In May, Hetfield went on a two-week bear-hunting expedition to Siberia. He not only missed the first birthday of his son, Castor, but also found there was little to occupy his free time and fell into bad habits. He had recently moderated his alcohol intake to nothing harder than beer and wine, but here there was only vodka. “That was the end for me,” he says.
On his return, the Presidio sessions continued, but so did Hetfield’s drinking. “My wife stood up and told me, Hey, I’m not one of your yes men out on the road. Get the fuck out.” On 19 July Metallica announced
he had entered an “undisclosed facility”
to undergo treatment for alcoholism and “other addictions”. “I realised how much my life was fucked up, how many secrets I had, and I was basically disclosing all this shit that happened on the road to my wife,” he says.
With women?
“Oh yeah. That brought up a lot of fear for the other guys. It did stir up the mud and the water was very thick with mud at that point.”
James Hetfield spent 11 weeks in rehab, but the band would take a back seat for months to come.
“I truly had to believe that I could survive without Metallica,” he says.
Ulrich, torn between concern for his old friend and annoyance that the band’s uncertain future was entirely in Hetfield’s hands, had come to terms with the fact that Metallica might never play together again. However, in April they finally met up at their newly completed HQ and continued working on St Anger, the infomercial concept abandoned in favour of Some Kind Of Monster. Though
the film portrays Towle as seemingly getting too close to Metallica, the band couldn’t talk to each other without him.
Hetfield returned from his hiatus a changed man. Calmer and more reluctant
to become embroiled in arguments with Ulrich, the newly sober singer instigated a policy that the band could only work between midday and four o’clock. The reason for this half-day regime was so that Hetfield could spend more time with his family. One memorable scene shows him meeting his wife to watch their daughter, Cali Tee, at a ballet class. “Most of that he-man thing was just a façade for him to deal with his own insecurities,” says Ulrich. “I always felt that he was a gentle soul and a very loving guy.”
The rest of the band didn’t take this well: Ulrich vented his anger – and years of bottled-up enmity – by screaming the word “fuck” right in the singer’s face. “It had to come out,” says Hetfield. “Afterwards I said, I’ll accept that once.”
Progress was difficult as the band adjusted to Hetfield’s needs. The open dialogue was
a double-edged sword too, evidenced by Hetfield feeling free to tell Ulrich that he just wasn’t enjoying playing with him any more. Slowly, though, their perseverance paid off, relations thawed and the album
was finished in April 2003, 715 days after the initial session. The result was unvarnished and over-long. Inevitably, it received a critical mauling. But it would turn out to be the most important record of Metallica’s career: it saved them.
“Phil Towle comes off badly,” says Bob Rock. “I was there. I saw what he did. There would be no Metallica without him. They fucking hated each other.”
Those reduced working hours are still in place today.
In his upstairs office, James Hetfield considers how Metallica fans react to the new, sober him. “They expect you to be this hard-ass who gets up on the table and demands beer for everyone,” he says. “When you don’t do that… Wow, I thought you were different. How much that hurts is so amazing but they only mean it in
a nice way.”
Were you fun to be around when you were drunk?
“Definitely not. I would get pretty violent. There’d be the happy stage. Then it would get ugly where the world is fucked, wanting to smash everything and hurt people. I’d get into fights, sometimes with Lars. That’s how resentments would get released. Pushing and shoving, throwing things at him.”
Do you love Lars?
“I do. We wouldn’t get our families together and go to Hawaii for a week, but, man, when someone’s challenging Metallica, we’ll cling together like there’s no tomorrow. We will watch each other’s back and fight to the death.”
Later that day, I sit down with Lars Ulrich in the control room of Metallica’s HQ. On a whiteboard above us, working titles for the next album are written in marker pen. We Put The Riff In Riff Raff and One Minute Closer To Death (Than You Were A Minute Ago).
The drummer seems mildly frustrated that we might be concentrating on the spicier elements of Metallica’s history. “For all the little titbits, it’s still about a band that’s lasted 26 years and continues to have one foot close to relevance.”
He has a point. What they’ve been through together would destroy most bands, but Metallica has the resilience of Hetfield and Ulrich as its nucleus and the bond between this oddest of couples appears shatter-proof.
“Absolutely,” he says. “I love James. “I hope we grow old together and that Metallica grows as old with us as we want it to.” |
