Metallica: This Monster Lives (30 page)

“I’m not questioning that. But I can reach for more if I want to and you can tell me I’m full of shit. I’m okay with that.”

“Sometime this process is fucking … it’s frustrating. I can’t put another word in there. English is my second language. It’s just frustrating, period. With a big exclamation point.”

The discussion continued in this vein for a while and then quieted down a little. Bob asked if anyone was up for playing some music. “Do you think we could tackle that?”

“Yeah, I’d like to play,” James said. “What do you think, Lars? I would like to just put out there that whatever it is that you want to tell me, I will open my heart as big as I can at that moment.”

“Thank you,” Lars said. He got up from his seat and started pacing around the room. The frustration he had been talking about for the last half hour was reaching a breaking point. “I want to say ‘fuck’ a lot to you,” he said, addressing James but looking away from him.
“When I was running this morning, and thinking about seeing you today, I was thinking how the word ‘fuck’ comes up so much.”

“Is that in anger?”
James asked.

“No, just—fuck! For … just, fuck … I … yes, it’s anger, it’s anger …
I just think you’re so fucking self-absorbed. What makes it worse is that you
always talk about … you always talk about me, and you use the words ‘control’ and ‘manipulation’ a lot. I think you control on purpose and I think you control inadvertently. I think you control by the rules you always set. I think you control by how you always judge people. I think you control by your absence.
… I just wish that there would be some sort of acknowledgment of that, at just some fuckin’ level.
All these rules and all this shit—man, this is a fucking rock-n-roll band, I don’t want fucking rules. I understand that you need to leave at four. I respect it. But don’t tell me I can’t sit and listen to something with Bob at 4:15 if I want to—what the fuck is that?”

Lars was still pacing slowly around the table. Bob Richman stood in the corner, still filming with the camera’s lens as wide-open as it could go, backed into a corner to make sure he got the whole scene.

“I don’t understand who you are,”
Lars said, looking at James now.
“I don’t understand the program. I realize now that I barely knew you before.
These fucking rules—it drives me crazy. You know, I have issues with people telling me what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. I will never tell you how to live your life, but the part that involves me—don’t bring that shit in, or do it in a mutually respectful way. Fuck, I … I’m just …” Lars paused.
“I don’t want to end up like Jason, okay? I don’t want to be pushed away. I don’t want it to happen twice.
I see all these great changes you’re making, but the part that involves me doesn’t feel like it’s changed at all. It almost feels like it’s worse. And I don’t want that. I’m somewhere around the halfway point of my life, or past it, and it’s just not fucking worth it.
So let’s do it, and let’s fucking do it full-on, or let’s not do it at all.
This half-assed shit—let’s step it up or step down.
See?”
He walked to James, who sat there stoically as Lars got in his face like a baseball manager yelling at the ump.
“Fuck … Fuck … FUCK!”

Lars would later tell us that he had never confronted James like that, not once in Metallica’s twenty-year history. At this moment, however, all he said was, “Okay, so I got that out of my system.”

James would later tell us that if anyone besides Lars had gotten in his face like that, he would have thrown a punch. But for now all he said was, “Thanks for sharing that, Lars.”

The entire exchange that led up to this point was fascinating. Choosing just a bit of it to represent the whole involved weeks of agonizing. The danger of drawing just a few minutes culled from hours of discussion is that you can miss how great the divide was between the most aggressive and most tender moments of these sessions. After the climactic “fuck,” we cut away to the fan
day, but read as part of a much larger exchange, what came after the obscenity is particularly illustrative of how emotionally complex the sessions could be.

Lars, looking sheepish, said to James that screaming “fuck” in his face made him feel like Sam Kinison.

“It feels good, huh?” Bob said, smiling.

“My back hurts,” Lars said, collapsing into his chair.

James smiled. “I think you’ll wear a path in the concrete, but yeah, there was a lot of good stuff I got out of that, a lot of insight into you.”

“I guess I’m so scared,” Lars replied. “My fear is that when I tell you these things, and I truly look you in the eye and say this … I really, from my heart, respect what you’ve done with yourself. I continually need to emphasize that, ’cause I really do admire you.”

“Thanks for getting to that place,” Phil said. “I really like how you opened up and cared enough to take on full-frontal anger. It’s a sign of who you are. This is the scariest time of your life, in my opinion.”

“It’s definitely the most uncertain,” Lars offered instead.

Phil talked about how inspired he was by watching James and Lars struggle with their issues, and how much it helped him.

“It’s hard to believe I could help you,” James said. “It really is, you know?”

“James, you’ve helped so many people,” Kirk said.

“You’re like a mentor to me,” James told Phil.

Bob said to Lars, “You finally got in deep, and that’s good, because now we’re all in deep, but the funny thing is, I know you were worried about showing all your anger and frustration, but I have more respect for you for doing that.”

“Thank you.”

“And I know you do, too,” Bob said to James.

“Well, it showed a vulnerable side,” James replied. “It really did.”

“And you don’t fucking hate him for doing that,” Bob continued.

“No, I understand he had to do it the way he had to do it.”

“Right.”

“And that,” James said, just before they decided to let this marathon session wind down, “was the way it was meant to be.”

THE “FUCK” SCENE

Two people deserve special credit for making the “fuck” scene such a dramatic part of
Some Kind of Monster:
Bob Richman and Lars Ulrich.

Bob’s expertise really came in handy here. The wide-angle zoom lens allowed him to take in the entire room while Lars was standing up and speaking to James across the table. Bob didn’t have to pan from Lars’s talking to James’s reacting, which could have diminished some of the scene’s power. Moments like this can and should be allowed to speak for themselves with as little interference as possible. “You try not to be too creative,” Bob says. “It’s almost like you’re trying
not
to do anything. You just make sure you’re in the right place to capture it.” Bob’s shot encompasses everyone else in the room, which I think adds to the scene a further sense of gravitas. The viewer is acutely aware that Lars is calling James out in front of the others.

Another advantage of the wide-angle lens is that it allows Bob to cover a wide area without getting too far away from his subjects. “I like to work really close, even though I try to be unobtrusive. The wide angle allows me to cover a scene in a more photographically interesting way. When you’re right in there, there’s an intimacy that has an unconscious psychological effect. I only have to move my body slightly, almost a slight caressing, to get someone on the left and right of me.” A perfect example of the power and utility of Bob’s method is the exchange between James and Lars regarding how little enjoyment each is deriving from playing music with the other.

Lars’s contribution to the scene came in the form of one of his late-night phone calls, in the autumn of ’03. Actually, this time, as I noticed when the ringing phone jerked me awake, it was early in the morning—three
A.M
. I picked up the phone and heard a voice nearly drowned out by a loud whooshing noise. It took me a second to realize it was Lars. He was calling from a bullet train in Japan, where it was a much more reasonable hour. We were a few weeks away from locking a fine cut of the film, and Lars had taken a cut with him to watch in Japan. As usual, he had had plenty of incisive comments. Now, as he pondered the film while the train hurtled through the Japanese countryside, he realized that something was missing from the “fuck” scene.

“When you first showed us the movie, there was a part in there where I
tell James not to push me away, and that I didn’t want to end up like Jason. Now it’s not there anymore. What happened?”

Unlike most of the conversations we had about the film, which often turned into heated debates about the scene in question, and free-floating discussions about film aesthetics in general, this time I was stumped. (I was also barely awake.) I remembered that we had cut this part out, but I couldn’t remember why. That sort of thing happened occasionally when we were trying to pare
Monster
to a reasonable length. The amount of great material we had was so much greater than what we’d worked with in the past that it was hard to keep track of it all.

“Well, I think you should put it back, because it makes the scene better. Also, I—”

The train entered a tunnel, killing the connection. I sat there in the dark, running some of the recent editing sessions through my head. When Lars called back a few minutes later, I told him that we’d deleted that sequence to shorten the scene, not for any aesthetic reason. The next day, I went back and looked at the previous cut of the film with Bruce and David Zieff, and I realized Lars was right. We had cut something absolutely central to the scene for no apparent reason, so we decided to put it back in. Thanks again, Lars.

CHAPTER 16

TO LIVE IS TO DIE

The universe said a lot of strange things during the making of
Monster
, but it was particularly vocal–and cryptic–on a June day in 2002.
I would be lying if I said I completely understood, even now, what it was trying to tell us. A series of seemingly unrelated events aligned themselves in a way that just cried out for some kind of interpretation. You couldn’t help but wonder if everything was connected.

The story starts with the Ramones. The legendary punk band plays a very significant part in the story we tell in
Monster.
As you may recall, on the first day in the studio after James returned from rehab, Metallica worked on songs for Rob Zombie’s Ramones tribute album. It was a little surprising to see Metallica, after so many months of inertia, use their reunion to play someone else’s material. Maybe they figured that the shaky transition of acting like a band again would be easier if they put off the grueling process of making a Metallica record, especially given the emotional histrionics of their last recording session almost a year ago.

Taking a broader view, it’s surprising that a band like Metallica was playing Ramones songs at all. Or, rather, what was noteworthy was that it
wasn’t
a surprise, certainly not the surprise it would have been even ten years earlier. It seems quaint to think about it now, but there was a time when metal and punk
were two fiercely divided subcultures. Any music fan with decent ears in those days could tell that there was plenty of musical crossover, with each side borrowing from the other. The differences were more stylistic: the way metal bands and fans looked versus their punk counterparts. The late-’80s Seattle bands, such as Soundgarden and Nirvana, mixed metal and punk in a way that truly made the division look silly, but the process actually started much earlier. Bands like Black Flag and Bad Brains, which grew out of early-’80s hard-core punk subcultures, sounded increasingly metallic as the decade wore on. Nominally “metal” bands, like Guns ’N Roses and Motӧrhead, drank freely from the punk well. Punk’s role in rock history was supposedly that it killed off dinosaurs like Led Zeppelin, but that was a story largely written after the fact. The Ramones, the very godfathers of punk, thought that rock had become moribund, but they also considered their music to be just another kind of hard rock. They even played some shows as the opening act for Black Sabbath. The hostile reception they received helped solidify the punk-metal divide.

Then there was Metallica, perhaps the biggest anomaly of all. James and Lars started jamming just a few years after the Ramones put out their first album, a time when punk was punk and metal was metal and never the twain shall meet. The moves toward the center by the ’80s bands were still a few years away. Though more commercially successful than punk, metal was sometimes the more “underground” music, denied even the currency of cool. In
Monster
, Lars talks about bonding with a young James Hetfield over their mutual love of “the new wave of British heavy metal,” a genre unknown to most people, for whom “new wave” tends to trigger memories of the Cars and Devo. Metallica were quintessentially metal, yet also somehow totally different from most metal bands. (According to Metallica lore, to amuse themselves backstage on an early “Monsters of Rock” tour, the Metallica guys would walk by the singer from a band they considered particularly derivative, and “cough” while saying “Robert Plant.”) Conversely, there was plenty about Metallica that could have made the band anathema to punks: guitar solos, long songs, the pervasive (and very metal) Wagner-esque bombastic vibe. But many punk fans—and even some people who didn’t particularly like most punk
or
metal—loved Metallica. And Metallica returned the favor: Their EP
Garage Days Re-revisited
included songs by the Misfits and the seminal British postpunk band Killing Joke. Metallica’s official fan-club magazine,
So What
, takes its name from a song that Metallica often covers by the Anti-Nowhere League, an early-’80s British punk band. The thrash rhythms that Lars still employs
today (think “St. Anger” and “Some Kind of Monster”) wouldn’t sound out of place on an old Minor Threat album.