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By Root 464 0

His crime: too much influence on the band’s music. Or, more accurately, scapegoated for all the years of tinkering with the formula; metaphorically blamed for the shortened hair, make-up and unsettling scenes of self-doubt and therapy-speak in Monster. It was as if he had never been fully forgiven for being the guy who came in and transformed Metallica from a thrash metal caterpillar into a squillion-selling mainstream rock butterfly with the Black Album. Now he never would be. Someone, it seemed, had to take the rap for Load and St. Anger. Rock affected a public nonchalance at odds with his real feelings, saying only that the petition was hurtful for his children. ‘Sometimes, even with a great coach, a team keeps losing,’ he said, as if in apology. ‘You have to get new blood in there.’

The band agreed and in February 2006 it was announced that the next Metallica album would be produced by Rick Rubin. Metal fans cheered. Rubin was the man who had signed Slayer and produced Reign in Blood, still regarded as the greatest thrash metal album of all. But while Rubin’s grass-roots credentials were impeccable, the real reason he was chosen had as much to do with his more recent and much more widespread reputation as the producer de jour who had single-handedly rebuilt the career of Johnny Cash, saving it from the ignominy it had fallen into, with his series of American Recordings albums that utterly transformed his fortunes, artistically and commercially, in the 1990s, to the point where Cash was bigger than ever at the time of his death in 2003. That Rubin had just done an almost identical job on Neil Diamond with his remarkable 2005 comeback album 12 Songs – rescuing a once-great songwriter from the creative purgatory of Las Vegas residencies and media scorn – was not overlooked, either. Nor, more to the point, that at the same time Rubin had been helping Cash reignite his career he had done a similar job for AC/DC, insisting that the original line-up be reinstated before shepherding them through their best album for decades in Ballbreaker, in 1995.

A large man generally dressed in billowing shirts and khaki camouflage trousers, with his enormous scraggily beard, trademark wraparound shades and chubby features, Rubin resembled a hippy-ish Orson Welles, and certainly there is something of the musical auteur about him. Rubin liked to go barefoot to meetings, espoused a Zen philosophy of vegetarianism and karmic law, fingering a string of lapis lazuli Buddhist prayer beads as he talked, closing his eyes and rocking silently back and forth as he listened intently to music, before pronouncing gnomic judgement. His voice surprisingly soft and always reassuring, many of the artists he worked with called him The Guru.

As an overweight Jewish boy growing up in Lido Beach, on New York’s Long Island, music had been a passion for as long as Rubin could remember. Interestingly, considering the career he was to have, he loved The Beatles but ‘never really liked the Stones’. Whatever the musical medium – from heavy metal to country, from hip hop to pure pop, all of which he has put his hands to at some point – it was always the strength of the songs that mattered most, he said. Hence his inspired suggestion to Cash, then in his mid-sixties, to cover rock songs such as ‘Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails, ‘Personal Jesus’ by Depeche Mode and ‘Rusty Cage’ by Soundgarden. (He also suggested Cash try Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’, but that proved to be one postmodern experiment too many for the sexagenarian.) ‘I have no training, no technical skill,’ Rubin insisted, although he could play guitar and plainly knew his way around a recording studio, ‘it’s only this ability to listen and try to coach the artist to be the best they can from the perspective of a fan.’

Along the way Rubin had produced crucial career-defining albums for the Beastie Boys (Licensed to Ill), LL Cool J (I Need a Beat), The Cult (Electric), the Red Hot Chili Peppers (Blood Sugar Sex Magik) and many others. Yet despite his background, melding rock with rap – as well as his groundbreaking