Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [171]
This was disingenuous, to say the least. Lars had been as intrigued by the prospect of possibly bringing in Bob Rock as he had been previously with Mike Clink. Hanging out with The Cult on tour the previous summer, the Sonic Temple album had been a favourite on his Walkman, as had Dr Feelgood. He was also big rock star buddies now with both Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and The Cult’s Matt Sorum. He had been awestruck by what Rock had done for them in the studio. Plus, and most importantly, if Metallica was to go ‘next-level’, as Lars put it, with their next album it was clear they could no longer go it alone in the studio with Flemming Rasmussen. They just needed coaxing in the right direction. Shrewdly, Q Prime agreed to put Rasmussen on retainer for a month, in case things with Rock didn’t work out, à la Clink, but from the moment Lars and James – alone – agreed to fly up to Vancouver and meet with Rock at his home, in the wake of their ‘very famous meeting’ with Burnstein just weeks before, the scene was set for Metallica to make what would be the most radical move of their career: go for broke with a big hit-making record. ‘We told [Bob] that live we have this great vibe and that’s what we wanted to do in the studio,’ Lars said, ‘It’s really funny ’cos he turned around and said, “When I saw you guys live and then heard your record I thought that you hadn’t come close to capturing what you do in a live situation.” He basically said the same thing as we had and from then on we thought that maybe we shouldn’t be so stubborn and maybe see where the fuck this would bring us.’
Where it brought them to was a place where James, who had once written ‘Kill Bon Jovi’ on his guitar, was now ready to spend months in the studio with one of the chief architects behind Bon Jovi’s biggest hits; the place where Mötley Crüe, leaders of the selfsame scene Metallica had originally fled LA to escape, had made their biggest-selling album. What they hadn’t bargained for was how hard Rock would make them work for their money.
Like all the best producers, Bob Rock was himself a more than able musician, adept on guitar, bass and keyboards. He had started out in his own band, The Payola$, who had a hit in Canada with the single, ‘Eye of a Stranger’. The band later metamorphosed into Prism but it was his work as engineer with Prism producer Bruce Fairbairn at Little Mountain Sound studios in Vancouver that really made his name in the music business. Fairbairn’s big break came through his work in the early 1980s on behalf of another, more successful Canadian band, Loverboy, who enjoyed a number of hits there and in North America with Bruce as producer and Bob as his engineer and point man. Working together and separately out of Little Mountain, they had created platinum-selling albums for second-division leaders such as Survivor, Loverboy and Black ’N Blue, before really hitting the big time in 1986 with Bon Jovi, whose Slippery When Wet album – and attendant hit singles ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ and ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ – had single-handedly saved the band’s till-then faltering career. (They had been on the verge of being dropped by their label – Phonogram, the same label Metallica was now signed to – when Fairbairn worked his magic, turning it into the