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By Root 407 0

dude with the long straggly hair and beer-stained Misfits T-shirt. He had allowed the real James Hetfield – whoever that was – to disappear. Now he wanted him back: ‘Not just within the band or on tour, but at home. You’d try to escape that feeling but no matter where you went you were identified as that guy in Metallica, and as corny as it sounds, you take that on. You kind of submit to it, and you’re signing autographs when you’re trying to eat dinner with your kids, or having photos taken when you’re on vacation. But you don’t have to do that. Any human would say, “Can you leave me alone for a second?” And in all of that attention, how lonely I was and how lost I was, and in a lot of denial about it. Of course, it happened for a reason and there’s some good things that I take from my past, but I’ve found a new love for life as me instead of the guy in Metallica.’

It was just a shame that it took Jason leaving to set the ball in motion. ‘I think that if Jason had just stuck it out for two or three more days rather than coming to that one meeting and saying, “I’m out of here, no questions asked,” things would have been a lot different in the band,’ said Kirk. ‘It’s been a huge learning experience and something that Jason set in motion for all of us. He was the sacrificial lamb for our spiritual and mental growth as well as our creative growth, and it just sucks. It’s medieval.’

Fourteen

The New Black

It was years later, another lifetime, more than one, and we were both bullshitting, going through the motions the way old pros do, making with the nice. He was on form – when wasn’t he? – and so was I. An article, not for Kerrang! any more but for The Times; not about the new album any more, heavy though it certainly was, but about the recession, and how rock had become big again because of it. It was November 2008 and the world’s banks were on the verge of collapse but Metallica was back doing better than ever. Could the two things somehow be linked? Neither of us believed it for a second of course but that’s what the paper had asked for and as we both stood to make something out of it – good promo for him, nice profile for me – we played along. Eminent figures in our fields, talking bollocks and being paid in kind for it as the rest of the world went to hell in an out-of-order ATM machine.

The thing that really struck me afterwards was how surprised I had been, just for a moment, to realise how much he’d forgotten about me…about us. Assuming there had ever really been an ‘us’.

‘Hey,’ he’d said at the start, pleasantly mangled accent still intact, although more Americanised by the years, as you’d expect, ‘who’d have thought that time in Miami, shit-faced, the next time we spoke we would have six kids between us?’

He was talking about that night on the Monsters of Rock tour in 1988, sprawled in his hotel room listening to those dreadful early mixes of the turgid Justice album. We had spoken many times since then, seen each other in different places – Tokyo, Los Angeles, London, rapped on the phone, had dinner with friends – and I was momentarily affronted that all that came to his mind was that one distant, drug-encrusted night.

Then I thought about where he had been in the interim, the two-year tours, the $15 million mansions, the second ex-wife and lovers I’d never known, the private art collection so precious and vast it had to be kept hidden in an air-conditioned vault somewhere in the Californian desert, before being sold off, or ‘passed on’ as he now put it – one of those air-conditioned phrases the very rich use to describe something the rest of us struggle to get our heads around. The cocktails with Courtney Love, the tennis matches with John McEnroe, the court cases and life coaches and zillion-dollar merch deals; the endlessly ringing cell phone. The shit that just always happens, wherever you are and whoever you might be, but most especially it must always seem if you are Lars Ulrich, big-brain inventor of the heaviest metal band of them all.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘who’d have thought…’

The real rehabilitation