Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [219]
Would purging their anger affect their creativity now, though?
‘I can see how someone could get caught up in that fear of running out of creative juice,’ allowed James. ‘But I truly don’t believe that. Music was a great gift for me and I discovered that somewhat early, but I don’t need alcohol, I don’t need anger, I don’t need serenity, I don’t need any of those things to be creative.’ All he needed now, he said, was ‘life – I’ve been trying to dump everything else: sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll; chocolate’s a real struggle these days – or work. You know, in rehab I saw it all, people taking certain behaviours to extremes to where it becomes an addiction; compulsive activity that just started to ruin their lives. So anything can really be taken to that extreme, but I’m comfortable with the unknown right now, and trusting of it, so life is filling that hole. Life on life’s terms is okay for me.’
The reason the album sounds so fragmented, James told me, was because that’s ‘exactly where we were at that point. For me, St. Anger kind of stands alone. It’s more of a statement than an album to me. It’s more of the soundtrack to the movie, in a way. Here’s what’s going on in our lives and documenting it, you know? But in that fragmentation it brought us together. So it was a very necessary piece of the puzzle to get us where we are today.’
Even Some Kind of Monster – now regarded as a high-tide mark in the band’s career – attracted mixed reviews when it was first released. In the Observer Music Monthly, Charles Shaar Murray called it ‘primo car-crash stuff, replete with moments of the Higher Bathos’. The Village Voice, once art-encrusted champions of the band, described it as ‘a two-and-a-half-hour puff piece about how “important” Metallica are and, worse, how much “integrity” they have’. Over the years, however, this often cringe-inducing movie has proved to be a more inviting entry point into the Metallica story for people new to the band than any of their albums. Like all great art, its appeal has proved universal: you don’t have to know Metallica or like heavy metal to relate to what’s going on there, or to be shocked and amazed by it.
‘It’s funny,’ says David Ellefson, ’cos you watch Some Kind of Monster and people are talking about, “Oh and then they had a therapist.” I’m like, gimme a fucking break! [In Megadeth] we had, like, four therapists!’ He laughs. ‘I’m like, fucking been there, done that, lived that movie. In fact, that’s the one thing we beat Metallica to. We fucking beat ’em with group therapy!’ Says Alexander Milas, ‘I remember when I first watched it, getting really emotional. Metallica by that point had become such a pinata, for me as a journalist but also as a fan, it was always that thing of: oh, it was all better before the Black Album, that’s where it ended – with Cliff. All of a sudden they were revealed to be human beings with flaws and emotions. And I actually began to like Lars Ulrich again. It resurrected my love of Metallica, as a band of the present and not just as a relic of the Eighties. At the same time, I was pretty shocked that they did it. It was almost like they were committing an act of supreme penance toward their fans.’
For James Hetfield it was about far more than that, though. Before the events shown in the movie, ‘Things weren’t working for me; it affected family life, it affected band life, it affected everything that went on around us.’ It wasn’t merely a case of now he was out of rehab things could go ‘back to normal’. From this point on, there was no ‘normal’. Life in and out of Metallica would be ‘a work in progress’. He loved being in Metallica but he was no longer the titty-squeezing, vodka-guzzling twenty-something