Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [191]
‘You can only be what the public thinks you are for so long before it becomes boring,’ Kirk said in 1996. Since the phenomenal success of Black, he had ‘begun to feel quite objectified’. Going to college helped reconnect him with reality, albeit a more select version of it: ‘When I met people, they’d go, “Wow, I always thought you were this big mean person. But you’re really very nice – and kinda short.” A lot of people get fixated on what they need [Metallica] to be – appearance-wise, how we should sound.’ None of this frankly interested either Kirk or, he was pleased (though not entirely surprised) to discover, Lars. It would become this mutual desire to multiply the range of Metallica’s inspirations and thereby increase its influence, both musically and otherwise, along with their mutual fondness still for experimenting with drugs, as ecstasy now joined cocaine and (in Kirk’s case) marijuana as recreational drugs of choice, that would draw the drummer and guitarist closer together in the mid-Nineties. Both divorced, having rejected the straight life, and more intent than ever on ‘seeing what’s out there’, as Lars put it, their newfound bond also had the side effect of making James feel more isolated from the group’s central purpose than he ever had been, putting him at a certain remove and continually on his guard – the two allowing themselves to be photographed kissing each other, knowing the uptight Hetfield would find such images infuriating – as the two sought to challenge his leadership again and again over the coming years. ‘I know he’s homophobic. Let there be no question about that,’ Lars would later claim in Playboy. True to form, James took exception to the pictures of Lars and Kirk kissing – which circulated briefly in 1996 – but understood the motivation. ‘Totally,’ he said in 2009. ‘I’m the driving force behind their homosexual adventures. I think drugs had something to do with it too,’ James laughed. ‘I hope!’ Kirk would later disingenuously characterise this period as ‘playing referee’ between Lars and James, but the fact is he was never closer to Lars – or further away from James – than now.
If these misadventures were meant to make a point to Hetfield, it was one that was lost on rock fans who remained largely unchanged in their own views. Either they were already okay with their own sexuality and that of others, or they were the type of young dolts to write ‘Lars is gay’ posts on veracious Metallica chat-rooms, the remnants of which still crop up today across the internet whenever anyone has anything derisive to say about the band. Lars, though, was merely role-playing. Determined as ever to keep Metallica relevant, turned on by the newfound freedom his wilful abandonment of the band’s old image had allowed him, behind closed doors he still preferred the straight, conservative life of the millionaire businessman. His new hilltop home in Marin County came replete with indoor racquetball court, home movie theatre, rec-room with pool table, CD jukebox and a patio view of San Francisco that was like a map splayed out before you, all guarded at its electronic gates by a matching pair of cannons. Away from home Lars liked to go scuba-diving. He was also about to get married again. After Deborah there had been a significant affair with Linda Walker, a former leading light at Q Prime who’d left her marriage and given up her job to live with him. But the fall-out from the success of Black had taken its toll there, too, and Linda had eventually moved out. Now Lars began an affair with Skylar Satenstein, an emergency doctor and former girlfriend of actor Matt Damon, who