Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [166]
The full, unedited video was nearly eight minutes long. Like the single, however, it was also made available to TV in edited form, minus the film footage, with a fade on the final couple of minutes of music. ‘They never really objected,’ said Salomon. ‘They held off their judgement until they saw the final piece. By that point, three or four weeks later, they had gotten used to the idea.’ Even then it was so at odds with prevailing trends in Eighties rock video, one MTV executive told Cliff Burnstein the only place ‘One’ would be seen was on the news. Undeterred, Q Prime applied its customary behind-the-scenes muscle and the full ‘One’ video was premiered on MTV on the night of 22 January 1989, on that week’s edition of Headbanger’s Ball. It instantly became the most requested video on MTV.
Smelling a hit, both Elektra and Phonogram prepared to issue the single in multiple formats, along with the specially edited versions for radio. By February, ‘One’ had become the first Metallica single to reach the US Top Forty, peaking at Number Thirty-Five; while in the UK it reached Number Thirteen. Dave Thorne, who became ‘very involved’ in the UK and European campaign for both the Justice album and, specifically, ‘One’, immediately grasped its potential for changing the whole perception of Metallica: ‘I did some research and discovered that the book had been banned under the McCarthy era and was still unavailable in the UK or Europe. So I went to the publisher in America and we bought like five hundred copies then distributed them to the media so they could read the story and understand what the song or the video was all about. That had an enormous latent impact in getting people to realise that this was a band that wasn’t just about noise and speed and headbanging. There was a deep, meaningful side to it.’
Under Thorne’s aegis, Phonogram sent out the ‘One’ single with the book and a VHS cassette of the video as a press pack to shrewdly targeted music press people on Sounds, NME, Melody Maker, Q and numerous broadsheet newspaper critics, plus key figures at Radio 1, and all the commercial networks that aired weekly rock shows on their stations. ‘It was a watershed moment. We definitely felt that.’ ‘One’ single-handedly moved Metallica out of the same bracket in people’s perceptions as Iron Maiden or Black Sabbath, and closer to that elevated realm of mainstream rock stars who actually had something to say: ‘Metallica became the band that everybody revered because they just seemed to be able to take things to a level that the other [thrash] bands couldn’t, and also do it in a way that was just so cool and understated really.’
‘One’ also achieved another landmark for Metallica when it attracted the attention of that year’s Grammy academicians, the band becoming shortlisted for the newly created award: ‘Best Hard Rock / Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental’. ‘“One” proved to us that things we thought of as evil aren’t as evil as we thought,’ said Lars, accommodatingly, ‘as long as we do it our way.’ The Grammys show took place at the Shrine Auditorium in LA on 22 February, where the band was invited to perform their much-discussed new song. It was a momentous occasion, the first time an unashamedly ‘heavy metal’ band had actually played live at the Grammys – even though it was the truncated, five-minute version of the song. Shrouded in shadows, colours muted so that they looked almost black and white, it was a stupendous performance from a band that Kirk later admitted was ‘very nervous’ playing for all the suits and ties. ‘We were like diplomats or representatives for this genre of music.’ There was a sense of outrage, however, when the band missed out on the award itself, that honour inexplicably going to Jethro Tull for their Crest of a Knave album – a decision