Enter Night, page 37
At another, more private moment, I sat with the band having a meal, and listened as they talked about the new houses they had all recently purchased, or were in the process of procuring, on the solid advice of their accountants, ready for their return home as millionaires for the first time later that year. They were still new enough to wealth, though, to feign indifference, Lars protesting that he drove around in ‘a piece-of-shit Honda’; James in a truck. Yet all I saw them in were limos and the private jet they travelled in while on tour in America – the same one previously used by Bon Jovi and before that Def Leppard. ‘We put some money back into how we travel while we’re on the road,’ said Lars, ‘because we’re out there a long time and it just makes the whole thing easier.’
The more he went on, however, the more the others sniggered and made faces. ‘How about that house you just bought?’ teased Kirk. ‘Where is it, like on a mountain?’
Lars looked at him, like shut the fuck up. It turned out the house he’d bought was situated so high on a hill that he was considering having an elevator built just so people could get to his front door.
‘Do it,’ I said. ‘If you can afford it, why the hell not?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you’re right. I will…’
And he did.
Eleven
Long Black Limousine
One on One studios, North Hollywood; late afternoon sliding slowly into evening; everybody’s thoughts now turning to dinner.
Bob Rock and I sat together in a side leisure room chatting idly about a new vegetarian restaurant I’d discovered on Sunset called The Source. The sort of place where dudes wearing hemp shirts and knee-length shorts showed up with chicks in no shoes. Way too cool for school but the food made it all worth the while.
I was telling Bob about the grilled tofu, to die for, I said. He smacked his lips. Then James walked in and the atmosphere instantly changed, like the bad guy entering the saloon via the swinging doors, the piano player stopping mid-song, the guys at the poker table staring but pretending not to.
He didn’t acknowledge us, just grabbed a seat and sat looking at the TV, the volume turned low.
‘Red meat,’ he said suddenly, in that deep slaughterhouse voice so familiar now from the records. ‘White bread…’
We got the message. Bob, already more used to this than me after months holed up in the studio with him, switched gear immediately.
‘Nothing beats a good burger, though,’ he said. ‘You know, you can give the kids all the vegetables and good stuff in the world but if you really love ’em you just gotta take ’em out for a good burger once in a while.’
‘Golden fuckin’ arches,’ growled James, still not looking at us but apparently tuned in.
‘Yeah!’ said Bob enthusiastically. ‘They do a great deal at weekends now, too. Like a kids’ burger and fries meal, with a Coke for like a buck and a half.’
‘Fuckin’ A,’ said James, reaching for the remote. He began zapping through channels till he came to the news. Bush was on talking up his victory in the Gulf.
‘I don’t get it why he didn’t just keep going till he reached Baghdad,’ I said, just throwing it out, like one of the regular guys.
‘Yeah,’ said Bob. ‘Like finish the job…’
‘Nuke ’em till they glow,’ said James.
Oh god, I thought. I can’t keep up with this. I can’t tell any more who’s joking and who’s not. Red meat, I thought. White bread…Jesus, where am I?
The summer of 1990 found Metallica at another crossroads. On paper, they were now one of the biggest, most fêted heavy metal bands in the world. Earlier that year they had won the Grammy they should have picked up a year before, this time for ‘One’. They would also win a second Grammy in 1991 for their cover of Queen’s ‘Stone Cold Crazy’, bashed-out as-live, Garage Days-style, for the double Rubáiyát album, a compilation of cover tracks to mark the fortieth anniversary of Elektra Records. ‘Let’s put it this way,’ Lars told me at the time, ‘if we release anything for the rest of the Nineties, every year we’ll get a Grammy for it just because they fucked up that first year.’ It was a prediction that turned out to be remarkably prescient. In terms of where Metallica went next, however, in reality their options had narrowed so dramatically in the wake of the one-dimensional …And Justice for All album that their choices were suddenly few. They could carry on the way they were going, make ‘another Metallica album’, sell another couple of million worldwide, and settle for being their generation’s Iron Maiden, who had settled for being Judas Priest, who had settled for being Black Sabbath, who had settled for never being quite as important as Led Zeppelin, who were still not, in the Nineties, regarded as being remotely as interesting as Cream or even Jeff Beck, who, let’s face it, were never going to be as highly regarded by history as Jimi Hendrix or The Who, both of whom lagged behind the Stones, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and so on back into rock antiquity. Or Metallica could do what they had always insisted they would when the time came and do something utterly unexpected and fabulous. Rewrite the rulebook.
Easier said than done, of course, in an era when it was already felt that it had all been seen and heard before. There was, however, one area left that a band as defiantly uncommercial – on the surface, at least – as Metallica might aim for, which could not have been foreseen. To make the one record – the one outrageous move – they had sworn as kids they would fight to the death not to make. Yet the one, as men, they were now swiftly coming to realise their musical lives might depend on. That is, something so blatantly, unprepossessingly commercial no one – not even Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield – could have seen it coming.
First, though, like reluctant virgins on their wedding nights, the boys in the band would have to be wooed. Whatever else it was, Justice was a hit. Yet they would not be able to get away with making another album as ponderous and unfriendly to newcomers as that. Not if they wanted their career to continue on its upward trajectory. The question was: did they have the courage to try and take Metallica to the next level? Or had they, perhaps, already reached their highest plateau? How, in fact, did Lars and James see the story of Metallica panning out now that they had reached this point? The person who would put these questions to them was Cliff Burnstein.
Lars later recalled what he characterised as ‘a very famous meeting in Toronto’ in July 1990, at a festival where Metallica was appearing second on the bill to Aerosmith: ‘Me, James and Cliff Burnstein sat down and Cliff said, “If we want to really go for it, we can take this to a lot more people. But that will mean we have to do certain things that on the surface seem like the same games other people play.” But we were the ones playing that game, which makes it us, Metallica, just doing something else. And it was nothing to do with the music, it was the way we handled everything outside the music. The idea was to cram Metallica down everybody’s fucking throat all over the fucking world.’ Or as Kirk Hammett put it to me in 2005: ‘We said, okay, we’re gonna make an album, we’re gonna put a lot of shorter songs on it, we’re gonna get these fucking songs on the radio and we’re just gonna indoctrinate the entire universe with Metallica. That was our goal and that’s what we did! And it took everyone as a big surprise…’
It certainly did. What were these ‘certain things’ Burnstein spoke of, though; what ‘games’ would they need to play? Top of the list was finding a producer who could drag Metallica out of the heavy metal ghetto Justice had left them to rot in. Someone who understood the rock genre intimately enough to deliver an album that would retain the credibility the band had painstakingly built up over the years, but for whom the words ‘hit single’ were not some form of blasphemy. Someone, above all, with a proven record of mainstream success but who also had a detailed enough knowledge of what Metallica’s music was at least supposed to be about. In the summer of 1990, there were very few names that sprang easily to mind able to fulfil such a remit. The biggest, most fashionable rock band in the world was then Guns N’ Roses, whose Appetite album had now sold nearly ten million copies worldwide, and Metallica had already tried – and failed – working with their producer Mike Clink. The only other rock album in recent times that had emulated those numbers and made any sort of statement musically had been Def Leppard’s Hysteria. But the producer of that album, Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, was a genius-perfectionist who used the studio like a blank canvas upon which he ‘painted’ his own highly evolved spectrum of sounds. A brilliant multi-instrumentalist in his own right, ‘Mutt’ was the kind of producer who insisted guitarists strike one string at a time, over and over again in order for him to build up the sound of the chords himself on computer; whose intricately layered vocals – lead and backing – comprised dozens of voices in harmony and counterpoint, interwoven and spun like silk; the sort of visionary technician who had long since abandoned the idea of using a ‘live’ drummer in the studio – years before it became the norm – so he could create more persuasive percussion sounds himself; a maverick conductor directing queer lightning. The idea of putting ‘Mutt’ together with Metallica was like asking a Formula One racing champion to pilot a chariot of horses, albeit highly trained thoroughbreds whose odds on winning were now seductively short, but animals nonetheless. Lange had also recently made it clear to Q Prime that he felt he had taken Def Leppard – until then, their best-selling, starriest clients – as far as he could and that he was now looking for something new, something more demanding from whatever project he next took on. Not remodelling Frankenstein’s monster to look like Marilyn Monroe.
Q Prime did have one suggestion, though: a Canadian producer named Bob Rock, whose stock was riding high for the incredible jobs he had done on two of the biggest-selling rock albums in America of the past year: The Cult’s Sonic Temple and Mötley Crüe’s Dr Feelgood. James, true to his nature, was sceptical: ‘No one fucks with our shit.’ And months later, when I paid a visit to One on One studios to interview Lars about how the new album was coming along, he would tell me they had ended up working with Rock almost by accident. But the truth was Lars had needed little persuading, having become enthralled by the volcanic drum sounds on both Cult and Crüe albums.
‘We’d never really liked the mixing on Justice, Master or Lightning,’ he told me earnestly. ‘So we were thinking, who can we get in to do the mixing? We felt it was time to make a record with a huge, big, fat, low end and the best-sounding record like that in the last couple of years – not songs, but sound – was the last Mötley Crüe album. So we told [Peter Mensch], “Call this guy and see if he wants to mix the record.” He came back and said not only did Bob want to mix the record, but he saw us live when we played Vancouver, and really liked us and would like to produce the album. Of course, we said, “We’re Metallica, no one tells us what to do!” But slowly, over the next few days, we thought maybe we should let our guard down and at least talk to the guy. Like, if the guy’s name really is Rock, how bad can he be?’
This was disingenuous, to say the least. Lars had been as intrigued by the prospect of possibly bringing in Bob Rock as he had been previously with Mike Clink. Hanging out with The Cult on tour the previous summer, the Sonic Temple album had been a favourite on his Walkman, as had Dr Feelgood. He was also big rock star buddies now with both Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and The Cult’s Matt Sorum. He had been awestruck by what Rock had done for them in the studio. Plus, and most importantly, if Metallica was to go ‘next-level’, as Lars put it, with their next album it was clear they could no longer go it alone in the studio with Flemming Rasmussen. They just needed coaxing in the right direction. Shrewdly, Q Prime agreed to put Rasmussen on retainer for a month, in case things with Rock didn’t work out, à la Clink, but from the moment Lars and James – alone – agreed to fly up to Vancouver and meet with Rock at his home, in the wake of their ‘very famous meeting’ with Burnstein just weeks before, the scene was set for Metallica to make what would be the most radical move of their career: go for broke with a big hit-making record. ‘We told [Bob] that live we have this great vibe and that’s what we wanted to do in the studio,’ Lars said, ‘It’s really funny ’cos he turned around and said, “When I saw you guys live and then heard your record I thought that you hadn’t come close to capturing what you do in a live situation.” He basically said the same thing as we had and from then on we thought that maybe we shouldn’t be so stubborn and maybe see where the fuck this would bring us.’
Where it brought them to was a place where James, who had once written ‘Kill Bon Jovi’ on his guitar, was now ready to spend months in the studio with one of the chief architects behind Bon Jovi’s biggest hits; the place where Mötley Crüe, leaders of the selfsame scene Metallica had originally fled LA to escape, had made their biggest-selling album. What they hadn’t bargained for was how hard Rock would make them work for their money.
Like all the best producers, Bob Rock was himself a more than able musician, adept on guitar, bass and keyboards. He had started out in his own band, The Payola$, who had a hit in Canada with the single, ‘Eye of a Stranger’. The band later metamorphosed into Prism but it was his work as engineer with Prism producer Bruce Fairbairn at Little Mountain Sound studios in Vancouver that really made his name in the music business. Fairbairn’s big break came through his work in the early 1980s on behalf of another, more successful Canadian band, Loverboy, who enjoyed a number of hits there and in North America with Bruce as producer and Bob as his engineer and point man. Working together and separately out of Little Mountain, they had created platinum-selling albums for second-division leaders such as Survivor, Loverboy and Black ’N Blue, before really hitting the big time in 1986 with Bon Jovi, whose Slippery When Wet album – and attendant hit singles ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ and ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ – had single-handedly saved the band’s till-then faltering career. (They had been on the verge of being dropped by their label – Phonogram, the same label Metallica was now signed to – when Fairbairn worked his magic, turning it into the biggest rock album of the year.)
Since then, Fairbairn had also helped rescue Aerosmith’s career with the hit-laden albums Permanent Vacation (1987) and Pump (1989). By the summer of 1990, Pump had been on the charts for almost a year, had housed four chart singles, and was on its way to selling four million copies in the USA – exactly the kind of album, in short, that Metallica now set their sights on having. These achievements came at a price, though. As Aerosmith bassist Tom Hamilton later recalled, the positives of working with Fairbairn were that he was ‘a very big, no-bullshit, in-focus, demanding producer who made sure the conditions were right to let the creativity happen. I mean, this guy had the ability to make us play better than even we thought we could play.’ The price: ‘A lot of it was painful because we gave up some control, big-time.’
When Rock ventured out as a producer in his own right – his first international success came with the debut Kingdom Come album in 1988 – he was determined to do things his way. Yet it was Fairbairn’s uncompromising methods he employed to reach his goals. ‘With Bruce, we kind of grew up together,’ said Bob. ‘Bruce’s style of production is so different to mine, though. But the one thing I really got from him was about really concentrating on the performance end of it rather than a perfectionism kind of thing, which may sound bizarre coming from me but that’s what I really try and concentrate on. I really try to facilitate musicians to be comfortable and really fill in the blanks when it comes to their needs, to get what they want accomplished.’ Or as Mötley Crüe bassist and band leader Nikki Sixx later recalled of his time with Rock: ‘Bob whipped us like galley slaves. His line was, “That just isn’t your best.” Nothing was good enough.’ Rock would make guitarist Mick Mars spend weeks doubling a guitar part over and over again until it was synchronised to perfection. As for the lead vocals, some days singer Vince Neil ‘would only get a single word on tape that Bob liked. Bob was critical, demanding and a stickler for punctuality.’ He went on: ‘No one had ever pushed us to the limits of our abilities before or kept demanding more than we thought we had to give until we discovered that we actually did have more to give.’ He admitted ‘the process was the antithesis of every punk principle I had held fast to as a teenager’, but concluded, ‘at the same time, I wanted an album I was finally proud of’.
Similarly, Metallica. Although they already had albums they were fiercely proud of, not least Master of Puppets, what they now craved – needed – was an album that opened their music up to the same audience that bought The Cult, Mötley, Guns N’ Roses and, yup, even Bon Jovi. They wanted it all and Bob Rock was to be the one to help them get it, they decided. The only snag – on paper – was Rock’s well-known reluctance to record anywhere but Little Mountain. However, as Lars told me, ‘We really didn’t want to do it in Vancouver – everyone comes to him. For a while I didn’t think it was going to work out. Bob’s got a big family and he wasn’t that keen on coming to LA. Then when we played him the stuff I could see his eyes light up. We’d built a little eight-track studio in my house and made some rough demos; just me on drums and James.’ The clincher was when they played him the roughs of an epic new track called ‘Sad but True’: ‘It was like, boom! From there it was pretty much a done deal.’
Recording had begun the first week of October, 1990. By the time I caught up with Lars again at the start of 1991, he was obviously thrilled with the way it had been going. ‘Looking back on our last four albums, they were great records. I’m not going to say anything bad about them. But we never thought that we’d done one where you think, there it is. That one album is it. You’re never gonna be able to make a record like that but as close as you can get to that one album, this is fucking it,’ he enthused. ‘The new stuff that we’ve been writing is like a breath of fresh air. We’re just really excited in a way that I don’t think we’ve been excited before. Bob says he thinks it shows we’ve got a lot of soul…a lot of emotions that we don’t let out easily, ’cos we’re very guarded as people. He says that he could see through that right away. He says that one of his things on this album was to try and let us take down our guard and let out the shit that’s in there.’
