Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [209]
The zeal with which Lars was pursuing the Napster situation was becoming out of proportion to other previous legal actions. Suddenly there appeared to be a very personal dimension. This only worsened as criticism against Metallica began to build in the media. At the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards Lars famously scored another own goal when he appeared in an anti-Napster video skit with the show’s host, Marlon Wayans. Wayans played a college student downloading ‘I Disappear’ in his dorm when Lars suddenly appears, demanding an explanation. When Wayans’ character explains he’s not stealing, only ‘sharing’, Lars proceeds to demonstrate the error of his ways by first drinking his Pepsi, then getting the Metallica road crew to empty his room of all his stuff, slapping Napster stickers on everything first. The video caused a certain amount of mirth from the industry guests in the room. But Lars’ appearance onstage later that evening was greeted by much more voluble booing from the public-admittance section of the audience. Despite looking decidedly uncomfortable, Lars later claimed he was ‘unaware of it’ until he got offstage. When Shawn Fanning appeared to respond by presenting an award while wearing a Metallica shirt, announcing pointedly, ‘I borrowed this shirt from a friend. Maybe, if I like it, I’ll buy one of my own,’ he received unreserved cheers. Again, Lars later brushed it off, claiming ‘the whole thing was planned’, and that the organisers had originally asked him to co-present the award with Fanning but that ‘Napster’s lawyers pulled him out of it’ at the last minute, concerned Lars would use the occasion to worsen the situation with their client. Talking to Playboy just a few weeks later, however, Lars made a point of saying he thought ‘It was the worst awards show, hands down, that I’ve ever been to’ and that he had left early to have dinner with friends.
Portrayed as the greed-driven villains of the piece, even James – who’d taken a back seat while his wife, Francesca, gave birth to their second child, a son, Castor, in May 2000 – admitted he had ‘cringed at certain interviews: “Oh, dude, don’t say that.”’ Lars, however, while also shuddering at some of the unexpected positions his hard-line stance put him in, ultimately remained unrepentant: ‘If you’d stop being a Metallica fan because I won’t give you my music for free, then fuck you.’ It seemed the feeling was mutual, however, and to this day the Napster debacle has hung like a shadow over everything Metallica has tried to do, their various attempts to make amends – including the cringe-making vision of Lars taking part in an internet interview explaining why file-sharing was actually good for fans, particularly in places such as Saudi Arabia where downloading tracks was the only way they had of accessing music they could not buy on CD. ‘I think it’s great,’ he said. ‘Obviously it’s the way to share this stuff and I think it’s awesome. I think that we were somewhat flabbergasted at some early internet things that were going on a few years ago but we’re at peace with that.’
Far less public but even more immediately damaging was the long-predicted meltdown of Jason Newsted, whose official departure from Metallica was announced in January 2001. Ostensibly the split had come about because James wouldn’t let Jason release an album by his side-project band Echobrain. In reality, the split had been coming almost since the day Jason had joined. ‘During the last couple of tours he was totally withdrawing from everything,’ James told Classic Rock in 2003: ‘Going into his own little world, wearing headphones all the time, never communicating, and