Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [170]
It certainly did. What were these ‘certain things’ Burnstein spoke of, though; what ‘games’ would they need to play? Top of the list was finding a producer who could drag Metallica out of the heavy metal ghetto Justice had left them to rot in. Someone who understood the rock genre intimately enough to deliver an album that would retain the credibility the band had painstakingly built up over the years, but for whom the words ‘hit single’ were not some form of blasphemy. Someone, above all, with a proven record of mainstream success but who also had a detailed enough knowledge of what Metallica’s music was at least supposed to be about. In the summer of 1990, there were very few names that sprang easily to mind able to fulfil such a remit. The biggest, most fashionable rock band in the world was then Guns N’ Roses, whose Appetite album had now sold nearly ten million copies worldwide, and Metallica had already tried – and failed – working with their producer Mike Clink. The only other rock album in recent times that had emulated those numbers and made any sort of statement musically had been Def Leppard’s Hysteria. But the producer of that album, Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, was a genius-perfectionist who used the studio like a blank canvas upon which he ‘painted’ his own highly evolved spectrum of sounds. A brilliant multi-instrumentalist in his own right, ‘Mutt’ was the kind of producer who insisted guitarists strike one string at a time, over and over again in order for him to build up the sound of the chords himself on computer; whose intricately layered vocals – lead and backing – comprised dozens of voices in harmony and counterpoint, interwoven and spun like silk; the sort of visionary technician who had long since abandoned the idea of using a ‘live’ drummer in the studio – years before it became the norm – so he could create more persuasive percussion sounds himself; a maverick conductor directing queer lightning. The idea of putting ‘Mutt’ together with Metallica was like asking a Formula One racing champion to pilot a chariot of horses, albeit highly trained thoroughbreds whose odds on winning were now seductively short, but animals nonetheless. Lange had also recently made it clear to Q Prime that he felt he had taken Def Leppard – until then, their best-selling, starriest clients – as far as he could and that he was now looking for something new, something more demanding from whatever project he next took on. Not remodelling Frankenstein’s monster to look like Marilyn Monroe.
Q Prime did have one suggestion, though: a Canadian producer named Bob Rock, whose stock was riding high for the incredible jobs he had done on two of the biggest-selling rock albums in America of the past year: The Cult’s Sonic Temple and Mötley Crüe’s Dr Feelgood. James, true to his nature, was sceptical: ‘No one fucks with our shit.’ And months later, when I paid a visit to One on One studios to interview Lars about how the new album was coming along, he would tell me they had ended up working with Rock almost by accident. But the truth was Lars had needed little persuading, having become enthralled by the volcanic drum sounds on both Cult and Crüe albums.
‘We’d never really