Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [237]
And if Metallica never again quite matched the peerless beauty of the work they did while Cliff was still around, they have other, equally great achievements with which to assure themselves. Back in 1988, a twenty-five-year-old Jason Newsted – still smarting from the bum behaviour dished his way but better placed than anybody to see how the band really worked when the doors to the dressing room were closed shut – told Rolling Stone: ‘Metallica is going to be one of the bands you look back on in the year 2008 that people will still listen to the way I still listen to Zeppelin and Sabbath albums.’ The stats certainly back up that prediction. Sales of Metallica’s albums currently stand at a little over 100 million copies worldwide (sixty-five million in North America alone), earning them gold and platinum certifications in more than forty countries. The Black Album earned the prestigious RIAA Diamond Award (for sales of ten million copies in the USA) and sold more than twice that overall. There have been numerous awards: nine Grammys and dozens of other prestigious awards.
More importantly, just like Zeppelin, Metallica have skated on thin ice with practically every album they’ve made, risking alienating die-hard fans by attempting something new and interesting, even when it nearly killed them. ‘I know, I know,’ said Lars, ‘and, listen, hey, that will forever be part of our legacy.’ Putting out another one a bit like the last one has never been their way, I said. ‘That to me would have just killed this band because that was not who we were as people. And if the band is an extension of who you are as a person, then it wouldn’t have been right. It just would not have been right.’
As Dante Bonutto says, ‘Any band that’s gonna have a long career – and that’s the hardest thing in this business ever to achieve – your career has to be a journey, it can’t be a plateau. You have to have the ups and downs. If you have those moments you’ve got somewhere to come back from, something to react against. It’s very important to create those dynamics in a career and Metallica succeeded in doing that. Lars always had the vision that Metallica could be as big as Led Zeppelin or whoever. He also had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of rock, knew what went wrong with groups and what went right with them. With Metallica you could argue that what originally was their weakness – being so extreme – ultimately became their strength. So they were always the cool band that was heavier than anyone else and were coming from left-field. And of course, what’s left-field today is now the mainstream of tomorrow. But if you start in the middle you’ve got nowhere to go. You have to start at the perimeter, and they were right on the edge with their first album.’
So is Metallica set fair now for the next few years? I asked James the last time we spoke. Will you be thinking along the same lines for the next album, doing it the same way, with Rick again? ‘We don’t know. We don’t know what the future holds, and that’s the beauty of the artist’s part of being in a band. What we’re playing right now, the stuff from Death Magnetic, what we’re playing onstage, it fits right in with the stuff that we love doing. And it feels right. It’s really, really easy to bash your last record. It’s almost a cliché. I’m not bashing St. Anger at all. It was exactly what it needed to be. It was perfect. But playing those songs live right now don’t fit into the set so much. Not that they won’t later. But the direction we’re on right now with Death Magnetic, it feels really good. And I like the potency of this record. I like the way we’ve gone back to the Lightning, Puppets, where you’ve got a less amount of songs but they’re all really