Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [187]
In 1992, the NME had pronounced new boys Nirvana ‘the Guns N’ Roses it’s okay to like’. It was a superbly telling phrase that Lars, although he initially railed against it, had quickly taken onboard, as first Nirvana, then Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains and countless other, lesser lights that trailed in their blaze changed the face of rock so dramatically it became virtually unrecognisable to all but its newest followers. While on the surface albums such as Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten sat easily in the same collections as Appetite for Destruction and Black, beneath the surface it was clear something entirely different, something radical and new was now going on. This was rock but no longer with a capital ‘R’. As if to emphasise its essential difference from what had immediately come before, most of the grunge bands had short hair and sported goatees, eschewed the costumed glamour of Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard et al in favour of genuinely battered old jeans and ill-fitting plaid shirts; the whole thrift-store look as down-tuned as their guitars. Most bizarrely, they all came not from New York or LA, or even London or San Francisco, but from a rainy north-western outpost named Seattle, famous previously for nothing much bar its micro-breweries and coffee bars and its thriving Boeing factory (soon to be overtaken as the number one local employer by the fast-emerging Microsoft industries). The kind of conferred exclusivity it was, literally, impossible to emulate, unless you too came from Seattle, which of course none of the Eighties’ rock goliaths did. Paradoxically, however, hard rock and heavy metal in general, and Metallica in particular, had always been huge there, in the same way it had always been a core musical component of the similarly rainswept and industrially bleak English Midlands. Indeed, Kurt Cobain once described Nirvana’s music as ‘a cross between Black Sabbath and The Beatles’ – exactly the kind of musical marriage, ironically, that Metallica might be said to be now aiming for.
There any similarities ended, though, with Metallica viewed from a grunge perspective as being very much in the older brother’s camp. Impossible to compete with, the birth of grunge spelled the death of metal as they knew it till then, as overnight million-selling bands like Mötley Crüe and Poison, Bon Jovi and Def Leppard, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, and, yes, Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, looked seriously out of whack. In many ways, Metallica was fortunate its tour ended when it did in 1993, just as the grunge wave was peaking. After nearly three years on the road, a long break had always been on the cards. Now it would also serve as time away from a scene that was in such rapid transition it was like the precipice of a cliff crumbling beneath them.
As Lars said in 1996, on the eve of the release of Load, the album he prayed would spare Metallica from the same sorry fate that had claimed the careers of everyone from Iron Maiden to Ozzy Osbourne and Mötley Crüe, ‘When we put out the Black Album, nobody knew who Kurt Cobain was. It’s mind-boggling.’ By then, though, grunge was all but over and Lars could afford to be kind. Speaking with him back in 1993, at the height of its influence, he was sounding distinctly threatened, angry even. ‘I think the whole thing has more to do with an attitude than anything musical,’ he told me tetchily. Pressed further, he admitted that ‘Soundgarden made a great record and I think that Alice In Chains made a great record. But this