Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [223]
Lars, meanwhile, was now living with the Danish actress Connie Nielsen, who he’d first met during a break from the Madly in Anger tour at the end of 2003. They would later have a son together, Bryce Thadeus Ulrich-Nielsen, born in San Francisco on 21 May 2007, to go with their other children, Myles and Layne, from Lars’ marriage to Skylar, and Sebastian, from a previous relationship of Connie’s. Thanks to a combination of Metallica, Napster and Some Kind of Monster, Lars was now such a household name in America that he even appeared in a special celebrity edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, on which he raised $32,000 for the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic (providing primary care for patients with substance abuse and mental health issues). After selling off most of his art collection, Lars was back to collecting again. As he said, ‘It’s one area where I can go and be myself. It’s not about being the drummer in a rock band. I’m accepted for who I am in the art circles. I love going into artist spaces and galleries and auction houses.’ It was, he said, ‘my place of sanctuary’. Speaking to me from his backstage hidey-hole in Glasgow in 2009, he explained the kind of thing he was into nowadays: ‘Most of the artists that I buy are painters. I’m a little more of a painter guy than a sculpture guy. A lot of contemporary art these days is more about the idea than about the execution. And I’m a little bit more about the execution than the idea. I’m interested in those moments between a painter and a canvas, more so than how clever some idea can be…Pollack, De Kooning, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Rothko, you know, Gorky. And then some European guys like [the painter and sculptor Jean] Dubuffet. But mostly painters…’ He had even begun some canvases of his own, although ‘not enough to warrant talking about. Trust me! Paul Stanley and Ronnie Wood shouldn’t worry!’ he laughed.
Kirk Hammett was also enjoying his version of domesticity, living in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco, in his haute Gothic mansion full of dark oak interiors and opulent crucifixes and stuffed two-headed sheep, with his Hawaiian wife Lani and their son, Angel Ray Keala, born in September 2006, as well as their dogs Darla and Hoku, and various cats. (They would have a second son, Vincenzo Kainalu, born in June 2008.) They had met at the height of the Load era and while they also spent time at their ranch, horse riding, or hitting the beach to surf, Kirk was still essentially the same incense-burning, indoors guy he’d always been. He, too, had become a collector, although his art centred as always on old Hollywood movie memorabilia. He still enjoyed reading comic books, old and new. ‘I’m still very much into all that stuff, yeah,’ he told me in 2009. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever grow out of it, you know? I still fucking read comic books, I still watch horror movies, I still buy toys. I’m still that guy; I just have more of it now.’ The original 1931 Frankenstein movie was still his ‘all-time favourite. It’s a tie between Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein.’ His favourite book was ‘probably the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’. He was into yoga, he said, and reading ‘Buddhist philosophy. Buddhist teachings resonate heavy with me.’ A believer in karmic law, he was vegetarian; his favourite drink no longer beer, but champagne. ‘Classy, yeah,’ he chuckled. And of course he rarely passed a day without picking up his guitar.
Musically, what really sealed the deal in terms of Metallica’s public rehabilitation was their decision to turn their summer 2006 festival appearances into a twentieth-anniversary celebration of Master of Puppets, performing the album for the first time in its entirety, track by track. They were getting in on the classic rock market somewhat belatedly but now they’d got there they were making the most of it, as always. Speaking with Kirk at the time, he described MOP as ‘my favourite