Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [180]
But even if Cliff Burton would have been comfortable with the shift in musical direction, how he would have responded to the other changes in the band remains open to speculation. What would their ‘big brother’ have made, for example, of them all living in LA during their near-year making the album, where they were all in their various ways now caught up in the rock star life, frequenting the Rainbow (the Hollywood watering hole where Led Zeppelin enjoyed some of their most notorious groupie-baiting nights) and hanging out with new friends such as the guys in Guns N’ Roses and Skid Row? How would Cliff have reacted to the new era in the band where music was still important, but no longer the most important thing once they left the studio and earnest Bob behind each night and headed back to West Hollywood and the chicks and the coke and the booze and the twinkling neon ooze of Sunset Strip after dark, the high-five, hair-metal sound of KNAC blaring from the car radio?
Speaking to me almost twenty years later, Lars confessed, ‘Whenever I think of the Black Album now, I think of spending a year in LA. I think of hanging out with Guns N’ Roses, I think of hanging out with Skid Row, who were there making records at the same time. I think of going out to the studio in the Valley every day and fighting with Bob Rock about what was going on. I think of all the late nights and early mornings, probably the craziest year of my life in LA, living everything that you can imagine when you’re twenty-six years old in LA and your dick is fucking six feet long.’ It was, he added, ‘great’. These were the days when Lars, James and Kirk (although still not Jason) would form an impromptu band one night with Axl Rose, Slash and Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses, also roping in Skid Row singer Sebastian Bach, under the ha-ha name of Gack – insider slang for coke – to play a set at a birthday party for RIP, the most hellacious hair-metal magazine in America, at the Hollywood Palladium; the days when Lars and James would visit Slash at his pad for some ‘outrageous partying’. In his autobiography, Slash recalls ‘a girl James wanted to fuck and I let him take her into my bedroom. They were in there for a while and I had to get in there to get something, so I crept in quietly and saw James head-fucking her. He was standing on the bed, ramming her head against the wall, moaning in that thunderous voice of his, just slamming away, and bellowing, “That’ll be fine! That’ll be fine! Yes! That’ll be fine!”’
The real fun, however, didn’t begin until the band was back out on tour – although on the surface it appeared that there at least they were trying to move away from, as Lars put it, ‘the metal clichés’. Just as they had worked to expunge the obvious ‘tells’ from their music and artwork, purged from their new stage show was the Iron Maiden-influenced paraphernalia of the Damaged Justice tour. Performing on an unadorned diamond-shaped stage, the emphasis was now on crowd interaction, with Kirk able to seemingly walk among the crowd while soloing and Lars on a movable drum-riser able to reach either side of the stage. Giant video screens were now mounted front and side, broadcasting close-ups of the band throughout, and the lightshow was much more subtle, blinding white light one moment, deep limpid shadow the next, casting James’ face in a suitably eerie glow, à la the ‘Enter Sandman’ video. Even Jason now had more of a feature. Besides his never-quite-Cliff bass solo he got to perform a lead-vocal cameo on ‘Seek and Destroy’ – which also allowed James the space to roam free among the audience in the new show’s most impressive innovation: the Snake Pit – an area set aside solely