Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [186]
The only person left who still demanded yet more was the boy for whom nothing was ever quite enough: Lars Ulrich. Indeed, if the first decade of Metallica’s incident-filled career had been testament to his drive, his ambition and – not to be underestimated – his ability to accommodate the increasingly forceful personality of James Hetfield, even, for a short time, that of the mercurial Cliff Burton, the next ten years would say even more about Ulrich’s fathomless desire to lift the whole enterprise still higher. Higher than anyone, perhaps not even Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch, would have been able to dream possible. Certainly further than Metallica’s own fans could have imagined; so much so, the very concept of Metallica – all the old notions of what they stood for – would become stretched so thin that many older fans would follow them no further, disillusioned by what they saw as the band’s ultimate sell-out. Not the making of an ultra-commercial album like Black, but, conversely, the conception of albums that, in their own hazardous way, ran against the grain more wilfully than anything they had managed in even their earliest, fiercest days. What James later called, with more than a hint of sarcasm: ‘The great reinvention of Metallica.’
And so it was. Not just in the Metallica sound, either, but in the actual look of the band – most symbolically, their suddenly much-shortened hair. ‘It’s not like we all went out together for a group haircut,’ said Lars, when I teased him about it in 2009. But in many ways that’s exactly what they did do – or certainly appeared to have done, when the first publicity pictures of the ‘reinvented’ Metallica were published in the summer of 1996, in time for the release of their new album, Load, the much-anticipated, utterly unexpected follow-up to Black. There was also the equally sudden appearance of piercings, tattoos and – most shocking of all for hardcore metal fans – make-up. It was one thing seeing Kirk Hammett – always the most (comparatively) effeminate of the group – posing in mascara, showing off his new body tattoos and face piercings, including a labret (a small, silver spike) dangling below his lower lip, camping it up for all he was worth in order to alter the public perception of who the people in Metallica really were. Seeing Lars imitating him, though stopping short of the extravagant tattoos (Lars was game, not reckless), was also strangely digestible, knowing what lengths Lars would go to in order to keep Metallica in the public eye. Looking at James Hetfield, however, in his newly pompadoured hairdo and thick black eyeliner, sitting there in a white vest smoking a cigar, it seemed momentarily as though the world had gone mad. (The only one somewhat off the pace, as usual, was Jason, who had cut his hair short some months before and was actually in the process of growing it back when the first Load publicity pictures were taken.) There was pushing the envelope and then there was tearing it to pieces and tossing it in the air like confetti. Suddenly in 1996, Metallica – in the shape of Lars and his new closest ally in the band, Kirk – seemed perilously close to doing the latter. It was as though Lemmy had suddenly walked onstage in a long evening gown and tiara. Actually, it was more shocking than that. Lemmy would clearly have been joking. Metallica clearly were not. As one magazine editor within my earshot put it, when first perusing the Load promo shots, thereby summing up the reaction of a generation, ‘What the fuck is this?’
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