Metallica: This Monster Lives (18 page)

The quality of the music and the accuracy of their memories notwithstanding, there was also a simpler explanation for this myopic view of the past. It has something to do with the old cliché about not missing the water until the well runs dry. The resentment directed toward James couldn’t mask the regret these guys had for not being able to make their band work, regardless of who was responsible for it falling apart.

By this point in the making of
Monster
, I knew something about this feeling firsthand. I sympathized with what James was going through, but I could also see the effect his absence was having on his bandmates. I felt like I understood both sides of the equation. To make
Blair Witch 2
, I had split from Bruce abruptly and with little explanation, for reasons that made sense to me at the time but which really hurt him. The fiasco made me understand and appreciate our creative partnership better than I ever had. I realized that there is some sort of indefinable creative magic that happens when we work together. I had tried so hard to put a value on what each of us brought to the table and had concluded that I was worth more, but I’d learned that you can’t really quantify the worth of each individual part of a true collaborative relationship. It’s not that
I decided that the issues I had with Bruce weren’t valid—just that there was a larger picture. When it looked like I’d blown it, I looked back on our years working together and I saw those experiences in a new light. I was really thankful that I’d been given a chance to recapture some of the positive feelings about working with Bruce that I’d never fully acknowledged before.

When we started filming
Monster
, a lot of these thoughts remained unspoken. All the work we had to do to get the film up and running allowed us to postpone the messy emotional business of talking about all of this. A few weeks into filming, before James left, Phil talked to us after a session, as we were packing up. Since I had regrettably done my own therapy session with Phil a few weeks earlier, he knew something about my history with Bruce and how I’d broken away from him. Phil asked us if we could identify personally with what Metallica and Jason were going through. We both kind of laughed sheepishly, looked at each other, and nodded. It wasn’t until we had filmed a few more sessions and thought about what Phil had asked us and what our cameras were capturing that Bruce and I spontaneously got everything out in the open. We went back to our hotel one night, got a little stoned in my room, and everything just came pouring out. Bruce talked about how “dispensable” he felt when I went off to make
Blair Witch 2.
He told me what he couldn’t bring himself to tell me at the time, that regardless of whatever business-related objections I had to our partnership, he had felt really hurt by my willingness to discard what was, in his mind, one of the greatest documentary teams ever, without at least trying to work on our issues.

We still had a lot of issues to resolve regarding our partnership, but we at least could now both say that we each did our best work in tandem with the other. By the time Metallica really began to admit how much they valued James, even as they were supremely pissed off at him, Bruce and I were already past that point. We knew how much we meant to each other and the ways we got on each other’s nerves. The fallout from
Blair Witch 2
had been so personally devastating that I figured I’d never be passionate about a film again. I didn’t think there would be any more films for me. What I’m getting at is that if someone like Phil had told me then about the “new direction” that was in front of me, I would’ve taken that as just desserts—
back to the ad world you go!
—not as the possibility of a second chance. Bruce showed me that the “new direction” could mean getting back on track in the old direction, something I realized fully in that hotel room with him, when it was clear that we both felt
passionate about the great film that was once again unfolding in front of us. And Bruce learned that we could each pursue healthy solo careers without worrying that this pursuit somehow jeopardized our creative partnership.

I’m sure Lars and Kirk weren’t considering an advertising career when Phil talked about their new direction, but I bet they were just as skeptical as I had been that they could ever regain what they once had. Phil was confident that the solution was to reassess and renew what their relationships with one another meant, that doing so would help heal James and Metallica, but they probably weren’t ready to hear that. I was a bit ahead of them on that point. They were still too close to what Lars sometimes called “D-Day,” the day James slammed the door on them. They had a ways to go.

CHAPTER 10

SHOOT ME AGAIN

Shooting Metallica for the first time for my VH-1
FanClub
pilot in 1999, over two years before production on
Monster
began (Courtesy of Niclas Swanlund)

04/21/01
INT. ROOM 627, RITZ-CARLTON HOTEL, SAN FRANCISCO - DAY

LARS:
What’s so ironic about the whole thing with Jason is that the last time Jason walked out that door six weeks ago, I feel that there was more love, respect, and understanding than there ever was in the fourteen fucking years he was in the band. Do you know what I mean?

KIRK:
We never got a chance to make music with Jason feeling [like he was at] the place where we felt best with him, which is kinda weird.

BOB:
Yeah, I mean, as the outsider in this situation, and knowing you guys a little bit but not really knowing what’s going on here … it seems like you’re in a much better place, almost like—I hate to say it—but where Jason wanted to be, in a way.

LARS:
Sure, because, in some way, what we’re gonna start on Monday [at the Presidio] is sort of what Jason wanted: for the four of us to just get in a room together to play music,
not the Hetfield-Ulrich show. We’ve joked—or half-joked—that Jason sort of sacrificed himself. He became a sacrificial lamb, so that the three of us could get to this greater place. It’s kinda weird.

KIRK:
It’s just a shame that he’s not here with us. I mean, it just breaks my heart that he can’t experience this. A whole new era is coming. He’s not even around to experience it, and he was part of the making of it.

In a way, we owe it all to Jason Newsted.

Well, actually, we owe it all to Cliff Burton, Metallica’s original bassist, tragically killed in 1986 at the age of twenty-four, when Metallica’s tour bus flipped over on a Swedish highway. When Cliff died, the members of Metallica didn’t just lose a close friend—they lost forever the original ideal of Metallica. Cliff was, by many accounts, the musical center of the band, the Metallica member with the most comprehensive knowledge of music history and even music theory. To this day, the surviving members of Metallica continue to deal with the complex emotions brought on by Cliff’s death. As James puts it in
Monster
, “It pisses me off that Cliff left us because it’ll never be just us four guys going on and on again.”

Jason Newsted’s tenure in Metallica lasted three times as long as Cliff’s. But as any Metallica fan knows, Newsted never really replaced Burton—at least not in the minds of James, Lars, and Kirk. If you listen to …
And Justice for All
, Metallica’s first album with Jason, it’s striking how inaudible the bass parts are. Jason is buried so low in the mix, it’s almost as though Metallica were sending a message to Jason—and Metallica fans—that Burton had left a hole in the band that would never be filled. Sometimes it almost seemed like they blamed Jason for trying to fill Cliff’s shoes. The stories of hazing during Jason’s early years are legendary. While on tour, the others would go barhopping without telling Jason, charge hundreds of dollars of room service to him, and, as world-weary rock stars, mercilessly take advantage of his naïveté. While out for sushi once with his
bandmates, Jason ate a big mouthful of wasabi because Lars told him the spicy-hot mint-colored Japanese condiment was, in fact, quite minty and refreshing.

After a few years, it seemed like Jason had become more of an equal. When Metallica was doing press for the
Load
album in 1996, Jason and James would often conduct interviews together; they were Metallica’s down-to-earth, “regular guy” half, as opposed to the more flashy, rock star—ish Lars and Kirk. But Jason never fully shed his outsider status. He began looking for other collaborators and eventually put together Echobrain. The rest of Metallica apparently had no problem with Jason’s extracurricular activities until he announced that he planned to tour with Echobrain. Even then, it appears that James was the only person who objected to Jason playing music outside Metallica. As we find out in
Monster
, James felt that Echobrain was a sign that Jason wasn’t putting all of his creative energies into Metallica, where they belonged. Of course, as Kirk Hammett would be happy to tell you, there are limits to how “creative” James and Lars would allow anyone else to be—but at least Kirk had his guitar solos, whereas Jason was stuck in the more journeyman position of bassist. The rules of Metallica’s creative process thus prohibited Jason from bringing all he could to Metallica, while James Hetfield’s possessiveness and insecurities prevented Jason from bringing his ideas to full fruition elsewhere. It was a crisis waiting to explode, and during the first month of 2001, it did.

In November 2000, two months before Jason announced his departure, the members of Metallica sat down with journalist Rob Tannenbaum for a
Playboy
interview. Metallica had laid low through most of 2000, as planned, a break that didn’t seem to have helped relations within the band. By this point, James and Jason basically weren’t speaking to each other, and Lars and James were barely in touch. “I’ve never seen a band so quarrelsome and fractious,” Tannenbaum wrote in the article’s introduction. Even Lars’s foray into the spotlight that year as an anti-Napster crusader, although supported by the band, somehow did nothing to bolster Metallica’s legendary “us against the world” solidarity: James told Tannenbaum that he “cringed” at the way Lars sometimes came off as a “snotty-nosed kid” when talking to the press about Napster. Tannenbaum interviewed each guy separately, which guaranteed plenty of sniping, often of the passive-aggressive variety. The journalist became the conduit through which the band members communicated with one another, since they weren’t doing much communicating on their own. James took shots at Lars (“To this day, he is not Drummer of the Year. We all know that.” “He can be a real ass.”), Lars took shots at James (“I know he’s homophobic … I think homophobia
is questioning your sexuality and not being comfortable with it.”), but the main thread that emerged was Jason’s growing discontent. Jason spoke of the years of hazing—such as the others bursting into his hotel room in the middle of the night, flipping over his bed, and throwing all his belongings out the window—but said the following years were worse: “Instead of fraternity pranks, there were things that cut deep and were based on disrespect.” “What did they do that was disrespectful?” Tannenbaum asked. Jason’s reply: Turning down the bass on …
And Justice for All
and “not listening to my ideas, musically.”

The musical humiliation hurt more than the personal humiliation. Stripping his bass parts from an album hurt much worse than stripping away his personal dignity. That was how much music meant to Jason—as he says in
Monster
, “I chose not to have kids; music, that’s
my
children.” Jason, who had grown up worshipping Cliff Burton, had put up with Metallica’s abuse for so long mainly because he understood, on some level, how blasphemous it was to presume to fill Burton’s shoes. Now he had begun to mature enough as a musician to put together his own project. James told Tannenbaum that Metallica’s fans expected complete dedication and that a side project signaled a diluted commitment; trying to make light of the situation, James said that everyone understood that Metallica is “Lars, James, Kirk, and—uh, what’s that guy? Jason.” Jason responded—through Tannenbaum—that James had appeared on several Corrosion of Conformity albums and had contributed vocals to the soundtrack of the
South Park
movie. James countered that his name wasn’t on those projects and he wasn’t “trying to sell them.” When pressed to say what he’d do if Jason went ahead and released his album, James said he’d be “disappointed.” Lars, for his part, said he didn’t think he could look Jason in the eye and tell him he couldn’t play his music. But it was Kirk, as usual the peacemaker, who was the most sensitive as well as the most prescient: “James demands loyalty and unity, and I respect that, but I don’t think he realizes the sequence of events he’s putting into play Jason eats, sleeps, and breathes music. I think it’s morally wrong to keep someone away from what keeps him happy.”