Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [185]
The truth of that, though, would only be revealed later. Much later, and only then when it was all but too late to do anything good – anything real – about it.
Twelve
Loaded
It was a phone interview. Where once phone interviews had been the option of last resort, by the mid-1990s they were increasingly becoming the norm. The recession of the early Nineties had forced record companies to cut back on their budgets; overseas trips were not as common as they had been. More to the point, the advent of grunge had killed off so many of the old Eighties-style rock stars, magazines such as Kerrang! were also now starting to suffer, caught between dramatically reduced circulation and the fact that grunge stars like Nirvana and Pearl Jam simply didn’t see themselves as Kerrang!-type bands. If you weren’t from the NME or the Melody Maker you were…well, somewhere much lower down the list.
Phone interviews it was then, unless it was a cover story or a similarly multi-page splurge. This was a glorified news story. That is, a feature-length, colour piece at the front of the mag but not yet a cover – that would come later when the band arrived to headline Donington. In the meantime, the record company drone explained, as Lars and the boys were still in America it was the phone or nothing. No biggie, I decided, it wasn’t like I didn’t know what he looked like…
‘Hey, Mick,’ he drawled down the phone that night. ‘Good to speak with you again, man, what’s up?’
I explained the deal, like he didn’t know already, and we got straight to it. I was spending the evening at home in my one-bedroom loft apartment in London. He had just gotten out of bed at his mansion in the plush Marin County part of northern San Francisco, where it was now early afternoon.
‘Hey, I’m sorry we couldn’t do this in person,’ he said. ‘It’s just our schedules…’
‘Not a problem,’ I said. And it wasn’t.
We chatted for twenty minutes, did our stuff, then said our goodbyes.
‘Hey, good talking to you,’ he said, ‘let’s have a beer or something when we next come over.’
‘Absolutely. And if I don’t see you before, see you at Donington!’
‘Cool, man. Bye.’
I hung up. Nice guy, I thought. Despite…everything.
The next day I was chatting on the phone to someone who still worked closely with the band. I told him about talking with Lars the night before.
‘Why did you interview him on the phone?’ he said. ‘Why not just wait and see him when he’s here?’
‘Because they need the story in time for the Donington announcement next week,’ I explained.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but he’s here tomorrow.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s here in London tomorrow.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah. He’s coming in to buy some antiques. Wants to keep it quiet, though, doesn’t want to get hassled by the usual…you know…’
We paused as what he was saying sunk in.
‘I don’t think he’s staying for long, though,’ he said, running to catch up. ‘Probably only a couple of days or so…’
‘And of course he’ll be busy.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Buying antiques…’
‘Mmm…don’t say I said so though.’
If the story of Metallica had ended with those final grand stadia shows in the summer of 1993, nobody could have complained. Over the past decade they had gone from LA outcasts – runts of the Sunset Strip litter, forced to try their luck elsewhere – to the very biggest, possibly even best, heavy metal band in the world. From the high-spirited but cringingly clichéd riffage of Kill ’Em All to the panoramic, calculated cool of the Metallica album, so mind-bogglingly popular they named it twice, where they went next, what they did from now on no longer mattered, not really. Certainly not to James Hetfield. As long as the band continued to make