Enter Night, page 43
Speaking in 2009 to writer Ben Mitchell, James admitted he was uncomfortable with the whole motivation behind the music and image of the Load era: ‘Lars and Kirk drove on those records. The whole, “We need to reinvent ourselves” topic was up. Image is not an evil thing for me, but if the image is not you then it doesn’t make much sense. I think they were really after a U2 kind of vibe, Bono doing his alter ego. I couldn’t get into it…The whole cover thing, it went against what I was feeling.’ He was also resentful, he said, about ‘being left out of the bond that they had through their drug use – Lars and Kirk were very into abstract art, pretending they were gay, I think they knew it bugged me. It was a statement around all that. I love art, but not for the sake of shocking others. I just went along with the make-up and all of this crazy, stupid shit that they felt they needed to do.’ It was the first time, he confessed, when musically, rather than the bold new statement Lars and Kirk made it out to be, the band felt unsure of its footing: ‘A lot of the fans got turned off quite a bit by the music but mostly, I think, by the image.’
For Lars Ulrich, however, the logic was obvious. If Metallica could no longer be expected to fulfil the role of outsiders – that job having been taken by the grunge generation – then the least they should do is try to ensure they arose to that pantheon of bands that existed somewhere way beyond the conventions of rock fashion. ‘Now you got U2 and R.E.M. – and Metallica,’ he said in 1996. ‘In America, these borders just don’t exist any more. After Cobain came along, everything became so blurred. Nowadays, bands are just bands: some are harder, some are softer, but heavy metal and pop and this and that…it’s all just one big fuckin’ soup.’
In the end a compromise was reached over the Serrano painting, in that only a detail from it was used on the finished cover while the title Semen and Blood III does not appear anywhere in the credits. Speaking from his New York home now, Serrano says: ‘Initially, when I met Kirk and Lars at the Paula Cooper Gallery [in New York], I don’t think they were looking for anything controversial. They just saw something that was strong, appealed to them, and it was abstract and yet also substantial or tangible in a real sense at the same time…I don’t think it was a novelty.’ Although he wasn’t familiar with their music, ‘I knew their name and reputation,’ he says, and was delighted by the approach. ‘I’ve always wanted for my work to appeal to those outside the art world.’ Kirk, he revealed, had also bought the original. Later, there would also be ‘a great T-shirt of Load, which I still have. I’d wear it down the street and people would give me the thumbs-up.’
Along with the reinvention came a palpable feeling of upgrading. There was a new Metallica logo, too: smoothing off the sharp edges of the original, simplifying and modernising its appearance, transforming it from obviously ‘metal’ to clearly ‘alternative’; Ross Halfin, king of the heavy metal photographers, was now supplanted by Anton Corbijn, U2 iconographer and Depeche Mode make-over artist, while the video for ‘Until it Sleeps’, the first single, says more perhaps about the ‘reinvented’ Metallica than the music even on Load. Directed by Samuel Bayer, who had previously worked with Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, the video was shot in LA over forty-eight hours in early May and premiered on MTV less than three weeks later. Referencing Hieronymus Bosch, represented by such figures as the human-eating monster from The Garden of Earthly Delights, the fall of Adam and Eve from Haywain, and Christ in the Crucifige Eum (Crucify Him) scene from Ecce Homo, most rock fans would simply have got the obvious Marilyn Manson influence – Lars, with his shirt open, showing off his newly pierced nipples, Kirk’s face streaked with lurid make-up, all the band with nice new haircuts, whatever the song was actually about subsumed beneath the greater message: aren’t we weird and interesting, look we have make-up and neo-biblical imagery too, we aren’t just Iron Maiden or even Megadeth and Slayer, truly. The result was an even bigger hit than ‘Enter Sandman’ had been. Metallica’s first – and only – Top Ten single in the USA, and its second Top Five hit in the UK, ‘Until it Sleeps’ went to Number One in Australia, Sweden and Finland, and became a massive hit in Canada, Norway, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland and New Zealand. Interestingly, the one big record-buying market that proved resistant to Metallica’s new point-de-jour make-over was France. Despite two of their singles from the Black Album reaching the Top Ten there, ‘Until it Sleeps’ was a resounding flop, as were all the subsequent singles from Load.
The videos for the ‘Hero of the Day’ and ‘Mama Said’ singles were less garish and more impressive, directed by Anton Corbijn. The latter was wonderfully understated, depicting a cowboy-hatted James sitting alone in the back seat of a car while playing the song on an acoustic guitar, winding down some lost metaphorical highway, the other three band members only glimpsed in passing, peeking at him through the windows. At the end the view pulls back to reveal the set-up, James in a back seat prop inside a studio. He then walks over to a white horse, takes its bridle and walks off-screen, not so much into the sunset as back to the dressing room. ‘Hero’, meanwhile, centred on a drugged-up kid staring at TV, unfurling on every channel a Load-related theme, including a Western movie titled Load, starring James and Jason; a boxing match with James as cornerman and Kirk and Jason as the fighters; a drink called Load being advertised by Lars and James in matching suits; a game show called Hero of the Day, hosted by a smirking Kirk and Jason, with Lars and James as contestants; and Kirk as news anchorman. It ends, finally, with the kid passing out and dreaming of tiny robot creatures, rendered in stop-motion, crawling from his ear. He comes to, abruptly and throws up in the toilet.
This was genuinely good, entertaining stuff, elevating the band’s status critically and reinforcing its position in the business as serious players. Nevertheless, album sales overall were down, not just in France but across the world, despite Load going to Number One in both the USA, UK and nine other countries. It’s fairly normal practice, of course, for a huge-selling album to be followed by a less spectacular but still impressive sales pattern. But Load sold less than half the numbers of Black. Depending on which way you looked at it – or whether, perhaps, you were Lars or James – either the shift in gear had achieved the desired effect and kept the band at Number One, or had significantly reduced its audience.
The reviews, which seemed to congratulate Metallica on merely surviving more than making good music, were uniformly excellent. Rolling Stone claimed the album boasted ‘a wholly magnetizing groove that bridges old-school biker rock and the doomier side of post-grunge Nineties rock’. In the UK, Q gave Load four stars and said, ‘These boys set up their tents in the darkest place of all, in the naked horror of their own heads’, but added, apparently straight-faced, ‘they’ve never needed the props’. Except those supplied by Anton Corbijn and their various make-up artists and costumiers, presumably. The New York Times gave a more balanced, accurate summation when it wrote: ‘On Load, Metallica has altered its music, learning new skills. Hetfield has committed himself to melodies, carrying tunes where he used to bark, and he no longer sounds sheepish when he sings quietly.’
Just as it had been with Black, in the real world the most asked question from long-term fans was what Cliff Burton – on the tenth anniversary of his death – would have thought about it. ‘I know one thing,’ says Gary Holt. ‘They would have never got Cliff to cut his hair off.’ He laughs. ‘I’ll go to my grave believing that. And I don’t think Cliff would have been too fond of band photos smoking cigars and drinking martinis with short hair and suits on. That just wasn’t him, you know?’ John Bush, who left Armored Saint in 1993 to join Anthrax, as part of their own post-grunge reinvention with the White Noise album, sees it from the opposite perspective: ‘If as an artist you’re not taking any chances, you’re a pussy – that’s what I think. So I don’t have a problem with Load. What was worse, in my eyes, was that it seemed a little bit forced, in the sense of their image. It was trying to stay away from the whole “metal” term, and I think it was a little bit exaggerated. But there were still some great songs…I don’t think they have any reason to have any embarrassment for it, by any means.’ As David Ellefson points out, it was the bands that didn’t try and meet the new reality at least halfway that experienced the real problems. He recalls how when Megadeth released their Youthanasia album in 1994, ‘We were trying to submit videos to MTV and they just said no. We were like, what? Why not? “No, we’re not playing that now. We’re playing Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains…” And Metallica eked through. They were the only band of the so-called Big Four that squeaked through.’
Looking back in 2009, I asked James what he thinks Cliff’s reaction would have been to the wholesale changes ushered in by Load. ‘Well, I certainly would have thought there would have been some resistance, for sure. I probably would have had an ally in all of the stuff that you’re mentioning. I think the Black Album was a great album and I appreciate the fact that we did have the balls to do that and have Bob to work with us. It had to be, it really did. You know, when I go back and I listen to Justice, it couldn’t have stayed on that path.’ But with Load, ‘I would certainly think that I would have had an ally that was very against it all – the reinvention or the U2 version of Metallica…There’s some great, great songs on there but my opinion is that all of the imagery and stuff like that was not necessary. And the amount of songs that were written was…it diluted the potency of the poison of Metallica. And I think Cliff would have agreed with that.’ With the benefit of hindsight, even Kirk agreed. ‘I think [Cliff] would have embraced the direction we were going in, because he was always into very, very melodic music. [But] as far as the image is concerned, he would have fucking spat all over it and fucking swore. He would have just said like, “You guys are fucking crazy!” and probably, “I’m out of here.” Or: “Don’t do it.”’
Back in 1996, however, the revolution continued apace. The Load world tour began with the band headlining that summer’s Lollapalooza extravaganza. A travelling annual festival show instigated by Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell in 1991 and presented as the totemic pinnacle of the Alternative Music Nation, the announcement that Metallica would be gate-crashing the party that year came as yet another controversial move in the band’s self-reinvention, and at first appeared to win over almost no one. Hardcore Metalliheads viewed it as another example of the band’s sell-out to the grunge generation; Lollapalooza freaks saw it as a hijacking by the very music and culture it had been specifically designed to reject. (Ozzy Osbourne had already been turned down as a potential headliner that year, initialising the birth in October of the first Ozzfest shows: Lollapalooza-style festivals aimed more specifically at metal fans.) The previous year, Metallica had followed their Donington Monsters of Rock show with festival appearances in Europe alongside Sugar and Sonic Youth; there had also been a bill-sharing show with Courtney Love’s band Hole in the Arctic Circle village of Tuktoyaktuk, Canada. None of this had generated undue comment, one way or the other. Lollapalooza was different, though, sparking months of debate, led by Farrell himself, then negotiating the sale of his share in the enterprise, who branded it no less than a betrayal of his original anti-establishment vision. With Soundgarden, the Ramones, Rancid and Screaming Trees booked to appear below Metallica on the main stage, it was hardly that. Nevertheless, with Kirk Hammett – who had been to every Lollapalooza and even played at a couple, guesting with Ministry and Primus – the only member of the band with any firsthand knowledge of what the event meant to the world at large, there was something intrinsically contrived about their haste to be shoehorned onto the bill now. ‘The part I like most is we’re hated again,’ said James defiantly. ‘I kind of miss that. People like us too much now.’ Careful not to push the boundaries between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Metallica too far, though, despite one of their guests in a revolving slot on the tour being Waylon Jennings, who James admitted had been an inspiration for ‘Mama Said’, the band would never dare to play ‘Mama’ live.
But perhaps their most radical move was the announcement the following summer that they would be releasing a sequel to Load – smugly titled Reload and comprising those tracks that remained from the original Load sessions. The idea of recording two albums’ worth of material and releasing the second CD halfway through a lengthy world tour a year later was one Axl Rose had told Lars about back in 1990 – had been the plan, in fact, before record company compromise meant that Guns N’ Roses eventually released their two Illusion albums on the same day. Lars had always kept the idea in the back of his mind, though. The fact that it also helped service the new deal with Elektra, in terms of delivering another album quickly, could not have hurt either.
If only the album itself hadn’t been such a let-down. From its bland, uneventful cover – another Andres Serrano painting, this time titled Piss and Blood – another red-tinged amber landscape, with only one central swirl this time, resembling, perhaps, a woman’s vagina, to its copycat inner booklet – more Rorschach inkblots and snatches of lyrics in lots of daintily distressed fonts – to its similarly copycat music, Reload looked and sounded exactly like what it was: leftovers from the main course. Beautifully played, beautifully produced by Bob Rock, beautifully photographed by Corbijn and designed by Airfix, but as remarkable as a faded piece of fax paper.
There were highlights but they were few: the ferociously catchy opening track, ‘Fuel’, would have sounded at home on any previous Metallica album, its lyric a wonderfully concise metaphor for those who drive their lives like their cars: too fast. ‘The Memory Remains’, released as the first single, was another fine moment, on the surface an old-fashioned riff-heavy metal song, about the perils of stardom, only let down in its overcompensating desire to snazzy things up by featuring Marianne Faithfull in a completely perfunctory rasping cameo, da-da-da-ing to no discernible effect, other than the principal aim of making the band seem cool, even Hetfield getting sucked into the postmodern mire with his throwaway line: ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust, fade to black…’. The band would perform the song with Faithful on both Top of the Pops and Saturday Night Live, the latter helping push the single into the US Top Forty – their last appearance there for twelve years. The single of ‘Memory’ also contained the full 10:48 version of ‘The Outlaw Torn’, retitled ‘The Outlaw Torn (Unencumbered by Manufacturing Restrictions Version)’ along with an explanation on the single’s back cover of why the ‘cool-ass jam at the end of “Outlaw” got chopped’ from Load. Still wanting to have their cake and eat it, the ‘M’ from the original Metallica logo was now used to make a shuriken-like symbol known as the ‘Ninja Star’, which became an alternative logo on this and other future releases and merchandising items.
Less interesting but still somehow a cut above the rest of the album is ‘The Unforgiven II’, which comes with the same Few Dollars More intro as the original but then gives way to a plodding riff, although Hammett’s guitar almost saves it, the whole echoing the original melody and its restrained vocal, but ultimately collapsing under its inability to come up with something new and genuinely different. The only other half-decent track is ‘Low Man’s Lyric’, which at over seven minutes is far too long for this funereal-paced dirge, but does at least start out more interesting, the hurdy-gurdy (by Bernado Bigalli) and violin (by David Miles) adding a relief texture, with lyrics which appear to find James begging forgiveness for what sounds suspiciously like the infidelity of the long-distance rock star. It was like a bizarre sea shanty in which the captain begs not to go down with the ship.
Elsewhere, however, it was truly turgid fare such as ‘Devil’s Dance’, a poor attempt at stoner rock – then the coming thing – with lots of brilliantly played but pointless guitar; ‘Better Than You’, which sounds like it could have come from an inferior Nine Inch Nails or possibly Marilyn Manson session. ‘Can’t stop the train from rolling,’ James intones solemnly, like a sleepwalker. When the single version won the 1998 Grammy for ‘Best Metal Performance’ it was a toss-up between who was most sick: the group who recorded it to prove there was more to them than just metal, or the genuine metal fans who wouldn’t have been seen dead listening to it. Then there was the generic rock of the interchangeable ‘Slither’ and ‘Bad Seed’, the dreadfully titled, musically uneventful ‘Carp Diem Baby’, and, worst of all, the even more dreadfully titled ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, stolen from the children’s book but, unlike ‘Enter Sandman’, with nothing whatsoever added to it, musically or lyrically, to make you feel they’d enlarged or reconfigured the story, rather than just swiping the title ’cos it sounded ‘cool’. This last, also, tellingly, was the only track on Load or Reload where Jason gets a co-credit. Then just when you think it can’t possibly get any worse, there is ‘Prince Charming’. How low on inspiration, one wonders, did they have to be to come up with this melange of triteisms and factory-fodder riffs? ‘Attitude’ was another bottom-of-the-barrel title, presumably about James’ hunting fetish, but sounded more like Ratt in their heyday. ‘Whatever happened to sweat?’ James bellows. Whatever happened to riveting riffs and impassioned lyrics? Then finally ‘Fixxxer’, a monumentally awful title for a monumentally irritating song which goes on for an incredible eight minutes, convinced that it’s some sort of ‘Voodoo Chile’ for the pierced-labia generation. Perhaps it is.
