A Discussion with James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich about Live Shit

«back to Interviews James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich about Live Shit: Binge & Purge

A Discussion with James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich about Live Shit: Binge & Purge IT IS the day before Metallica are scheduled to wrap up their latest release. As the clock strolls lazily towards 3:00 a.m., the labor of love that has become the 9 hour Live Shit: Binge & Purge project is enjoying some final touches from Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield and Mike Fraser. The Planet recording complex in Sausalito will have its normal life back tomorrow, but since the third week of July Metallica has controlled the whole building, causing it to become known (for obvious reasons) as the "Metallica Plant." It has been a gruelling, demanding, yet highly satisfying time for Hetfield and Ulrich, one which has seen an initially simpIe project
take on gargantuan proportions.
"It really started as nothing more than wanting to document the show we did on the '...Roam' tour and add
a bonus live CD," starts Ulrich.
"We asked Wayne lsham to come down and shoot those two San Diego shows at the beginning of the '...Roam' tour. He brought the whole 10-camera deal down and basically documented the two nights. It was similar to what we'd done with two Seattle shows on the '...Justice' tour. So the plan was to have a visual document of this tour and then throw in a few bonus tracks from those Seattle shows, maybe find the best 3 or so. Then the tour goes on and Mensch (Peter
Mensch who, along with Cliff Burnstein, manages Metallica) starts calling to tell us we have to start picking tracks from the San Diego stuff, so they can start editing this video package which was gonna come out toward the end of the tour. We
could've started listening to it immediately, but we didn't want to dilute our focus on tour. We were playing the stuff every night and we didn't want to spend more time listening to it on the road."
"When we finally sat down and listened to the San Diego stuff it was 15 months later in the tour, the set list was different and we were playing better. So we decided to document some more stuff because we were playing much better. Which is where the idea came from for a package that had one gig on video and a different gig on CD but both from the same tour."
"We were sitting there, at that stage, facing the fact that we had 5 nights in Mexico City. One of the things you look for when you wanna put shit on tape, whether that be audio or video, is for as many nights as possible in the same place so as you don't have to fuck with mikes and set-ups and so on. We also wanted a city where we felt we'd get some good feedback from the audience, where we'd hopefully get lifted'to another level of performance. And everything we'd heard about the whole vibe of Mexico City, the craziness and so on, made it a good choice. So then the idea came to record Mexico City just on audio, so there was one gig on CD and the San Diego stuff on video.
"We got The Plant in July, and when we started picking tracks, we started picking through the San Diego and Mexico City stuff we had. Then we were going to look at the Seattle stuff from four years ago and pick the 3 or 4 songs from that show which we didn't do on this tour, 'The Thing That Should Not Be,' the full version of 'Master Of Puppets,' '...And Justice For All' and 'Breadfan,' none of which were a regular part of the '...Roam' tour. We were hesitant about approaching the Seattle stuff, thinking that it wouldn't sound so good or that we weren't playing so well, but it had a really cool feeling, there was a
really good vibe with those gigs. So the more we listened to it the more we thought, 'Why not just fuckin' clean house and put this whole gig out too, to show the different sides of what we've been doing.' So we decided to go for that contrast, showing the '...Justice' tour where the band were physically a lot closer together onstage, and what we did we did in
'...Roam' which was more of a 'reaching out' and involving people in the arena thing. Both of them hold up really well in their own way, and together they become even more. So basically, here is 9 hours of live Metallica shit. I remember having the conversation with Cliff (Burnstein) where we said, 'Let's just fucking do this and go totally over the top.' It's pushing things further than we've ever pushed anything and, as far as we can tell, further than anybody else ever has." Hetfield was initially against releasing the Seattle "...Justice" tour footage.
"I wanted to hang onto Seattle for a long time, because it was the only properly shot old shit we had. It had a lot of stuff that we, myself anyway, didn't really wanna get rid of right now. We'd always talked of it being something that would come out I0 years down the line, like, 'Wow here's some vintage crap that's never been seen and, wow, it's on proper film,' that sort of thing. But as we started watching it, we found that it was pretty alright stuff, and we agreed to just get it all out now so as it doesn't look really out of place later. If we'd held on, it could've been a situation where we're rockin' along and this
thing comes out 10 years later, people see it and start saying 'HEY ... they used to be good!' hahaha. " The much-discussed "de-climatization" from 2 years on tour has gone on rather longer, and been a good deal
more intense, than was envisaged in late June/early July.
"This thing has wound me up more than anything on tour," chuckles Hetfield, "it hasn't been a 'winding down' process at all. It really snowballed into something we didn't think would take so long. We, ended up mixing in three studios with three different people, so we were running between rooms. It was a three ring circus where we just took over the whole joint (the Plant Studios). Including this here (points to the small room we're sitting in, which looks to have been a large closet). We had them do this up so we had somewhere to get away from this shit! hahaha. We were obsessed or possessed by this thing, we had to be there. Even if someone elsewas producing it, we'd still have to be here. That's just the way it is."
ULRICH: "It was like a revolving door between the studios, go in and check a mix, run over to the another room and check one edit, come in here run over to another room and check the videos, come in here and check the videos coming up from LA and run 16-18 hour days. A lot of the assistant engineers would bed down here in their sleeping bags and not have days off for weeks at a time.
"But referring to that 'de-climatization' point. It's been about 3 1/2 years from when we started writing the last album, and I think we had this idea that after what we'd been through on the tour, we'd come home and not be able to spend as much time dealing with this as we have. That was obviously a very ignorant train of thought that maybe got us throuh the tour, especially knowing how anal we tend to get when it comes to this phase of any project we're involved in. It has turned into a bigger thing, but I think it's turned into a great way of getting the last 3 1/2 years out of our systems. Now the slate really is completely clean. We wrote the album, made the album, toured the album and here's the documentation of the album's music on the road. Now we can take our 9 months or whatever off and start with a clean slate. Everything about this tour is gone. It will enable us to completely let go of everything from the last few years, and when we begin to approach the next album we can do so without any lingering, left-over baggage."
HETFIELD: "Everything we've been hanging onto is out and gone. Every song we've written, everything we've had on video is GONE!" There could be criticism of releasing this much material at once, as well as coughs over the price tag.
HETFIELD: "If we put these things out separately over the years, it would cost the same amount of money, maybe more. It seems that other bands put crap out because 'wow we need money' or something, and this is absolutely NOT that! It's chock full of various stuff, more than enough, more-than-enough. There's stuff in the book we shouldn't even be showing people, some of the faxes and stuff. It is way over the top and yeah, I think it's great. Nothing's really stood out like this does, as far as live albums or videos are concerned."
ULRICH: "Looking around and seeing what other bands have done with their situations, a single video and a double video, a single CD and a double CD, a third CD with two different posters and a bonus live track, I feel that's really ripping people off. What we're doing is saying, 'Here it is, take it or leave it.' And the reason it costs $89.95 is not so we and Elektra can walk away with big fat bank accounts, it's basically to cover the fucking costs of about 2 1/2 million bucks. Our management did a survey and discovered that this is the most expensive packaging anybody has ever put together. You've got everything
in there, 9 hours of music, 72 page book, backstage passes, stencil, keys to our houses ... so fuck, take it or leave it!"
Metallica have always pushed boundaries: their career was founded on such principles. Did this live set become a challenge, to break the boundaries of how one presents live material?
ULRICH: "That wasn't the strategy, you've got to realize that with us things always build..."
HETFIELD: "...into a frenzy. We knew this could kill a lot of people, including ourselves! hahahahaha. This is just one huge Metalli-hell, 'Hell For All,' victims everywhere!

ULRICH: "Like it says in the sleeve notes tbat James and I wrote to explain what this is all about, we know that this is pushing it but can you handle it, pussies? We know it, you know it, so let's give it a go and see what happens. I think this package also has a longevity factor. You can go back to it for a long, long time finding different things in the music and in the videos, because there's so much material. Everytime you open that 72 page booklet, you'll be able to find something different to see." The idea of printing some of those "personal" tour faxes is, indeed, a first. It effectively puts a bunch of (at
times dirty) tour laundry out for public consumption.
HETFIELD: "There's a lot of stuff people don't need to, or shouldn't really, see in there. It's not really 'insider' stuff to us, it's just everyday crap we deal with on tour. It may seem super-inside to other people, but it's our lives. There's nothing in there that could really embarrass us, that'd be pretty hard, but it might embarrass some other people involved. There could be a few phone numbers that need to be changed, hahaha. "
ULRICH: "Me and Jaines ended up finding a lot of cool fax-shit We thought would be fun to share, to give people an idea of what happens in our little daily road world. Once again, it started out as 10 pages, but once I dug through my stuff there was so much cool shit that covered very angle of our lives, even that snowballedl"

Discuss exactly what kind of work was done in the studio, and explode the myth that there were 5 million overdubs right here and now.
ULRICH: "I can say officially that it doesn't have to be that way with live albums. For us, the burden of the work was in selecting exactly what music we wanted. There were 15 hours of music from Mexico City, two nights from Seattle, two from San Diego, all in all about 25 hours of music. There were two phases of this project. The first month was pretty much weeding through all the stuff and picking the best performances of each song from each night. The second part was mixing it together and making it sound as good as possible without losing what live shit's all about: we didn't want to lose that
'live' thing. And dealing with three different gigs, two videos and a CD, we decided that instead of having one video guy and one audio guy, we'd get different people for each video and the CD. All the gigs retain their own personality that way, everything has a different series of flavors.
"We took a 'documentary' approach towards the shows. The gigs are whole gigs, not half of a gig or 14 out of 18 songs, it's the first note to last note of three different shows."
No fancy editing?
"No. Everything's in, I know some people will moan that there's three bass solos and three guitar solos in the package..."
HETFIELD: "...And that the sing-along's boring as sbit, that the spaces between songs are too long. But that's how it really is, and people aren't used to reality witb live releases," Metallica have always done plenty of media work in the past, but Live Shit: Binge & Purge is the first release Metallica will do no interviews for. The reason is simple enough.
ULRICH: "Everything about the project is self-explanatory. Once people know the facts and read the note James and I wrote explaining the whole deal, there won't be anything else to know. So with everything being so self-explanatory, for us to sit down and be bombarded with interviews about what the next album's gonna sound like is something we don't need to deal with right now. " For me there's no definitive way to look at this," concludes Ulrich, "it's our first attempt at a live package and it's definitely the right time in our career to do this. It's also the right time for us to take a step away from
everything for however long. And it's the perfect way to leave our hardcore fans witb something to listen to while we're away."
11/93

«back to Interviews