Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [217]
The mixture of competing emotions on his face when they make him the offer is evident in the film, placing his head in his hands and groaning, ‘I don’t know what to say,’ when they inform him he will receive ‘an advance’ of $1 million just for joining. ‘There’s this whole mystique about what they’re like, you know, the evil Metallica. I didn’t see that. Actually, at first, not seeing that evil Metallica kind of made me uncomfortable.’ Rob Trujillo joining ‘had a pretty calming effect on the band’, observes Alexander Milas. ‘He wasn’t just a lapdog. He had this incredible pedigree. Rob wasn’t going to be overawed or overwhelmed by Metallica. And he brought so much. He described himself as like “a Samurai whisky warlord”, which I think pretty much sums up his stage presence. He’s just so fun to watch. An electrifying bass player – how many of those can you name?’
When, towards the end of Some Kind of Monster, James learns of Towle’s plans to relocate his family to San Francisco then accompany the band out on tour, he becomes concerned that the good doctor ‘thinks he’s in the band’. Trying to discuss this with him provides one of the most awkward moments in a stupendously awkward film, the therapist clearly squirming at any suggestion that he might have finally outstayed his welcome, and in so doing appearing more conflicted and needy even than Jason. He talks of having ‘visions’ as a ‘performance coach’ and making sure the new bass player is ‘right’.
Looking back on the movie five years later, Lars told me, ‘They started filming us in the studio and all of a sudden fucking hell broke loose, and then it turned into something else. And so I’m proud of the fact that we let it become what it became, and I’m proud of the fact that we didn’t stand in the way of it. It sort of turned into its own thing, and Joe and Bruce felt that they were witnessing something special with their cameras and they asked us to trust them and kind of go on this ride with them because they felt there was something truly unique happening. And we trusted Joe and Bruce enough to let them kind of do their thing. In some way there was something quite liberating about that. Because once you free yourself to that point, then you stop being self-conscious…very quickly it stopped being us and them and became all of us together.’
Had it actually aided the process they were going through?
‘I do think that in some way one could argue that the cameras, certainly with some of the more therapy stuff that we were doing when we were really trying to come clean with each other, I think the presence of the cameras helped us not in any way filter or censor ourselves…there was a vulnerability and a nakedness there that was probably complemented by the presence of the cameras – in those moments when we were sitting in front of each other and saying pretty much what we were really thinking and feeling.’ He laughed, still conscious of just how ‘naked’ they had allowed themselves to be.
The other thing we get to see close-up in the movie, of course, is the tortuous conception of the most controversial, certainly the hardest to listen to, of all Metallica’s albums. In among the anger and frustrations, the perceived betrayals and emotional backdraughts, the songs on St. Anger reflect Lars’ personal travails with Napster, the loss of Jason, the ghost of Cliff, and the people they had become in Metallica, conflicted, overstretched, insanely rich, and now, suddenly, immensely self-doubting. Musically, the results are far from pretty. Not only are there no guitar solos, but the drums sound machine-like, like an anvil being pummelled. And there are no quieter moments, no ballads, no instrumentals, no place to escape the fearful maelstrom of crazed guitars, rubber-band bass and utterly pained vocals. Taken piece by piece, tracks such as ‘Dirty Window’, ‘Invisible Kid’ and ‘Shoot Me Again’ were some of the fiercest, most convincingly honest, if musically disjointed moments the band had laid down since the sonically disfigured but brutally forthright Justice fifteen