Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [234]
Just before the event, I had asked Lars a final word on the subject of Jason. He said: ‘It sometimes got a little difficult because there were times where there [were] personality issues within the band. Where his dedication – and I mean this in a positive sense – to perfection and the pursuit of everything being next-level, sometimes clashed a little bit with the rest of us because it’s still rock ’n’ roll, at the end of the day. And sometimes it felt like it got dangerously close to something more in the direction of athletics or something akin to troop movements, or military position-level strategies and stuff. Once in a while you just wanna go, “Fuck! We’re in a rock ’n’ roll band!” although a fairly hard and heavy one.’ He added: ‘I wanted to be in music because I wanted to be away from living these incredibly structured lives and have a little bit of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants energy to it also. Do you know what I mean? So I think that sometimes it got a little too next-level serious, and sometimes there were some personality clashes. But I got nothing bad to say. Jason was an incredibly loyal and dedicated member, and always gave his all.’
The final plank in the new foundation as classic rock untouchables came in the summer of 2010 and a return to Britain and Europe for the Big Four tour. That is, eleven outdoor festival shows headlined by Metallica but also featuring on the bill Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax – climaxing with a massive show to over 100,000 people at Knebworth, the 500-year-old stately home that has staged some of the most historic rock festivals of the past forty years. Following in the footsteps of such giants as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, Metallica had already headlined their own show there in the summer of 2009. Now, in August 2010, they would do so again with the Big Four, as part of that year’s travelling Sonisphere weekend, another guaranteed 100,000-plus sell-out.
Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax had never played on the same bill before, despite their shared histories. As a result this would become the most anticipated live event in the European rock calendar that year. The tour kicked off with a sold-out show to 55,000 people on 16 June at Bemowo Airport in Warsaw. Over the next few weeks they would repeat the experience in Holland, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria (where the show was simultaneously broadcast in HD to various cinemas around the continent), Romania, Turkey and England. The most anticipated tour of the summer, the question was how the four bands would get on. As well as the well-aimed barbs sent their way by Dave Mustaine, Metallica had also endured taunts from Slayer over the years. Guitarist Kerry King had called them ‘fragile old men’ after seeing Some Kind of Monster. ‘Oh, listen,’ joked Lars, ‘the reason we did that movie was to piss Kerry King off. Being the source of his amusement, that’s great!’ But then it was easy to set aside differences when there was so much at stake. Where once Lars would feel ultra-competitive in the company of Slayer and Megadeth, in particular, calling up to get the merch figures each night on their joint Clash of the Titans tour in 1991 (which had also featured Anthrax), he now professed to merely ‘feeling supportive’ to Metallica’s fellow travellers. ‘I don’t feel the need to prove how big my dick is any more,’ he told me.
At the opening show in Warsaw, the massive airfield seemed to be all horizons and sky, apart from the stage itself, which stuck out like a giant monolith, surrounded by people. The backstage area comprised a few tents stuck together with buses parked behind them. Only a few people walked around, including