Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [151]
‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘you should try it. Before it’s too late…’ He walked off.
Later that night, over a beer and a spliff, I mentioned it to Big Mick the sound guy. Mick and I often ended up together whenever I was with Metallica. He couldn’t get good black hash in the USA, and I could rarely get good strong weed at home in London, not in the late Eighties. So we helped each other out. Somehow in Newcastle we’d both got what we were looking for. It was a day off the next day so Mick and the crew were holed up at the hotel with the band.
‘What’s this Kirk’s going on about,’ I said, ‘Rogaine? Regaine? Do you know it?’
‘Oh, Christ,’ he said. ‘It’s Kirk’s new thing. We’re carrying fucking truck-loads of it on this tour. Between that and the fucking statue there’s hardly any room for the equipment.’
Mick, with his thick, shoulder-length hair, wasn’t the kind of guy who needed to trouble himself with the ins and outs of this one so he made a joke about it instead, in lieu of changing the subject to something – anything – else. Still, I was intrigued. The next time I saw Kirk, I asked him about it.
‘Sure, man,’ he said, ‘you just rub it into your scalp like every day. You have to do it every day or it won’t work. But it’s cool. You should really try it,’ he said again. ‘Before it’s too late…’
In the careers of the most successful rock artists, certain albums become such landmark releases they afford them a certain leeway with whatever they decide to do next. When that album comes near enough to the start of an artist’s career, however, to constitute a significant breakthrough – commercially or artistically, or best of all both – if they are savvy, the logical next step is to make the follow-up along similar lines, thereby cementing their growing status among both their core constituency of fans, and keeping faith with the record company they depend on to work hard for them, plus promoters, agents, and their various media partners. Once that job is done, their fan base substantial and secure, they can then wrestle with the formula if they want to on subsequent releases. What they aren’t advised to do is risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater by trying something completely different with their breakthrough follow-up.
This was the position Metallica found themselves in 1987 when it came to planning their fourth album: not just the follow-up to their breakthrough hit, Master of Puppets, but their first without Cliff Burton. The logical, safe option would have been to make a conscious sequel, in effect Master II; to both cash in on their now-established winning formula and prove that Burton’s replacement by Jason Newsted had been achieved seamlessly. When, however, Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield came to sit down and talk about it one afternoon in October 1987, while winding through the Riff Tapes – the compilation of bits and pieces they routinely compiled between albums, little ideas that had emerged at soundcheck maybe, or odd musical movements Lars would hum and James would turn into chords on his guitar – they decided not to follow any of these rules and instead go for broke with something so completely different from what had come before as to be virtually unrecognisable from the Metallica template as established over their first three albums.
Or rather, Lars did. High on the million-selling success around the world of the Garage Days single EP and mini-album CD, and unduly taken with the rule-breaking sound of the debut album from a bunch of LA ne’er-do-wells called Guns N’ Roses, he felt the time had come for Metallica to jettison the thrash lifeboat completely and go for a whole new approach. James, inured after years of putting up with Lars’ non-stop talk of world domination, yet still lost and unsure how to proceed without Cliff’s bullshit-o-meter to guide them, merely nodded his head. What did it mean anyway, all this talk of ‘adding new elements to the sound’ that Lars was so fond of expounding on? They would just put the songs together as usual