Enter Night, page 45
Reviews were upbeat if somewhat lukewarm. In Britain, Q was avuncular, describing it as ‘another just about forgivable flirtation with Spinal Tap-esque lunacy’. Rolling Stone claimed the album ‘creates the most crowded, ceiling-rattling basement rec room in rock…The effect is…one of timelessness.’ Later, however, it changed its mind, describing S&M as Metallica’s ‘very worst disc…just as useless as every other album on which a rock band plays their hits with an orchestra’. Nevertheless, it reached Number One in America, although it did not even gain entry into the Top Thirty in Britain. ‘No Leaf Clover’ was also issued as an obligatory single – the only one from the album – but that was not a hit even in America. As Metal Hammer editor Alexander Milas says now, ‘If you go back to Justice or Ride there’s this fury and passion that just didn’t exist any more. All of a sudden Metallica didn’t seem to be aware of who they were as a band…they appeared every bit as rich and divorced from the common man as they possibly could.’ He adds, ‘Even though some of the music is actually quality, I really like “No Leaf Clover”, for example, this was a down and dirty thrash metal band that had become part of the elite.’
If as recording artists Metallica were now beginning to take on the appearance of jaded old gods, as concert masters they were still considered a top-drawer ticket, as monolithic and unmissable as the pyramids. So what if they would never make another album as good as Master or as popular as Black, who cared if they had lost the plot artistically, they still kicked ass live, right, dude? What they then did next, however, almost wrecked their reputation completely.
In early 2000, it was discovered that a demo of a thunderous new Metallica track – a kind of mini-me ‘Enter Sandman’ called ‘I Disappear’ – earmarked for the soundtrack of the forthcoming Mission: Impossible II movie was receiving radio play in the USA. Outraged, they ordered an investigation; the source of the leaked track was traced back to a new, pioneering ‘peer-to-peer’ internet service named Napster. Conceived from a computer programme written by a nineteen-year-old college freshman named Shawn Fanning, which allowed users to trade music files without paying a tariff – essentially, providing free music – further investigation revealed that the site had attracted an estimated thirty-eight million users in its first eighteen months. They also discovered that the entire Metallica back catalogue was freely available via the site. At this point the whole band, but Lars in particular, decided something had to be done, instructing Q Prime to look into the legal position. The result was a lawsuit filed at the District Court, in California, in April 2000, alleging that Napster violated three areas of US law: copyright infringement, unlawful use of a digital audio interface device, and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisation Act. Suits were also simultaneously filed against Indiana University, Yale University and the University of Southern California, for contributing to copyright infringement by allowing their students the technology to use Napster. Metallica’s lawyer, Howard King, said: ‘We don’t know how realistic it will be, but we will see what we will find out when we go through the Napster files to see if we can find the people who have downloaded them and if we can then we will go after them.’ He added: ‘Our goal is to put Napster out of business in total and bury them.’ In an official statement, Lars justified the action, saying it was ‘sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is. From a business standpoint, this is about piracy – a.k.a. taking something that doesn’t belong to you; and that is morally and legally wrong. The trading of such information – whether it’s music, videos, photos, or whatever – is, in effect, trafficking in stolen goods.’
Less well publicised was the fact that Napster was already being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). A rock band threatening to sue its own fans, though – that was news. Hiring an online consulting firm, NetPD, to monitor the Napster service for a weekend, a list of 317,377 internet users who it was claimed had illegally traded Metallica MP3s was then personally hand-delivered by an indignant Lars to Napster’s San Mateo headquarters: thirteen boxes of over 60,000 pages of legal paperwork. At Metallica’s request, the users were banned from the site. A sophomore student at IU, Chad Paulson, and founder of the website Students Against University Censorship, was quoted as saying: ‘I can’t believe [Metallica] have to or would sue their fans. I am sure that nobody anticipated this. I think it is a big hypocrisy on their part, because Metallica allows fans to record their live concerts and freely distribute their recordings like Dave Matthews and Phish.’ Within days, however, both Yale and Indiana had blocked Napster use on campus. As a result, both universities were dropped from the Metallica lawsuit. USC also later followed suit.
The battle over the legitimacy of the site raged on, and in July pictures of Lars arriving in his limo to testify before the US Senate Judiciary Committee made the TV news across America. Eventually Federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel would order Napster to place a filter on its own site within seventy-two hours or be shut down immediately. A settlement was also eventually reached between Metallica and Napster when the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann BMG looked into buying the rights to Napster for $94 million, with the site blocking users from file-sharing tracks by any artists that objected to the process. Presented publicly as a win/win situation for both sides, Metallica’s lawsuit effectively closed down Napster in its original form. Less than two years later the company would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. By September 2002, when another judge blocked its sale to Bertelsmann under US bankruptcy law, Napster was obliged to liquidate its assets. These days Napster exists as an online provider of legal downloads for subscription fees to members. The real loser in the war with Napster was arguably Metallica, such was the permanent scar it left on the band’s public face. Metallica may have had all the legal rights in the Napster case but publicly it was the website that would occupy the moral high ground, becoming Robin Hood to the band’s nasty Sheriff of Nottingham. This was not just in the minds of the fans who had been using the site, but also in the majority of the music press in Britain and America, even with other artists, who publicly came out in favour of Napster. Fred Durst of nu-metal stars Limp Bizkit said pointedly, ‘The only people worried about [Napster] are really worried about their bank accounts.’ He then agreed for Limp Bizkit to participate in a free nationwide US tour to generate support for Napster. In a letter to the New York Times, rapper Chuck D said: ‘Unlike many of my fellow artists, I support the sharing of music files on the internet. I believe artists should welcome Napster. We should think of it as a new kind of radio-promotional tool.’
This last point was one shared by many fans who claimed they only used the file-sharing service to ‘preview’ tracks of albums they would then buy online or in-store. Critics, meanwhile, pointed out the hypocrisy of a band such as Metallica, who first came to prominence via the cassette-tape-trading scene of the pre-internet early 1980s, now complaining about their fans trading in the modern equivalent. Whatever one’s view of how readily copyrighted material should be made available over the internet, this last accusation was disingenuous at best. Making a cassette-tape recording of a record then mailing it out to a friend, who may then make a second- and third-generation recording of that tape is a laborious process, the quality of the recording diminishing slightly each time a copy is made. To suggest it might significantly reduce an artist’s ability to sell original copies of their recordings is spurious. The difference with Napster was that one fan putting one track online could result in millions of perfectly recorded copies being downloaded in a single day. The threat to an artist’s livelihood is obvious. As Scott Stapp, lead singer of Creed, said at the time, ‘My music is my home. Napster is sneaking in the back door and robbing me blind.’ Rap godfather Dr Dre also came out in support of the band, demanding an additional 230,142 Napster users be similarly banned from downloading his music. After being made a ‘disingenuous’ out-of-court settlement, Dre filed a lawsuit against Napster on the same grounds as Metallica.
Taken aback by the furore, Lars – usually so shrewd a judge of fan opinion – had completely misread the situation. From his and Q Prime’s point of view, the Napster lawsuit was just another day at the office. Three years earlier they had threatened Amazon.com with a lawsuit for selling an unauthorised album of rarities – the action that had partly prompted the release of Garage Inc. – and had gone after online retailers N2K, distributors of the Dutch East India Trading Co., and independent British label Outlaw Records over the sale of a bootleg live album. In January 1999, they had also filed a lawsuit in a federal court in LA against Victoria’s Secret, the women’s lingerie catalogue, seeking injunctive relief and damages when it was discovered they had used the name Metallica on lipsticks without authorisation. They also sued Pierre Cardin over the marketing of a Metallica tuxedo. There was no PR backlash then and both companies eventually settled out of court. Just weeks after Lars’ Napster court appearance, the band was suing the centuries-old fragrance manufacturer Guerlain for trademark infringement over their new perfume named Metallica, a vanilla-based scent then on sale for the headbanging price of $175 for an 8oz bottle. They also sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to department stores including Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman for daring to stock the perfume, claiming ‘dilution, unfair competition, false designation of origin and injuring the heavy metal band’s reputation’, revealed Jill Pietrini, the lawyer acting for the band. When the response they received was ‘not quite acceptable’, they launched a suit seeking punitive damages, requesting the court to order Neiman Marcus to destroy the perfume.
The problem with the Napster suit was that this time the band appeared to be penalising its own fans. As such, the Napster case beamed the media spotlight on Metallica more searingly than ever before. Suddenly, both fans and media were turning against them; the internet a hive of invective against the band. On the Metallica Usenet group, there was a lengthy, ongoing thread entitled ‘Kirk and Lars are gay’, while a hilarious spoof Metallica ad from an outfit calling itself Camp Chaso (the brainchild of producer, director, writer and now political columnist Bob Cesca) became one of the most popular items on the net. It depicted a cartoon Lars as a tiny greed-obsessed motormouth, with James pictured as his gargantuan, mono-brain-celled ogre, yelling slogans such as ‘Money good! Napster bad!’ The pair of them were apparently wading in a mountainous pile of sacks with dollar signs on them as the mini-Lars yells about how rich the band are; railing against the ‘dickless cocksuckers who try to steal our music with their motherfucking Napster’ and how the band’s lawyers will ‘hunt you down like the table-scrap pilfering grab-asses you are’.
As Alexander Milas says, it all left Metallica looking like ‘the anti-christ. It had soured the entire universe on Lars Ulrich, who had pretty much successfully identified himself as the biggest dick in the galaxy.’ Milas recalls seeing Metallica at the RFK stadium in Washington on their Summer Sanitarium tour of the USA that year: ‘Right in the middle of Metallica’s set they actually stopped playing and a video came up on the big screen. It’s like Lars Ulrich drumming and he’s got a Pepsi right next to him and someone off-screen takes the Pepsi away and he stops playing drums, and goes: “Hang on a minute, that’s not cool, they took my Pepsi. You know what else is not cool? Taking people’s music and…blah blah blah.” I’m not even joking! I mean, I’m paraphrasing, because by then I was shouting and so were fifty thousand other people. I’ve spent like a hundred bucks, which is an absolute fortune when you’re that age, to listen to Lars preach to me about not stealing the records when I owned everything and the singles already. It was just completely disgusting. It actually turned me off from them. In retrospect, you can completely see their point but at the time they were the wrong persons to be the spearhead of that awareness campaign.’
The zeal with which Lars was pursuing the Napster situation was becoming out of proportion to other previous legal actions. Suddenly there appeared to be a very personal dimension. This only worsened as criticism against Metallica began to build in the media. At the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards Lars famously scored another own goal when he appeared in an anti-Napster video skit with the show’s host, Marlon Wayans. Wayans played a college student downloading ‘I Disappear’ in his dorm when Lars suddenly appears, demanding an explanation. When Wayans’ character explains he’s not stealing, only ‘sharing’, Lars proceeds to demonstrate the error of his ways by first drinking his Pepsi, then getting the Metallica road crew to empty his room of all his stuff, slapping Napster stickers on everything first. The video caused a certain amount of mirth from the industry guests in the room. But Lars’ appearance onstage later that evening was greeted by much more voluble booing from the public-admittance section of the audience. Despite looking decidedly uncomfortable, Lars later claimed he was ‘unaware of it’ until he got offstage. When Shawn Fanning appeared to respond by presenting an award while wearing a Metallica shirt, announcing pointedly, ‘I borrowed this shirt from a friend. Maybe, if I like it, I’ll buy one of my own,’ he received unreserved cheers. Again, Lars later brushed it off, claiming ‘the whole thing was planned’, and that the organisers had originally asked him to co-present the award with Fanning but that ‘Napster’s lawyers pulled him out of it’ at the last minute, concerned Lars would use the occasion to worsen the situation with their client. Talking to Playboy just a few weeks later, however, Lars made a point of saying he thought ‘It was the worst awards show, hands down, that I’ve ever been to’ and that he had left early to have dinner with friends.
Portrayed as the greed-driven villains of the piece, even James – who’d taken a back seat while his wife, Francesca, gave birth to their second child, a son, Castor, in May 2000 – admitted he had ‘cringed at certain interviews: “Oh, dude, don’t say that.”’ Lars, however, while also shuddering at some of the unexpected positions his hard-line stance put him in, ultimately remained unrepentant: ‘If you’d stop being a Metallica fan because I won’t give you my music for free, then fuck you.’ It seemed the feeling was mutual, however, and to this day the Napster debacle has hung like a shadow over everything Metallica has tried to do, their various attempts to make amends – including the cringe-making vision of Lars taking part in an internet interview explaining why file-sharing was actually good for fans, particularly in places such as Saudi Arabia where downloading tracks was the only way they had of accessing music they could not buy on CD. ‘I think it’s great,’ he said. ‘Obviously it’s the way to share this stuff and I think it’s awesome. I think that we were somewhat flabbergasted at some early internet things that were going on a few years ago but we’re at peace with that.’
Far less public but even more immediately damaging was the long-predicted meltdown of Jason Newsted, whose official departure from Metallica was announced in January 2001. Ostensibly the split had come about because James wouldn’t let Jason release an album by his side-project band Echobrain. In reality, the split had been coming almost since the day Jason had joined. ‘During the last couple of tours he was totally withdrawing from everything,’ James told Classic Rock in 2003: ‘Going into his own little world, wearing headphones all the time, never communicating, and we certainly weren’t kings of communication, either. We were just four guys who would shut up, play and let the beast roll on.’ More to the point, as Lars recalled the last time we spoke in 2009, Jason was ‘intense, very serious…he joined as a new member, obviously, and I think sort of stayed a new member, pretty much for all the fourteen years that he was in the band’.
At the time, though, Lars was too distracted with his own problems. Now separated from Skylar and their two-year-old son, Myles, he was living temporarily in a hotel suite in New York while mixing the debut album by Systematic, Somewhere in Between, for the Elektra-backed boutique label TMC (The Music Company) he had recently formed with record exec Tim Duffy. (The label would later run aground amidst personal animosity between the two co-founders.) Lars couldn’t have cared less just then what Jason was up to. Kirk, meanwhile, thought the Echobrain album was ‘great’ and was happy for him to release it. Jason had been quick to point out how many other artists’ records James had appeared on – including vocals for the track ‘Hell Isn’t Good’ on the South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut movie soundtrack; cameos on two Corrosion of Conformity albums; and playing guitar on a Primus album track. But James wasn’t ‘out trying to sell them’, he replied, and compared Jason’s working on a side-project to ‘cheating on your wife’. Reflecting on the situation two years later, Lars felt free enough to admit the reason for James’ hard-line stance was down to ‘control issues’. He said, ‘James has his vision of the perfect family, and it’s almost kind of mafia style. You’re part of the family and if you step outside of the family you’re betraying the family, and you’ll get ostracised. And that is at the heart of a lot of the stuff that we’ve tried to work through in the last couple of years.’
There had reportedly been a nine-and-a-half-hour band meeting at the RitzCarlton Hotel in San Francisco, which had followed an equally intense get-together a week earlier. Newsted was given the choice: forget Echobrain and stay with Metallica, or release the Echobrain record – and forget Metallica. Jason resigned the same day. His official statement referred to ‘private and personal reasons, and the physical damage I have done to myself over the years while playing the music that I love’. Behind the scenes, however, he admitted he had felt ‘almost stifled’. What hurt most was that Jason had always looked up to James, in much the same way as James had once looked up to Cliff. ‘[James] taught me determination and perseverance,’ Newsted would recall. ‘People have tried to burn him and break him, but he’ll always jump right back up. And kick your ass. No matter what differences we’ve had…I’ll always regard him as one of the best musicians ever.’
