Enter Night, page 41
The answer, in a word: survival. Just as Lars had been shrewd enough in 1990 to grasp that Metallica risked getting left behind if it didn’t get with the programme and produce an album as commercially viable as less-credible-but-more-successful contemporaries such as The Cult and Mötley Crüe, so in the mid-1990s he saw the world had changed again and that if Metallica didn’t change with it they might perish – just as almost all their contemporaries from the 1980s now had. The arrival of grunge and the ground-zero approach it engendered had seen to that.
In 1992, the NME had pronounced new boys Nirvana ‘the Guns N’ Roses it’s okay to like’. It was a superbly telling phrase that Lars, although he initially railed against it, had quickly taken onboard, as first Nirvana, then Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains and countless other, lesser lights that trailed in their blaze changed the face of rock so dramatically it became virtually unrecognisable to all but its newest followers. While on the surface albums such as Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten sat easily in the same collections as Appetite for Destruction and Black, beneath the surface it was clear something entirely different, something radical and new was now going on. This was rock but no longer with a capital ‘R’. As if to emphasise its essential difference from what had immediately come before, most of the grunge bands had short hair and sported goatees, eschewed the costumed glamour of Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard et al in favour of genuinely battered old jeans and ill-fitting plaid shirts; the whole thrift-store look as down-tuned as their guitars. Most bizarrely, they all came not from New York or LA, or even London or San Francisco, but from a rainy north-western outpost named Seattle, famous previously for nothing much bar its micro-breweries and coffee bars and its thriving Boeing factory (soon to be overtaken as the number one local employer by the fast-emerging Microsoft industries). The kind of conferred exclusivity it was, literally, impossible to emulate, unless you too came from Seattle, which of course none of the Eighties’ rock goliaths did. Paradoxically, however, hard rock and heavy metal in general, and Metallica in particular, had always been huge there, in the same way it had always been a core musical component of the similarly rainswept and industrially bleak English Midlands. Indeed, Kurt Cobain once described Nirvana’s music as ‘a cross between Black Sabbath and The Beatles’ – exactly the kind of musical marriage, ironically, that Metallica might be said to be now aiming for.
There any similarities ended, though, with Metallica viewed from a grunge perspective as being very much in the older brother’s camp. Impossible to compete with, the birth of grunge spelled the death of metal as they knew it till then, as overnight million-selling bands like Mötley Crüe and Poison, Bon Jovi and Def Leppard, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, and, yes, Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, looked seriously out of whack. In many ways, Metallica was fortunate its tour ended when it did in 1993, just as the grunge wave was peaking. After nearly three years on the road, a long break had always been on the cards. Now it would also serve as time away from a scene that was in such rapid transition it was like the precipice of a cliff crumbling beneath them.
As Lars said in 1996, on the eve of the release of Load, the album he prayed would spare Metallica from the same sorry fate that had claimed the careers of everyone from Iron Maiden to Ozzy Osbourne and Mötley Crüe, ‘When we put out the Black Album, nobody knew who Kurt Cobain was. It’s mind-boggling.’ By then, though, grunge was all but over and Lars could afford to be kind. Speaking with him back in 1993, at the height of its influence, he was sounding distinctly threatened, angry even. ‘I think the whole thing has more to do with an attitude than anything musical,’ he told me tetchily. Pressed further, he admitted that ‘Soundgarden made a great record and I think that Alice In Chains made a great record. But this whole thing about Seattle this, Seattle that…I’m not really sold on the whole thing, you know? I wouldn’t go out and wave any flags for it.’
What about Nirvana? I persisted. What did he make of them? His voice became cold. ‘Erm…what do I think about Nirvana?’ he stalled, trying to think of the right thing to say, rather than show his real feelings. ‘I don’t mind Nirvana. They don’t really do very much for me, but I don’t mind them, you know, they have very nice, hummable pop metal anthems.’ I laughed at that one and he went on, encouraged. ‘Some of their attitude annoys me a little bit, though. Because they’re so…I dunno, they just seem really contrived to me, somehow.’ It offended him in some way? ‘No, just that whole attitude they have. “Oh, we don’t wanna be a big band. We don’t wanna sell a million records.” If you don’t want to sell any records, don’t release any records, you know what I mean? They should just be glad there’s a million motherfuckers that wanna listen to their stuff.’ I had never heard him sound so old, so off the pace. He sounded like Dee Snider seeing Metallica onstage for the first time all those years before, then turning to Jonny Z and asking: ‘What is that, Jonny?’
Eventually, though, Lars would come to terms with the whole thing, once it had been tamed in his mind. Meanwhile, others had also tried to keep up. Judas Priest singer Rob Halford, whose homosexuality had been no secret in the business but largely been kept from the fans for the past twenty years, chose this moment not only to leave Priest for a solo career, but also to publicly come out, live on MTV, where he appeared in his new Nineties guise of make-up, black fingernail polish and a flurry of black feather-boas. None of this inflamed the interest of the grunge generation, who merely tittered. Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson also read the runes and left the band for a solo career, recording two self-consciously ‘different’ albums, neither of which was a hit, and soon found himself back playing clubs – neither fish nor fowl in the new post-grunge era. Others, such as Mötley Crüe and Poison, merely grunged-up their acts, shedding important members and losing countless fans. Others still, like Maiden and Priest, simply carried on as they always had, King Canute stoically commanding the tide to turn even as their careers were being washed away, bringing in new, copycat singers and merely delaying the inevitable. (All would later revert to previous, more conspicuously successful forms in order to forge new careers in the coming classic rock era, but that was still some years away and could not have been anticipated back in the grunge-is-all killing fields of the mid-1990s.)
The only survivors were those few Eighties stars who had always exhibited as much brains as brawn, and even they had to work out their strategies carefully in order to successfully pull it off. Smart cookies such as Bon Jovi and Def Leppard, both of whom conspicuously amended their public image, cutting their hair, ditching the metaphorical shoulder pads, even sprouting semi-convincing facial hair, temporarily ditching the big rock anthems for less showy but more easy-on-the-ear power ballads, hoping no one would notice the incredible lengths they were prepared to go to in order to keep their careers alive. Things were moving fast again now, though, and even they were sent scurrying back to the drawing board as grunge was suddenly holed beneath the waterline by the grim suicide, in April 1994, of Kurt Cobain, putting a shotgun in his mouth after pulling a syringe from his arm. Within months the emphasis had switched in the UK to something called Britpop – indie bands with suddenly loud guitars and nicely contrived bad attitudes that made the grunge stars seem over-earnest, musically flatulent and – biggest crime of all – badly dressed. Bands such as Blur, Oasis, Pulp and the usual gaggle of slipstream followers were the new music-mag messiahs whose artful mien reached back to a time before hard rock and heavy metal, to the pre-dawn days of The Beatles, The Kinks, The Who and the Small Faces. In the summer of 1995, in fact, Lars had become so infatuated with Oasis – to Britpop, what Metallica had been to thrash – he actually began following them around on tour, the unashamed superfan again, hanging out with twenty-three-year-old Liam Gallagher and sharing a gram or two with his older but not necessarily wiser brother Noel.
As he later told Mojo, ‘I’m the one who will go and find out what goes on in Oasis-land or Guns N’ Roses-land or Alice In Chains-land. I’m so curious to see how other bands do things. It’s fun to sit down with Liam Gallagher and talk complete and utter nonsense about music.’ Had Liam ever heard of Metallica, though? Did he even know who the motormouth with the funny name and weirdly mangled accent was? Or why he kept turning up at gigs on their US tour that year? It didn’t matter, not to Lars. Just as he had done with Diamond Head all those years before, he really was there as a fan, to look and to listen and maybe learn. Just as with Diamond Head, he probably didn’t even get round to mentioning he actually played the drums, sometimes, you know, a bit.
If the music was changing around them, so was the business. In 1994, Metallica filed suit in a San Francisco court against Elektra, seeking to be released from their deal. Their original contract had been for a fourteen per cent royalty rate, for seven albums. They had never renegotiated, not even after they first hit Top Ten pay dirt with Justice, as would have been the norm for most groups in that position, looking instead to put together a new, partnership-based deal when the current one ended. In 1993, they were alarmed to discover, however, that none of the various video, DVD and box-set compilations they had released counted as one of the nominal seven albums stipulated by their original Elektra contract – not even the Garage Days Re-Revisited mini-album. They considered this particularly unfair as the original drafts of their contract were still based on the conventions of the 1970s when artists routinely released two albums a year, and video, DVD and boxed sets did not exist.
As a result when they came to renegotiate their deal in the wake of the huge success of the Black Album, they did so from the ground up, putting together a new joint venture/partnership agreement with Elektra president Bob Krasnow, in April 1994. The new contracts were still being drawn up when they were then cancelled in the wake of Elektra’s takeover by the Time Warner Music Group that summer. TWG chief Bob Morgado appointed Doug Morris, president of Atlantic, as the new president and head of Warner Music US (which included Elektra, Atlantic and Warner). Subsequently, Krasnow resigned at Elektra, as did Warner’s chief, Mo Ostin. Lars wasn’t underselling the situation when he described them as ‘the two most music-oriented company bosses…We’ve had a great thing going for ten years but it’s a very different situation, a different set of rules than a few years ago.’
Metallica’s lawsuit demanded that they be released from what remained of their original Elektra contract so they could sign with another label ‘free and clear of any interference from or obligation to Elektra’. In response, a Time Warner statement claimed the suit was ‘without merit. The contract is a valid and binding document and Elektra will vigorously enforce its rights to the fullest extent of the law.’ The result was a declaration of war by the band. It wasn’t just about the money, Lars insisted: ‘We were more interested in the long-term outlook.’ They had deliberately not renegotiated in the wake of their success on the basis that ‘Bob [Krasnow] would make it up to us later.’ More specifically, they wanted more control over back catalogue and a larger share of bottom-line profits. ‘There would be a greater gain in the long run only if we made good records people were buying,’ Lars told the Washington Post. ‘The beauty of the partnership is it’s down to us.’
Morgado, however, ‘preferred a more traditional risk/reward structure where the label takes a risk by paying substantial advances’, explained Metallica attorney Jody Graham, ‘which are then recoupable by artists’ royalties. Then they get the rewards for risking that money.’ Unusually, however, Metallica had never been in an unrecouped situation, so there was no basis for Elektra constructing a deal based on ‘risk’. The success of the band had effectively eliminated any element of risk for years to come. As Lars astutely pointed out, ‘We’re a record company’s dream because we don’t require radio promotion or marketing. We don’t go out and make million-dollar videos. We tour until we fall on our faces and that buzz generates word of mouth. We’re as low maintenance a group as you can get.’ He may have been overstating the case somewhat – the expensive videos and promotion were very much becoming the norm even for Metallica – but the principle still held. Moreover, according to Metallica’s legal argument, in recent years it had accounted for up to twenty per cent of Elektra’s domestic billings, generating more than $200 million in revenues in the USA alone. The fly in the ointment, and the straw that Elektra clung to, was that the band had officially still only recorded four of the seven albums it had originally contracted for. The counter-argument: that aside from the albums, Metallica had also released the Garage Days EP – regarded as a Top Thirty mini-album in the USA – and a special deluxe edition box-set in 1993 titled Live Shit: Binge & Purge, containing three live CDs and two live concert videos, which retailed in the USA for $100 (where it sold over 300,000 copies) and in the UK for £75. There had also been the release of two platinum long-form videos with Cliff ’Em All and A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica (detailing the recording of the Black Album), ‘despite having no contractual obligation to do so’.
By December, Lars was in New York, where depositions for the looming court case were now in process, sitting in the same room as Robert Morgado, ‘him nervously smiling over at me. It was quite funny being in a room with twelve lawyers. And me sitting there after sleeping three hours, still drunk from the night before, with my shades on, not having showered in a week.’ Eventually, a new agreement was reached when Burnstein and Mensch accompanied Lars to a meeting with Doug Morris and his advisers. ‘We said, “All the people who can fix this are in this room. We don’t need to deal with lawyers, with the food chain. Let’s talk this through.”’ Two hours later they ‘came to an agreement that everybody felt comfortable with’. Lars stuck his hand out, Morris shook it, ‘and there was the deal’. Metallica hadn’t walked away with an unequivocal victory. They would still need to deliver three more albums, but under much improved financial terms and conditions, in regard to how they chose to deliver material for those albums, the impact of which would be felt over the next five years.
The other members of Metallica, meanwhile, were undergoing their own re-education – literally, in the case of Kirk, who actually enrolled for a semester at the City College of San Francisco, where he took classes in film, jazz and Asian studies (the latter reflecting his mother’s Filipino heritage) and came away with straight ‘A’s. Now divorced from Rebecca, who got a sports car and a significant financial settlement, and living back in the heart of the city – modelling his home as a Gothic retreat full of long, candlelit corridors, the walls covered in rare Hollywood posters for the original Frankenstein and Dracula movies, its vast ceilings hand-decorated in paintings of moon-bathed night scenes full of forked lightning and thunderclouds – Kirk was suddenly part of a younger, more boho crowd. This was something that became a huge influence on his metamorphosis into the make-up-wearing, pierced and tattooed character we would meet for the first time on Load. Musically, he had also moved on, although, unlike Lars, not into the emotional quicksand of grunge or self-referential peacocking of Britpop, but towards more left-field musical innovators such as Nine Inch Nails, Aphex Twin and The Prodigy, groups who positioned themselves as musical emissaries of the near-future, subverting their guitars with the greater intelligence of computers. He was also greatly impressed by outré image-mongers like Marilyn Manson and Perry Farrell, with their portrayal of a neo-Gothic, quasi-religious image that owed something to piercings and make-up and even more to the twisted ideals of self-immolation.
‘You can only be what the public thinks you are for so long before it becomes boring,’ Kirk said in 1996. Since the phenomenal success of Black, he had ‘begun to feel quite objectified’. Going to college helped reconnect him with reality, albeit a more select version of it: ‘When I met people, they’d go, “Wow, I always thought you were this big mean person. But you’re really very nice – and kinda short.” A lot of people get fixated on what they need [Metallica] to be – appearance-wise, how we should sound.’ None of this frankly interested either Kirk or, he was pleased (though not entirely surprised) to discover, Lars. It would become this mutual desire to multiply the range of Metallica’s inspirations and thereby increase its influence, both musically and otherwise, along with their mutual fondness still for experimenting with drugs, as ecstasy now joined cocaine and (in Kirk’s case) marijuana as recreational drugs of choice, that would draw the drummer and guitarist closer together in the mid-Nineties. Both divorced, having rejected the straight life, and more intent than ever on ‘seeing what’s out there’, as Lars put it, their newfound bond also had the side effect of making James feel more isolated from the group’s central purpose than he ever had been, putting him at a certain remove and continually on his guard – the two allowing themselves to be photographed kissing each other, knowing the uptight Hetfield would find such images infuriating – as the two sought to challenge his leadership again and again over the coming years. ‘I know he’s homophobic. Let there be no question about that,’ Lars would later claim in Playboy. True to form, James took exception to the pictures of Lars and Kirk kissing – which circulated briefly in 1996 – but understood the motivation. ‘Totally,’ he said in 2009. ‘I’m the driving force behind their homosexual adventures. I think drugs had something to do with it too,’ James laughed. ‘I hope!’ Kirk would later disingenuously characterise this period as ‘playing referee’ between Lars and James, but the fact is he was never closer to Lars – or further away from James – than now.
