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JAMES Hetfield
leans forward into a leather jacket and flicks
his wrist. "Hi man," he rumbles, without looking up. The ink
flows
silver across the jacket. On the floor a small pile of posters already
wear
his mark. He wears cool; he looks cool. Waistcoast, white t-shirt, black
jeans, boots. Some silver - "heavy metal"-style metal - flickers
around his neck, on his fingers.
The legs, the arms, the man,
are lean,
rangy. The hair cropped and quiffed, full goatee, set off by long chopper
sideburns. He appears and exudes comfortable, until he looks up. His eyes
are direct, deep, and slightly shy. When he speaks, he looks down, away,
seems to dig for his thoughts, changes tense sentence by paragraph. A
sporadic
unease runs like a synaptic twitch across his composure. Not quite as
cool, after all.
James Hetfield, 15 years a rock god, the Atlas on the mountain of
Metallica;
the thinker, the metal guru, the gruff, growl, tortured screamer who used
to tear at the world's disease, exorcise omnipresent threat in a spew of
rage: drug addiction, mass murder, nightmares - Hetfield and his cohorts
unleashed, incanted and decanted, a speed metal version of primal scream
therapy. If you yell loud enough, long enough, it won't hurt you anymore.
The tradition of heavy metal lived and breathed in lumbering doom-laden
masses for the threatened; their fears blown away on the thunder of
double-time
rhythms, moshed into submission by bludgeoning electricity amidst a spray
of flailing hair and a sea of divers at their feet. When the sweat dried
a few hours later, the worshipful left cleansed - to re-enact the ceremony
in private confessional behind closed bedroom doors, over and over again.
Metallica earned that mountain top, took it by force, afforded themselves
the loftiest seat in rock, way above their contemporaries: Megadeth came
closest, briefly; ant figures on a distant ridge. Even their plunder had
its irony: co-founder and lyricist Dave Mustaine came and went in
Metallica's
earliest sortes.
Their godhood was enshrined in 1991 with the release of their self-titled
fifth album, a work of empirical genius. Metallica redefined metal,
leant a "soft" grandeur to its dark squall. The notion that
metal
couldn't cross over to the mainstream was rammed up the rectums of
disbelievers
as Metallica unleashed three massive anthems - songs that still five years
later churn with rare emotional majesty across countless rock formats:
Enter
Sandman, Nothing Else Matters and The Unforgiven. Men
in suits, women chic and styled, joggers in designers, strapped on for the
ride. Really, nothing else mattered: and 300 sellout shows proved it.
Yet time marched on and with it the new breed: grunge - inwards
looking, a fused punk/metal inheritance exhaled as angst, confusion,
self-doubt,
soul psychology. Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam,
Llayne Staley and Alice In Chains. Kris Cornell and Soundgarden - screwed
up, drug
addicted, poets for the '90s mob; the generation that got lost in its own
loss of identity.
Slowly but surely as the indieness of grunge dissipated into mass appeal
and commercial conformity, the angry external railings of Metallica and
their brethren seemed a step removed. And Metallica were silent. Five
years, three post-world tour with only a minor diversion and skirmish with
60,000
of the horde at Castle Donington in England, last year.
Until Load: yes, Metallica
- Hetfield (guitar/vocals), Lars Ulrich (drums), Kirk Hammett (guitar) and
Jason Newstead (bass) - are back and the mountaintop is safe. And Hetfield
knows it; he knows he's written the best songs of his long career; he
knows
that allowing Metallica to grow up has paid off; he knows that the
symbolic shearing of the locks is more than that - the faces are as fresh
as the
sound; he knows Metallica have renounced their own inbred restrictions and
let go. What emerges is a band willing to embrace the core of hard rock,
pull from the roots of the '70s, spin a melody through the punch and
swagger,
extend technique and ability into a melting pot of ideas. Sure, the sonic
smash still pounds through a bunch of mosh majors but there's a delicacy
and new found joy in picking the heart of an acoustic, stepping on a pedal
steel guitar, toying with wah-wah; for Hetfield in singing - without
apology
- soft, deep and pure.
Similarly, the songs bend to the time: Hetfield's vision now finds the
sores
inside and exhumes his own phobia: Bleeding Me, Thorn Within, The Thorn
Within, Mama Said, a quartet of analyst's couch outpourings define the
essence of a band undergoing its own shift publicly; in their 30s
Metallica
find the neuroses of their age - and their past. Cure, Poor Twisted Me,
Wasting My Hate: the titles breathe an entrapment they previously hadn't
considered. Everything - especially godhood - has its price. Hetfield's
dis-ease is that of growing older, of wondering whether the shoe fits on
the body of rock; a change of need, masquerade, or a real-life makeover?
Self-realisation or commercial reality? The answer roars back in Load.
It stumbles out of Hetfield.
"WHAT can I say about Metallica now, I couldn't say five
years ago ... mmmm, I think we cherish our freedom a little more and the
fact we can do what the fuck we want; we've always said that but there's
always been this unwritten law in Metallica, 'you can't do this, you can't
cut your hair, you can't do that ...' Now all that's shit; just blown out
of the window.
"There's total freedom but there's such a unity in the band now with
that freedom. It's so weird. Everything is out in the open; everything is
- there's no clouds. I think everyone is very respectful of each other
and,
err, just glad things are out in the open and we can do basically what we
want. I think Jason has starred big time on this record with his playing
and Kirk has surprised me too with his rhythm and chops and things."
The metal of the matter is that Load is personal. Hetfield gets all
soft around the edges when he starts talking about the songs, his love of
songwriting: yet sometimes it's as if even James Hetfield - this strong
man - is unsure of what he's let fly, where the poetry, the very words
fell
from; and he's open for the first time. Load is Hetfield and there's
no escaping the invasion and incision of the private.
It's almost like he half expects somebody to burst out laughing at his
human
foibles; he can't even hide behind his once blonde hair. Nowhere to run.
He starts slowly.
"I think we really wanted these songs to be their own entities, have
their own characters and I think we did pretty good at that. We tried to
give each song its own flavour, even more so than on The Black Album.
"Yeah, there's a lot in the songs. It's inner feelings but this time
it's a little different because there weren't really any subject matters
I was going for. The way it always was before was I got all these subject
matters, I got all these titles, put 'em all together. This time, it's
like
'that's so fucking stale. Okay, throw that fucking book away. Let's try
something else. Just start writing just whatever comes into your head,
just
start writing. I might have an idea about where I wanted to go but I just
started writing and things came out and turned into stuff and it's like
'whoa, I didn't really want this but I got it, you know." He stops
eyeing off the purple bass leaning against the far wall, looks back and
his eyes laugh as he does.
"I guess a lot of the time I start writing and 'boom' THAT part
happens
but then you have to start thinking 'well, this part needs help now' and
really kind of tweak it and get it happening. I'm never really satisfied
with them, ever, you know. You think they could be better always."
There's a pause and then a rough chuckle, "but it's damn good. This
record's damn good. Good stuff."
His following admission is almost coy. James Hetfield enjoys
songwriting more than anything else in the five-star rock world where the
elevators to The Observatory in Sydney's exclusive The Rocks are sealed
to the third floor where he and Newstead are conducting promotional
business.
It takes a key to gain admission - or the lift has a memory lapse and
follows
2 with 4. Poetic really. "2 X 4" is track two.
Not that Hetfield cares. In his world "when the song is great and you
add a lyric that takes it to another level, there's no better feeling.
There's
a big satisfaction in that. But I don't know, it's a proud kind of feel:
'Here's my baby; look at my kid'."
And Bleeding Me is father's fave. "It's thick as snot, man,"
he enthuses sounding like gravel has suddenly imbedded itself in his lower
throat. "It's full on. It's a great song. It's got it all." It
has.
The cool is dissolving at X-Files pace. The sniff of the road is already
in his nostrils. These publicity jaunts the first stretch of the legs, a
tone-up for the year-long stampede ahead. A short trans-global over ground
by their standards that includes the headlining slot on the trimmed down
and leaner Lollapalooza '96. That's fitting too - what's more alternative
to grunge than heavy rock with metal spurs.
"Heh, heh, heh," the big man's into third. "The gears are
turning again. The fact that new record - it's hard to believe. We
struggled;
no we didn't struggle. We put a lot of work into it. A lot of fucking
time.
We shaped, we moulded, we tried so many different things; we push pulled,
there were battles internally. No doubt, this was the biggest group effort
of all the records from the four of us. But, yeah, the fact it's really
done. Coming home from New York after the war ... we were in New York two
months, mixing and finishing up vocals and I'm still writing fucking
lyrics
and shit while I'm mixing the fifth song and it's 'oh, I'd better get
going'.
"After being there for so long and not really hearing all the songs
together - especially as there's 14 songs (coming in at a second under 80
minutes, the time limit of a CD - 45 seconds of guitar and vocals had to
be faded off the album's epic 10-minute closer The Outlaw Torn'to
get everything on: the full version will see light as a future 'b- side'),
that's the most we've done on a record - so, yeah, on the flight home I
just put the DAT on and listened to it, like top to bottom, and it's like
'fuck, it's done man'. I didn't know whether to cry or scream or what.
Really, really, a good feeling, a really good feeling."
He breathes, and disappears into an even longer rant about how good
producer
Bob Rock was in the studio; how they chucked the "Metallica records
this way" rule book out of the window; how overdubbing went the same
way ("When you start overdubbing it gets tighter and you get more
anal
about things, like it's gotta be exact and 'oh, you're not on the beat'
and all that shit: we threw that out the window."); how some of the
vocal tracks went the same way and Poor Twisted Me was a scratch
vocal ("I just did it and boom").
He positively smoulders, "This time it was more GET IN THERE with
your
own microphone and start yelling, blast the speakers and we'll go with it.
I found myself in the mixes saying, 'hey turn the vocals up'. I never,
ever, would have said that before. I guess I'm proud of it or something. I
really
want people to hear all the songs. Yeah, I do."
THE CONCLUSION
"Tear me open, pour me out/ The things inside that scream and
shout"
- Until It Sleeps from 'Load' -
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