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By Root 516 0

the last couple of months of 1994, in Lars’ basement studio, The Dungeon, then begun the serious work with Bob Rock at The Plant studios, in Sausalito, in March 1995, where they would continue off and on for most of the next year, with a break for the summer festival season. By the start of 1996 the band was in New York, working out of three studios at once: Right Track, in Manhattan, where they were finishing up recording overdubs in one room while mixing proceeded in another; and Quad Recording, across the street, where additional mixing took place. In the end they would have nearly all thirty tracks fully recorded: in effect, enough material for at least two, possibly three albums, although nobody outside of the band knew quite why yet.

In their determination to save Metallica from post-grunge obsolescence, Ulrich and Hammett had combined to create what, in retrospect, was Metallica’s boldest, if not always their most likeable, move yet. It wasn’t that they had left thrash far behind; it was as if they had tried to shrug off the very sound of Metallica itself; a self-conscious reconfiguration that had begun with the haircuts and tattoos, the make-up and piercings, and now found its apotheosis in the kind of bluesy, far-out rock ’n’ roll that liked to shimmy and shake where once it had preferred to shatter and explode. ‘When someone says “Metallica”, they think heavy metal, thunder and lightning, long hair, drunk kids,’ explained Kirk. ‘But times have changed and the kind of person who listens to metal doesn’t necessarily look like that. And why should we? Why should we conform to some stereotype that’s been set way before we ever came into the picture?’ There were a couple of long tracks – ‘Bleeding Me’, over eight minutes, and ‘The Outlaw Torn’, over nine – but these were exceptions. The rule of thumb was now to keep things tight, rhythmic, or ‘greasy’ as Lars and Kirk liked to describe it in the studio – a move that Bob Rock was more than happy to facilitate. It was, he said, ‘a chance for them to kind of look at what they had done and to try some different things’, although, ‘when you’re as big as Metallica you do that out in the open and you may not get everything right’.

As if to try and compensate for the continued emphasis on shorter, catchier songs, Load was actually Metallica’s longest album yet, with a total running time of 78:59. To ram the point home, initial pressings even had stickers that boasted its extra-long playing time – another odd throwback to the days when Lars would sit there timing each track in order to make sure they were long enough. Then, embarrassingly, the final track ‘The Outlaw Torn’ had to be shortened by a minute to fit.

Mostly, they got it right. ‘Ain’t My Bitch’ (a Mötley Crüe-style title for a song not about ‘chicks’ but someone with no concern for anyone’s problems but his own, replete with Kirk on slide guitar, another first for a Metallica album), which opens, is as roaring and anthemic as anything from their immediate past. Everything else, though, is so shiny-new at first it’s hard to see past the dazzle – what James would later call ‘the U2 version of Metallica’. In fact, for many Metallica fans, then as now, Load was the beginning of the end. It wasn’t just the music. It was what it stood for. For a band for whom one of the foundation stones of its reputation had been its apparent disregard for current trends, the new sound of Load was outrageous, beyond the pale. Even the album sleeve seemed designed to get up as many noses as possible. Where once there had been lyric sheets, now in the booklet that came with the CD – designed by Def Leppard favourite Andie Airfix – there was a postmodern clutter of snatches of lyrics, Rorschachian inkblots and a dishevelled spread of pictures that would have fitted perfectly in the pages of a fashion mag.

Most controversially, the front sleeve was built around a detail from a picture titled Semen and Blood III – an abstract, fiery-coloured, cauldron-splash set against a mottled black background not a million wavy lines away from the kind