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By Root 425 0

Napster fracas had left in their reputation than they were ready yet to admit and still reeling from the psychic wounds Jason’s unhappy departure had reopened, for the first time the band was entirely unsure as to which direction their music should take. Rock and metal had undergone a huge renaissance in public taste since the last time Metallica had entered a recording studio seriously in 1995. Nu-metal, as evinced by rap-rock crossover stars such as Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park, had replaced them at the cutting edge, but there was no way they were going to convince James Hetfield to try competing as a rapper, while the classic rock market – although undergoing its own resurgence in the shape of zillion-selling reunion tours by the original line-ups of Kiss, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Iron Maiden and others – was not yet seen as a comfortable fit for the band.

Pragmatism was now the order of the day and, unable to suggest anything more concrete, they were happy to take Bob Rock’s lead in proposing a more collaborative approach, going into the studio empty-handed and literally seeing what happened, an idea previously considered anathema to the controlling Hetfield and Ulrich. Taking a six-month lease on an old army barracks just outside San Francisco called the Presidio, at Rock’s suggestion the sessions would take on a far more ‘free-thinking’ aspect than on previous Metallica albums, with lyrics for once being worked on by everyone – quite literally, as they all sat together in a room and took turns writing down lines, Rock included. ‘We’ve really kind of changed our process in the way we’re approaching this [album],’ said Rock. ‘We loaded in a lot of my equipment from my studio [and] we recorded there for two months, and we put down about eighteen kind of song ideas. It’s definitely a different approach. The whole thing [has] a very live feel…almost like a garage-type band atmosphere, only with great recording equipment to capture at the moment of conception so to speak.’ He predicted, ‘What this album is going to be like is…what they are as people, what they’re thinking and where they’re at.’ It would certainly become that, though not remotely in the way Bob or indeed the band had originally conceived.

There would be another, entirely unexpected ingredient this time: the addition to the day-to-day team of a $40,000-a-month ‘performance-enhancement coach’: Dr Phil Towle. A former sports psychologist who had worked, most famously, with the Tennessee Titans’ defensive lineman Kevin Carter and the legendary NFL coach Dick Vermeil, Towle’s first foray into the music business had been with Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello. Hired by Q Prime to try to bring the remaining members of Metallica – and Bob Rock – back to some sort of emotional tempo that would permit them to work well again in the studio, despite their recent setbacks, Towle not only instigated intensive two-hour daily sessions, he stayed around for the rest of the day and night, becoming increasingly more involved in the actual making of the album.

In their attempt to reinvigorate their music, post-thrash, post-grunge, post-reinvention, post-orchestras, post-fame and fortune and, clearly in subtext, post-Napster and post-Jason – and now group-therapy – the band would create a new form of Metallica music whose most immediate feature would be a complete dearth of guitar solos and an unlikely, cut-and-pasted drum sound; a genuinely distressed, fiercely antagonistic package, reflected in song titles such as ‘Frantic’, ‘St. Anger’, ‘Some Kind of Monster’ and ‘Shoot Me Again’. How happy the rest of the world would be with the end results, however, would prove to be a matter of the utmost debate, more so even than on Load and Reload. But that discussion was still some considerable way off when, after just three months of working like this at the Presidio, James arrived one morning with unexpected news. He was checking himself into rehab, effective immediately, and all other plans would have to be put on hold – indefinitely.

‘When we started playing music after