Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [232]
Something Metallica – who had already contributed images and songs to Rock Band – had taken serious note of by the time they stepped up to the plate to take part in their own billion-dollar version of Guitar Player. Lars, smartly, played down the whole thing, brought it back to the level of simply entertaining the folks. ‘Our kids love playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band,’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘It’s awesome. There’s something really positive coming out of video games. It’s so cool to sit there and have your kids talk to you about Deep Purple and Black Sabbath and Soundgarden.’
As ever, though, the real business of Metallica took place out on the road. The World Magnetic tour would actually find the band out on the road for the best part of the next three years, but the schedule was now built specifically to combat the stresses and strains that would otherwise be placed on the four husband-and-fathers who now populated the band. ‘We do two weeks on and two weeks off,’ Lars told me, the band flying home to California wherever they were in the world, literally going straight from the stage of the final show into a limo and onto a private jet. Nice work if you could get it, the 2009 year-end issue of US trade bible Billboard reported that the World Magnetic tour had earned a total ticket-sale gross (so far) of $76,613,910. The same issue calculated that between 2000 and 2009 Metallica had earned a total ticket-sale gross of $227,568,718. Astonishing figures, but giving only a fraction of the true financial picture, once profits from record and merchandising sales had also been factored in, possibly doubling or even trebling that final figure.
The show itself was initially built around the new Death Magnetic album, as would be expected, but would go through various changes as each new phase of the tour unfolded. The Metallica live show has always been a purist experience, the band all dressed in uniform black whatever phase of their twisting career they happened to be going through. So it had been with the first phase of the World Magnetic tour: a show staged in the round and built around a faintly ludicrous circle of coffins, concealing the lighting rig, but with the emphasis firmly on what can fairly be termed all-round family entertainment. As I watched from one of the high-price boxes at London’s O2, I marvelled at the diversity of the 20,000-strong crowd. Below, surrounding the stage, were the sorts of rabid, devil-horn-saluting fans one might have encountered in their true heyday twenty years before. To my right and left were other boxes full of young female fans, the kind normally only found at a Robbie Williams show, dancing as though listening to Michael Jackson, making sexy such previously thought impregnable musical edifices as ‘One’ and ‘Sad but True’. Thanking those Metallica fans each night who had ‘stayed loyal’, James added for those kids present too young to have seen the band play before, ‘You got some cool parents.’ It was a comment he would make a habit of somehow working into those shows, tossing guitar picks out to the crowd whenever he spotted anyone young enough to warrant one. He still strode the stage like a lone gunman, spitting copiously and growling into the mike, but James Hetfield the proud husband and father was no longer buried so far below the surface you couldn’t see him. Indeed, he was now all but impossible to avoid.
Robert Trujillo, his bass slung