Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [222]
The rotten album reviews were largely overhauled in the public mind by the reception Some Kind of Monster received after it previewed at the Sundance festival in February 2004. ‘We hear a lot from our peers in other bands about how much they’ve seen this movie and how many things ring true for so many [of them],’ Lars told me. ‘It was better received in the film industry than it was in the music industry [and] in the music industry it was better received by the peers than the punters. I think a lot of punters felt that it was like, whoa, maybe this is just a little too much [information]. I think some punters were a little miffed. But the peer group and all the cats in all the other bands were very complimentary and could certainly relate to most of it.’
The same month as Sundance, Metallica won yet another Grammy for Best Metal Performance, this time for the ‘St. Anger’ single. That summer they also completed the second of their US Summer Sanitarium stadium tours, with Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit applying the hip seal of approval as guest supports on the bill. Rob Trujillo took it all in his giant, crablike strides. ‘I ignored the media and even the fans,’ he said. ‘I just told myself, “I’m going to be Robert [and] give one hundred per cent as me.”’ Easier said than done, he later admitted. ‘It was intense. I had to learn the catalogue of music, twenty-two years of music. And I had to learn the St. Anger album.’ He also had to learn how to deal with the complicated relationships, strung like an aged web across the stage, between the three main members. ‘You gotta know how to balance each person,’ he said diplomatically, ‘because they’re so different.’
In 2005, they took a year off, the first time they’d done that voluntarily since 1994, the outbreak of peace only interrupted in November when they agreed to appear as special guests to the Rolling Stones – the only group left Metallica was happy to play second banana to – at two massive shows at the AT&T Park football stadium in San Francisco. For a band that counted so heavily on unity and togetherness, on keeping the whole stronger than its sum parts, the three members who had played on every Metallica album also spoke of their need to express their individuality; to seek solitude when the touring was finally over, or the last track finally recorded. At heart, they were all still loners, even if they were all, in their own ways, now making strenuous attempts to integrate family lives into that oneness.
James had fully settled back into his new home life with Francesca and their third child, ‘my little angel’, Marcella. For the first time he had been there for the birth, cutting the umbilical cord: ‘my daughter pretty much glued us back together’. He no longer went hunting, either: ‘Nowadays it doesn’t feel necessary, killing things just to kill them.’ His den was still stocked with the mounted heads of animals he’d hunted, including a boar, an antelope and a 1,600-pound buffalo that took four rifle shots to finally put down. But for kicks, James now preferred to go ‘one hundred and fifty miles an hour in my car’. Certain that both he and Metallica were stronger for having survived their ups and downs, he said: ‘I’ve gone through life trying to avoid struggles, either drink them away or hide from them, but being able to face them and take them on and knowing that you are going to grow after you have walked through the fire and be okay, all of these things that we have been talking about – Napster, Jason, rehab