Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [193]
This, then, was to be a one-step-at-a-time reconciliation, not a total embrace. ‘There’s still a lot of unanswered questions,’ he said at the time. ‘You could hate someone like that for ever.’ At least, though, they were able to spend time together again, ‘hunting, things like that’. Father and son also shared a love of country music. When a college radio station invited James on to appear side by side with country star Waylon Jennings – ‘to get the two outlaws together of certain different styles of music’ – they suggested James might like to conduct a mini-interview with Jennings. ‘I guess Dad helped me out with a few of the questions,’ he later recalled. ‘It’s funny ’cos my dad wanted me to get a CD signed for him and then Waylon brought some Metallica stuff to get signed for his son. So it was completely cool.’
After so many years apart, James confessed: ‘I saw a lot of myself in him.’ Not that they discussed the past in any detail still, ‘because there’s no doubt that we’d argue about things’. He didn’t want to ‘stir the water up’. The past, he’d decided, ‘just fucks things up – always’. These would be issues between father and son that would remain unresolved, and that Hetfield would later be forced to return to – after his father’s death. Already seriously ill at the time of their brief reconciliation, Virgil Hetfield died on 29 February 1996, after a two-year battle with cancer. James was with him at the end and got the chance to say goodbye. Like his mother, his father had stuck to his terrifyingly rigid Christian Science principles. Although he still found himself struggling with the concept, James looked on his father’s way of dealing with his illness – eschewing regular forms of medicine in favour of rising at dawn each day, doing his daily lesson – with a much greater degree of admiration this time. ‘He stuck with it to the very end. And that, I think, helped him keep his strength – his knowledge that he did it his way.’ They had spent hours discussing not just his family’s religion but faith in general, ‘and I let him know there were no bad feelings…I had sorted out a lot of my anger in his departure, his never being around.’
Four days after Virgil died, James Hetfield flew to New York to finish off the recording of Load. ‘I kind of went back to when Cliff died,’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘We got back to work and got some of the feelings out through the music.’ Not in the angry sound of apocalyptic songs such as ‘Dyer’s Eve’ from Justice or ‘The God That Failed’ on Black, but in the more resigned melancholy of dramatic tracks like the brutally frank ‘Until it Sleeps’, with its haunting ‘So hold me, until it sleeps…’ refrain. The achingly sad, country-tinged ‘Mama Said’, with its wincingly honest reflections: ‘Apron strings around my neck / The mark that still remains…’ Most bleakly, ‘The Outlaw Torn’, where the targets are blurred between mother, father and son, but utterly specific in the desolation left behind: ‘And if my face becomes sincere / Beware…’
If the Black Album had been the first Metallica record to contain truly personal, adult insights into the scarred emotional landscape of its principal lyric-writer, the songs on Load would take the whole game forward several more steps. Hetfield would insist later that the lyrics were meant to be ‘kept vague’ to allow others their own interpretations but it was clear from tracks such as ‘Poor Twisted Me’ (‘I drown without a sea’), ‘Thorn Within’ (‘So point your fingers…right at me’), ‘Bleeding Me’ (‘I am the beast that feeds the beast’) and others, that James was addressing his true feelings to only one ‘other’: himself. There were songs that