“They’ve always had a very off-and-on sort of relationship with each other,” he says. “We all have. Sometimes we love one another, sometimes we hate one another. It just depends on the level of saturation.”
By 1996, the “levels of saturation” were dangerously high. Money, fortune and ego had splintered Metallica into two ideological factions. On one side were Hetfield and Newsted, the diehard rockers. Experimental aesthetes Ulrich and Hammett formed the other camp. The artwork for that year’s album, Load, made it clear which pairing had the upper hand. Photographs of the band, shot by U2 collaborator Anton Corbijn, found them with short hair styled somewhere between Depeche Mode and a gay bowling team.
“The whole ‘we need to reinvent ourselves’ topic was up,” says Hetfield. “I’m a team player most of the time and I know Jason and I did not agree on what was going on, but if we’re going to make this work, let’s all get into it.”
The subsequent tour found Hammett overdoing it with more than just the eye-liner he had taken to wearing; his coke habit began to jeopardise his physical and mental health. “I was starting to turn green,” he says. “And I was seeing things that weren’t there, like bugs on the wall.”
If life within Metallica was increasingly turbulent, at least some band members found stability in their personal lives in 1997, the year that Load’s companion piece, Reload, was released. Ulrich wed second
wife Skylar Satenstein on 26 January, while Hetfield married Francesca Tomasi on 17 August. Metallica saw out the decade with the covers album Garage Inc (1998) and S&M (1999), a live show recorded with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. They began 2000 by recording a song, I Disappear, for the soundtrack to Mission: Impossible 2.
In March 2000, Ulrich heard that radio stations were playing I Disappear. The track wasn’t due to be released for another month and only existed as working versions. “It was traced back to something called Napster,” says Ulrich. “Somebody was fucking with us, we were going to fuck with them back.”
The ensuing legal battle with the download company was a PR disaster. Despite Ulrich’s assertion that this was about music being taken without consent rather than money, the band were seen as bullies by fans and fellow musicians – a situation not helped when the drummer personally delivered the names of more
than 300,000 alleged copyright violators to Napster’s offices.
“We were always the good guys. All of a sudden we were the bad guys,” says the drummer. “How I became the poster child for that is the mindfuck of all time.”
The case was eventually settled in Metallica’s favour in 2001, but things were about to get even worse.
In late September 2000, James Hetfield informed Jason Newsted that he would be well advised not to release a record by one of his side projects, Echobrain. “James said the words to me, Other arrangements can be made,” Newsted recalls. “I will not let anybody talk to me in that way. After everything that I’ve fucking been through for this band. Somebody else can take your place. OK, I’m done. Fuck you.”
It was clear that Metallica were fragmenting, but their solution was surprising even by their own standards. In January 2001, the band’s management enlisted the help of therapist Phil Towle, who specialised in resolving problems between teams in business, sport and entertainment.
On 17 January, an announcement was made that Newsted was leaving Metallica. “Jason threw the match into the gasoline,” Towle tells Q. “The remaining band members began to take a look at themselves. James and Lars had been battling for a long time. They felt disrespected. People don’t process things until there’s a crisis – this happens in marriages.”
In April 2001, Metallica decided to plough on and start recording the next album. In characteristically OTT fashion, they opted to forsake the comforts of a traditional recording studio in favour of the Presidio, a decommissioned military base in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. With Bob Rock standing in on bass, Towle encouraged the band to pen a “mission statement”: “We come now to create the album of our life.”
Hetfield and Ulrich’s friendship was finally crumbling in front of Berlinger and Sinofsky’s cameras. In one memorable scene in Some Kind Of Monster, the singer accused Ulrich of being too “clever” by trying to write a drum beat for his latest guitar riff. “You’re being a complete dick,” thundered the drummer. Hetfield stormed out of the studio control room, dramatically slamming the door behind him. The presence of Towle, alongside directors Joel Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, who were initially only filming for a series of TV “infomercials” to promote the album, only heightened the sense of chaos. |
