Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [174]
Powerful yes, but made even more so by Rock’s last-minute addition of an orchestra, its score arranged by Michael Kamen. A production touch the band would never have considered themselves, their first reaction to it was negative. Listening back to it late one night, however, they suddenly saw the light. ‘I used to call James Dr No,’ Rock recalled. ‘Whenever I was about to make a suggestion that seemed even a little off the wall, he’d say no before I’d even finished the first sentence.’ It was the same when he also created a subtle bed of cellos for another sweepingly balladic track, ‘The Unforgiven’, underpinning the obvious Morricone influence with something even more impressive. Or the sitar-like guitar intro to ‘Wherever I May Roam’; the bugling refrain from Leonard Bernstein’s ‘America’ at the start of ‘Don’t Tread on Me’; the marching-band drums and bagpipe guitar at the start of ‘The Struggle Within’. Even on the more obvious thrash-derived numbers such as ‘Holier Than Thou’, ‘Through the Never’ or ‘The Struggle Within’, Rock’s influence meant the band now sauntered into view where previously they had simply battered at the door until it splintered; pedestrian thrash-templates transformed by the imaginative sum of the production into something greater than their otherwise predictable individual parts.
At other times, the producer simply insisted that they play together as a band live in the studio, as on the rhythm track to the monumental ‘Sad but True’. Recalled Kirk: ‘The energy coming off all of us playing was so intense and so locked into the groove, with so much attitude, that Bob Rock said, “We could take this track right here off the floor and put it straight on the album because all you guys played your asses off.”’ It was a musical adventurousness mirrored by Hetfield’s new boldness with his lyrics. No longer did the words come from watching CNN, as they had for much of Justice. Now they came from somewhere much closer to home. In ‘The God That Failed’, he addressed specifically his mother’s unnecessarily agonising death due to her devout, to the point of perversity, religious beliefs. ‘Don’t Tread on Me’, a ‘God Bless America’ for the Nineties, seemed shocking coming so soon after the anti-war stance of their till-then most famous song ‘One’. ‘Of Wolf and Man’, meanwhile, gloried in his love of the outdoorsman’s life, fishing and shooting: ‘I hunt / Therefore I am…’ Tellingly, the album’s weakest track is its longest and the one which harks back most to the band’s earlier days: ‘My Friend of Misery’, a mid-paced, blustering meditation on the ego-ravages of stardom. Buried at the back of the album, this was the only track on which Jason Newsted was given a co-credit, and it was saved only by its Who-like mid-section where Hammett’s guitar at least brings to it a certain poise. The bullying may have subsided now the band was off the road, but Jason’s part in the creative process was still extremely limited. He hoped this would change as time passed and his role naturally grew. He hoped in vain.
In fact, all the playing on the album – including the vastly improved drums – excels on every level but Hammett’s guitar, in particular, is exquisite throughout. Again, though, the biggest surprise comes from Hetfield, whose vocals take a quantum leap forward from the macho posturing of even his best Master- and Justice-era efforts, towards a more sensitive (his almost spoken-word outro on ‘Nothing Else Matters’), even sweet (his high vocals on the chorus of ‘The Unforgiven’) quality unheard of before in his work. Even his guitar playing betrays a tinkling, newfound delicacy, as on the superb acoustic and electric playing on ‘Nothing Else Matters’, including the achingly searching guitar solo – so much so, indeed, that Hammett does not feature anywhere on the track.
The stand-out tracks, however, are its opening brace: