Enter Night, page 46
James, too, would come to look back on the whole episode with regret as the years passed. Speaking in 2003 with the newfound clarity that sobriety had brought him, he admitted it was his own ‘fears of abandonment and control issues’ that lay behind the way Jason’s desire to record his own music had been mismanaged: ‘It makes sense that I would…try to grip harder to keep the family together, that no one would leave, for fear that they might find something better somewhere else, when initially all [Jason] had to do was go jam with some other band and find out that, you know, Metallica is home. You don’t know what home is until you leave, and he’d maybe have become more grateful to be in Metallica. That’s certainly one ending to that story.’ He was honest enough to admit, though, that Echobrain ‘wasn’t the only reason that he left. A lot of other things combined and caused him to escape into a future of his own elsewhere, and search for happiness, and we’re all hoping that he finds it.’
In the meantime, Metallica had a new album waiting to be delivered. With Jason out and the will to find an immediate replacement simply not there, Bob Rock offered to play bass on the album and the others gratefully accepted. More badly scarred from the huge dent the Napster fracas had left in their reputation than they were ready yet to admit and still reeling from the psychic wounds Jason’s unhappy departure had reopened, for the first time the band was entirely unsure as to which direction their music should take. Rock and metal had undergone a huge renaissance in public taste since the last time Metallica had entered a recording studio seriously in 1995. Nu-metal, as evinced by rap-rock crossover stars such as Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park, had replaced them at the cutting edge, but there was no way they were going to convince James Hetfield to try competing as a rapper, while the classic rock market – although undergoing its own resurgence in the shape of zillion-selling reunion tours by the original line-ups of Kiss, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Iron Maiden and others – was not yet seen as a comfortable fit for the band.
Pragmatism was now the order of the day and, unable to suggest anything more concrete, they were happy to take Bob Rock’s lead in proposing a more collaborative approach, going into the studio empty-handed and literally seeing what happened, an idea previously considered anathema to the controlling Hetfield and Ulrich. Taking a six-month lease on an old army barracks just outside San Francisco called the Presidio, at Rock’s suggestion the sessions would take on a far more ‘free-thinking’ aspect than on previous Metallica albums, with lyrics for once being worked on by everyone – quite literally, as they all sat together in a room and took turns writing down lines, Rock included. ‘We’ve really kind of changed our process in the way we’re approaching this [album],’ said Rock. ‘We loaded in a lot of my equipment from my studio [and] we recorded there for two months, and we put down about eighteen kind of song ideas. It’s definitely a different approach. The whole thing [has] a very live feel…almost like a garage-type band atmosphere, only with great recording equipment to capture at the moment of conception so to speak.’ He predicted, ‘What this album is going to be like is…what they are as people, what they’re thinking and where they’re at.’ It would certainly become that, though not remotely in the way Bob or indeed the band had originally conceived.
There would be another, entirely unexpected ingredient this time: the addition to the day-to-day team of a $40,000-a-month ‘performance-enhancement coach’: Dr Phil Towle. A former sports psychologist who had worked, most famously, with the Tennessee Titans’ defensive lineman Kevin Carter and the legendary NFL coach Dick Vermeil, Towle’s first foray into the music business had been with Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello. Hired by Q Prime to try to bring the remaining members of Metallica – and Bob Rock – back to some sort of emotional tempo that would permit them to work well again in the studio, despite their recent setbacks, Towle not only instigated intensive two-hour daily sessions, he stayed around for the rest of the day and night, becoming increasingly more involved in the actual making of the album.
In their attempt to reinvigorate their music, post-thrash, post-grunge, post-reinvention, post-orchestras, post-fame and fortune and, clearly in subtext, post-Napster and post-Jason – and now group-therapy – the band would create a new form of Metallica music whose most immediate feature would be a complete dearth of guitar solos and an unlikely, cut-and-pasted drum sound; a genuinely distressed, fiercely antagonistic package, reflected in song titles such as ‘Frantic’, ‘St. Anger’, ‘Some Kind of Monster’ and ‘Shoot Me Again’. How happy the rest of the world would be with the end results, however, would prove to be a matter of the utmost debate, more so even than on Load and Reload. But that discussion was still some considerable way off when, after just three months of working like this at the Presidio, James arrived one morning with unexpected news. He was checking himself into rehab, effective immediately, and all other plans would have to be put on hold – indefinitely.
‘When we started playing music after Jason leaving,’ James said later, ‘the music was not all it could have been. We started to write and then as we were going deeper into ourselves, and exploring why it was that Jason left – what it meant to us, and all of that – it started stirring up a lot of emotions and a lot of stuff about how we could better ourselves as individuals. So I made the decision to go into rehab.’ Jason’s departure may have been the spark that finally lit the fuse but the reality was that Hetfield had been questioning his own mental and emotional state since the days when he would plan his week around whatever days he was going to have a hangover on. He’d first given up drinking back in 1994, when – in recovery terms – he ‘white-knuckled it’ for almost a year, not drinking alcohol but not feeling any happier with his choice. He was soon back drinking again throughout the years of the Load and Reload world tours.
Since the death of his father and then his marriage in August 1997 to Francesca Tomasi – a former Metallica crew member – he had been swinging back and forth between on-the-wagon sobriety and on-the-road hell-raising, even after the birth of their children Cali (in June 1998) and Castor. Happy to play the gentle giant family man at home, away from home – not just on tour but on his frequent, all-male hunting trips – James was still the same short-tempered human grizzly he’d always been. When, during a short vacation during those initial months working on the new Metallica album, he found himself away for his son Castor’s first birthday – hunting bear and drinking double-strength vodka on the Kamchatka peninsula in Siberia, a four-hour helicopter ride from the nearest small town – he finally began to crack. When Francesca then confronted him, threatening to leave with the children if he didn’t do something about his monstrously selfish behaviour, ‘That was the end for me,’ he confessed.
The upshot was an eleven-month programme of rehab – ‘a nice little cocoon’, he called it. Not so nice to begin with, though, during those earliest, most painful days of recovery: ‘I realised how much my life was fucked up. How many secrets I had, how incongruent my life was, and disclosing all this shit to my wife. Shit that happened on the road…Women, drink, whatever it is.’ Making a clean breast of things had a knock-on effect with the rest of the band, too: ‘Like I’m this whistleblower and then all of a sudden: “Er, wow, isn’t it terrible, honey, that he did that?”’ Yet, as far as James could see, looking back almost ten years later, ‘it was the saving part of Metallica, there’s no doubt. It had to come to an end a certain way.’ Tormented by the thought of losing both his wife and his band, he decided: ‘I’ve got to get it together or they’re both going to go away and then what?’
It also had an immediate effect on another, more tangential project that would now blossom into one of the most fascinating of the band’s career. A month before arriving at the Presidio, they had agreed to allow New York-based film-makers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky to make a documentary about the recording of the album. Best known previously for their collaborative 1992 debut, Brother’s Keeper (an acclaimed examination of the murder trial of Delbert Ward) and, four years later, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hills, Berlinger was also known, less flatteringly, for his solo fictional debut, Book of Shadows, the critically derided follow-up to The Blair Witch Project – such a disaster that Berlinger went into hiding for a period. Now back working on documentaries with Sinofsky again, their first major project would be the Metallica documentary.
Their initial ambitions for the film were modest: this would essentially be a promotional tool, just as the 1991 documentary video A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica had been for the Black Album. The deal was that Metallica would pay for the cost of producing the film but Berlinger and Sinofsky would be allowed unprecedented access. The two film-makers had dealt with the band previously on the soundtrack for Paradise Lost, a film ‘about heavy metal on trial as much as the kids accused in the film’, according to Berlinger. Since then there had been vague discussions about making a Metallica documentary movie, but ‘they’d always have the excuse, “We’re not ready to pull the curtain back”’, recalled Sinofsky. ‘As it turned out, the time that we were invited in, in March of 2001, they were at their most vulnerable, they were at their all-time low, at a time that you would expect that nobody would allow a camera crew – especially a crew like us who make very in-depth films. But they invited us in, gave us complete access; never told us, “We have a meeting now, so you can’t come in.” Every door was open, nothing was ever locked. We were never asked to leave. They treated us, in terms of access, better than any other project that we’ve been involved in.’
When they continued filming throughout the fall-out from James’ decision to lay down tools and seek psychiatric help, the film now transmogrified into something else entirely: a close-up study of people in crisis. Named Some Kind of Monster after one of the new tracks, the most surprising thing about this documentary full of shocks was that Metallica allowed it to be made at all. But then this was the new era of reality TV. Hetfield was still ensconced in his prolonged rehab programme when the first episodes of a groundbreaking new TV series called The Osbournes began airing in the USA – a phenomenon that had not escaped the Ulrich radar any more than it had anyone else’s in 2002. As the main driver behind the film project, Lars’ instincts to push Metallica towards the latest trends proved to be inspired this time, even though he could not have imagined how differently the film would eventually turn out. When it was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in February 2004, film critics were so impressed that they put it forward for ‘Official Selection’. Some music critics predictably compared it to the spoof 1980s ‘rockumentary’ This is Spinal Tap. But that was to miss the point entirely. Not only were there few laughs in Some Kind of Monster, the insights it offered of a major band unravelling before one’s very eyes struck a chord far beyond the rock and metal – or even alternative – audience. As such, it also achieved for Metallica something that the new album it showed them desperately struggling to make would not manage to do: rehabilitate their reputation, restoring them from out-of-touch, Napster-crushing millionaire spoilsports back to somewhere closer to the truth-preserving musical vigilantes they had been perceived as previously.
Not that they knew this at the time it was being filmed, as practically every scene from the movie makes clear. Indeed, rather than look like they were about to return as triumphant conquerors, for most of its 160 minutes Some Kind of Monster portrays Metallica as being hopelessly at sea. Beginning, literally, with their equipment being loaded into the Presidio, and ending over two and a half years later with the band’s first tour since Jason Newsted’s departure, via the Napster-baiting debacle, the arrival of Dr Towle, James’ sudden retreat into painstakingly lengthy rehab, the appointment of a new bassist, and many other things neither Berlinger or Sinofsky could possibly have predicted, we get a real sense of how close Metallica was to imploding throughout the months and eventually years the album and movie were being made. From those first few weeks in the studio, with James constantly ‘in a shit mood’ and at loggerheads in particular with Lars, to the excruciating eleven months he was away – when the others had no idea where he was, or if he was ever coming back, ‘I’m preparing for the worst,’ says Lars – the cameras keep rolling, defying rule number one of showbiz: never show the strings and wires.
‘Lars, Bob Rock and I had continued getting together for meetings just to keep the faith,’ recalled Kirk in 2003, ‘keep the momentum going and just keep in touch, because everything was falling apart around us and we felt that if we held strong and held it together at least we had each other. It was a pretty cold realisation that we hadn’t heard from James for X amount of time and I had to think of a back-up plan. I’m the kind of person who always needs back-up plans or, as my therapist says, exits, escape routes. So I sat down and thought about it long and hard and thought, “Do I have enough things in my life to fill the void if Metallica is gone?” And I discovered that I did. I also asked myself if I would carry on in music, and there was no question; it’s what I do. But was I ready for the big drop? And it would have been a drop; right back down to the ground, it would virtually have been like starting over for me. [But] after realising that I could, it gave me enough confidence to wait things out rather than just panic about the situation that was going on with the band.’
James, too, was conscious the band might be on the brink of collapse without him. ‘I think each one of us went through that possibility in our own minds, and what that meant to us, and that was a healthy thing,’ he reflected, ‘to identify that each one of us as people is more important than Metallica the thing, the machine and the creative force. I certainly went through that in rehab; I completely stripped everything about me to the bone and rebuilt myself as an individual. Growing up in Metallica was all I knew, and I didn’t realise how much I was using and manipulating with it. But yeah, after Jason left and I went into rehab the other guys certainly spun the wheels in their heads wondering how to control their futures when it wasn’t up to them, it wasn’t up to any of us really, but coming to that realisation was important. It made us stronger as individuals and it gave us real perspective on how much we mean to each other and how much we’d taken each other for granted.’
Kirk recalled how when James finally sent them a message, four months after leaving for rehab, ‘saying that he still needed some more time to sort things out and he had no idea how long that would be’, the band really did think it was over: ‘It was a long time coming. After we hadn’t heard from him for six weeks or so, Lars and I were driving each other loony speculating on what he was doing and why we hadn’t heard from him and what was going on in his head. In the meantime, friends would come up to us and say: “I ran into James at the mall. Damn, he looks good.” And we’re like: “What is this? Friends of the band are seeing James and we’re left in this holding pattern.” That continued through the whole of September and October until the third week of November. My wife had a surprise [birthday] party for me and I saw this guy standing in the corner, casting a familiar shadow, and it was James. I was so glad to fucking see him, and I could instantly see from looking into his eyes that there was a new clarity there; a new awareness and a new sensitivity that I didn’t detect before. It was totally amazing, we were able to exchange a few words, and I was able to make sure for myself that he was okay and functioning on a somewhat sane level. But he told me, “You know, it’s still going to be some time.” So we actually didn’t start hooking up until March [2002] and only then did we start having meetings and reconnecting with each other. But that was the adjustment period that we had to go through to adjust to the new James Hetfield, and it was just as much of an adjustment for him to us.’
For James, his first time back with the band, was ‘very scary. Any of the firsts in sobriety are scary, just leaving rehab was scary. Going through some absolutely cathartic experiences [and] then coming out into the world was scary. You were in a nice little cocoon of safety there, so you can tear down and rebuild. But, oh boy, coming out was scary. “What should I do? What should I not do? Where should I go? Uh, I don’t want to go in here, because something might trigger me into this and that.” You know, the fear of just living, it was with me for a little while. So coming right back into the band, it just didn’t work. And it was hard to explain to them how it wasn’t time yet. I needed time to adjust to the world and I couldn’t just come and plug in because every time we plugged in and started playing together it was like a security blanket, the world went away and everything was fine. It was a safety zone and I didn’t want to forget about all the other stuff that had to happen; like me explaining to them what I need; how it’s different for me and how the dynamic has changed, and how we’re not going to be going on two-year tours any more. My family is important to me and I can’t let my children grow up without me and all the other priorities, how they lined up in my life. And it’s become contagious, you know, that stuff spread within the band and we all started taking a look at ourselves and becoming a lot more respectful of each other and our needs.’ He had felt like a stranger suddenly, he said: ‘Totally, I had to reintroduce myself to those guys and they didn’t know what to think…To them, to my wife, to everybody.’ Even, he said, ‘to myself: “Is this me talking? Man, I’m not even thinking about what I’m saying and all this shit’s coming out, you know, and it feels right and it feels okay.” And yes, especially to my wife, you know: “I know you, you’re very manipulative,” and addicts are pretty manipulative, and, “Ah, this is just an act,” and after two years, it’s a way of life now. But yeah, there was a whole dynamic change that had to happen within the group. And certain things had to shift…One person changes and everyone else around them, all relationships, friends, everything changed.’
