Enter Night, page 40
In fact, the running order was the least of anybody’s worries, with it agreed early on that Metallica, although billed as co-headliners and splitting the proceeds 50/50 with GN’R, would go on first, by simple dint of the fact that by this stage Axl Rose was keeping audiences waiting for up to three hours most nights of the tour. As Slash said, ‘Metallica was not a band to pull that kind of shit at all, so they wisely opted to play first so as to avoid being pulled down by our bullshit.’
The twenty-five-date stadium tour began at the RFK Stadium, in Washington, in July. Axl was at the height of his megalomaniacal fame. To his usual on-tour retinue of chiropractor, masseuse, vocal coach, bodyguard, driver, personal assistant, PR, manager and gaggle of hangers-on masquerading as friends, he now added a psychotherapist, Suzzy London, and a professional psychic named Sharon Maynard, a short, middle-aged Asian woman nicknamed ‘Yoda’ by the rest of the band (after the mystic goblin in Star Wars) whose specialities included ‘channelling’ past lives, communicating with extraterrestrials and utilising the power of crystals. Sure enough, Metallica would go onstage each night bang on time – and Guns N’ Roses wouldn’t. Sometimes because Axl genuinely had throat problems; often times because he was still ‘psyching himself up’ back at the hotel. The energy might not be right, the vibes all muddled, or Yoda would simply advise him against it.
Ten days into the tour, at Giants Stadium in Rutherford, New Jersey, Axl was struck in the genitals by a cigarette lighter thrown from the audience. He hurled down the mike, tore off the white cowboy hat he was wearing and hobbled to the side-stage wings where he tried to catch his breath. A chant went up among the crowd: ‘Axl! Axl! Axl!’ Then the houselights came on and it became clear the show was over. The next three shows – in Boston, Columbia and Minneapolis – were all cancelled. The official explanation: ‘severe damage to [Axl’s] vocal chords’. The real reason: humiliation; fury; hubris? Only Axl really knew.
To begin with, Metallica took it all in their stride. They knew touring with GN’R would be ‘a trip’. Besides, they were busy having their own, less public adventures. During the lull after New Jersey, James flew down to Mexico, ‘had a few too many tequila poppers, got into a fight in some bar and had a bottle cracked over my head’. He was still carrying the scars when the tour resumed, on 8 August, at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal. At this point, a real, much more frightening accident occurred when, during ‘Fade to Black’, James badly injured his left arm after a mistimed pyrotechnic explosion, the twelve-foot flame leaving him with third-degree burns. Forced to abandon their set while James was rushed to the hospital, a frantic call was made to GN’R, still relaxing at their hotel, requesting that they start early that night to compensate for Metallica having to truncate their show. They all agreed, according to Slash, then had to wait for Axl, eventually going on three hours later than their own time slot, before leaving the stage early when the flame-tempered singer walked off after just nine songs, complaining that the onstage monitors weren’t loud enough for him to hear his voice. Others whispered he was just pissed off at Metallica ‘leaving him in the shit’. His parting message to the crowd: ‘Thank you, your money will be refunded, we’re outta here.’ Righteously pissed off, having endured premature ends to both sets, more than 2,000 angry fans rioted as they left the venue, fighting with police, resulting in over a dozen injuries. As even Lars later wryly noted, ‘That was the wrong night to have monitor problems.’ Added James: ‘I was so disappointed in [Axl] because he could have won so many people over by continuing the show.’ Instead, ‘There was a lot of unnecessary violence because of his attitude. He could have turned it into a great evening.’ This time, seven shows had to be cancelled and rearranged. By then, Alan Niven had long-since departed – for talking back to ‘the red-haired dictator’, as he called Axl. But even his replacement, Doug Goldstein, had to admit the tour had become ‘like people who go to watch the Indy 500. They don’t go to watch the race. They go to see the crash.’
Backstage, there were even greater high jinks taking place. ‘Axl was out to impress Metallica and everyone else,’ recalled Slash, ‘having backstage parties every single night.’ Each day Axl would write large cheques to his step-siblings, Stuart and Amy, and instruct them to put together something ‘special’ for that evening’s after-show entertainment. ‘We’d spend a hundred thousand a night on parties,’ recalled drummer Matt Sorum. One night would be ‘Greek night – four greased-up, muscle-bound guys [carrying] in a roast pig’. Another night might be Sixties night, replete with lava lamps, psychedelic lightshows and slogans spray-painted everywhere: ‘Acid is groovy’; ‘Kill the pigs’. The only constant was the presence of a free bar, several pinball machines, pool tables, hot tubs and strippers dancing on tables. According to Roddy Bottum, keyboardist for Faith No More, who opened the show on a handful of dates, ‘There were more strippers than road crew.’
For a while, Lars was in his element. Still doing large amounts of cocaine most days, sporting the replica of Axl’s white leather jacket he’d had made, his was a regular face at these after-show parties. ‘It was like, we’re in Indianapolis,’ he recalled, ‘so there were Formula One cars everywhere, with all the girls dressed up in pit-crew uniforms. It was decadence at the highest level I’d ever seen, a Caligula kind of outlandishness. There were orgies, sure. Was I involved? Yes. Well, I was in the same room – we’ll leave it at that.’ Ross Halfin recalls taking the band for a photo-shoot in Jacksonville, where Lars wore the white leather jacket ‘and the band stood behind him making signs of the cross’. James, in particular, was getting seriously bugged. The GN’R tour ‘was very extravagant, which was so un-me. The hot tubs backstage. I’d go back and drink their beer and shoot pool, that’s what I’d do. By the time they’d come offstage I’d be gone so I didn’t have to hang out with them.’ For non-drug-taking James, Guns N’ Roses ‘were part of the enemy. Lars was out there in the white leather jacket and all that, posing up a storm. Lars is that way. He will be infatuated with certain people in his life and need to get into them. That’s just part of him, I guess. He likes learning things from people who have that something. Axl had that.’ As if to underline that fact, when the tour was over, Lars would not see Axl again for nearly fifteen years. ‘Axl was two people,’ said Lars, looking back later. ‘You were truly left wondering what the fuck was going to happen next. When he was in a good mood, he was the sweetest guy, and when he forgot to take his medicine or decided to go off, he was kind of a freak. He was the last person I’ve ever seen, though, besides maybe Bill Clinton, that when he walked into a room every single person was drawn to him. That’s a rare thing.’
Meanwhile, over a year on from its release, the Black Album was still selling hundreds and thousands of copies each week all over the world. Boosted by no less than five back-to-back hit singles – ‘Enter Sandman’ had been swiftly followed in the charts by ‘The Unforgiven’ (released in eight different formats in the UK alone), ‘Nothing Else Matters’ (also eight UK formats), ‘Wherever I May Roam’ (six formats) and, finally, at the end of 1992, ‘Sad but True’ (a further eight formats) – by the tour’s end in the summer of 1993, the album had sold nearly seven million copies in the USA, and a further five million abroad. It had become one of those albums no self-respecting record collection did not include, eventually notching up more than fifteen million US sales, to date, and nearly twenty-five million worldwide, making it one of the biggest-selling popular music albums of all time, in any genre.
The final money-spinning leg of the world tour was dubbed the Nowhere Else to Roam tour, another large outdoor co-headlining stint, this time in Europe with Lenny Kravitz. Its crowning glory was Metallica’s own headlining festival show back in England, in June, at the 55,000-capacity Milton Keynes Bowl. ‘Obviously it’s a great ego kind of thing to do it,’ Lars had said over the phone prior to the band’s arrival. ‘But it’s got to be right. I think Iron Maiden, when they did their first Monsters of Rock stadium tour probably did it better than anyone else; you’ve got to wait till the time is right. Now, all of a sudden this seems like the right thing for us to do.’
It certainly looked that way as I walked around the backstage area that afternoon. Lars was as friendly as ever, arriving at the festival site hours before he actually needed to, bounding around saying hello to friends old and new. The only difference, one couldn’t help noticing, was the gaggle of MTV crew members who followed him everywhere, cameras and mikes lapping up every scrap of attention that came his way, including scenes of themselves filming…themselves. The concert itself was flawless, with James now very much the star of the show, the archetypal metal frontman, intense, uncompromising, tall, thin, completely in control of the stage, a million miles and several lifetimes removed from the acne-ridden bundle of insecurities who had spent years trying to wriggle out of the frontman role. His bond with the audience now seemed unbreakable, complete, as though when he looked out at the thousands he saw a mirror image of himself looking back, fists raised. You could tell the audience, his people, felt they knew this man more intimately than they did their best friends. The hard-drinking, headbanging, woman-devouring, gun-toting, icon of good-(and bad-) time rock, of heavy fuckin’ metal, as he called it, raging from the stage. And yet, for all that he projected and made them think this way, they didn’t know the half of it – that even now James Hetfield was still only pretending, only doing what he thought he was obliged to do.
There were already signs of the change that was coming, but Metallica’s fans had been too busy multiplying and worshipping to read into them. ‘Having money, being part of all this freaks me out,’ James had said in the band’s first Rolling Stone cover story. ‘I like being where most people can’t find me, doing things by myself, or just being with good friends in the wilderness, camping or drinking or whatever. I get a lot of time to think about what this shit is really about and what makes you happy…Looking good, being seen in the right places, playing the fucking game. I get real sick of that shit. That has nothing to do with real life, with being alive.’
The truth of that, though, would only be revealed later. Much later, and only then when it was all but too late to do anything good – anything real – about it.
Twelve
Loaded
It was a phone interview. Where once phone interviews had been the option of last resort, by the mid-1990s they were increasingly becoming the norm. The recession of the early Nineties had forced record companies to cut back on their budgets; overseas trips were not as common as they had been. More to the point, the advent of grunge had killed off so many of the old Eighties-style rock stars, magazines such as Kerrang! were also now starting to suffer, caught between dramatically reduced circulation and the fact that grunge stars like Nirvana and Pearl Jam simply didn’t see themselves as Kerrang!-type bands. If you weren’t from the NME or the Melody Maker you were…well, somewhere much lower down the list.
Phone interviews it was then, unless it was a cover story or a similarly multi-page splurge. This was a glorified news story. That is, a feature-length, colour piece at the front of the mag but not yet a cover – that would come later when the band arrived to headline Donington. In the meantime, the record company drone explained, as Lars and the boys were still in America it was the phone or nothing. No biggie, I decided, it wasn’t like I didn’t know what he looked like…
‘Hey, Mick,’ he drawled down the phone that night. ‘Good to speak with you again, man, what’s up?’
I explained the deal, like he didn’t know already, and we got straight to it. I was spending the evening at home in my one-bedroom loft apartment in London. He had just gotten out of bed at his mansion in the plush Marin County part of northern San Francisco, where it was now early afternoon.
‘Hey, I’m sorry we couldn’t do this in person,’ he said. ‘It’s just our schedules…’
‘Not a problem,’ I said. And it wasn’t.
We chatted for twenty minutes, did our stuff, then said our goodbyes.
‘Hey, good talking to you,’ he said, ‘let’s have a beer or something when we next come over.’
‘Absolutely. And if I don’t see you before, see you at Donington!’
‘Cool, man. Bye.’
I hung up. Nice guy, I thought. Despite…everything.
The next day I was chatting on the phone to someone who still worked closely with the band. I told him about talking with Lars the night before.
‘Why did you interview him on the phone?’ he said. ‘Why not just wait and see him when he’s here?’
‘Because they need the story in time for the Donington announcement next week,’ I explained.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but he’s here tomorrow.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s here in London tomorrow.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah. He’s coming in to buy some antiques. Wants to keep it quiet, though, doesn’t want to get hassled by the usual…you know…’
We paused as what he was saying sunk in.
‘I don’t think he’s staying for long, though,’ he said, running to catch up. ‘Probably only a couple of days or so…’
‘And of course he’ll be busy.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Buying antiques…’
‘Mmm…don’t say I said so though.’
If the story of Metallica had ended with those final grand stadia shows in the summer of 1993, nobody could have complained. Over the past decade they had gone from LA outcasts – runts of the Sunset Strip litter, forced to try their luck elsewhere – to the very biggest, possibly even best, heavy metal band in the world. From the high-spirited but cringingly clichéd riffage of Kill ’Em All to the panoramic, calculated cool of the Metallica album, so mind-bogglingly popular they named it twice, where they went next, what they did from now on no longer mattered, not really. Certainly not to James Hetfield. As long as the band continued to make music, James didn’t really care how many nights they now played in a row at Madison Square Garden or whether Rolling Stone put them on its cover again, they were Metallica and you weren’t and that’s all there was to it, fucker. Not even Jason Newsted felt able to complain. Or rather he did, but not about that. ‘I never thought it was possible to have a Number One record with the kind of music we played,’ he’d said, genuinely taken aback. But then Jason had never thought it was possible to do a lot of things until he’d joined Metallica.
The only person left who still demanded yet more was the boy for whom nothing was ever quite enough: Lars Ulrich. Indeed, if the first decade of Metallica’s incident-filled career had been testament to his drive, his ambition and – not to be underestimated – his ability to accommodate the increasingly forceful personality of James Hetfield, even, for a short time, that of the mercurial Cliff Burton, the next ten years would say even more about Ulrich’s fathomless desire to lift the whole enterprise still higher. Higher than anyone, perhaps not even Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch, would have been able to dream possible. Certainly further than Metallica’s own fans could have imagined; so much so, the very concept of Metallica – all the old notions of what they stood for – would become stretched so thin that many older fans would follow them no further, disillusioned by what they saw as the band’s ultimate sell-out. Not the making of an ultra-commercial album like Black, but, conversely, the conception of albums that, in their own hazardous way, ran against the grain more wilfully than anything they had managed in even their earliest, fiercest days. What James later called, with more than a hint of sarcasm: ‘The great reinvention of Metallica.’
And so it was. Not just in the Metallica sound, either, but in the actual look of the band – most symbolically, their suddenly much-shortened hair. ‘It’s not like we all went out together for a group haircut,’ said Lars, when I teased him about it in 2009. But in many ways that’s exactly what they did do – or certainly appeared to have done, when the first publicity pictures of the ‘reinvented’ Metallica were published in the summer of 1996, in time for the release of their new album, Load, the much-anticipated, utterly unexpected follow-up to Black. There was also the equally sudden appearance of piercings, tattoos and – most shocking of all for hardcore metal fans – make-up. It was one thing seeing Kirk Hammett – always the most (comparatively) effeminate of the group – posing in mascara, showing off his new body tattoos and face piercings, including a labret (a small, silver spike) dangling below his lower lip, camping it up for all he was worth in order to alter the public perception of who the people in Metallica really were. Seeing Lars imitating him, though stopping short of the extravagant tattoos (Lars was game, not reckless), was also strangely digestible, knowing what lengths Lars would go to in order to keep Metallica in the public eye. Looking at James Hetfield, however, in his newly pompadoured hairdo and thick black eyeliner, sitting there in a white vest smoking a cigar, it seemed momentarily as though the world had gone mad. (The only one somewhat off the pace, as usual, was Jason, who had cut his hair short some months before and was actually in the process of growing it back when the first Load publicity pictures were taken.) There was pushing the envelope and then there was tearing it to pieces and tossing it in the air like confetti. Suddenly in 1996, Metallica – in the shape of Lars and his new closest ally in the band, Kirk – seemed perilously close to doing the latter. It was as though Lemmy had suddenly walked onstage in a long evening gown and tiara. Actually, it was more shocking than that. Lemmy would clearly have been joking. Metallica clearly were not. As one magazine editor within my earshot put it, when first perusing the Load promo shots, thereby summing up the reaction of a generation, ‘What the fuck is this?’
