Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [208]
Taken aback by the furore, Lars – usually so shrewd a judge of fan opinion – had completely misread the situation. From his and Q Prime’s point of view, the Napster lawsuit was just another day at the office. Three years earlier they had threatened Amazon.com with a lawsuit for selling an unauthorised album of rarities – the action that had partly prompted the release of Garage Inc. – and had gone after online retailers N2K, distributors of the Dutch East India Trading Co., and independent British label Outlaw Records over the sale of a bootleg live album. In January 1999, they had also filed a lawsuit in a federal court in LA against Victoria’s Secret, the women’s lingerie catalogue, seeking injunctive relief and damages when it was discovered they had used the name Metallica on lipsticks without authorisation. They also sued Pierre Cardin over the marketing of a Metallica tuxedo. There was no PR backlash then and both companies eventually settled out of court. Just weeks after Lars’ Napster court appearance, the band was suing the centuries-old fragrance manufacturer Guerlain for trademark infringement over their new perfume named Metallica, a vanilla-based scent then on sale for the headbanging price of $175 for an 8oz bottle. They also sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to department stores including Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman for daring to stock the perfume, claiming ‘dilution, unfair competition, false designation of origin and injuring the heavy metal band’s reputation’, revealed Jill Pietrini, the lawyer acting for the band. When the response they received was ‘not quite acceptable’, they launched a suit seeking punitive damages, requesting the court to order Neiman Marcus to destroy the perfume.
The problem with the Napster suit was that this time the band appeared to be penalising its own fans. As such, the Napster case beamed the media spotlight on Metallica more searingly than ever before. Suddenly, both fans and media were turning against them; the internet a hive of invective against the band. On the Metallica Usenet group, there was a lengthy, ongoing thread entitled ‘Kirk and Lars are gay’, while a hilarious spoof Metallica ad from an outfit calling itself Camp Chaso (the brainchild of producer, director, writer and now political columnist Bob Cesca) became one of the most popular items on the net. It depicted a cartoon Lars as a tiny greed-obsessed motormouth, with James pictured as his gargantuan, mono-brain-celled ogre, yelling slogans such as ‘Money good! Napster bad!’ The pair of them were apparently wading in a mountainous pile of sacks with dollar signs on them as the mini-Lars yells about how rich the band are; railing against the ‘dickless cocksuckers who try to steal our music with their motherfucking Napster’ and how the band’s lawyers will ‘hunt you down like the table-scrap pilfering grab-asses you are’.
As Alexander Milas says, it all left Metallica looking like ‘the anti-christ. It had soured the entire universe on Lars Ulrich, who had pretty much successfully identified himself as the biggest dick in the galaxy.’ Milas recalls seeing Metallica at the RFK stadium in Washington on their Summer Sanitarium tour of the USA that year: ‘Right in the middle of Metallica’s set they actually stopped playing and a video came up on the big screen. It’s like Lars Ulrich drumming and he’s got a Pepsi right next to him and someone off-screen takes the Pepsi away and he stops playing drums, and goes: “Hang on a minute, that’s not cool, they took my Pepsi. You know what else is not cool? Taking people’s music and…blah blah blah.” I’m not even joking! I mean, I’m paraphrasing, because by then I was shouting and so were fifty