Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [116]
Afterwards, back at the Scandinavia Hotel, I sat with Lars in the bar talking, drinking Elephant beer as we taped an interview. At one point I asked why so many of their more towering numbers seemed to change course so often, going from hoodlum-fast to zombie-slow, often just as things were really starting to get going. He asked for an example and I pointed to one of the songs they had just played me: ‘Master of Puppets’. ‘What a riff!’ I told him. ‘Sabbath would have killed for that in their heyday. Then, just as things really started to take off, this big downward curve; like taking the record off and putting something else on.’ Why did they have to do that? He looked at me, stunned. ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about that,’ he frowned. ‘It may be that we try hard to stay as unpredictable as possible.’ He sat there chewing it over. I hadn’t meant to confuse him, it just seemed…well, an obvious question. ‘We don’t like the idea of playing it safe at all,’ he eventually decided. ‘We always like to try and do things that work out a bit different from what even we imagined them to be.’ He concluded, ‘I think the key to any success we might have as a band lies in the fact that we follow our own instincts, and not what we think people want to hear.’
Five years later, once it no longer mattered, he was able to be more honest with me, and would ruminate on how ‘in the past we’d do a rough version of a song and I’d go home and time it and go, “It’s only seven and a half minutes!” I’d think, “Fuck, we’ve got to put another couple of riffs in there.”’ In 1985, however, right there as they were finishing up what was to become one of the most important albums of their career, he immediately went on the defensive at any suggestion that the songs might be overlong or unnecessarily convoluted: ‘There have been times when we’ve been working on a new number that has started life as maybe a four- or five-minute piece. But we’ve ended up extending it just because our ideas haven’t ended there.’ He added tetchily, ‘If we can make the number a bit longer, a bit more interesting, and still make it work, then why not?’
When I teased him and asked if they had ever tried – just once – to write a commercial hit song, he relaxed again and admitted, ‘One time and one time only,’ citing ‘Escape’, in so many words, their Thin Lizzy-esque romp from Ride. The fact that neither Music for Nations nor Elektra had eventually chosen it as a single – the former preferring the more à la mode ‘Creeping Death’, the latter not bothering to release a single at all – only reinforced their conviction, he said, that they should never ‘depend on adapting to whatever mode popular music is in at any given moment. We’re into sticking to what we wanna do, sticking to all the things we, as a band, believe in. And if we can stick to what we are, sooner or later people will have to change their ideas about us and not the other way around.’
I had been asked not to throw the ‘thrash’ word around willy-nilly, but of course I couldn’t resist. What about it? I asked. Caught between the inevitable accusations of sell-out from the hardcore thrash crowd that would surely come their way once their fans had heard the new album, and the blind prejudices of mainstream critics who had never even listened to their music, merely knew the name as synonymous with thrash metal, might they be in danger of pleasing no one but themselves? Lars shrugged, admitted the whole subject irritated him ‘a lot’, insisting they would receive the recognition they needed from the people who mattered most – Metallica fans. Fuck the critics. ‘If you take the extremes on our new album, which to my mind would be “Damage, Inc.