Enter Night, page 36
Seemingly oblivious to all this, Lars felt welcomed inside the Megadeth dressing room and settled down to ‘chew the shit’ with his old buddy Dave. Mustaine, in a surprisingly good mood for a junkie allegedly out of gear, even invited Lars up onstage to join them on the encore, which he duly did, singing along on backing vocals to ‘Anarchy in the UK’. The crowd, grasping the significance of what was happening, dutifully cheered and played its part. Then the band and Lars staggered off back to the dressing room area, the Metallica drummer who had plotted his downfall with his arm around Dave Mustaine’s neck. I was also there that day and recall registering only mild surprise at this unexpected turn of events. Lars liked to hang out, everyone knew that. And maybe big bad Dave had finally forgiven him. Maybe…
I was more perturbed when, wandering around the backstage area an hour or so later, I spotted what I imagined to be some drunken reveller face down in the dirt, barely moving. Concerned at his lifeless state, I went over to see if perhaps he was in need of some help, only to find, when I managed to turn him over, that it was Lars. He got to his feet very unsteadily, grinning, though, as only the seriously stoned do when they’re feeling pleased with themselves. ‘Hey, Mick,’ he slurred, flinging his arms around my neck, ‘how ya doing?’ He started giggling. Wow, I thought, he must be really drunk. Then he pulled back and I noticed his eyes. They were utterly pinpricked, his face a mask of sweat.
‘What have you done?’ I asked, concerned.
‘Been hanging out,’ he giggled.
‘Are you okay? Do you need help? Can you even stand?’
‘I’m fine,’ he drooled. He walked off, swaying as he went.
Fortunately, Lars’ excesses were not confined specifically to drugs and alcohol. Still the same teenage nerd at heart that had misspent his youth collecting tapes and bootlegs when he should have been practising on the tennis court, Brian Tatler – delighted that Metallica had, yet again, decided to release a recording of an old Diamond Head song, ‘The Prince’, on the B-side of their forthcoming ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ single – recalls travelling down to London to hang out with Lars at his hotel, going to Shades to buy Metallica bootlegs (Lars already had over forty in his hotel room that he’d collected on tour). When Lars suggested they return to the Midlands together for Sunday lunch with Debbie’s parents, Brian assumed he meant they take the train. ‘Fuck that,’ said Lars, and simply hailed a taxi. The bill, which Lars paid in cash: £180. Plus sizeable tip. ‘He’s always been incredibly generous like that,’ says Tatler. That was the first time, though, he felt, that Lars had demonstrated any sign of rock star excess.
The fourth Metallica album…, And Justice for All, was finally released on 5 September, just as Master of Puppets was officially certified platinum. Master had taken eighteen months to sell its first million copies in America; Justice would take just nine weeks, peaking at Number Six, their highest US chart position yet. Reviews were uniformly positive, with Kerrang! summing up the general view when it concluded that the album ‘will finally put Metallica into the big leagues where they belong’. At record company level, however, behind closed doors there were serious concerns. Although the album would eventually match its American sales in Britain and Europe, it would take much longer to do so. Dave Thorne at Phonogram, who considered the production ‘appalling…particularly the lack of bass on it’, spent the first few weeks of its release defending it to ‘large numbers of opinionated people in the record company [who] were coming knocking on my door going, “This record sounds shit, what’s the matter with it?”’
Nevertheless, the album went straight into the UK chart, reaching Number Four, an unqualified commercial success for an act that had never broken the Top Forty with an album before. The British and European legs of the Damaged Justice tour were also a sell-out, beginning in Budapest a week after the album’s release. The tour reached Britain in October, where they sold out three nights at the Hammersmith Odeon. The big surprise of the tour was the band’s new stage show, their first attempt at anything elaborate, featuring a twenty-foot replica of the album sleeve’s blindfolded and bound Statue of Liberty – nicknamed Edna after Iron Maiden’s Eddie – which collapsed melodramatically at the endless climax to ‘…And Justice for All’ each night, its head falling off as if guillotined. This was the era of the heavy metal pantomime as acceptable stage spectacle – led by Maiden’s ubiquitous Eddie figure, now brought to life for the encores each night, and Dio’s even sillier dragon (nicknamed Denzel), which singer Ronnie James Dio would ‘do battle’ with onstage – and in this context Edna’s plummet to disgrace every night was almost dignified by comparison. Nevertheless, it could have its comic, Spinal Tap-esque moments, too, on the nights when the statue simply refused to collapse or just its head would roll off the stage into the audience, or half an arm would fall off, swaying gently before toppling onto the drum riser.
These were minor concerns, however; day-to-day cares easily overcome in the bar of the hotel every night. The band was already thinking ahead. Taking a wrong turn towards a dressing room one night in Newcastle, I found Lars and Mensch huddled together over a cassette player, scrolling back and forth through the seven-minute-plus ‘One’ looking for places where they might be able to edit it down to a length suitable for US radio to play. Seeing immediately that I had intruded on a sensitive moment – certainly for Lars, for whom the concept of editing album-length tracks into radio-friendly singles had always been antithetical to the Metallica philosophy – I accepted Mensch’s suggestion to ‘get the hell out’ and closed the door behind me. In retrospect, though, it was exactly this sort of pragmatism that would soon separate Metallica from the likes of Iron Maiden and Motörhead; groups they had grown up worshipping at the altars of but were now poised to leave far behind – on every level. It was no longer enough for Lars Ulrich to be in ‘the fastest, heaviest’ band in America, he now had his sights set on a much larger glittering prize. Not just best, but biggest.
As Mensch later put it, Metallica were ‘like the Grateful Dead of heavy metal. They can sell so much on their own, as they are. To take it further, it means edit a song for a single, do a video – all the usual stuff. And they realise that’s the only way to expand the audience. It’s not like the Sixties, when something really outside could make a mainstream impact.’ Or as Lars commented: ‘My whole view is that if taking the last guitar solo out could get the song out to more people who would hear, then buy the album, hear a fuller version and get turned on to Metallica music, then fine. “One” is nearly eight minutes long and has twenty-three guitar solos, so we could trim it a bit.’
Released in February 1989, in the middle of their first arena headline tour of America, what would really turn ‘One’ into Metallica’s first really significant singles success, however, was not the radio-edit, although that played an important part; it was their agreeing finally to make a video to go with it. Another former hard-and-fast rule broken, it came with another plausible bit of Lars philosophy to explain it. ‘If it had been crap, we wouldn’t have put it out,’ he said simply. ‘That was the deal. But it worked so well, we thought, sure, why not?’ Filmed in what looks like an underground bomb shelter – actually a disused warehouse in Long Beach – in December 1988, for a first video ‘One’ was a stunningly accomplished piece of work. Built around actual footage from the movie version of Johnny Got His Gun, starring Jason Robards, intercut with stark, strobe-lit shots of the band performing the song, the ‘One’ video would do for Metallica what none of their records or live performances, with or without Cliff, had yet been able to: both enhance their reputation as musical innovators and reposition the band centrally as mainstream rock stars.
It almost didn’t happen, though, after the band was turned down by a succession of top-drawer video directors, before coming to an arrangement with Michael Salomon, best known previously for his work with Dolly Parton and Glen Campbell. The major issue for Salomon was finding the right balance between band performance and film footage. ‘It’s a complicated story and to do it with just one or two sound-bites here and there really wouldn’t have made it,’ he later reflected. In the end, Salomon decided to go with his gut instincts and simply make the best video he could, putting the band’s vanity second, covering almost every solo with film footage, including snatches of dialogue occasionally obscuring the music. ‘The musician side of them said, “That’s not cool, we don’t get to hear the music.” I think they realised, though, that the story element was more important.’ This was an important lesson they would learn well. All their best future videos would relate back to the risks they took with ‘One’, all becoming mini-features in their own right, intercut with all sorts of images, of war, of prisoners, of nightmares, road trips, dreamscapes, white horses…eventually even girls.
Bill Pope shot the black-and-white performance footage at the same Long Beach warehouse where he had previously shot videos for Peter Gabriel and U2. Here, the band did put its foot down, insisting that the video showed them playing exactly the right notes, singing the right words, everything synched as though they were really playing, not just miming. ‘We decided if it was not what we wanted we’d throw it in the garbage can,’ said Lars. However, ‘Pretty early on we felt we had something special in our hands. Whether it was great or shit, it meant something.’
The full, unedited video was nearly eight minutes long. Like the single, however, it was also made available to TV in edited form, minus the film footage, with a fade on the final couple of minutes of music. ‘They never really objected,’ said Salomon. ‘They held off their judgement until they saw the final piece. By that point, three or four weeks later, they had gotten used to the idea.’ Even then it was so at odds with prevailing trends in Eighties rock video, one MTV executive told Cliff Burnstein the only place ‘One’ would be seen was on the news. Undeterred, Q Prime applied its customary behind-the-scenes muscle and the full ‘One’ video was premiered on MTV on the night of 22 January 1989, on that week’s edition of Headbanger’s Ball. It instantly became the most requested video on MTV.
Smelling a hit, both Elektra and Phonogram prepared to issue the single in multiple formats, along with the specially edited versions for radio. By February, ‘One’ had become the first Metallica single to reach the US Top Forty, peaking at Number Thirty-Five; while in the UK it reached Number Thirteen. Dave Thorne, who became ‘very involved’ in the UK and European campaign for both the Justice album and, specifically, ‘One’, immediately grasped its potential for changing the whole perception of Metallica: ‘I did some research and discovered that the book had been banned under the McCarthy era and was still unavailable in the UK or Europe. So I went to the publisher in America and we bought like five hundred copies then distributed them to the media so they could read the story and understand what the song or the video was all about. That had an enormous latent impact in getting people to realise that this was a band that wasn’t just about noise and speed and headbanging. There was a deep, meaningful side to it.’
Under Thorne’s aegis, Phonogram sent out the ‘One’ single with the book and a VHS cassette of the video as a press pack to shrewdly targeted music press people on Sounds, NME, Melody Maker, Q and numerous broadsheet newspaper critics, plus key figures at Radio 1, and all the commercial networks that aired weekly rock shows on their stations. ‘It was a watershed moment. We definitely felt that.’ ‘One’ single-handedly moved Metallica out of the same bracket in people’s perceptions as Iron Maiden or Black Sabbath, and closer to that elevated realm of mainstream rock stars who actually had something to say: ‘Metallica became the band that everybody revered because they just seemed to be able to take things to a level that the other [thrash] bands couldn’t, and also do it in a way that was just so cool and understated really.’
‘One’ also achieved another landmark for Metallica when it attracted the attention of that year’s Grammy academicians, the band becoming shortlisted for the newly created award: ‘Best Hard Rock / Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental’. ‘“One” proved to us that things we thought of as evil aren’t as evil as we thought,’ said Lars, accommodatingly, ‘as long as we do it our way.’ The Grammys show took place at the Shrine Auditorium in LA on 22 February, where the band was invited to perform their much-discussed new song. It was a momentous occasion, the first time an unashamedly ‘heavy metal’ band had actually played live at the Grammys – even though it was the truncated, five-minute version of the song. Shrouded in shadows, colours muted so that they looked almost black and white, it was a stupendous performance from a band that Kirk later admitted was ‘very nervous’ playing for all the suits and ties. ‘We were like diplomats or representatives for this genre of music.’ There was a sense of outrage, however, when the band missed out on the award itself, that honour inexplicably going to Jethro Tull for their Crest of a Knave album – a decision so unexpected that none of Jethro Tull was there to accept it. Metallica put a brave face on it, like the whole thing was beneath them – they even suggested adding a sticker to the Justice album with the words: ‘Grammy Award Losers’. But privately Lars was seething. ‘Let’s face it, they really fucked up,’ he told me. ‘Jethro Tull best heavy metal band? I mean, fucking come on!’
They didn’t have time to stew on it, the US tour resuming just three days later. Along for the ride as support act was another up-and-coming Q Prime act, Queensrÿche, who had just released their own break-out album, Operation: Mindcrime. Although the two bands got on well as people – ‘We drank a lot,’ laughs singer Geoff Tate – musically, Queensrÿche saw themselves as occupying higher intellectual ground than the likes of Metallica, and while they were appreciative of the boost being offered such a high-profile tour would give them, having to win over Metallica’s hardcore crowd each night was an exceptionally difficult proving ground. ‘We were playing to a predominantly male audience,’ says Tate, ‘usually people of lower income, not a lot of education, heavy drinking, you know, heavy drug use…go to the show and get violent and rage against society, kind of thing, you know? My world is not good and so I’m gonna take it out on the guy standing next to me, kind of person…we met with a very violent resistance at first…every night it was like going out to battle. There were bottles flying and projectiles. I still have many scars from that tour. I think everybody in the band does, yeah.’ He laughs again. ‘You’re talking about a bunch of idiots as an audience. I mean, really people that are uneducated. The way they react to anything new, of course, is with fear. That’s a very typical human reaction but again as our forty-five-minute show progressed I think we won over a lot of people.’
There were other concerns, too; two occasions where young Metallica fans had committed suicide; in one instance, leaving a note requesting ‘Fade to Black’ be played at their funeral; in another, leaving a suicide note in which the lyrics to the same song were quoted. ‘It’s not something that brightens your day, but what can you do?’ said Lars, pointing out that they had also received ‘thousands of letters from kids telling us how that song gave them the will to live’. Then, on arriving for a show at the Memorial Coliseum in Corpus Christi, Texas, they awoke to a call from Mensch ‘who said there’s some shit going on – the local TV station is making a big deal because this kid apparently took some acid or other fucked-up drugs and went on a killing rampage, and the one thing that stuck in this witness’s mind when he shot someone at point-blank range was that he was quoting one of our lyrics – “No Remorse”.’ Lars shook his head, disbelievingly. ‘He got sentenced to death and there was this big yahoo when he stood up in the courtroom and quoted the lyrics again. But believe me,’ he added nonchalantly, ‘it’s not something I have a day-to-day interest in.’
Having a ‘day-to-day interest’ in anything outside of the tour’s own dizzying momentum was becoming impossible. After this leg of the US tour ended in April, it was off to New Zealand and Australia for the first time: the start of the biggest and most exhausting leg of the entire Damaged Justice tour, six months that would take them to Japan, then on to Hawaii, Brazil, Argentina, and back for another swing through North America. Support on most of these shows came from The Cult, another band with a substantial back catalogue now on the cusp of multi-platinum success, thanks to the elevated production work on their latest album, Sonic Temple, by producer of the moment, Bob Rock – a fact not lost on Lars Ulrich, in his never-ending quest to keep up with the rock Joneses.
I caught up with the band again during their May 1989 five-date tour of Japan, where I saw them play two shows at the Yoyogi Olympic Pool arena in Tokyo. They had been on the road for the best part of a year by that point but apart from James’ stomach problems, which he appeared to be trying to alleviate by downing as much Sapporo beer and hot flasks of sake as he could, they seemed to be holding up well and in generally good humour. Money had come in and they no longer lived together as one, but they still went out together as a gang – when they were on the road, at least. All except for Jason, whose time in the shadows seemed not quite to be over yet, although the hazing had spread out more, aimed as often now at Lars or Kirk, but never at James – or not to his face, anyway.
Late at night they went to the Lexington Queen, a well-known hang-out for rock bands since the days of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, where it was said you could get a free drink just by mentioning guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s name. Strangely, the place seemed to be home also to several dozen beautiful young American models, dancing around in negligees, flown in apparently for regular work in Japanese TV ads and glossy magazines. There were also hundreds of young female Japanese fans who followed the band wherever it went, screaming out their names and begging for a chance to present them with the numerous gifts it is the Japanese custom to give. ‘Kitten toothbrushes, Snoopy towels [and] pictures of yourself stumbling drunk into the hotel from the night before,’ as James ungallantly put it. As Lars and I walked back to the Roppongi Hotel late one night, a gaggle of young female fans suddenly sprang out at us from where they’d been hidden in the bushes, crying and screaming, ‘Rars! Rars!’ One lucky girl got her wish and would not be returning to the bushes – not that night, at least.
