Metallica

Frayed Ends of Sanity


"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" enquired John Lydon when the Sex Pistols finally imploded at the end of their 1978 American tour. The question was essentially rhetorical, yet it's remained one of the most vexed moments of rock'n'roll history, acting as something of a metaphor for the music industry at large. The relationship between the band, the fan, and the grinding wheels of commerce has changed phenomenally over rock music's 50-year tenure.

In this business, it’s both money and power that corrupt, and it’s not just the fans who are victims, so too are the bands. Sure, they're complicit in their own fate, but can you blame someone who's crawled out of the gutter with a pure artistic vision for being blinded by the trappings of success? They’re suddenly afforded a lifestyle that they're simply ill equipped to deal with it.

It is a painful experience to witness this kind of fall from grace, especially when the band in question was once important to you. Here the Sex Pistols reference gathers momentum. When Metallica appeared they were at the vanguard of a movement that upheld many of the central tenets of the punk phenomenon. Thrash metal was at heart an anti-social, questioning genre, beholden to no one. Due to the fickle state of the American music industry in the early 1980s, like the hardcore scene it was an underground movement that was a self-supporting community. Bands arranged their own gigs, toured extensively by van, and released their own demos. It was unimaginable that this most abrasive form of metal could possibly go overground.

Metallica were, from their inception in 1981, leaders in this scene. Their earliest independent releases - 1983's demo No Life Til' Leather and debut album, Kill 'Em All - garnered the band a rabid following who immediately emotionally invested in the band's hostile stance. Tracks such as 'No Remorse', 'Seek and Destroy', and 'Metal Militia' reflected the violent and uncompromising realities of Reagan's America. And, pre-death metal, grindcore, and every other extreme strand of metal to come, Metallica and peers speed and outright aggression made them pretty much the heaviest thing around.

But how does a band go from an album called Kill 'Em All to a live album with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Kamen in several easy moves? It's perhaps one of the most spectacular flip-flops in rock history, a progression that left many early Metallica fans bewildered and feeling betrayed. Here was a band that had made a pledge to their fans to never sell out, to never turn it's back on metal, and who had even stated unequivocally that they would never make a music video.

Well, they did that years ago, and in 2004 trumped that broken promise in spectacular fashion, appearing in a self-commissioned documentary about the recording of their 2003 album St Anger. Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster was not the self-aggrandising ego fest you’d imagine from a vanity project. For starters, it was made by the highly credible directors Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky, who had previously made Brother's Keeper (1992) and Paradise Lost (1996). Secondly, the band was going through some of the worst times they had experienced, providing excellent subject matter. Thirdly, the band waved their right to make editorial cuts to the film, rendering it a painfully honest viewing experience.

In fact, the spectre of the spoof 'rockumentary' This Is Spinal Tap is raised by many of the scenes to be found in Some Kind Of Monster. Berlinger and Sinofsky have an acute eye for the little details that give the game away. Guitarist Kirk Hammett reading a copy of the investment bible Fortune that has the Rolling Stones on the cover. Frontman James Hetfield's refusal to work any times other than noon to four pm when he returns from a lengthy stint in rehab. Drummer Lars Ulrich selling his massive art collection for 20 million dollars at auction.

But the most telling scenes are of the group in therapy sessions with Dr Phil Towle, a performance enhancement coach who had previously worked with football teams, and with Rage Against the Machine. The issues dealt with in these sessions slice to the heart of why Metallica have changed so much over their career, and beg the question, why do they keep doing it?

To put into perspective exactly what happened to Metallica, and how mammoth their success has been, consider these facts: 90 million album sales; 6 Grammy Awards; the number one act played on rock radio; the biggest concert draw in North America over the last ten years.

This success is largely attributable to the latter part of Metallica’s career, following the release of 1991’s self-titled album. Producer Bob Rock planed away the sharper edges of Metallica's sound, bringing to the fore a diluted, radio friendly hard rock sound. While this lost the band some of their original audience, it opened the door to the more conservative rock masses, and subsequent albums Load (1996) and Reload (1997) went a lot further down this road.

Certainly the band's change in direction didn't do their bank accounts any harm, but as Some Kind Of Monster portrays, it destroyed any kind of group harmony or healthy creative process. This in turn led to a lack of desire to even continue.

A Loaded magazine article in September 1996 captured Metallica at the worst of their rock star excesses. Dressing like pimps, travelling around North America by luxury jet, snorting coke at every opportunity, it was an insight into how far from their original fan base the band had grown. "No one ever writes about the drugs and stuff, no one ever tells the truth," slurred Kirk Hammett at one point. "The drinking and shit. Fuck, we're really fucking bad, yet no one ever prints a word... Hey do you guys want another bump?" For someone who had grown up with the band's prosaic, everyman drinking roots, this was a bitter pill to swallow.

Absent from this bacchanalia was Jason Newsted, who joined the band when original bassist Cliff Burton died in a bus smash while touring Europe in 1986. Not one to buy into the rock star bullshit, it was Newsted's sudden departure in 2001 that set in motion the band’s therapy sessions. As Phil Towle told Australian broadcaster Red Symons, "Jason's leaving rocked their world, so they began looking inside themselves to see why he would want to leave the millions. They were motivated to get better, they didn't like the way they were with each other."

It is for this reason that Lars Ulrich says Some Kind Of Monster is not a film about Metallica, it is a film about relationships. The band had become so dysfunctional they were barely communicating, leading to the realisation they barely knew each other despite the years together. Also, their lives have changed so much over the 20 years of their career – wives, children, changing lifestyles. But being in the pampered microcosm of rock stardom hasn’t really allowed them to adjust to these everyday responsibilities.

Towle quickly becomes a central character in the documentary, a living cliché of a therapist. Middle aged, vaguely parasitic, with a terrible line in knitwear, Towle's rhetoric spans the range from insipid through to addled. The irony is that although he insinuates himself into the band's structure like a dangerous charlatan, he actually does them some good.

The therapy sessions are intensive, leading early on to James Hetfield's departure into rehab. He walks out of the studio, and his fellow band members neither see nor hear from him for the better part of a year. In the interim they continue working on the album, and on fixing themselves. When Hetfield finally returns, a lot has changed both for him and the rest of Metallica, leading to much friction. This is really where the resolution of historical scars begins, in an often painful and brutally honest fashion. It's scintillating viewing, the likes of which most bands would be loath to release to the public.

One key scene is when the band calls time out on the therapy sessions so they can concentrate on touring. Towle, who by now considers himself the fifth band member, is not entirely happy with this. “It was tough for me, I 'd been with them for a long time,” he told Symons. “I don't like the way I handled myself in that sequence, I don't like watching it. I like watching Lars rally behind James - that was one of the key resolutions for them. But I’m finishing up my final stage with them now”

In some ways the heart-rending honesty of the documentary signals a return to the old ways of the band. This was band, after all, who released a video in the late 1980s titled Cliff 'Em All - a collection of bootleg live footage, and other footage of the bands after hours exploits. It showed a bunch of relatively normal guys having a good time. Some Kind Of Monster ultimately shows a bunch of relatively normal guys who have struggled with success, fortune, death, addiction and a raft of other issues. That they chose to air this all to the world in some way redeems their past failings.

"When the screening (for the band) was over, we were floored," says Bruce Sinofsky. "They loved it. They said, 'You did what you said you were going to do. This is the truth.' We braced ourselves for notes like, 'I don’t like how I look in this scene - cut it,' or, 'My playing sucks in that scene - cut it.' But there was nothing that they were afraid of."

Gavin Bertram.