for liberty. It contains the Alpha-Omega split of “Sad But True,” the resistance to conformity of “The Unforgiven,” and internal war of “My Friend of Misery.” The meaning of the song was much more literal and immediate when Hetfield sat down to write it. Fitting that it closes the album, the band wrote and performed it on their last day in the studio during The Black Album sessions. The song’s lyrics challenged Hetfield like none of the others on the album, and as he stared at the page, coming up with nothing, he dubbed the process “the struggle within.” The song became a means of venting the frustration Hetfield felt for his inability to control his temper and deal with anger. “I’m not a psychiatrist, but it’s all there,” he said. The music begins with a marching drum beat—the sound of soldiers heading into war. A winding guitar slowly turns into a thrash style riff; one that is among the fastest on the record. Hetfield spits venom-covered phrases in sync with the music—the drums and guitars acting as the engine to his speeding down a dead end street. The chorus captures the bipolar nature of the narrator, pressing his desire to reform against his failure to do so, “Struggle within / Your Ruin / Struggle within / You seal your own coffin / Struggle within / The struggling within.” After the slow and heavy march of an introduction to the song, “The Struggle Within” fires down the road with frenetic fury. Like the rage of the singer’s soul, the song seems one second away from exploding out of control, •

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but Metallica manages to keep it together. The music controls the chaos, and channels the emotional volatility into creative productivity. It is a function of the song that matches and mirrors the life of the singer who’s admitted more than once that music is his therapy, and his saving grace. Ralph Ellison wrote that black Americans, in the face of State-sanctioned and sponsored terrorism, institutionalized racism, and normalized bigotry, had to make the choice between “dying with noise” and “living with music.” They created music. Hetfield, in “The Struggle Within,” screams in pain, trauma, and desperation about struggling within “his own hell” and taking pleasure in “kicking at a dead horse,” but he is creating music. He growls the word “struggle” in a deep voice, and Hammett enters the war with the missile assault of his lightning quick guitar solo. Hammett’s improvisational playing for The Black Album is particularly well suited for “The Struggle Within”—a song that is entirely about cathartic, emotional release. The song ends abruptly, and with it, so does The Black Album. After a false ending, the riff reenters the room, only to leave quickly again, creating silence. The album ends not with a resolution, but an emphasis on struggle. The fight for freedom, against enemies foreign and internal, and the struggle for peace, against external antagonists and spiritual erosion, is everlasting. There is hope in that silence, however. It is not the empty stillness of a tomb. Just as those with the courage to face their own demons and the world’s disasters, continue the struggle with hope, the silence at the end of The Black Album, following all the aggression, the screams, and the soul groove intensity of reckless rock, is a pregnant pause. It is full of promise that Metallica, like the struggle they sing about, will go on. •

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“We wanted to get as far the fuck away as possible from all of that,” Lars Ulrich said when juxtaposing the simplicity of Metallica’s self-titled record’s name and cover image with the cartoonish horror of swamps and skeletons on most heavy metal albums, including those of two other Big Four bands, Slayer and Megadeth. Because Metallica’s cover is almost entirely black—only a light Gadsden snake is visible, along with shaded letters spelling “Metallica”—it quickly earned the nickname, The Black Album. In an equally short amount of time, The Black Album became immensely popular, with Spin praising Metallica for their “newfound versatility” and Rolling Stone claiming that many of its songs are “instant hard rock classics.” It emerged as not just a musical masterpiece, but a “cultural album,” in the words of Bob Rock. It is an album that not only excites fans, impresses critics, and advances its genre, but influences and impacts all of music culture. An album of great significance to Metallica, and an obvious •

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influence on the packaging of The Black Album, AC/ DC’s Back in Black is a cultural album. Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut, possibly the birth of heavy metal, is a cultural album. Led Zeppelin IV is a cultural album, and an album that, in many ways, is inseparable from The Black Album; Nevermind by Nirvana, is a cultural album. Cultural albums transcend their genre, and allow their creators to enter a rare pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll immortality and invincibility. They often lead to the improvement or broadening of a musical movement. The Marvin Gaye album, What’s Going On, demonstrated that smooth and sultry R&B could enter the political arena with songs of brilliant and righteous protest. The Velvet Underground and Nico, the earliest and, perhaps, best indicator of Lou Reed’s genius, proved that rock ‘n’ roll could remain shocking, but also become literary. The Black Album brought Metallica into the mainstream, but it also brought the mainstream to Metallica. Despite the complaints of hardcore metal purists, it seems that Metallica, at least in the few years subsequent to The Black Album’s release, had more influence on the mainstream than the other way around. The purists who were quick to issue indictments with the “sell out” charge were probably reacting more to the people buying the record than the record itself. “When you’ve got doctors and dentists buying The Black Album by Metallica, you know that, culturally, something is going on,” Bob Rock said. You also know that the people who don’t want to sit next to doctors and dentists at the concert venue are going to get pissed. Any subculture born out of rebellion and resistance to the mainstream does not welcome an invasion of •

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carpetbaggers who will seek to benefit from the rewards of that subculture without understanding it. James Hetfield called heavy metal the “tightest box,” claiming that if a heavy metal performer sings a little differently, writes a love song, or even cuts his hair and takes off his leather jacket, the congregants are ready to excommunicate him from the church. It is undeniable that with The Black Album, Metallica simplified their sound, and in the words of Jason Newsted, added “a little rock ‘n’ roll, a little swagger” to the music. The tempos were no longer lightning speed, tailored for thrash audiences. Many of the songs still had a thrash template, but the influence of Aerosmith and AC/DC became audible. Metallica always spoke, sometimes while planting their tongues firmly in their cheeks, about “world domination.” The high-octane tempo of Kill ’Em All and Ride The Lightning, and the metal progressivism of …And Justice For All, had a ceiling of worldwide appeal. The accessibility factor of separation between Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin would function as a barrier between Metallica and international superstardom if they did not make slight alterations to their sound. The question then becomes: did Metallica actively aim to enter the mainstream with The Black Album, or, was rock ‘n’ roll meets heavy metal, hard rock hybrid, a natural stage in Metallica’s evolution? Lars Ulrich has said that Metallica never makes music or plans projects to “please the fans.” They have creative control and artistic autonomy, and they use it to pursue passions of an internal source and an interior home. Given that James Hetfield grew up with a poster of Aerosmith on his bedroom wall; that Ulrich’s favorite •

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album is Made in Japan by Deep Purple; and that Kirk Hammett idolizes Jimi Hendrix, it isn’t insane to imagine that Metallica made music they liked, and felt compelled to make, when they slowed down the tempo a little, and allowed some rock ‘n’ roll ingredients to fall into their heavy metal tonic. It is also entirely reasonable to argue, as Bob Rock does, who admittedly has an obvious personal bias, that The Black Album is Metallica’s best single collection of songs. With The Black Album, due to his personal growth, the influence of punk rock and even John Lennon, Hetfield wrote some of his best lyrics—better lyrics than any of Metallica’s previous work. Hetfield also, by his own admission, transformed from a screamer to a singer. Without losing any of his brutal edge, he learned how to add melody, nuance, and soul to his vocalization, enhancing the emotional power and texture of Metallica’s music. Kirk Hammett’s guitar solos became more intense and emotive when he adopted an improvisational style, and Ulrich’s drumming dramatically improved with simplification. Newsted’s bass became audible in the mix, and he fully formed the propulsive instrument backing the crushing force of the Metallica machine. As a unit, the band cultivated and maintained the “soul groove” of Hammett’s instinctive musical criteria, but it was still aggressive. When music is loud, and it’s heavy, and it has the soul groove, it is a rare gift of life affirming intensity and energy. The “sell out” accusation is the rattle of an empty can, because it judges music according to an unmusical standard. Heavy metal fans claim to have an unshakable loyalty to their favorite bands, but when Metallica put •

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out Load, the follow-up to The Black Album, many of them were ready to abandon the band, all because they cut their hair, Hammett put on eyeliner, and they further embraced the blues, Southern rock, and rock ‘n’ roll as part of their musical identity. Bands change, but it doesn’t always mean that they are “selling out” or “betraying their roots.” Metallica already made Ride The Lightning. It is a triumph of heavy metal, and in the opinion of Jason Newsted, their best album. It is on the shelf ready for play whenever anyone desires. Why should they make it a second time, or a third? The sound of The Black Album, or Load for that matter, isn’t entirely foreign from the music of Metallica’s early records. “Seek and Destroy” and “For Whom The Bell Tolls” were artifacts of inspiration from Metallica’s museum of metal when making their self-titled album. Rather than representing a departure from “traditional” Metallica, if such a category exists, The Black Album illustrates the interaction between the two Metallicas. One of the peak moments of Metallica as challenger was when the band collaborated with Lou Reed. They provided heavy metal power to the poetry of Lou Reed’s existential angst and rock ‘n’ roll literature. The result of the courtship, which began with a joint performance at a Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame concert, and the consummation is the conception of the child, Lulu. Lulu is a concept album Reed named after its main character—a small town girl who enters a sexual underworld, and quickly turns violent and vengeful. Poor sales and harsh reviews, such as Chuck Klosterman’s condemnation for Grantland and The Quietus’ statement that the album is not “fit for human consumption,” would deceive the •

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otherwise curious listener. Lulu is a daring, brave, unique, and oddly moving musical hybrid of heavy metal, rock ‘n’ roll, drama, and poetry. Its unfriendly reception—ranging from detached mockery to angry ridicule—has little to do with its music. That much is clear from the fact that the derision began before the album’s release. Heavy metal fans were so resistant to a collaboration with Lou Reed, and Reed fans were so irritated by a collaboration with Metallica that they collectively decided to hate the album before they heard it. Lou Reed was so inundated with angry letters over the mere announcement of the collaboration that he joked, “Metallica fans haven’t even heard the record yet, and they’re recommending various forms of torture and death.” Sincere in their eventual distaste for the actual record or not, many of those fans were not about to admit that they were childish and prejudiced after the songs emerged as challenging and compelling works of art. “That was just people being sheep on the internet,” Kirk Hammett said, with audible disgust, when I raised the subject of Lulu. Hetfield was equally dismissive of those who insist that Metallica can only make one form of music, in one way, for the rest of their lives—that they have to cease their creativity once it moves them to venture beyond the borders of traditional heavy metal: “It’s fearful. There are fearful people who are probably typing from their mom’s basement that they still live in. They’re afraid to move on or to experience life. They need that safety, and if something that they have embraced in their life that’s speaking for them changes, they don’t know what to do. But how do you know you’re not supposed to go somewhere until you go there?” •

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With Lulu—a bold and underrated album deserving of unbiased reevaluation—Metallica attempted to take their fans somewhere new. With The Black Album, they brought much of the world to hard and heavy music. “We were the spearhead for this music for our generation,” Jason Newsted said. “Certainly, the teachers of us—Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Motörhead, Deep Purple—who we regurgitated to make our style, were the spearheads of their style. We became the spearhead of our style. We took on an ambassadorship, because of the timing of everything in our country and on our planet—the way the wars were happening, the politics were happening, how many twelve- to eighteen-year-old-white males there were on the globe at that time. All of those things enabled us to go around and take this music to places it had never been before. The Black Album was the album that laid down the pavement—laid down the platinum pavement—for us to go to countries that never heard heavy music before. We were the first ones to do it, with The Black Album. That’s something that can never be overstated. Any heavy band that’s playing around the world now for the third time is doing it because Metallica went there twenty years ago.” Internationally and domestically, Metallica and The Black Album came to represent heavy metal. In America, the doctors and dentists of Bob Rock’s recollection, who would have never otherwise bought a heavy metal record, bought The Black Album, just as people who hate country music might own a few Johnny Cash albums, or people who dislike jazz, might like Miles Davis. Overseas, Metallica rose to the challenge of their •

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ambassadorship, selling out stadiums right alongside U2 and Bruce Springsteen. The “Wherever We May Roam” tour that Metallica launched in support of The Black Album becomes more comprehensible and meaningful when considering Newsted’s appointment of the band as ambassadors for heavy music. In its third year, the band rechristened it the “Nowhere Else to Roam” tour after selling out seventyseven stadiums and arenas throughout North America, Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, and Israel. It was a moment when there was no bigger rock band in the world. Metallica gave their massive audiences, made of longtime fans who remembered them in the California club days and newcomers just learning the band’s back catalogue, a mix of the new Black Album material; a tour of their 1980s classics including the soul groove songs inspirational to the creation of The Black Album, “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” and “Seek and Destroy”; and covers of Diamond Head, The Misfits, and Queen. Sold-out crowds, by all accounts, were enraptured by the band’s energy and intensity. “One of the greatest things that ever happened to our band,” Lars Ulrich said, “was that our success happened gradually. It was the European model. We had ten years of build-up. Every album was just a little bigger than the previous one. By the time The Black Album came, it was just a continuation of what was already going on. Shit was just rocking, and we were ready to go to the next level.” Ulrich claims that The Black Album was the “right record at the right time” for their graduation to global superstar status, but he connects it with what was happening, overall and culturally, in the “rock ‘n’ •

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roll climate.” “It was an alignment of the planets for this record to have the impact it had,” he concludes. “I loved it,” Hammett said when talking about Metallica’s conquest of the world subsequent to the release of The Black Album, “It meant that we could keep playing and playing. We penetrated more of American radio, more of American music, but we also went to places in the world that we had never played before.” The culmination of the “Wherever We May Roam” tour happened when Metallica took on their most daring mission as metal ambassadors, and played the Tushino Airfield in Moscow, Russia for 1.5 million people. Sharing the bill with AC/DC and Pantera, Metallica brought their message, representation, and aggressive personification of freedom to the Soviet Union, giving millions of young people a moment to observe, enjoy, and internalize the liberty, autonomy, and individuality their government had so long denied them. Metallica’s sonic destruction of conformity and melodic tribute to rebellion had to resonate with the audience of adolescents and young adults who, in violation of their country’s leadership, likely lusted after the electric jolt of freedom and creativity that comes from plugging a guitar into a dusty amplifier in the corner of a garage, shouting out lyrics of joy and pain, and living according to the code James Hetfield often has his audiences repeat as a mantra and motto: “I don’t give a shit.” While Metallica traversed the world, planting their flag in city after city, stadium after stadium, their intoxicating performances of “Enter Sandman,” “Sad But True,” “Nothing Else Matters,” and other songs from the rapidly selling Black Album not only empowered them  100 •

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as heavy metal ambassadors and kings, but also enabled American radio, television, and audiences to open their minds and ears to the seductive sound of hard and heavy music. No one had created a space in the late 1980s or early 1990s for hard rock or heavy metal in the mainstream. The Black Album, just as it tore down geographic walls, cut across cultural fences, created the opening for Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and other “grunge” bands. By inculcating an appetite for harder music in the general public, Metallica made the enraged fury and aggressive assault of Nirvana palatable. It showed record company executives, radio station managers, and MTV programmers that there was a demand for music outside the narrow pop and predictable rock formats. There was a demand for music with anger, music with raw power, and music fitting Jason Newsted’s description, “beautifully ugly.” Kirk Hammett could not help but notice the sequential timing of The Black Album’s success and the emergence of grunge. “It broke down doors for other bands,” he said. “Rock radio embracing our sound—our heaviness— helped the whole grunge thing take hold. Not long after The Black Album came out, Nirvana put out Nevermind. I like to think that we had something to do with the acceptance of Nirvana.” Grunge bands were already playing and building audiences before The Black Album, but as Hammett points out, “They couldn’t get above ground before The Black Album.” The sole exception is Pearl Jam, who released Ten before Metallica’s international ambass­ adorship, but their sound is much friendlier and much  101 •

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lighter than the controlled chaos and intense scream of Nirvana, or the brooding, heavy doom of Alice In Chains. “Somehow the edge, the dirt, the danger, the distortion of it,” Newsted said, referring to Metallica’s heaviness opening the door for Nirvana, “was accepted on the radio and by more people as Metallica, and then Nirvana, unleashed their big shit on the world.” The Black Album shined a searchlight on a new market. “Radio had to come over to it if they wanted anyone to listen to them,” Jason Newsted said. “We helped each other (Metallica and Nirvana) bring it to a level of acceptability to the masses.” Jerry Cantrell, lead guitarist of Alice In Chains, offered the same insight when he said that Metallica “took the underground thing worldwide.” “Metallica changed music,” Cantrell explained. “They are a huge thing for me, and for any hard rock band.” It is not difficult to imagine Nirvana without The Black Album, but it is nearly impossible to imagine the success and influence of Nirvana without the success and influence of Metallica. Bob Rock recalls sitting in the back of van driving through Los Angeles and seeing a sign advertising a Nirvana show at the famous club, The Roxy. Hammett and Hetfield began to discuss how Nirvana should open for them on the “Wherever We May Roam” tour. The idea never turned to action, and shortly after Nevermind hit record stores and radio, Nirvana had become too popular to open for any other band. The two “spearheads,” to use Newsted’s term, of their generation playing on the same tour would have made metal and music history. Even if it never happened, the mere idea demonstrates the connection the two bands share. Metallica emancipated other bands that  102 •

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had something unfit for convention. Nirvana was one of those bands, and they busted down some doors for bands that followed their footsteps. A minority of detractors heard and observed Metallica’s inclusion of hard rock influences into their heavy metal music, and their rise to superstardom, and reacted with vitriol. The “sell out” charge hung in the air, and many metal purists objected to the changes Metallica were making. They were betraying their origins, according to the dubious refrain. In a recent interview, Lars Ulrich incensed some followers of Metallica by saying, “The minute we have a conversation about ‘what does the fan want?’ we stop ourselves, because it’s a lost cause. We turn the conversation inward: ‘What are we comfortable with? Is this something we feel we can get behind?’ It’s not about selling out, but whether it’s selling our souls.” Metallica was proud of the choices they made leading up to The Black Album, and they were proud of The Black Album. The scrutiny of their metal purity, which began when they used acoustic guitars on “Fade to Black,” did not bother them. It did not even slow them down. “By The Black Album there were people who were critical of what we were doing,” Ulrich said. “It started with Ride The Lightning, and there were many people who were bewildered by the ‘Justice’ record. It’s interesting that that record wasn’t as universally beloved then as it is now. So, by 1991, we were more than aware that everyone had a fucking opinion about Metallica. We knew people would have a reaction to The Black Album, and some of it wouldn’t be good, but I don’t think we ever slowed down enough to take it seriously. We were moving so fast, and had already built up a thick skin. We  103 •

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thought it was more humorous than anything. In the tour book, we compiled all the worst sound bites and review quotes we could find, bashing the record, and we printed them in the tour book.” If Lars laughed off the criticism of The Black Album, and the narrow thinking that produced it, James Hetfield sees it as symptomatic of larger problems within heavy metal, and even American culture: “We claim artist amnesty on anything we want to do. With every musical genre, there is a box, and I do think that the heavy metal box is the tightest. You’re not supposed to play a ballad. You’re not supposed to play Glastonbury. You’re not supposed to play Woodstock. I hear that and I think, ‘If you guys preach diversity, why aren’t you more accepting?’ It can start in your backyard, but it goes big picture really quick. There’s not enough freedom to allow change and growth. There are purists in every sector of life who believe you have to stick to something specific or you aren’t being true. Well, what is true metal? Is Manowar true metal? Is wearing a loincloth on stage true metal? Who is to define it? We’re not, and neither is some other band. We’re all just a part of it. So, we’re not allowed to expand, age, or mature. There is something wrong, innately, with the box. It doesn’t protect. It confines.” The Black Album sold 650,000 copies the week of its release and was certified platinum in two weeks. At this point, it is the highest selling record since 1991. Current counts put the total figure of copies sold at over thirty million. Kirk Hammett explained that it is hard to worry about those who are against you when “you believe in what you’re doing and you have millions of  104 •

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people on your side,” while Newsted said that not one person ever had anything valuable to say after he issued the challenge, “Come to the live show. … You’ll see that, in terms of the weight of it, this is the heaviest thing Metallica has ever done. I mean, ‘Sad But True’, holy shit,” he continued, “Come to the live show and listen to us play ‘Sad But True’, ‘Fight Fire with Fire’, and ‘Whiplash’, back to back to back, and then come and talk to me about betraying heavy metal.” “We didn’t have anything to prove to anyone at that point,” Newsted offered. There were those who were angry that Metallica broke out of the confinement of the heavy metal box, and they got angrier with the release of Load and Reload, in 1996, and 1997, respectively. Originally conceived as a double album, Metallica released the two discs, separately, when Hetfield needed more time to write the lyrics for the songs on Reload, including concert staples, “Fuel” and “The Memory Remains,” and the continuation of themes and ideas of “The Unforgiven,” a sequel song titled, simply, “The Unforgiven II.” Eventually, Hetfield would make it a trilogy. On 2008’s Death Magnetic, Metallica included “The Unforgiven III.” Load is an especially strong album of hard rock that maintains the metal intensity of Metallica, but further explores the influence of Aerosmith, AC/DC, and the other bands that helped inspire The Black Album. The drums and bass propel the music, staying rhythmic and steady, making the riffs of Hetfield, and the solos of Hammett, even more important. The guitars interplay with a mesmerizing and exciting tension, while Hetfield’s vocals become even more melodic, nuanced, and powerful. While The Black Album created space for the  105 •

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emergence of grunge, Bob Rock argues that The Black Album, Load, and Reload also kept alive, at least commercially, more traditional hard rock. The producer refers to Staind, which made its debut with Tormented in 1996 and Zakk Wylde’s Black Label Society, which debuted in 1998 with Sonic Brew, and similar bands, as “secondary Black Album stuff.” David Grohl, the former drummer of Nirvana and the current rhythm guitarist and lead singer of The Foo Fighters, engineers the connection between the influence of Metallica on grunge and their influence on traditional hard rock. “Metallica has always been a huge influence,” Grohl recently explained before giving the defiant promise, “You will have to pry their CDs out of my cold, dead hands.” If Lars Ulrich is right in his assessment that the genius and success of The Black Album required an alignment of the planets, then two of those planets would leave the orbit of the Metallica solar system not long after Reload. Jason Newsted, citing personal reasons and professional disputes, quit Metallica in 2001. He played with Ozzy Osbourne’s band, released solo projects under the band names Echobrain, Newsted, and Papa Wheelie. He has collaborated with a wide range of bands including Sepultura and Gov’t Mule, and he has become a painter, showing his abstract art in a variety of galleries in California. He is also on the board of directors for Little Kids Rock, a non-profit organization that provides free musical instruments and instructions for underfunded schools in poor neighborhoods throughout the United States. Metallica replaced Newsted with bassist Robert Trujillo in 2003.  106 •

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Although members of Metallica have stated that they treated Newsted unfairly—never quite warming up to him, because he replaced Cliff Burton after Burton’s tragic death—Newsted speaks positively about his days with Metallica: “I’ll always fly the flag of Metallica. People always try to get me to say bad things about my brothers, and that’s never going to happen. I’m never going to create negative energy about the people who gave me the opportunity and space to realize my dream.” When Newsted left Metallica, the band was preparing to record their 2003 record, St. Anger. Bob Rock, who was still producing Metallica, filled in for him, playing all the bass parts. He and Metallica would end their relationship shortly after the release of the record. Rock said that the dissolution was mutual. Metallica felt that working with him was beginning to feel like routine, and he said he was growing tired of “living and breathing Metallica.” One of the problems Rock identifies is that he became “more of a friend than a producer.” The personal relationship caused his “perspective to be lost.” He was no longer able to challenge them like he did when he first met them and started working on The Black Album. The tension that helped energize the creativity of Metallica was gone as Rock became too close. The Black Album was a “magical moment in time,” Rock said, and everyone began to recognize that they had tapped the source of that magic until it was dry. Like Newsted, however, Rock has nothing but praise for his former collaborators and current friends. The Black Album is an apotheosis of the rock ‘n’ roll energy that runs through heavy metal and hard music.  107 •

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The intensity, aggression, and raunchiness of Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, The Rolling Stones, The Misfits, Motörhead, Aerosmith, and AC/DC all meet on The Black Album, but Metallica are certainly not imitators. They are not merely innovators. They are inventors. They have invented a new form of heavy metal and hard rock, and The Black Album is one stage of that invention: the “soul groove” stage. It just so happens that that stage is what led Metallica to finally complete their quest for “world domination”—a pledge that started as a joke among the band and eventually became a reality. Metallica became the only band to play all the planet’s seven continents after performing in Antarctica in 2013. When an interviewer asked him, “What’s the next frontier?” Ulrich said, “There aren’t any left, at least on this planet. We’d have to do space.” An intergalactic tour seems far-fetched, but Metallica is full of surprises.

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7

The Fangs of Rage

Near the end of his life, the late Gore Vidal—one of America’s greatest writers and citizens—was asked what he would consider his most impressive achievement. “That I’ve made it through my entire life without killing anyone,” he said with a sardonic smile. Vidal was a man of unequalled erudition and eloquence, but also outrage. He was an illustration of the reality that it is impossible for anyone with intelligence and compassion who is paying the slightest amount of attention, to not regularly feel a murderous drive of anger. Experiencing, witnessing, or even learning about injustice—the sheer measure of cruelty and stupidity in the world—gives anyone sane the impulse and urge to look back at the world and flash, in the words of Hetfield, “fangs of rage.” Metallica’s music, and The Black Album, is not only a celebration of freedom and aggressive rebellion against forces of conformity, but also a celebration of anger. Hetfield explains that he felt inspired to pick up a guitar and play it as loudly as possible, because he “wanted to be  109 •

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heard,” and as a teenager felt that no one was listening. The natural reaction to indifference is often anger. Anger is a natural and necessary response to the conditions of the world, and the harmful pressures and unjust limitations society often imposes on the individual. …And Justice For All took rage against the bloody and boneheaded foreign policy of American Empire, and the cruelty and criminality of the criminal justice system, and fashioned a high-octane, garage-metal statement of protest. Most of Metallica’s rage, as channeled through the fury of their music and communicated through the lyricism of James Hetfield, bites against the personal and social shortcomings of a culture insistent on preaching freedom, diversity, and creativity, but intent on demolishing opportunities to put those principles into practice. No matter the popularity of Metallica, they began as outsiders, related to the misfits of America—both Glenn Danzig’s punk horror show and the social category in every street—and made music to not only document, but celebrate their deliberately marginal status. It is the wildness, the intensity, and the fire storming from the margins that makes a cultural or political movement exciting. Rarely does anything interesting begin in the mainstream. From the Civil Rights Movement to Heavy Metal, the improvement and elevation of the mainstream requires the intensity and energy of the margins. Kirk Hammett’s indictment of American culture as one that verbally promotes individuality and independent thinking, but actively “bats it down” is the condemnation of ethical inconsistency and hypocrisy. The philosopher and novelist, Albert Camus, gave what is, perhaps, the best definition of rebellion, claiming that it is the “violent  110 •

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denunciation of hypocrisy.” Camus was an anti-war and anti-colonial thinker and writer who, in the words of one of his most important essays, believed in living as “neither a victim nor an executioner.” It was not assault and battery that Camus advocated, but a combative spirituality of internal violence against the machinations and mechanisms of oppression and manipulation. One of the most effective weapons of warfare, in the sociopolitical battle for the soul, is art. The fight between propaganda and art, clashing with all the hostility and horror of two heavyweight boxers bashing each other’s skulls, captures the fight between all that is good and all that is bad: truth versus lies, freedom versus bondage, peace versus murder, and life against death. “Every act of creation, by its mere existence, denies the world of master and slave,” Camus writes in The Rebel. Rebellion is a prerequisite to civilization, Camus explains, and in order for rebellion to succeed, the “authentic artist” must find “time for passion and creation.” Propaganda comes not from passion, but from political manipulation. It is not the result of creativity, but the product of command. Art is at once, the expression, the embodiment, and the engine of human potential and freedom. The world is full of madness, and if the civil rights anthems of folk and soul music, are the artistic equivalent of the democratic processes of the protest march, the righteous campaign, and the moral uplift of the movement, then Metallica’s music is the artistic equivalent of the riot. There is a reason that their songs worked so well with the imagery of social disorder and riot in the movie, Through The Never. As Camus would understand, Metallica’s music represents the “violent denunciation of  111 •

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hypocrisy,” and while that violence might often manifest itself in metaphorical measurements, it always has the potential to breakout into the physical and immediate reality of the every day. Riots played an integral part in the democratization of America. When the peaceful process fails, the only way to convince the oppressor to end oppression, is often with the threat of the gun. Martin Luther King once remarked that he was the mediator—the broker—standing between white America and the Black Panthers, and other militant organizations. Rage plays a healthy role in the development of history, and it plays a vital role in the life of the conscious individual. The Black Album, with its emphasis on freedom and its heavy swagger of rock ‘n’ roll metal, sounds like what a soul bursting from a cage, longing for liberty, would sound like if it could speak. In “Wherever I May Roam,” James Hetfield’s rough and snarling vocal has the passionate anger of a man taking advantage of his ability and opportunity to speak his mind anywhere. Hetfield’s turn from the tender to the primal, and his own guitar solo that follows the transformation, in “Nothing Else Matters” sounds like the heart breaking out of bondage, resisting the pressure to conform, and moving toward the cradle of love—always fragile, but never frail. Kirk Hammett’s ferocious guitar solo, cutting through the center of “The Unforgiven,” is the soundtrack to anyone trying to break out of the cell confining individual identity to what wardens deem socially permissible and acceptable. “Metallica is about individuality and refusing to be dictated to,” Kirk Hammett said. “Heavy metal is the format we’ve taken on to express ourselves.” Heavy  112 •

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metal fans, Jason Newsted points out, “are the only ones in the universe who will stand neck deep in the mud, waiting all day, to see their favorite band play for an hour. There’s not going to be a country fan, pop fan, Tom Petty, opera—ain’t nobody else going to do that for their music.” Heavy metal fans are often as loyal as they are unforgiving. Hammett points out that Metallica will always resist any attempt on the part of fans or critics to tell them what to play or what not play, but he understands that the dictation comes from people who feel heavy metal “saved them,” just like Hetfield, Hammett, Ulrich, and Newsted felt saved by their heavy metal and hard rock heroes. James Hetfield has even used words like “salvation,” “therapy,” and “rescue” to describe the redemptive role music plays in his life. A book on the lead singer by Mark Eglinton has the subtitle, “The Wolf at Metallica’s Door.” Newsted called him the creative leader of the band, and he is undoubtedly the front man, but, when it comes to the expression of anger, it is Hetfield who writes the lyrics that scratch and claw at the contradictions, cruelties, and indignities of the political process, religious bullying, and the cultural conformity of everyday life. It is Hetfield’s voice that growls and snarls in the face of the forces responsible for hypocrisy, repression, and the pressure to conform. Rage was one of his principal motivations for becoming an artist, and engineering an identity based on his creativity. It also provided emotional encouragement for self-medication. Hetfield has openly discussed his problems with alcoholism. He has gone through rehab,  113 •

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as depicted in the documentary Some Kind of Monster, and has embraced the “rescue” of music and family instead of the trap of addiction. Maturity, accomplishment, and sobriety have mellowed him, but “anger will always be there,” he claims. “It seems like it is a natural evolution for everyone to become less angry as they get older,” Hetfield said. “To me it is strange when I’m driving around home and I see an eighty year old woman flipping me off. It’s weird. Why is that happening? There is a grace and honor in becoming older and calmer. I’ll never get rid of my anger entirely forever, but my music no longer has to be based on anger. We hope our fans will grow with us, but we aren’t going to lie to ourselves and the rest of the world, that we are still seventeen and just as angry. That’s ridiculous.” Hetfield certainly isn’t the teenager believing that if he plays his music at maximum volume, someone, for lack of other options, will finally listen to him. His insight, however, into the attraction of heavy metal to the teenage rebel, misfit, and outcast still applies to him, as much as it applies to everyone. The desire for access to an audience—the need “to be heard”—under conditions that mute your voice or ignore your words, results in the very tension that defines democracy. The black citizen wants to be heard over a white system that often relegates his story to the sideline. The poor family wants to be heard in a system that honors the rich with political favor and social advantage. The dissenting minority wants to be heard when filing a grievance against a policy the majority consider sacrosanct. So, what do they do? They protest, they advocate, they litigate, they rally, they riot. They make some noise, and they try to make  114 •

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it at sufficient volume, and with sufficient clarity, to demand and garner attention. The promise of democracy is that the oppressed will develop a way, and find a forum, to be heard. It is simple, and there is a simplicity to Hetfield’s statement about the teenager’s need to be heard, but on another level, there is nothing more powerful or profound than an unpopular and unwanted voice lifting itself out of silence, and creating a new song out of pain, heartbreak, and oppression. That is the music of democracy. Music, at its best, demonstrates the Camusian connection between art and revolution. Metallica is not a political band, but their insistence on making beautifully ugly music out of the noise of aggression and anger offers an illustration of the power of individuality, liberty, and creativity. The anthems of The Black Album celebrate and honor that unending and unbending source of power. Given its influences, its innovations, and its inventions, it is not only one of the greatest hard rock records of all time. It is a tribute to the power of heavy music, a reinforcement of the democratic energy in the declaration, “I’m free to speak my mind anywhere,” and a full blast amplification of Jason Newsted’s philosophical decree, “Heavy equals happy.” “Loud equals free,” Newsted said. “It represents rebellion, and not being afraid to scream and make yourself heard. You have to do it loud to do it right. Heavy equals happy. The heavier it is, the happier we are.” Many heavy metal and hard rock bands achieve it, but it is safe to say that none do so with the majesty and might of Metallica. They perform the alchemy of art  115 •

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by making music that allows for the transformation of anger into joy. The Black Album has sold tens of millions of copies, stands as a spearhead of its genre, and transgresses all boundaries in its popularity and influence, but it will also always remain an artifact of the artistry of liberty—the loud noise and heavy music of rebellion. The Rolling Stones famously sang, “I know it’s only rock ‘n’ roll but I like it.” Great music needs no justification for its existence, and Metallica makes great music—music that I, like millions of people, am proud to say I like, but they also join the long line of true artists and agents for democracy by raising their voices for freedom, now and forever: Carved upon my stone. My body lie. But still I roam.

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Also available in the series 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans Harvest by Sam Inglis The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli Electric Ladyland by John Perry Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard Let It Be by Steve Matteo Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk Aqualung by Allan Moore OK Computer by Dai Griffiths Let It Be by Colin Meloy Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis Exile on Main Sreet by Bill Janovitz Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli Ramones by Nicholas Rombes Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno Murmur by J. Niimi Grace by Daphne Brooks Endtroducing … by Eliot Wilder Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese Low by Hugo Wilcken

27. Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy 31. Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard 42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz

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49. Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris 58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. XO by Matthew LeMay 64. Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. One Step Beyond … by Terry Edwards 67. Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. 69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol 70. Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Kid A by Marvin Lin 76. Spiderland by Scott Tennent 77. Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr

79. Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Dummy by R. J. Wheaton 86. Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer 89. I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Entertainment! by Kevin J. H. Dettmar 92. Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. ( ) by Ethan Hayden 100. Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker

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