Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (44 page)

For a band who in time would become celebrated for washing their linen on public thoroughfares, even in the early years of the Nineties this was a collective that did not cower from the scrutiny to which they were now being subjected. Neither, for that matter, did Bob Rock, a man whose counsel was not sought on the wisdom of bringing a film crew into the studio. Throughout filming, Rock exudes a quiet charisma and a sense of stoic humour capable of withstanding the mockery of the men he was attempting to shepherd. At an early stage of the recording process, the producer incurs the disdain of Hetfield and Ulrich following the discovery by the pair of an old
twelve-inch
vinyl record by the Payola$. As the members of Metallica regard the item, their attention becomes focused on a picture of Rock on the release’s inner sleeve. Tousled and groomed in a manner entirely typical of a band performing the kind of
radio-friendly
pop-rock fare common in the early Eighties, Hetfield surmises the image of his producer as a younger man with the put-down (and stay-down) ‘Bob used to be a woman.’ Such is the clamour of both guitarist and drummer to mock their new producer that the line is barely allowed to breathe before it is smothered by fresh insult.

‘The whole first three months of pre-production were very difficult,’ recalls Rock with a equilibrium worthy of a statesman. ‘They were very suspicious.’

‘Our reaction to [the producer’s] proposals was initially negative,’ admits Ulrich. Elsewhere the drummer noted that the union between band and producer was an occasion where ‘all hell broke loose’, the reason for this being that Rock ‘really started challenging us and pushing us and arguing with us and he didn’t take any of our bullshit. It was tough.’

For Rock the process of recording Metallica took the form of a war of attrition. As happens in politics, he had been given the role of realising the art of the possible. The producer understood immediately that he would gain no traction in the field of musical arrangements. Rock, though, was no pushover, and even in matters where his opinion seemed certain to be ignored the Canadian still proffered his point of view. Occasionally the force and sense of the outsider’s outlook was sufficient to knock holes in Metallica’s brick wall, as was the case when the producer wondered aloud why ‘Sad But True’ was written in the key of E. Rock’s recollection of the answer to this question proves that while he regarded Metallica as often bullet-headed in their sense of self-assurance, in his eyes they could also be loveably naive.

‘They said, “Well isn’t E the lowest note?”’ recalls Rock. ‘So I told them that on Mötley Crüe’s
Dr. Feelgood
, which I produced and Metallica loved, the band had tuned down to D. Metallica then tuned down to D, and that’s when the riff really became huge. It was just this force that you just couldn’t stop, no matter what.’

It is possible, however, that the producer may have
misremembered
this exchange. Metallica had already experimented with down-tuning their guitars at Sweet Silence five years previously, in order to create the lurching, dread-drenched guitar tones of ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’ on
Master of Puppets
.
Given Hetfield’s technical proficiency, it seems unlikely that the musicians would have forgotten such a detail. One thing upon which all parties were agreed, however, was that the task of recording their new album was a gruelling job of work. While the demands placed upon each participant were significant, none felt the strain quite as acutely as Bob Rock. It was the Canadian’s job to orchestrate the band’s schedule, the movements of which often resembled ships passing in the night. Following years of living his life on the far side of midnight, Hetfield was discovering a taste for working during daylight hours and for sleeping during periods of darkness. In this, as in much else, Ulrich was his band mate’s exact opposite. On occasion the drummer would treat himself to a power nap and emerge in One On One’s recording room at two o’clock in the morning, ready for his working day to begin.

‘James was pretty diplomatic about it at the time,’ recalls Jason Newsted, ‘but it was difficult. James was the most frustrated, and Kirk and I had to be there as a kind of support system.’

For anyone that has witnessed a band at work in a recording studio, the level of commitment and attention to detail required in such surroundings is revealing. Nonetheless, many albums released fail to reach the level of their own potential, and too often those involved in the making of such albums are aware at the time that this is the case. For Bob Rock, however, the squandering of opportunity and talent in the face of hard work was an act of sacrilege. For those whose efforts failed to match this standard, the producer was capable of scalding scorn. During the recording of the guitar solos, the producer’s opprobrium fell on the bewildered head of Kirk Hammett. One song in particular demanded a contribution from the group’s lead guitarist that required the unification of two often incompatible bedfellows: grandiosity and tastefulness. This song was the epic ‘The Unforgiven’. To give the musician his due, Hammett had
invested much energy in composing a guitar solo he believed would suit the ebbs and swells of the track’s middle section, the only problem being that everyone who heard the solo hated it. As the guitarist fumbled and dallied in his efforts to conceive a suitable replacement, Rock lost his temper – if not his sense of control. ‘Cut to the chase and fucking play, man,’ snapped the producer. ‘Now that you’ve warmed up, let’s hear the fucking
Guitar Player
[magazine] guitarist of the year play.’ Appearing both alarmed and not a little wounded, Hammett replies, ‘All right’, and with hurt at his fingertips performs in just one take a guitar solo the magnificence of which would be heard by more than 20 million listeners.

In making an album that sounded like a million dollars – and for reasons other than the fact that it cost a million dollars – Bob Rock bullied, probed and seduced Metallica into realising a version of themselves that swelled to its fullest parameters. In order to achieve this aim, the producer first had to plunge the detonator on years of bad habits. Surveying the rubble, he then replaced this construct with a more unified and purposeful whole. Nowhere was this task more evident than on the performance coaxed from the larynx of James Hetfield. With the exception of the uncommonly carefree ‘Enter Sandman’, Hetfield’s lyrical contribution to his group’s fifth album took the form of unvarnished truths concerning the human condition. The words written were not so much subject-led as they were driven by the kind of emotion its author would surely struggle to express in conversational form. Because these words did not come without cost to the man who had authored them, the producer understood that in recorded form such sentiments required from their singer a performance of authority, nuance and depth.

‘The word “Bob” strikes fear into all metalheads,’ was Hetfield’s opinion, a case of many a true word being spoken in jest. ‘But a producer isn’t meant to make you sound like him, he’s meant
to make you sound like the best version of yourself that you can possibly be.’

This Bob Rock did with both patience and determination. With the emotional skill-set of a behavioural psychologist, in relation to recording the sound of Hetfield’s voice the producer assumed the role of nurturer and surrogate father. In this the producer was aided by a blessing that arrived cloaked in heavy disguise. Following years of barking into microphones positioned both in recording studios and the stages of clubs, theatres and arenas, Hetfield had wreaked havoc upon his throat.

‘I went to [a vocal coach] who was a cantor,’ recalls Hetfield. ‘I walked in and I was so scared. He was sat there with a piano. [But] I looked up on the wall and saw gold records for a bunch of other bands and I thought, “Okay, I’ll give it a go.” And he got my voice into shape. He gave me a lot of confidence.

‘I didn’t end up singing like an opera singer, which I couldn’t do even if I wanted to,’ the front man is quick to add, before concluding, ‘I still sing like a sailor.’

With Hetfield’s mind opened following his encounters with a professional singer, Rock expertly positioned himself in the thoroughfare of this slipstream and coaxed from the front man a vocal performance far in advance of what had gone before. Equipped with the natural capacity to carry a tune, the producer built the singer’s confidence to such a degree that by the end of their sessions what had been recorded amounted to as commanding and assured a performance as any in modern metal. While managing to accentuate Hetfield’s bite and snarl (at least when required), in the vocal booth of One On One Studios the vocalist had journeyed from angry young man to complex and multi-dimensional narrator. At least as far as the recording of Metallica’s upcoming album was concerned, it was Hetfield and Rock’s finest hour.

‘I wouldn’t be where I am today without [the producer’s]
willingness to open my mind and push me further into different singing styles and moods,’ is the front man’s recollection of his long hours spent standing level with a studio microphone.

Slowly, exhaustingly, the album began to take form. Pieces of tape were cut and spliced together; yet despite these technical sleights-of-hand, the songs recorded carried with them both an organic quality and a volcanic force. Cleared of clutter, the recordings swaggered with a gun-slinger’s groove and the bite of a rattlesnake.

Away from One On One – and Little Mountain Sound, the studio in British Columbia at which finishing flourishes were added – Q Prime were beginning to marshal their forces in Metallica’s name. The organisation knew that the music industry at large held the band in patronisingly low regard as a niche group that had no commercial crossover appeal; Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch intended to fix this misconception in their cross-hairs and blow it to pieces. This emphatic repositioning would take place (poetically enough) in San Francisco, at a convention of America’s regional FM radio stations. It was at this event that record companies would present to the nation’s broadcasters their ‘product’ for the forthcoming season, a smorgasbord of sound from which each station would determine the order and nature of its playlists. Determined to prove to this gathering of programmers that in radio terms Metallica were about to become more than a faint blip on the edges of the radar, Burnstein and Mensch instructed Rock to prepare a snippet from the group’s as yet unheard album that could be played at the convention. This trailer would last just sixty seconds, and would be comprised of the opening minute of ‘Enter Sandman’. Prior to this, arguments had taken place between Ulrich and Rock as to which of the batch of new Metallica songs should be presented to the public as the album’s lead-off single. The producer believed this nomination should go to the wholly unsuitable ‘Holier than Thou’, while Ulrich – who held in his head
a vision of his group’s fifth album before even a second of music had been recorded – understood as if by instinct that this honour should be presented to ‘Enter Sandman’. It took just one minute for the drummer to be proved correct.

‘Imagine the first sixty seconds of “Enter Sandman”,’ instructs Adam Dubin, who recalls the decision with resonant clarity. ‘You have the booming drums and the riff building up and building up and each instrument comes in and it builds up into that first vocal, and it’s
huge
. [The track] has one of the greatest [slow] building openings of maybe any song in the whole of rock. So Bob Rock spent a day or two setting the thing up and mixing it and then we sat there and listened to it. Just as a fan, as a person who loves music, I was hugely excited. I just knew it was dynamite. Whatever somebody’s conception of Metallica was before that, this song was about to shatter that preconception. So they took that song away and a few days later we heard back that it blew the doors off the room when they played it: everyone went nuts. You just had to know you had a hit on your hands. So that was a very key moment when that happened. I remember that as a very significant day.’

Over nine arduous months in Los Angeles and Vancouver, as the band and their producer squabbled over single seconds of music, the two parties were united in just one detail: a shared desire to achieve greatness. In a space as shorn of natural light as a Las Vegas gaming room, Metallica had finally showcased the full extent of their sound and talent on a record capable of seizing the attention of the mainstream and leading it astray. But as the sessions finally drew to a close, creative harmony and personal enmity did not unite in anything resembling a Hollywood ending.

‘It wasn’t a fun, easy record to make,’ recalls Rock. ‘Sure, we had some laughs, but things were difficult. I told the guys when we were done that I’d never work with them again. They felt the same way about me.’

‘In retrospect,’ concedes Ulrich, ‘the nine months we spent in [One On One] were pure hell.’

Elsewhere in the summer of 1991 the American public were being presented with a touring package that had all the subtlety of swinging jackboot. Featuring co-headliners Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer, the forty-eight-date Clash of the Titans tour was the most punishing metal bill ever assembled. With its three main attractions rotating their position on the bill on a nightly basis – although in truth neither Anthrax nor Megadeth relished following the God-in-tap-shoes thunder of Slayer – the tour drew audiences of up to 17,000 people a night in cities from Seattle to Miami.