Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [238]
For Kirk Hammett, ‘It was absolutely important that we went through all this bullshit that we had to go through, because when it spit us out at the end, we were better people; better, wiser, and more aware of just how fragile the Metallica thing really is – fragile as hell. We have a saying that we used to kick around HQ: you’re never more than thirty seconds away from total and utter complete chaos and disaster. I mean, in thirty seconds everything could fall into shit. So it’s taught us to learn how to appreciate all that we have so much more than how we used to just take it for granted. It’s a great place to be and we went through the meat grinder but we’re still together we’re not just a fucking quivering piece of hamburger in the corner.’
The last time I spoke to Lars Ulrich I asked him how his relationship with James had changed over the years. ‘A lot of the basic elements are still the same,’ he insisted. ‘Instead of it having changed, it’s expanded. And that’s obviously a kind of a different thing. The one thing that me and James do share is a love for music – a love for hard music and an unparalleled love and passion for all things Metallica. It’s been twenty-eight years now and obviously the glue that holds us together is Metallica. The other thing that’s happened in the last ten years or so is that we have another element to our relationship, which is the whole thing with the children. We have kids. I have three kids, he has three kids. They’re all sort of the same age, they all hang out together. So obviously being parents of similar age kids has brought a whole other dimension to our relationship. And nowadays we sit around and talk a lot about other things than music, you know, our lives out in the suburbs of San Francisco, about, you know, carpooling and soccer games and fucking lunchboxes and homework and all this stuff. You know, obviously we have very different personalities, but in some way I think we’ve realised over the years our different personalities really complement each other and really are sort of necessary for both of us to have in order for both of us to feel complete, in order for both of us to feel like we have something to offer. [We have had] ups and downs. But when I look back on it, it’s never derailed to the point of not functioning. Both me and him, we’re pretty responsible. We answer phone calls and we show up more or less on time, when we’re supposed to. We hold up our end of it, and the great thing about it is that we realise that what we have between us is greater than the individual parts. And that, I think, has always been kind of the unwritten, underlying message of Metallica, and the relationship. We do love each other and we cherish each other, and we’ve had problems maybe explaining that or vocalising that in the past. But, you know, as we get older and we have more and more cool moments, I think we also share a similar journey in that we spent a lot of our young years really worrying mostly about two things, about getting drunk and getting laid. We were sort of oblivious to most other things. Then as you turn the corner of forty and all of a sudden you start sitting there, opening your eyes and realising how awesome a lot of these things are around us.’
‘It did start as music and it still is very important,’ said James, when I asked him the same question. ‘I mean, obviously we have different musical tastes and that’s fine.’ It struck him, though, while he had been listening to a radio interview with Kirk recently in which ‘he was talking about how him and Lars are so close. They have the same political views, the same social interests, and things like that. And I just started thinking about it. Like, you know what, Lars and I don’t share any of that. We’re pretty much the opposite at everything – except when we play music together. Like, hey, I hear it going here. Yeah, me too! You know, whenever we’ll take a break, we’ll go away for six months from each other and come