Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [210]
At the time, though, Lars was too distracted with his own problems. Now separated from Skylar and their two-year-old son, Myles, he was living temporarily in a hotel suite in New York while mixing the debut album by Systematic, Somewhere in Between, for the Elektra-backed boutique label TMC (The Music Company) he had recently formed with record exec Tim Duffy. (The label would later run aground amidst personal animosity between the two co-founders.) Lars couldn’t have cared less just then what Jason was up to. Kirk, meanwhile, thought the Echobrain album was ‘great’ and was happy for him to release it. Jason had been quick to point out how many other artists’ records James had appeared on – including vocals for the track ‘Hell Isn’t Good’ on the South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut movie soundtrack; cameos on two Corrosion of Conformity albums; and playing guitar on a Primus album track. But James wasn’t ‘out trying to sell them’, he replied, and compared Jason’s working on a side-project to ‘cheating on your wife’. Reflecting on the situation two years later, Lars felt free enough to admit the reason for James’ hard-line stance was down to ‘control issues’. He said, ‘James has his vision of the perfect family, and it’s almost kind of mafia style. You’re part of the family and if you step outside of the family you’re betraying the family, and you’ll get ostracised. And that is at the heart of a lot of the stuff that we’ve tried to work through in the last couple of years.’
There had reportedly been a nine-and-a-half-hour band meeting at the RitzCarlton Hotel in San Francisco, which had followed an equally intense get-together a week earlier. Newsted was given the choice: forget Echobrain and stay with Metallica, or release the Echobrain record – and forget Metallica. Jason resigned the same day. His official statement referred to ‘private and personal reasons, and the physical damage I have done to myself over the years while playing the music that I love’. Behind the scenes, however, he admitted he had felt ‘almost stifled’. What hurt most was that Jason had always looked up to James, in much the same way as James had once looked up to Cliff. ‘[James] taught me determination and perseverance,’ Newsted would recall. ‘People have tried to burn him and break him, but he’ll always jump right back up. And kick your ass. No matter what differences we’ve had…I’ll always regard him as one of the best musicians ever.’
James, too, would come to look back on the whole episode with regret as the years passed. Speaking in 2003 with the newfound clarity that sobriety had brought him, he admitted it was his own ‘fears of abandonment and control issues’ that lay behind the way Jason’s desire to record his own music had been mismanaged: ‘It makes sense that I would…try to grip harder to keep the family together, that no one would leave, for fear that they might find something better somewhere else, when initially all [Jason] had to do was go jam with some other band and find out that, you know, Metallica is home. You don’t know what home is until you leave, and he’d maybe have become more grateful to be in Metallica. That’s certainly one ending to that story.’ He was honest enough to admit, though, that Echobrain ‘wasn’t the only reason that he left. A lot of other things combined and caused him to escape into a future of his own elsewhere, and search for happiness, and we’re all hoping that he finds it.’
In the meantime, Metallica had a new album waiting to be delivered. With Jason out and the will to find an immediate replacement simply not there, Bob Rock offered to play bass on the album and the others gratefully accepted. More badly scarred from the huge dent the