Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [123]
‘What it all came down to,’ said Lars, when we spoke in 2009, ‘was the element of variety. It was like, after you’ve written “Fight Fire with Fire” [and] “Battery”…what else are you gonna do? By repeating it you run the risk of watering it down, because they’ll never be as good as what you’ve already done. Or you have to go somewhere else and try something else. And for us, we had to go somewhere else and try something else, because there was too much other stuff that turned us on.’ As he pointed out, ‘I’ve heard in interviews that Kerry King has a very musical broad taste, and Scott Ian and all these guys. But we…just…went for it. And I’m not saying that in a self-congratulatory way but we sort of had a little of the devil-may-care attitude. Because I think we pretty early on said listen, we’re Metallica, we do what we do, and off we go now, we’re gonna try all these different things and have fun on all these different levels.’ Determined not to be ‘boxed in by the one-dimensionality of the thrash label’ they had braced themselves for ‘a fucking uproar in the thrash community about the sell-outs and the acoustic guitars and all that. But we had to go on that path because that was the truth; that was our truth. The sell-out would have been not to do it because then we would have bullshitted ourselves and bullshitted our fans, and that wouldn’t be right.’
Master of Puppets would also, symbolically, become the album that defined Metallica’s philosophy from now on. Already so far ahead of the game in terms of whatever Slayer or Megadeth and Anthrax might be doing, far from competing for the thrash crown, Metallica had its sights set on the same mainstream rock audience that would make Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time, also released in 1986, and Ozzy Osbourne’s The Ultimate Sin, released the same month as Master of Puppets, the highest American-charting albums to date of both respective artists’ careers. Far from being the year of thrash, the biggest-selling rock record of 1986 was Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, an album that epitomised the safe-as-milk, art-for-art’s-sake, hits-for-fuck’s-sake Reaganomic rock of the era more perfectly than any other. While Metallica weren’t looking to sell their music to exactly the same audience, in Lars Ulrich they had at least one member who recognised they were in exactly the same business and on that level at least – making chart albums, selling out tours, building up as broad a fan base as possible – Metallica certainly did want to compete.
In America the spread of coverage for Master of Puppets in the print media stretched as far as generally good regional newspaper reviews and the to-be-expected smattering of raves in the metal-specific rock magazines such as Faces and Hit Parader. But the heavyweight mainstream magazines like Rolling Stone still kept their distance, except in the context of a general overview of the rapidly ripening thrash culture. Most gallingly, Metallica found it all but impossible to gain a foothold even in the most specialist areas of FM rock radio. With no cool video to help spread the word via MTV either, the band would have to rely on promoting their album the old-fashioned way: by simply getting out there and touring. Or as Kirk put it, ‘just go on the road and tour until we dropped, which is what we literally did’. Here they did get an important leg-up, though, thanks again to the impeccable connections of Q Prime, who were able to buy them onto Ozzy Osbourne’s mammoth summer tour.
‘That was a real break for us,’ Lars admitted. ‘At the time, Ozzy was perceived as one of the most controversial metal stars in the US – he drew a really extreme type of crowd – which suited us down to the ground, because here we were as this even more extreme up-and-coming metal band that Ozzy was giving his kind of seal of approval to by taking out on tour with him.’ Ozzy later told me he’d never even heard of Metallica