Enter Night, page 49
Meanwhile, behind closed doors, plans were already being laid for an even more surprising, if typically shrewd, return to their roots with their next album. Halfway through recording St. Anger, Phil Towle had told them: ‘All this work you’re doing right now is not for this record, it’s for the next one.’ And so it proved. Reading the runes as wisely as ever, the band had gone out on a limb and decided not to include Bob Rock in the new project. Coincidentally – or perhaps not – there had been an online petition that included the virtual signatures of more than 20,000 fans calling for Metallica to jettison Rock as producer. His crime: too much influence on the band’s music. Or, more accurately, scapegoated for all the years of tinkering with the formula; metaphorically blamed for the shortened hair, make-up and unsettling scenes of self-doubt and therapy-speak in Monster. It was as if he had never been fully forgiven for being the guy who came in and transformed Metallica from a thrash metal caterpillar into a squillion-selling mainstream rock butterfly with the Black Album. Now he never would be. Someone, it seemed, had to take the rap for Load and St. Anger. Rock affected a public nonchalance at odds with his real feelings, saying only that the petition was hurtful for his children. ‘Sometimes, even with a great coach, a team keeps losing,’ he said, as if in apology. ‘You have to get new blood in there.’
The band agreed and in February 2006 it was announced that the next Metallica album would be produced by Rick Rubin. Metal fans cheered. Rubin was the man who had signed Slayer and produced Reign in Blood, still regarded as the greatest thrash metal album of all. But while Rubin’s grass-roots credentials were impeccable, the real reason he was chosen had as much to do with his more recent and much more widespread reputation as the producer de jour who had single-handedly rebuilt the career of Johnny Cash, saving it from the ignominy it had fallen into, with his series of American Recordings albums that utterly transformed his fortunes, artistically and commercially, in the 1990s, to the point where Cash was bigger than ever at the time of his death in 2003. That Rubin had just done an almost identical job on Neil Diamond with his remarkable 2005 comeback album 12 Songs – rescuing a once-great songwriter from the creative purgatory of Las Vegas residencies and media scorn – was not overlooked, either. Nor, more to the point, that at the same time Rubin had been helping Cash reignite his career he had done a similar job for AC/DC, insisting that the original line-up be reinstated before shepherding them through their best album for decades in Ballbreaker, in 1995.
A large man generally dressed in billowing shirts and khaki camouflage trousers, with his enormous scraggily beard, trademark wraparound shades and chubby features, Rubin resembled a hippy-ish Orson Welles, and certainly there is something of the musical auteur about him. Rubin liked to go barefoot to meetings, espoused a Zen philosophy of vegetarianism and karmic law, fingering a string of lapis lazuli Buddhist prayer beads as he talked, closing his eyes and rocking silently back and forth as he listened intently to music, before pronouncing gnomic judgement. His voice surprisingly soft and always reassuring, many of the artists he worked with called him The Guru.
As an overweight Jewish boy growing up in Lido Beach, on New York’s Long Island, music had been a passion for as long as Rubin could remember. Interestingly, considering the career he was to have, he loved The Beatles but ‘never really liked the Stones’. Whatever the musical medium – from heavy metal to country, from hip hop to pure pop, all of which he has put his hands to at some point – it was always the strength of the songs that mattered most, he said. Hence his inspired suggestion to Cash, then in his mid-sixties, to cover rock songs such as ‘Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails, ‘Personal Jesus’ by Depeche Mode and ‘Rusty Cage’ by Soundgarden. (He also suggested Cash try Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’, but that proved to be one postmodern experiment too many for the sexagenarian.) ‘I have no training, no technical skill,’ Rubin insisted, although he could play guitar and plainly knew his way around a recording studio, ‘it’s only this ability to listen and try to coach the artist to be the best they can from the perspective of a fan.’
Along the way Rubin had produced crucial career-defining albums for the Beastie Boys (Licensed to Ill), LL Cool J (I Need a Beat), The Cult (Electric), the Red Hot Chili Peppers (Blood Sugar Sex Magik) and many others. Yet despite his background, melding rock with rap – as well as his groundbreaking work with the Beastie Boys and LL Cool J, Rubin had also produced ‘Walk This Way’, the first major rock-rap crossover hit, for Run-DMC and Aerosmith in 1985 – Rubin’s first love had always been rock and heavy metal. Working with Metallica would be a unique opportunity to bring all his considerable talents to the table.
‘He’s all about the big picture,’ said Lars of the earliest sessions with Rubin. ‘He doesn’t analyse things like drum tempos or tell James to play something in F sharp. He’s more about the feel: is everyone playing together? Rick’s a vibe guy.’ Or, as Rubin put it: ‘The right sound reaches its hand out and finds its way. So much of what I do is just being present and listening for that right sound.’ Quick to praise, he was also swift to pass judgement. ‘There’s not a lot of grey with him,’ said Lars. ‘He really speaks his mind. Either something’s great or something sucks.’
Rick had known Lars, James and Kirk for years, but they had never worked with him before and came new to his methods. ‘Imagine you’re not Metallica,’ Rubin had told them early on. ‘You don’t have any hits to play, and you have to come up with material to play in a battle of the bands. What do you sound like?’ This was the sort of statement, James decided, that gave the project instant ‘focus’. According to Lars, ‘Rick said he wanted to make the definitive Metallica record.’ For Rubin – a true metal fan who’d once turned down the opportunity of working with Ozzy Osbourne, he told me, ‘because I’m only really interested in making a classic Black Sabbath album that tries to recapture that golden era’ – that was code for making the sort of Metallica album that had only previously been thought possible during the Cliff Burton era. Or as Lars put it: ‘Every time there was a fork in the road, we said, “In 1985, we would have done this.”’ Rob Trujillo, from his more typically down-to-earth perspective, had simply remarked on the fact that Rubin insisted they stand up in the studio while playing ‘and rock out, like we would live’.
The end product, as promised, harked back explicitly to the band’s 1980s albums – now, a generation on, considered classics of the genre – even down to the new album’s pre-CD choice of just ten tracks. All but one was over six minutes long – another clear sign of the album’s focus – and all were credited equally to all four members, something that had decidedly not happened back in the Eighties. Any hope that this might really be some sort of return to the golden era of Metallica is quickly extinguished, however, with the opening brace of tracks, ‘That Was Just Your Life’ and ‘The End of the Line’. Both over seven minutes long; both, on first listening at least, plucked wholesale from the top deck of the Ride the Lightning chocolate box; both all but forgotten minutes after they have juddered to their predictably explosive climaxes – like most of the album, in fact. This is not to say that tracks such as ‘Broken, Beat & Scarred’ (over six minutes) or ‘The Day That Never Comes’ (almost eight) aren’t solid, full-on Metallica recordings: the latter is redolent of some sort of built-in-the-laboratory Load-meets-Justice hybrid that starts off relatively quietly then takes off halfway through into an all-out Iron Maiden-style freak-out; the former is like a more conventional, if much better mixed, outtake from Justice, down to its pillaging of the guitar solo from ‘One’. It’s just that there is little that lingers in the memory in the same way ‘Creeping Death’ or ‘Leper Messiah’ did the first times you heard them.
The dreadfully titled ‘All Nightmare Long’, another near-eight-minute old-school thrash epic shot through the prism of Rubin’s 21st-century production values and the best track on the album, finds James downstroking his guitar with genuine ferocity as Kirk seems to make up for all the solos he never got to play on St. Anger by jam-packing them in here. The formidably bouncy ‘Cyanide’ which follows (over six minutes) sounds like something from Master via the best of Load, if that’s possible, and it dawns that for the first time since the 1980s Metallica are allowing the songs to go where they will, not completely into the big ‘movements’ of yore, but certainly abandoning the commercial template that had served them so well with Bob Rock. None of the tracks fade out, either, but simply vanish into flames. The other stand-out moment is ‘The Unforgiven III’, a moving piano soliloquy, with strings and horns, extemporising over the atmospheric intro of the original, before moving into a song nearly eight minutes long, like ‘Nothing Else Matters’ meets ‘Orion’; the only self-consciously slow track on an album determined to complete the circle, rather than break the mould, including the most enormous guitar-fest three-quarters of the way through; a real love-it-or-hate-it moment, and better for it. After that, however, the album rather plunges, beginning with ‘The Judas Kiss’, eight more minutes recalling the band that recorded ‘Sad but True’ and ‘Disposable Heroes’, with more-frantic-by-the-moment soloing from Kirk, which, rather than galvanise the listener, has the opposite effect of making them wonder if this doesn’t smack too much of box-ticking; painstakingly putting Humpty Dumpty back together again only to find his oval arse where his pointy head had once been, and vice versa.
This feeling reaches its apotheosis on the album’s most bloatedly self-referential – and, frankly, embarrassing – moment in the near-ten-minute instrumental ‘Suicide & Redemption’, clearly intended as a big ‘Call of Ktulu’ moment that, against the odds, might just have succeeded if it didn’t go on (and on). The only track to fade out, it’s a safe bet most general listeners will have exercised the skip option on their CD players/laptops/iPods long before then. This underlines the chief failings of the album: the completely tokenistic feel it all has; the very 1980s signage it gives everything. Ending with the shortest track at just over five minutes, ‘My Apocalypse’ is yet another track entirely given over, it seems, to somehow recreating the golden era of the band; redolent of the title track of Master of Puppets, its riff straight from ‘Battery’. The question inevitably occurs: who is all this meant to please? Those fans too young to have experienced the real thing first time around? The producer whose modus operandi centres on recapturing the spirit of those heydays? Or perhaps a band that has now so thoroughly lost its way, musically, it simply wishes to wipe the slate clean and go back to what it perceives as simpler, more heartfelt times? Or more cynically, to simply tap into the classic rock market in the same way AC/DC, Iron Maiden and Kiss now do, reinforcing the nostalgia for a not-always-shared past grown way out of proportion to its original meaning? As if everything after Black had not really happened and, like Bobby Ewing, the band had simply stepped out of the shower to begin again where they had left off before everything went, you know, all fuzzy and freaked-out and fucked-up?
That certainly seemed to be the message they were sending out when James characterised the new songs as ‘like old Metallica…but with more meaning now’, or when they had begun performing the title track to…And Justice for All again in their latter shows. Kirk, meanwhile, had begun referring openly to the new album as feeling ‘like the band’s sixth album’ rather than what would be their ninth –i.e. the follow-up to Black, rather than St. Anger. This from one of the main instigators of Metallica’s mid-1990s musical rethink.
These were not reasons, on their own, to damn the new Metallica album, however. If most of the lyrics seemed to concern death, that was fine, too. As J.R.R. Tolkien once put it, ‘the best human stories are always about one thing: the inevitability of death’. What ultimately disappointed were not the songs – solid enough attempts to at least do what they had once been best at, delivering thrash metal anthems for the headbanging crowd – and certainly not Rubin’s production, which, despite his reputation for valuing atmosphere over technical perfection, was super-tight and glossy. It was the sense of a band bringing a well-defined, carefully thought-out product to market; something that could be forgiven when, in the case of Black – their first major attempt to do so – it had resulted in such great work as ‘Enter Sandman’ and ‘Sad but True’; or, paradoxically, in the case of Load, where the determination to subvert their own image clearly took such precedence over the actual songs. But here, on an album that purported to refute such notions in favour of a return to old-fashioned principles of musicianship and honest artistic endeavour – of, as Jason Newsted, of all people, put it, ‘[working] for eight hours a day in a rehearsal room like brothers should’ – it hits entirely the wrong note.
From the ponderous sound of the heartbeat that opens the album (as if the broken body of Metallica was coming slowly back to life on the operating table, like the moment in Kirk’s beloved Frankenstein when the good doctor cries: ‘It’s alive! It’s alive!’), to its truly cringe-inducing front cover image of a coffin – a motif that, excruciatingly, would feature throughout the two-year world tour they would embark on to promote the album – to surely the worst title of any Metallica album ever, Death Magnetic, an oblique reference to how so many rock stars have died young, as if magnets for death, this is Metallica-by-numbers; thrash-made-easy; the classic sound of a golden-era band delivering its goods with knobs on but few, if any, surprises for those of us whose memories are now longer than our hair. Even the pedantic sleevenotes seem hopelessly ill thought out, like a grown-up’s idea of a child’s drawing, the lyrics to the tracks partly disabled by the coffin-shaped cut-out that runs through every page and made even harder to decode through being scattered in random order, beginning with the last track first (perhaps not so randomly after all then). Naturally, there are the usual Anton Corbijn band shots, but even they – studied poses of each member standing in shades and leather jacket against a grainy black-and-white wall – could have been taken by Anton Anyone.
None of this stopped Death Magnetic becoming the most colossal success when it was released worldwide on 12 September 2008, going straight to Number One in thirty-two countries, including both Britain and America – the first time that had happened since Load twelve years before – thereby proving that metal fans would take even substandard prime-time-era Metallica over postmodern, Napster-baiting, therapist-consulting Metallica any day of the headbanging week. The album had shifted more than 490,000 copies in its first three days in the USA, making Metallica the only band in US chart history to have five albums debut at Number One (breaking their previous tie with The Beatles, U2 and the Dave Matthews Band). Reviews were also highly complimentary. The New York Times praised the album for ‘compositions that are nasty and complex’, while Time magazine claimed that ‘songs fly by with the force of the world’s angriest amusement-park ride, and when they set you down, often after seven or eight dizzying but tuneful minutes, giddiness is the only appropriate response’. The grass-roots reaction was the same, with the Kerrang! review proclaiming that ‘Metallica once again sound like one of the most exciting bands in the world’ making ‘a mockery of the modern [metal] competition’.
The key to this success, Lars told me some months later, during the band’s second round of arena-headlining dates in the UK, ‘was timing’. Death Magnetic was ‘a reconciliation with the past’. He had wondered if it was possible for the band to return with such fervour to its thrash roots. ‘But I knew that if it was gonna happen, the only way it could happen would be organically. It was not something that could be forced: “Now we have to sit down and make another of these records that has one foot in what we did in the Eighties.”’ It had been made possible by ‘the combination of Rick Rubin; the combination of the twentieth anniversary of Master of Puppets and how we [re]familiarised ourselves with that record, started playing it again, became comfortable with it; the Rob Trujillo element; again the planets aligning…All of a sudden it was just like there we were in the thick of it again, and it felt good and it felt right and it felt real – through a little bit of prodding from Rick Rubin and some pep talks about how we didn’t need to sort of deny that side of us and blah, blah, blah.’
It was as much about Bob Rock not being there, as Rick Rubin being there, James had told me earlier that same day: ‘I think Bob had gotten comfortable. We had gotten too comfortable with each other, especially going through all of the emotional draining of St. Anger. We learned so much about each other, we were too close, I think. It was good to move on and I think Rick Rubin is the exact opposite of Bob Rock. The fact that we were able to sit down and write ourselves, somewhat pre-production ourselves, do things for ourselves without Rick Rubin babysitting or sitting over our shoulder the whole time, that was where we were able to try our wings out again and fly as a band, after all these near-death experiences of the Monster movie and St. Anger. So it was the right thing at the right time. Not to talk bad about Bob whatsoever, because he’s taken us places that we never would have gone before. We’ve learned so much from him.’ But this, suddenly, was different. It had to be.
