Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [192]
Lars now had the money and wherewithal to begin a serious art collection: a passion, like music, inherited from his father. As he told me in 2009, ‘For many years it became really the only area where I felt I could express myself creatively outside of Metallica. And that it was a place where I was on my own. When you spend as much time in a gang like Metallica, once in a while you need to just do stuff on your own. And you need to feel that you have an identity that’s you and who you are and not you as part of something else.’ He laughed self-consciously. Talking about being the biggest metal stars in the world, that was kids’ stuff. But talking about his art collection…‘For many, many years that was the place where I really needed solitude and some sort of creative sanctuary. That’s where I would go.’ He liked to collect ‘schools’ of art: abstract expressionism; the COBRA movement; art brut. And prized individual works by modern painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, the black American former graffiti artist who produced neo-expressionist classics in the 1980s before his death of a heroin overdose at just twenty-seven; Jean Dubuffet, the French painter-sculptor who pioneered the concept of ‘low art’ before his death in 1985; and Willem de Kooning, the Dutch-American abstract expressionist who had been one of the original ‘action’ painters. Lars also had ‘the best collection of Asger Jorn [Danish painter, sculptor] on this planet’.
James Hetfield, meanwhile, was involved in less cerebral pursuits but more challenging emotional issues. In common with both Lars and Kirk, his longstanding relationship – with Kristen, subject of ‘Nothing Else Matters’ – had not been able to survive the ravages of the three-year Black tour. His way of dealing with it was not to seek out new pleasures, or more esoteric forms of self-expression, but to re-immerse himself in some of the old ways. When he wasn’t drinking beer, watching the Oakland Raiders, he was working in his garage, customising cars and motorcycles. After his ’74 Chevy Nova there had been his all-terrain four-wheel-drive Blaze, which he nicknamed The Beast. He was also building himself an impressive collection of vintage guitars, with special emphasis on those from 1963, the year of his birth. Going out, he liked to stay hidden, either choosing country and western bars or restaurants where he knew he wouldn’t be hassled. He rarely went to rock gigs and when he did, he would become so ill at ease he would have to get seriously drunk to face it.
Mainly, when he wasn’t working, Hetfield liked to go hunting. Like Lars, he’d bought a big spread in Marin County. Unlike Lars, he’d turned his into what the drummer only half-jokingly characterised as ‘the biggest hunting lodge in the universe, with dead deer coming out of every wall and rifles hanging everywhere’. Hanging out at a friend’s place outside San Francisco where it was ‘tough to get to without a four-wheel drive’, James could ‘just sit there on the porch, drinking, playing music’. Now a member of the National Rifle Association, he kept a growing collection of guns, was a good shot, and saw himself as an environmentalist, belonging to Ducks Unlimited, an organisation dedicated to the preservation of US wetlands. His dream, he told Rolling Stone, was to own his own ranch ‘somewhere out in the middle of nowhere’. He loved nature, he said, being out in the wilderness. ‘There is not much more of it left. It makes me hate people. Animals, they don’t lie to each other. There is an innocence within them. And they’re getting fucked.’
The most significant event in his life in this period, though, was meeting up again with his father, Virgil, who he had not spoken to for over ten years; an unforeseen occurrence that would have long-lasting repercussions for him, as both a son and father in his own right. An intimidating presence,