To review this article, My Account, then View Saved Stories
To review this article, My Profile, and then View Saved Stories
By Amanda Petrusich
This content can also be viewed in which it originates.
The merchant preceded them. Forty-eight hours before Metallica performed in Las Vegas, the restaurants and bars on the Strip were packed with pilgrims dressed in designer clothing: T-shirts, sweaters, sweatshirts, sneakers, tank tops, caps, hats, socks, wristwatches. Gray devotees wore frayed denim vests decorated with decades of patches. Metallica’s licensing team estimates that approximately one hundred and twenty million Metallica T-shirts have been sold since 1995. The patterns are iconic. There is the one in which a hand holding a dagger emerges from the toilet, next to the word “Metal Up Your Ass”. There is one in which a skull wears a gown and plays brain surgery with a fork, a knife and its fangs. There’s the one where the skull has a handful of stubby straws and announces, “This shorter straw drawn for you!”You were given the idea.
Metallica is now in its forty-first year. The band was an ancestor, along with Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth, of thrash, a subgenre of heavy steel marked through thick, suffocating riffs, played with astonishing speed. Lyrical themes come with death, despair, power, pain, and anger. Although steel is considered underground, frenetic, wild, niche music, Metallica has sold some one hundred and twenty-five million records to date, beating the band on par with Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z. It is the only musical organization that has performed on all seven continents in a single calendar year. (In 2013, Metallica played a set of ten songs in Antarctica for a scientific studies organization and contest winners; due to fragile ice formations, the band’s amplifiers were placed in insulation cabinets and the concert was played with headphones. )Since 1990, each and every one of Metallica’s albums have debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
In 2009, Metallica joined The Rock.
Metallica’s current lineup includes lead singer and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, who co-founded the band; lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, who joined in 1983; and bassist Robert Trujillo, a member since 2003. Hetfield—fifty-nine, tall, gray-haired at his temples—moves with the self-confident gait of a well-armed cowboy. Fifty-eight-year-old Ulrich exudes such kinetic power so much that it’s hard to believe yawning. Hammett, fifty-nine, and Trujillo, fifty-eight, are the band’s meek, long-haired surfers, jazz lovers with little inclination for theater. If Hetfield is Metallica’s medium, his musical medium and main lyricist, Ulrich is his brain, a visionary who instinctively understands the cultural terrain.
The night before the Las Vegas concert, the band gathered at Allegiant Stadium for a soundcheck. A scrum of about a dozen people, most commonly from Metallica’s excursion team, stood on the ground to watch. (The entire organization on the touring team has at least one hundred members. ) Derek Carr, the quarterback of the Las Vegas Raiders, appeared, seeming to have an intense need to play aerial guitar. they gathered periodically around Ulrich’s drums. “Is there anything anyone needs to run?” Ulrich asked. But everyone knew what to do. At one point, Trujillo looked at the empty seats and Dad joked, “I think we were betting on a sold-out show. “Even in an almost empty stadium, the band sounded powerful, lucid, heavy.
The following afternoon, a pre-show occasion was planned at House of Blues, somewhere in the abdomen of the Mandalay Bay casino. I sent a series of increasingly frequent text messages to a friend: “I’m at the casino, where are you?””Am I in the casino?” before we met again. We were dressed in antique T-shirts with cemetery art from “Master of Puppets,” the band’s third album.
At the bar, we top plastic cups of the band’s own Blackened whiskey, a blend of bourbon and rye that’s finished in brandy barrels as Metallica songs blare from giant speakers. One product description credits the music for enhancing the flavor of the liquor: “The whiskey is hammered via low-hertz sound waves that force the whiskey deeper into the wood of the barrel, where it selects for even more flavor characteristics. ” woody”. it was smart. You might feel a twinge of anticipation in the air. COVID-19 had anchored Metallica for long stretches of 2020 and 2021. (My backstage pass showed a skull with a wispy Mohawk self-administering a COVID check—the results, of course, were positive. ) how much they had missed him. The feeling was: let’s go. People were in a position to party, drink too many beers, their earplugs, buy a new Demons Metallica T-shirt and throw it over an old Demons Metallica T-shirt, banging their heads. twisting his hands into devil horns and pushing them up, to say “Ahhh!” when the pyrotechnics exploded, to shout “SearchArrayArrayArray seek and destroy!” with fifty thousand other wild-eyed people, only to turn to a friend and say “Me!” when someone was alone Greta Van Fleet, a young rock band from Michigan, opened for Metallica throughout the year. “Metallica selected their own culture, and you can see the effect that had when you look at the audience,” Greta Van Fleet singer Josh Kiszka told me. “Going to the venue, it’s Metallica everywhere. It’s a component of how the band has replaced the global a bit.
From a distance, it’s easy to see Metallica as an instigating force, an accelerator, making rebellious hooligans even more rebellious. But that concept alone cannot sustain a faithful following for decades. Over our whiskey, my partner, August Thompson, a Metallica fan since their formative years in rural New Hampshire, told me his favorite lyric from “Escape,” a thick, catchy song from “Ride the Lightning” (1984). ): “Life is for me, to live it my way. Hetfield repeats the sentiment, with a slightly different phrase, in “Nothing Else Matters”, a song from “Metallica” (1991): “Life is ours. Array, we live it our way. “Other people like me, who have felt out of place in a hyperviolent world, and the hyperviolence that is masculinity, there’s a lot of convenience in that,” Thompson said. Metallica’s music is rooted in the emotions of marginalization, and the band, despite their achievements, has figured out a way to uphold that vision for more than 40 years. It makes sense that other people would be drawn to it through Metallica’s music. since they are inconvenient in a culture that values things that are free (money, love, directly teeth) without which it is very easy to be born.
That night, Metallica opened their set with “Whiplash,” from “Kill ‘Em All,” their debut album. Mosh pits have formed on the ground; From the stands, they looked tiny counter-existent, bodies surrounding each other, forming an existing but more commonly orbiting threat. A Greek wedding, late, after other people had been drinking. “I think the most productive position in the arena is the level of the moment, where you can see the band but you can also see all the fans,” Hetfield told me later. Forget about the band, look at the audience. “
These days, the track list is most commonly composed of old songs and the atmosphere is largely benevolent. Hetfield’s voice is low and rough, and he can go from contemplative to wild on a single note. He is likely to end his sentences with a tense, curly growl. You can still say “yes!” in a vast and terrifying invocation. It can also be more finished and serious, which recently led enthusiasts to call it Papa Het. “This song is for everyone who struggles,” Hetfield said before “Fade to Black,” a ballad about suicide. If you think you’re the only one, that’s a lie. You can communicate with your friends, communicate with someone, because you are not alone.
The band closed their encore with “Enter Sandman”, some single of “Metallica”. Though steel its bag, it’s hard to deny the menacing perfection of the song’s opening riff: a chord in E minor, a wah-wah pedal. , the feeling that something dark and scary is about to happen. During the choir, I looked at Thompson, who had the dazed, lush gaze of someone who has been cured of illness through an itinerant preacher. All around us, other people were delighted, ecstatic and free. “I get up and sing, and I see other people changing,” Hetfield told me.
Hetfield was born in Downey, California, to 1963. Su mother, Cynthia, had two children from a previous marriage. His father, Virgil, had fought in World War II and started a trucking business when he returned to California. “You had a wonderful childhood,” Hetfield said of his father. church, where Virgil helped lead a weekly service. But Hetfield never tied himself to religion. ” It was a feeling of loneliness,” he said. “When my father was there reading the scriptures, he had tears in his eyes. Hetfield recalls feeling embarrassed when he wasn’t allowed to attend a fitness event or get a medical exam to play football. “I’m ashamed of that,” he said. How different we were from the people. “
When Hetfield was thirteen, his father left. “I went to church camp, came back here and he was gone,” she recalled. Two years later, his mother developed cancer, but refused medical treatment for devout reasons. “We saw her wither,” he said. He had faith all around her, within her. She had practitioners coming. But the cancer was stronger. Hetfield still doesn’t know precisely what type of cancer he had. “Probably anything really curable,” he said. For a long time, Hetfield was angry that his mother chased away doctors. “I think she cared more about faith than her children,” he said. “Nor has it been communicated: if you communicate about it, you are imposing it and you must take away the force. So, admitting that you have health problems is a no-no. We just saw that it happened Cynthia died when Hetfield was sixteen. “There was nothing forged to stand on,” he said. “I felt incredibly lost” the experience: “Broken is promised, betrayal / The healing hand held through the deepened nail. “
Ulrich had a very different childhood. He was born in Gentofte, Denmark, in 1963. His father, Torben, is both a professional tennis player and jazz critic (godfather to saxophonist Dexter Gordon Ulrich), and his worldly and cultured circle of relatives. (“We ate McDonald’s, he ate herring,” Hetfield said of the cultural divide. ) Ulrich came to the United States in 1979, at the age of fifteen, to attend a tennis camp. He ended up at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, in Bradenton, Florida. He had been a promising young player in Denmark, but he found the restrictions of American sports education stifling. “9 o’clock curfew, 10 o’clock lights out, 4 in a bunk room, then wake up and eat cornflakes and start hitting forehands across the line for 4 hours, then cross backwards for the next 4 hours,” he said. he said. array “He’s too strict and disciplined for me. ” When Ulrich was sixteen years old, his circle of relatives moved to Newport Beach, California. “In Denmark, most sensitive to my age diversity across the country,” he said. “When I went to qualify for the Corona del Mar High School tennis team, I wasn’t one of the seven most sensible tennis players at Corona del Mar High School. I don’t think I was “one of the seven most productive tennis players in the street where he lived. Ulrich turned to the music. He wowed through what was then called the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, bands that combined the fury and speed of punk rock with the density and danger of metal. ” and Styx and Journey? I’d say, “No, like Angel Witch or Saxon or Diamond Head or the Tygers of Pan Tang,” he said.
Copied link
In 1981, Ulrich, looking for musicians interested in forming a band, placed an ad on the back cover of The Recycler, a loose publication originally called E-Z Buy E-Z Sell. A friend of Hetfield’s responded to the announcement and Hetfield followed suit. “He was extraordinarily shy,” Ulrich said. We immediately joined the fact that we were lonely and strange, and open to more productive dates with friends. None of us had figured out who we were yet. “I see it as a flowing river,” Hetfield said, complementing each other. there were other people in the room, it became, ‘Who’s in charge?'”
Hetfield and Ulrich recruited a momentary guitarist, Dave Mustaine, through another advertisement in The Recycler. In 1982, Hetfield and Ulrich saw a band called Trauma play at Whiskey a Go Go, a club on the Sunset Strip. Cliff Burton, the twenty-year-old bassist of Trauma, and began looking to convince him to join Metallica. Scott Ian, of Anthrax, said: “There was Cliff in his flares and his Lynyrd Skynyrd pin” – an affront to the indebted. Punk aesthetic of the thrash scene, which included leather jackets, heavy boots, and studted belts. Unlike the members of Metallica, Burton had a musical background. He played bass with the audacity and harmonic sophistication of a guitarist. that got me thinking, fuck, man, where did this guy get this from?” said Kirk Hammett. It was so. . . musical”.
To get Burton, who founded in El Cerrito, a small town across the bay from San Francisco, Hetfield and Ulrich agreed to settle there, rented an unpretentious space on Carlson Boulevard and rehearsed in the garage. Mustaine moved into a unit on Burton’s grandmother’s property. Times were bad. ” We’d look for a tomato and mayonnaise and we’d make tomato sandwiches and think we were metal nerds,” Mustaine recalls. Ulrich described the band’s beginnings as fast and simple: “Just that moment, and ‘Where’s the beer?'”
In early 1983, Metallica signed through Jonny Zazula, better known as Jonny Z. , a part-time concert promoter who sold heavy steel records at an indoor flea market on Route 18 in East Brunswick Array New Jersey. It was still difficult to buy imported steel albums in classical record stores, and a kind of scene had been messed up around Zazula’s booth. One weekend, Zazula asked Scott Ian if he wanted to listen to “No Life ‘Til Leather,” a seven-song demo Metallica recorded before Burton joined the band. The songs were raw and deranged, highlighted through the band’s teenage mania and Hetfield’s tendency to play, resulting in a denser and heavier feel. “Shit,” Ian said. Nothing sounded like that before Metallica. Directo. It was like electrical energy coming out of a tape recorder. Jonny Z. said, ‘I’ll take you to New York. Do you know how to do that? And he says, ‘No!'”
Zazula and his wife, Marsha, founded Megaforce Records after buying Metallica’s demo and failing to get an offer. When the Zazulas introduced Megaforce, Jonny Z. was serving a six-month sentence in a halfway house for conspiracy to engage in wire fraud. (He had been hired through a company that passed off scrap steel for tantalum, a rare detail used in capacitor manufacturing. ) He spent his weekdays powering a pay phone, watching e-book programs. “I just got stuck in this passion, like there’s a little Led Zeppelin going around El Cerrito, you know?” Zazula, who died earlier this year, told Mick Wall “Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica. ” Zazula sent the gang members fifteen hundred dollars so they can drive east in a U-Haul with his equipment. In “Mustaine,” a 2010 autobiography, Mustaine recalled him getting out of bed, “bleedy-eyed, hungover, and smelling like bad cottage cheese,” and noticing the truck parked out front. “We stopped for a beer less than a mile out of the driveway and were in a drunken stupor for most of the trip,” he wrote.
Although Mustaine was an integral component of Metallica’s early sounds and compositions, Hetfield and Ulrich felt that his fierce drinking made him a disadvantage, no small feat in a band that would later adopt the nickname Alcoholica. Shortly after Metallica arrived on the East Coast, Mustaine won a bus ticket to California. “I went to the only position I could pass, my mom’s, and started over,” Mustaine said. That year, he shaped Megadeth, which has sold fifty million records to date, and recently released his 16th album, “The Sick, the Dying. . . and the dead!
Mark Whitaker, who ran Exodus, another Bay Area steel band, advised twenty-year-old Exodus lead guitarist Kirk Hammett to upgrade Mustaine. , attracted him to Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Hammett was nowhere near his father, a merchant seaman. “When I drank, I was violent. When he wasn’t drinking, he was verbally abusive,” Hammett said. and he’d say things like, ‘Kirk, he’s a bookworm, he’s not smart in football’ or anything else. I saw a lot of brutal habits when I was a kid. Who is the toughest?Who is the baddest? Is it the ultimate dominant?Some of it rubbed off on me.
That spring, Metallica invited Hammett to go east for an audition. It’s his first time outside of California. ” It might as well have landed on Mars,” Hammett told me. He had first encountered the band in a steel shop window in San Francisco. “James calm and probably the skinniest user I’ve ever noticed. LarsArrayArrayArray I have never noticed anyone so European. Me from the neighborhood, you know?I grew up surrounded by “An Organization of Mexicans, Filipinos, Chinese and Africans. “American. I didn’t see any Europeans. I didn’t even see any full-fledged whites. The encounter was brief and blurry through the “When I was delivered to New York, I’m not one hundred percent sure they remembered me or what it sounded like,” Hammett said. The first song he played with the band “Seek and Destroy”. “. They gave him the job. At the time, Metallica was living in a run-down practice area in Jamaica, Queens. There is no heating, no hot water, no showers or beds. “I would wrap my leather jacket in a pillow,” Hammett said.
“Kill ‘Em All” was released on July 25, 1983 on Zazula’s Megaforce Records. Hetfield describes the album’s tracks as “head blow, death and blood”. “Ride the Lightning” followed a year later. From the beginning, Metallica refused to capitulate, stylistically or otherwise, to everything that was happening around it. “They, more than any other wonderful trendy band, ignored what other bands were looking to do,” critic Chuck Klostterman told me. Members of the organization dressed as if they spent most of their days walking in front of a gas station. His music was hard, fast and difficult. “you’re too ugly,'” Hammett said.
For Metallica, the concept should never seduce an audience, but repel them. The enthusiasts who stayed, who perhaps understood this as a kind of love, have become faithful and have gained devotion in return.
In 1984, Metallica left Megaforce, signed with Elektra Records and agreed to a control deal with Q-Prime, a new heavy steel company. Cliff Burnstein, owner of Q-Prime, found that selling Metallica to a general audience was nearly impossible. America was gripped by a strange ethical frenzy (satanic panic, which linked heavy steel to demonic rituals) and the gang had cultivated a reputation for being dangerous. for them to play Metallica,” Burnstein recalls. The typical reaction I got was, ‘No, never listen to Metallica on our station. ‘So my answer would be, ‘I’d like to give you gift tickets. ‘And the typical reaction to that was, ‘We probably wouldn’t even say the Metallica call at our station. » »
To some extent, justified apprehension. Burnstein recalled an exhibit at the Felt Forum, a small theater in Madison Square Garden. “During the first song, a user ripped the cushion off a chair and threw it onto the stage. At the end of the song, there wasn’t a cushion left on a chair,” he said. “Instead of being paid, we paid Madison Square Garden for the damages. “from the balcony,” Burnstein said. Hetfield and Ulrich then gave the impression on the radio to ask enthusiasts to avoid looting the places.
But the Metallica experience wasn’t designed to be easy to use. Hetfield rarely antagonized the public with complaints: “Hey, anytime this gets too heavy for you. ArrayArray Loud shit!” Backstage, Metallica members taunted each other, adding Ulrich and Hetfield. Their complex sibling dynamic: Hetfield was possessive; Ulrich was demanding, at times threatening to overwhelm the band. “We would get on and go,” Hammett said. “I don’t forget one time James stood up and led Lars away, and Lars literally flew across the room. We’d see each other and start fighting. We might only be in a room with twenty other people and we’d be obsessing the with each other. No one else mattered. To some degree, Metallica thrived on conflict. “Toxic masculinity fueled this band,” Hammett said. I’m still sitting there saying, “Okay, I’m going to write a riff really, really hard. Just take a look at my rhetoric there: hardcore riff, kick. It’s an attack that all global feels, yet it intensified on us – that macho bizarre macho crap.
In September 1985, the band flew to Copenhagen to record their next album, “Master of Puppets”. apocalyptic terror. ” Many are still the biggest thrash record of all time. “Master of Puppets” ends with “Damage, Inc. ,” a high-pitched, hectic song that feels like being locked in a batting cage with a faulty throwing machine. confirmation and acquittal. ” Fuck everything and don’t regret it,” Hetfield shouts.
In 1986, the band secured an opening spot for former Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne on the American leg of a solo excursion. “I’ve had a special position at my center for Metallica since they went hiking with me in the ’80s. “Osbourne told me, “In my opinion, they picked up where Sabbath left off and deserve everything they accomplished. “The race was a success, and they blew other people’s brains,” Scott Ian said.
That fall, Metallica headlined a European tour. On September 27, the organization was traveling at night through Sweden when their bus skidded on the road. Cliff Burton, the bassist, shot out of a window. Hetfield, Ulrich and Hammett were left out. doors in their underwear, at the austere and icy dawn, staring at Burton’s legs as he waited for a crane to lift the bus from the rest of his body. Burton was twenty-four years old. His death was sudden and horrible. Anthrax was Metallica’s opening act. ” We sat together in a room and drank and drank,” Ian told me. without even taking the time to grieve or treat him properly. “He stopped. “Who knew how to do that?
Less than a month after Burton’s death, the band hired bassist Jason Newsted and soon began recording their fourth album, “The Death of the Beat. “And Justice for All”, which is noted for the singleness “One”, and for containing almost no audible bass. Whether it’s the result of Newsted’s cut too close to Hetfield’s rhythm guitar, or hazing born of new pain, remains uncertain. “When I joined the group, everyone was absolutely drunk,” Newsted said. He had lost his guide. Cliff his teacher.
For their fifth album, “Metallica”, in 1991, known as the black album due to its monochrome “Spinal Tap” cover, which features only a coiled snake and the band’s name, the band hired Canadian manufacturer Bob Rock, who had in the past painted on successful releases through Bon Jovi, Aerosmith and Mötley Crüe. The album’s tracks are dark (the single “Enter Sandman” was written about sudden infant death syndrome), but the songs are flexible, catchy and dynamic. Hammett recalled a verbal exchange with Rock about how the band can achieve even greater fame. “The paintings don’t prevent you once the recording is complete. Every interview, each and every appearance, each and every single of the things, I have to do each and every thing,” Hammett said. “That’s what Jon Bon Jovi did. “
The Black Album spent six hundred and twenty-five weeks on the Billboard charts and sold around thirty-five million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time. Five singles: “Enter Sandman,” “The Unforgiven,” “Nothing Else Matters,” “Wherever I May Roam” and “Sad yet True” entered the Hot 100, and the band has become a mainstay of MTV and trendy rock. radio. “A lot of other people reach out about it or say Metallica sold out,” Kerry King of Slayer told me. “Would I have looked for any other ‘Damage, Inc. ‘? Damn, yes.
The following year, the band co-led a field trip with Guns N’ Roses. At an exhibit in Montreal, there was a lack of communication about pyrotechnic signs during “Fade to Black,” and Hetfield walked straight into a twelve-foot column of flames, suffering momentary and third-degree burns. through the hand and arm. After being taken to the hospital, Guns N’ Roses waited more than two hours to continue; Axl Rose, the Mercurial leader of Guns N’ Roses, left the level early. Riots broke out. Cars were overturned, bonfires were lit, boxes of goods were broken with stones. Looking back, Montreal was the end of something. Grunge, a new subset of hard rock, has struggled to reject the excesses and nonsense of the ’80s: no more women writhing on the hood of cars, no more peacocks in tight leather pants. Metallica had repudiated such extravagance: the members wore jeans and black T-shirts and worked hard, yet the band risked getting stuck on the wrong side of the cultural divide.
A possible solution for Metallica to position itself as the antithesis of Guns N ‘Roses and other bands of the same type. The 1992 documentary “A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica” features a scene in which Hetfield mocks Rose’s private jockey. backstage, which included a diced ham cup, a ribeye dinner, a plate of gourmet cheese, pepperoni pizza, Pringles and a bottle of what Hetfield calls “Dom Perig-non. “In the video for “Nothing Else Matters,” Ulrich is shortly shown shooting darts at a photo of Kip Winger, the witty and flashy singer of the steel band Winger. . Both albums are loose and blues by Metallica standards. Before the release of “Load”, the 4 members cut their hair, which made some enthusiasts feel apoplegic.
Hetfield now believes that “Load” and “Reload” have been shaped too sharply through a preference for reinvention. “We’ve been very organic. ” Load’ and ‘Reload’ seemed different to me,” he said. “I felt forced. ” It was a volatile time for Metallica. red Napster, after an unreleased edition of “I Disappear”, a song recorded for the soundtrack of “Mission: Impossible 2″, was leaked on the network. Ulrich insists the trial was not about money but about control. He was right to be outraged, but the generation was new, he was rich, and most of the other people wearing Napster were academics in pajama pants. Ulrich was demonized. It was also prophetic. ” That doesn’t comfort me,” he told me. “It was a street fight. It was “You’re fucking with us, let’s fuck with you. “And then he went crazy. In retrospect, could we have done more to see this coming?Probably. “
In 2001, Newsted left the band, mentioning the physical damage to his body and an argument with Hetfield about a solo project. “When you’re one of the 4 who make things work, the sacrifices you have to make. . . it’s not for everybody, man,” Newsted said. That’s why there’s only one organization like this. “Bob Rock agreed to temporarily upgrade the bass when Metallica began painting on “St. Colère”, their eighth album. Three months after the sessions, Hetfield abruptly entered an extensive rehabilitation program, primarily for alcoholism, and then stood firm in follow-up and circle therapy of relatives. In total, Hetfield took an 11-month break from Metallica. For a moment, it seemed unlikely that the organization would break them. “There were six months where they were completed, no doubt,” Rock said.
Copied link
When Hetfield, in spite of everything, returned, there were limits. He only worked from noon to four in the afternoon, so he could only attend meetings and spend time with his children. His bandmates were angry with the new restrictions. With some nudges from Q-Prime, Metallica had been working with Phil Towle, a functional coach who acted more like a therapist, and kept him on the payroll until it began to look like he wanted to join the band. Ulrich’s father came from Denmark to study some early songs. Their reaction? I would erase that.
Metallica also needed to locate a permanent bassist. Robert Trujillo, a former member of the thrash-punk organization Suicidal Tfinishencies, was invited to audition. Trujillo, born in Santa Monica in 1964 to a Mexican mother and a Native American and Spanish father, is pensive and composed. He wears his bass low and his long black hair in braids. When he performs with Metallica, he crawls across the stage, swinging from one leg to the other, a move fans have dubbed “crab walking. ” The bass audition of him took position for two days. “The first day, I was just a fly on the wall. And then around 11pm, Lars said, “Hey, do you need to stop by for a drink?” We ended up drinking until five in the morning,” Trujillo told me. “People ask me, ‘Was there any hazing? Did you get tested in any way? I think that might have been part of it for him. At nine a. m. that night, Metallica gave Trujillo a spot in the band. He was still wearing one of the band’s Ulrich Armani T-shirts (early the following year, he was given a million-dollar signing bonus).
In what would arguably be the most fortuitous moment in documentary film history, administrators Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky were in position to film “St. Anger” for a crazy promotional stunt: a series of late-night infomercials that set the new record. , created a feature film, “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” which was released in 2004. Currently, big-budget music documentaries tend to be produced or even directed by the artists themselves and take position predictably. Shapes: a little tension, lots of feedback. But “Some Kind of Monster” shows Metallica, a band known for being probably insensitive even to the death of one of its members, in its most awkward and vulnerable form. When I first saw the movie, I was twenty-four years old and I discovered its incongruity: a guy in a sweater who asks Metallica to communicate his emotions: funny; Now, at forty-two, I find it incredibly moving.
In the end, Metallica made a record with all the defeated power of a sinking stone. “St. Colère” is devoid of air and magic (guitar solos are also missing). “Hey, that’s honest,” Hetfield told me, shrugging. “You may not identify with it, or you may not like the sound. But that’s where we were, and that’s what we got here. He will have his time, maybe. He laughs. “Maybe not!”
Somehow, Metallica controlled to survive. ” The four of us were in a room with our instruments, chasing each other and saying, ‘Okay, this is starting again, now, right now,'” Hammett said. The concept of moving forward and never backing down has long been at the core of the group’s philosophy. Although it is about communicating about Metallica’s music full of hope or optimism, it is not the case, the band has been propelled in an almost pathological way through a kind of anti-nostalgia, a frenzied religion in everything that comes after. “The afterlife all the stops, always,” Hetfield told Rolling Stone in 1993. when interviewed, and that even then tends to acquire an almost mythical quality.
In 2007, the band hired Rick Rubin to produce their ninth studio album, “Death Magnetic,” and Rubin presented the members with a thought experiment: What kind of record would they make if Metallica didn’t exist? “The name of the song ‘Metallica’ is heavy,” Rubin told me. “What is the music you write if no one has heard of you before?” To some degree, each and every Metallica record is a concept album about death, not reaching for it, fearing it, but none embrace death as explicitly as “Death Magnetic. ” The songs are fast, complex, unsightly, and surprising. There are elaborate, harmonized guitar solos, rhythm adjustments, and lyrics that take into account the sensitive membrane that separates what’s still alive from what’s gone. “Just a Bullet Away”, an exit, back sees Hetfield imagining, up close and personal, what it would be like to commit suicide. “All reflections alike / In the midnight gun glow,” he sings, his voice quavering. If Hetfield saw his mother’s reluctance to seek medical attention as an involuntary embrace of death, rather than an expression of faith, it would make sense that his life paintings question that impulse. “There are moments when I am so afraid of dying,” Hetfield told me. “Other times it’s like it’s okay,” he said. “I feel clean inside. “
In September 2019, Hetfield returned to rehab and the band cancelled an Australian and New Zealand tour; Five months later, Metallica pulled out of two U. S. festivals because, as Hetfield explained in a message to fans, “I have critical moments of recovery those weekends that can’t be moved. “for sure,” Hetfield said of the season in rehab. I the one who threw the toolbox and said, ‘I don’t want this. I’m tired of it. It’s too much work to be on the road and looking to stay in touch with the house. I don’t take care of myself. I know that’s kind of a topic here: I don’t know how to take care of myself.
The surprising name of Metallica’s tenth album, “Hardwired. . . to Self-Destruct” (2016), asks if it is imaginable to counteract our maximum harmful tendencies. “On the Path of Paranoia / On the Twisted Frontier / On the Road to the Great Destroyer/Design Doom,” Hetfield barks. Their reaction to aid is, infrequently, aggression. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he said. I can easily identify the problem. But what is the solution?” He stopped. ” I don’t know if I need to hear the solution. Somehow I need to be stuck in my back. Earlier this year, Hetfield filed for divorce from Francesca Tomasi, his wife of twenty-five years. Hetfield goes on to cite Tomasi as very important to his early sobriety. “She was the one who kicked me out of the space to help me. I don’t need to call it tough love, because it devalues it,” he said. It hasn’t been easy for her to say, ‘Get out. ‘It also affects his life. “
Copied link
I asked Hetfield whether, in the absence of drugs and alcohol, music could also offer a useful form of forgetting. I felt, as a fanatic: the edges of my consciousness are getting a little blurred, maybe I’m forgetting where. He nodded. ” There are several names for this. I call it entering the zone,” he said. They’re there, and you’re doing precisely what you want to do. He continued, “I think everybody’s looking for that sense of presence. I have long sought her out in bad drugs. I just tried to turn my head. He painted until he painted no more. Finding a new god other than alcohol. . . Yes, that’s what I continue to do.
Last spring, the San Francisco Giants hosted Metallica Night at Oracle Park. Hetfield and Hammett were to perform an instrumental edition of the national anthem with their guitars, and Hetfield would release the first release. The day before they accumulated in what it calls Metallica HQ, a low-profile semi-industrial complex in San Rafael. It comprises the band’s administrative offices, a studio, convention halls and a cavernous practice area decorated with hand-painted flags from around the world and other fan-made mayflies. Hetfield and Hammett repeated the anthem several times. There’s a mess. There were big riffs. In his hands, the anthem has become strong, anarchic and harsh.
The next afternoon, Hetfield warmed up outdoors in the park with one of the group’s physical therapists. He threw hard. Green Room, saw a video of Mariah Carey’s notorious first release at the Tokyo Dome in 2008, in which she spectacularly breathed it in while wearing four-inch wedge heels, giant sunglasses and very short shorts. “It’s much harder to do in warm pants,” he said.
I asked Hetfield if he was more nervous about the release than the anthem. “Oh, yes,” he said. Football is more his game. Hetfield grew up supporting the Oakland Raiders before the team moved to Las Vegas, and said betting on the Raiders’ new stadium in Las Vegas was “a big deal. “He met quarterback Derek Carr that night after the soundcheck. Non-secular guy, and I got hooked on that right away,” he said. “I’m an idiot in general, like, ‘Derek, this is going to be weird, but can I have your phone number?’I never ask anyone for that. We send text messages either way.
When it was time to play the anthem, which would be placed near the pitcher’s mound, Hetfield was stopped by an older, irritable security guard. “I have to scan you,” he shouted, earning Hetfield’s credentials. Do you have to scan me?”?” Hetfield laughed, to the disbelief of someone who hasn’t been arrested by a security guard in decades. “I have to scan you,” the guy repeated, impassively to pay his respects. Alex Wood, a pitcher, gave the impression of holding a Sharpie and a bottle of blackened whiskey that he helps keep in his locker.
After checking the sound, Hammett and I sat in the empty bleachers, overlooking the bay. The sky was wide and cloudless. ” This domain was once filled with dilapidated warehouses and factories from the forties,” Hammett said, pointing to the water. “After school, my friends and I, in our Catholic school uniforms, loitered here and threw stones. All the windows were already broken, but we were going to recover the last fragments of glass.
Since joining Metallica, Hammett has had to find a way to do it in a band led by two alpha males. at most, other people wouldn’t be able to live with it,” Q-Prime’s Burnstein told me. “But Kirk is a natural player. Live to play. Hammett, who is a Buddhist, will speak for a long time about consciousness, God, enlightenment, resonance, Nirvana. He believes that the paintings he makes with Metallica are an extension of a sublime and all-powerful artistic force. “I put myself in this area where I capture all the creativity around me and channel it to create more,” he said. . His hope is that Metallica will facilitate some kind of healing communion. “We’re so non-denominational,” he said with a laugh. Come to Metallica Church. You will become a member and rejoice! You have nothing to tell us. . You can direct it to the fun you’re having.
That night, Hetfield and Hammett worked their way through the anthem. Then, Hetfield put the guitar back on and headed to the pitcher’s mound. The launch was good. Strong, confident, unwavering. Straight to the plate.
In July, the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” which follows an organization of thin, worried teens looking to save themselves from a scary swap size known as Upside Down, debuted as part of its fourth season. Maximum original series seen on the platform. The main protagonists are dungeon enthusiasts
Unsurprisingly, older Metallica fans found the attention annoying. It’s simple in the mid-’80s, publicly identifying yourself as a Metallica fan occasionally meant being classified as a junkie, a kook, a creep; at the time, a user was suffering socially for his loyalty to thrash. The concept that the true fan of steel wants to resist that stigma is basic and longstanding. However, the organization was quick to embrace its new acolytes. Metallica members even filmed themselves wearing Hellfire Club T-shirts and performing to footage of Munson’s solo. In a pinned comment on their official TikTok, the band clarified their open door policy: “FYI, EVERYONE is welcome to the Metallica family. Whether you’ve been a fan for 40 hours or 40 years. Good. The solo was recorded for the exhibition through Robert Trujillo’s eighteen-year-old son, Tye Trujillo. The hope was that it would sound raw and frantic, like a teenage game. “I don’t think Tye fully understood how this was going to blossom,” Trujillo told me. “I liked that. We don’t have a lot of TVs on all the time at home. We live in Topanga Canyon, and there’s plenty of time to play music and make art, hike and surf. Somehow, you’re shielded from the power that surrounds you. There’s a purity there, which I love.
Copied link
In late July, Metallica titled Lollapalooza, in Chicago, their first U. S. date since the last “Stranger Things” aired. When the band first played at the festival in 1996, the reservation infuriated Perry Farrell, co-founder of Lollapalooza and frontman of the rock band Jane’s Addiction. “A lot of other people were upset,” Burnstein told me. I sense how Perry felt, as if his chosen thing was co-opted. “He added: “Of course Perry was backstage last night, waving to the guys. “These days, Lollapalooza is virtually indistinguishable from any other major American music festival. Other headliners During the week, the finale included pop star Dua Lipa, rapper J. Cole and pop-punk band Green Day. After “Stranger Things,” Metallica is now the highlight of the lineup.
The day before the show, the band reunited in Grant Park to film a short comic strip with Joseph Quinn, the twenty-nine-year-old British actor who plays Munson. “You’re taller than on TV,” Hetbox joked, trembling. The hand of Quinn. La band took Quinn in his tune trailer to play. “I’ll give you a count of four,” Ulrich said, chopsticks in the air. Quinn left with an autographed guitar; The video was posted on the group’s social media accounts. Then, the band went up to the level to rehearse. It had rained the day before, and the floor was slippery from mud. I stood on a piece of plywood in a nearly empty box and watched Metallica heat up. .
Hetfield has become a magnetic leader. At first, he said, his personality level (arrogant, aggressive, difficult) was more commonly ambitious. “Being level is a fantasy world,” he said. “Every frame is out there dusting you gloriously. You start with that, and then you come home and you’re like, ‘Where’s my dust?'” he said. “It’s not so glorious now, sitting here alone with two cats, taking out the trash. On tour, he says, days off are harder than days at work. There’s nowhere to channel power. Time becomes in a strange liminal expanse. ” My frame is tired, but my brain continues to work. What do I do with this? he said. “I just ask team members, friends or my assistant, ‘Hey, can you sit down and watch TV with me?'” ‘Moth Into Flame’, a song from ‘HardwiredArrayArrayArray to Self Destruct’, talks about the top of fame. “Celebrity addiction is genuine,” Hetfield said. “I have my little recovery organization on the road to help me. ” We will say a prayer before moving on to the level: “James, you are a human being. You will die. You are here doing a service. You do your best. is helping me
The next afternoon, the park was filled with thousands of Metallica T-shirts, many of which looked dazzlingly new. The atmosphere in the background relaxed. I sat on a wicker couch with Robert Trujillo and drank a canned water logo called Liquid Death. One of the band’s trailers rated “Yoga”. Shortly before the Metallica set, I climbed into an elevator at the edge of the level so I could see the band and the crowd. Festival sets can be challenging: much of the audience had danced in the last July sun for nine hours. through time Metallica took the level, but the power high. “Master of Puppets” has been on the band’s track list for decades, but has now gained additional prominence as the last song in the encore. When Hammett began betting alone, Eddie Munson’s photographs gave the impression on giant screens that flanked the level. The crowd went crazy. I clung to the edge of the counter-footprint. For a moment, I felt the whole of Chicago shaking.
After the set of Metallica, Ulrich rushed to the Metro, a rock club near Wrigley Field. His two eldest sons, Myles and Layne, play in a wonderful bass-drum duo called Taipei Houston, and opened for the British band Idles. “It’s the past, it’s the future!” Ulrich joked, running towards a van. dressed in a military robe with the hood raised. On the subway, he stopped at the V. I. P. Balcony, radiant with pride. After the set, while Myles and Layne diligently removed the equipment, Ulrich chatted with club owner Joe Shanahan about the first time Metallica bet on the Metro, in August 1983, as the steel band’s opening act. Raven. Ulrich nineteen.
Later, while having tea at his hotel, I asked Ulrich about the phenomenon of “Stranger Things. “He leaned back, optimistic: “If you and I were sitting here twenty years ago, thirty years ago, back then, it was just music. Participating in such opportunities would have been considered a sale. But the culture is much more indulgent with these things now. He continued, “When you’ve been around as long as we have, you have to fluctuate. I don’t think there was any article in Lollapalooza this morning that didn’t mention Eddie, that didn’t mention “Stranger Things”. . . It’s great. “
In 2021, the band released “The Metallica Blacklist”, a collection of fifty-three cover songs from the black album, in honor of the record’s 30th anniversary. Twelve of the fifty-three artists chose to cover “Nothing Else Matters”, which Hetfield wrote when the band was on a tour in aid of “. . . And Justice For All”. Elton John once compared “Nothing Else Matters” (favorably) to “Greensleeves. ” This is, in my opinion, the first Metallica song about romantic love. Hetfield can be coy about his origins: he missed his girlfriend; He found that sentiment embarrassing, but it’s also true that since its initial release, “Nothing Else Matters” has come to sound less particularly romantic and more like an ode to any kind of major devotion. It’s technically a waltz, but it feels like the last of the wonderful power ballads: capital, tortured, cathartic, triumphant. The Metallica network refers to the track as a fan anthem. In moments of deep communion with the band and their music, nothing else matters. It’s a moving song, but also terrifying. “What is heavier than love?” says Scott Ian.
This kind of vulnerability was once anathema to Metallica: “What I felt, what I experienced / It never shone in what I showed,” Hetfield sings on “The Unforgiven,” but is now central to the band’s mission. Singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson, a longtime supporter, praised Metallica’s humanity and goodwill. “I’m a big fan of their music, but even more of the extraordinary human beings they are,” he told me. “In conversation, I discovered that Hetfield was warm and charmingly open. He asked me about my little girl. When I told him I had trouble sleeping in my hotel room, he reminded me that it was vital to have something at home. “My daughter gave me those stones, what are they called?Crystals,” he said. You have to bring anything A pillowcase, lavender oil.
One afternoon I asked Hetfield if he felt that he had nevertheless discovered the life and network he had wanted: he lives in Colorado, hunts, beekeeps, spends time abroad; he sees frifinishes; tour with Metallica. He paused to consider the question. ” Will I ever admit that I figured it out?”Will I ever allow myself to be satisfied enough to say I discovered it?It would possibly be a lifelong search, the search for a circle of relatives,” he said. “When my circle of family fell apart, very early in life, I discovered it in music, I discovered it in the band. I don’t forget that Lars was the first to buy a space and have frifinishes, and I was like, ‘Who are those people?You are cheating on me with some other circle of relatives!’Obviously, our enthusiasts have become a kind of global circle of relatives. But at the end of the day, Array say they love you and you say, “O. K. ArrayArrayArray, what does that really mean?»
But you like at least one of you, I took a risk, yours that exists at work.
“Yes, and what is it?” Hetfield hit back.
It is naïve thinking, assuming that it can be locked in or delimited in the context of an organization that he has led throughout his adult life. “Metallica is bigger than individual members,” Burnstein told me. “And to some extent, in their lives, they are subordinate to the concept of Metallica. “This sense of legal responsibility allowed the organization to continue, shaping what its members sacrificed. “The fifth member of Metallica is the collective,” Ulrich said. “People say, ‘What does Metallica mean to you?’It’s just a shitty one. . . It’s a state of mind. “He stopped. ” Metallica is all the power in the universe. We just handle it. ♦
Have the regulations of war worsened the global one?
What boredom does to us. . . and us.
The enduring appeal of the test.
The ten meteorological occasions in fiction.
The faces of indebted Americans.
Message from Joan Didion: How once the idyllic city fell into the clutches of a gang of teenagers.
Subscribe to our newsletter to get The New Yorker’s most productive stories.
By registering, you agree to our Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement.
By David Remnick
by Andrew Marantz
By Susan B. Glasser
By Jill Lepore
Sections
continuation
© 2022 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and your California Privacy Rights. The New Yorker would likely earn a share of sales of products purchased on our site as part of our component partnerships associated with retailers. Materials in this Site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used unless you have the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices