Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [169]
‘Golden fuckin’ arches,’ growled James, still not looking at us but apparently tuned in.
‘Yeah!’ said Bob enthusiastically. ‘They do a great deal at weekends now, too. Like a kids’ burger and fries meal, with a Coke for like a buck and a half.’
‘Fuckin’ A,’ said James, reaching for the remote. He began zapping through channels till he came to the news. Bush was on talking up his victory in the Gulf.
‘I don’t get it why he didn’t just keep going till he reached Baghdad,’ I said, just throwing it out, like one of the regular guys.
‘Yeah,’ said Bob. ‘Like finish the job…’
‘Nuke ’em till they glow,’ said James.
Oh god, I thought. I can’t keep up with this. I can’t tell any more who’s joking and who’s not. Red meat, I thought. White bread…Jesus, where am I?
The summer of 1990 found Metallica at another crossroads. On paper, they were now one of the biggest, most fêted heavy metal bands in the world. Earlier that year they had won the Grammy they should have picked up a year before, this time for ‘One’. They would also win a second Grammy in 1991 for their cover of Queen’s ‘Stone Cold Crazy’, bashed-out as-live, Garage Days-style, for the double Rubáiyát album, a compilation of cover tracks to mark the fortieth anniversary of Elektra Records. ‘Let’s put it this way,’ Lars told me at the time, ‘if we release anything for the rest of the Nineties, every year we’ll get a Grammy for it just because they fucked up that first year.’ It was a prediction that turned out to be remarkably prescient. In terms of where Metallica went next, however, in reality their options had narrowed so dramatically in the wake of the one-dimensional …And Justice for All album that their choices were suddenly few. They could carry on the way they were going, make ‘another Metallica album’, sell another couple of million worldwide, and settle for being their generation’s Iron Maiden, who had settled for being Judas Priest, who had settled for being Black Sabbath, who had settled for never being quite as important as Led Zeppelin, who were still not, in the Nineties, regarded as being remotely as interesting as Cream or even Jeff Beck, who, let’s face it, were never going to be as highly regarded by history as Jimi Hendrix or The Who, both of whom lagged behind the Stones, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and so on back into rock antiquity. Or Metallica could do what they had always insisted they would when the time came and do something utterly unexpected and fabulous. Rewrite the rulebook.
Easier said than done, of course, in an era when it was already felt that it had all been seen and heard before. There was, however, one area left that a band as defiantly uncommercial – on the surface, at least – as Metallica might aim for, which could not have been foreseen. To make the one record – the one outrageous move – they had sworn as kids they would fight to the death not to make. Yet the one, as men, they were now swiftly coming to realise their musical lives might depend on. That is, something so blatantly, unprepossessingly commercial no one – not even Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield – could have seen it coming.
First, though, like reluctant virgins on their wedding nights, the boys in the band would have to be wooed. Whatever else it was, Justice was a hit. Yet they would not be able to get away with making another album as ponderous and unfriendly to newcomers as that. Not if they wanted their career to continue on its upward trajectory. The question was: did they have the courage to try and take Metallica to the next level? Or had they, perhaps, already reached their highest plateau? How, in fact, did Lars and James see the story of Metallica panning out now that they had reached this point? The person who would put these questions to them was Cliff Burnstein.
Lars later recalled what he characterised as ‘a very famous meeting in Toronto’ in July 1990, at a festival where Metallica was appearing second on