Metallica: This Monster Lives (22 page)

I tried several times to call home to New York, but I couldn’t get a line out. Not knowing what else to do, I picked up the phone and dialed Phil’s number. I assumed today’s session was canceled, but I wanted to check in. I was surprised to hear from him that the session was happening as scheduled. Oh well, I figured, better to keep busy by doing something. Still numb, still shocked and scared, Wolfgang and I headed to the Ritz-Carlton. The more I thought about it on the ride over, the stranger it seemed that we were going through the motions. But then I figured having Phil here was a great opportunity for all of us to talk about how freaked-out we were feeling. This was one time I didn’t mind bending my own rules by unloading on him.

The way the sessions often worked, Phil and the guys would talk informally while we set up lights and put mikes on everyone. Once we were ready, the therapy would begin in earnest. As we were setting up on the morning of 9/11, the room’s TV was on, tuned to CNN. The guys were watching it and talking about the unthinkable events that were unfolding, but once the session began, Phil gently guided the band into familiar emotional territory. All of us on the crew were struggling to do our jobs while inwardly panicking. The band members also tried gamely to go through the motions, but you could tell they were uncomfortable treating this like a normal session, without acknowledging what was happening in the outside world.

“I thought about calling James yesterday, but I was gonna talk to you first,” Kirk said to Phil. “I talked to you and then …” Kirk paused. “Things are a lot different now. There’s no World Trade Center.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Phil said.

Thus did Metallica and Phil acknowledge that we were now living in a different world.

“I’m just so scared that there’s a line out there somewhere,” Lars said at
one point, referring to his relationship with James. “And I’m scared that if that line gets crossed it will be impossible to get it back. I just feel so, you know, disrespected.”

It’s safe to say that those of us on the crew who were from New York were experiencing a completely different type of fear.

I was anxious to get back home, but all flights were grounded. I was stranded in the Bay Area. I didn’t know it, but so was Dave Mustaine.

Dave was Metallica’s first lead guitarist. He joined the band in 1982 and was kicked out in 1983 because of his drinking problem. (Given the epic benders “Alcoholica” went on in those days, Dave must have been particularly out of control.) It was an ignominious dismissal. One day, when Metallica was in New York to record
Kill ’Em All
, Dave was awakened early in the morning by the others. They handed him a one-way bus ticket back to San Francisco and told him to hit the road.

He definitely landed on his feet. He went on to form the rival metal band Megadeth, releasing nine albums with total sales of fifteen million. Mustaine developed a reputation as a thoughtful lyricist; like Metallica, Megadeth avoided metal’s Spinal Tap—ish clichés. Mustaine’s thinking-man’s-metalhead status even landed him on MTV a few times to comment on politics and current events.

Dave’s name had come up in therapy a few times, but I’d never heard anyone say anything about bringing him in for a session with Phil. Metallica’s contact with Dave had been limited since he left the band; they’d never had an in-depth discussion about his abrupt dismissal. Lars and Dave had apparently had several phone conversations over the last few months, while James was away. When Lars heard that Dave was in town, and that Dave’s stay had been unexpectedly extended due to 9/11, Lars invited him to drop by room 627. I only found out about this historic summit on the day it happened, September 13, when I got a call from Lars. “Maybe you should film this,” he said. He sounded overly casual, almost as though he had mixed feelings about having us there.

We showed up at the hotel not really knowing what to expect. Lars had given me Dave’s cell-phone number, which I kept trying, but he wasn’t picking up. So I just waited in the lobby for him to arrive with Lars. I didn’t know it then, but Lars had told Dave about Phil (Megadeth had also spent some time with a therapist) but had said nothing about a film crew. When Dave and Lars walked
through the hotel doors, I quickly went up and introduced myself to Dave, who looked like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights. Lars wasn’t being much help. He would often adopt a sort of aloof attitude toward us when we filmed him in public, as though he wanted to downplay his involvement with the film. He wasn’t about to explain to Dave what we were doing, other than to make it clear that Lars was okay with my presence. If I was going to get into room 627 today, it was all up to me. I quickly explained our project, half-expecting Dave to think this was some
Punk’d-
style prank. But he was actually quite willing to go with it. I’m not sure why, though perhaps the week’s tragic events had made him, like all of us, feel like old rules and conventions just didn’t apply; we were all struggling to make sense of the world. I got the feeling that if Dave had walked through those doors a week earlier, I would not have been welcomed. In a strange way, the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history had not only given Dave the impetus to confront the source of his ongoing mental anguish, it had also given me a front-row seat.

Now, by any reasonable criteria, Dave Mustaine is not a failure. Sure, Megadeth never reached Metallica’s heights, but how many bands have? You might think Dave would be proud of all he’s accomplished, especially since he’s done it on his own, rather than in the shadow of the Lars-James juggernaut. But no: Dave is still tortured by his brush with Metalli-greatness. As he puts it in one of
Monster'
s most memorable moments, every time he hears Metallica on the radio, he feels the same sentiment: “I … FUCKED … UP!” (The way he slaps his head while saying this really makes the scene indelible.) The chronic chip on his shoulder may be why he’s also developed a rep within the rock world as something of an asshole, but what I found instead was a thoughtful man struggling to articulate why he can’t be satisfied with his own success.

The scene with Mustaine in
Monster
gives you a good idea of his anguish, but it doesn’t quite articulate how fond Dave’s memories of his time in Metallica still are. “In the very beginning, we had a master plan,” he recalled for Phil. “I remember the day I met Lars like it was yesterday. I went to his house, and we talked, and I kept saying that the song he was playing for me needed more solos.” From that day on, “we had this game plan about ruling the world.” Maybe it was because it was Lars who Dave was actually confronting head-on, but it was obvious to me that he and Lars (“my little Danish friend”) shared a very tight connection in those days. (In fact, it seemed very similar to the way Lars described his own relationship with James back then. Perhaps Lars was the glue that held the band together.)

Another reoccurring theme of that session was how strong Dave’s loyalty to Metallica was. The band really was his family “When my dad went into a coma,” he said at one point, “it didn’t faze me like being let go [from Metallica].”

Dave brought up the time he beat up a member of another metal band when the guy tried to rough up Lars at a party. “Every time I see Phil, I feel bad for him,” Dave said. “But I wasn’t gonna let him hurt you. I’m awfully protective of the people I love.”

Lars scowled like he was trying to remember that night. “Who’s Phil?”

“Phil Sandoval, from Armored Saint. Don’t you remember me breaking his leg?”

“I remember the incident, but I don’t remember—”

“He pushed you down, and he hurt you. And I kicked him. And I made sure he didn’t hurt you again. And you heard his leg break.”

Dave also recounted a harrowing car accident from one of their early tours. “I remember we were in Laramie, Wyoming, and I was behind the wheel. None of us had any experience driving on ice. We hit some black ice, which is something even experienced truckers crash on, and our truck spun out and then fucking crashed.”

“Thankfully, you were behind the wheel,” Lars said. “Because I don’t think anybody else was equipped to deal with it at the time.”

Dave managed to keep the truck from spinning completely out of control. Everyone piled out onto the cold highway and surveyed the damage. “James’s Fender [amp] got crunched, and I just remember being so mad at myself. Mark, this kid who was trying to be our sound guy, was standing in front of the U-Haul going, ‘Oh my fucking god, oh my fucking god!’ I looked up the road, and I saw a jeep coming at us. I grabbed him, dug my feet into the ground to get traction, and I pulled him out of the way. The jeep would’ve killed him.”

Dave’s memories of James were similar to Lars’s and Kirk’s description of James today: proud, aloof, and hard to get close to. Dave and Lars each mentioned at different times during this session that they wished James were there to participate, but I’m not sure the raw emotion of Dave’s and Lars’s encounter would’ve worked with James there. Given what James was going through and the type of personality he has, I think he would’ve been much more defensive toward Dave. As it was, just like the scene with James slamming the studio door, we could have practically made an entire mesmerizing short film from this session. With Dave speaking directly to Lars, there was a fascinating give-and-take,
a mixture of blame and forgiveness, anger and sadness, regret and reminiscence. Several times during the exchange, Dave became overcome with emotion and asked us to turn off our cameras. Through it all, Phil was uncharacteristically quiet, apparently content to let the intense emotions flow on their own.

Lars didn’t quibble much with Dave’s description of how the band gave him the boot, but he put his own heartbreaking spin on the events that led up to it. “We had played shows on Friday and Saturday, and things had gotten out of control,” Lars recalled. “By the time Sunday rolled around, we were all pretty tired. We were driving back, and me and you were in one truck together, and the rest of them were in another vehicle. Me and you were just sitting there. I think we were smoking pot and being very mellow. And I can clearly remember being overwhelmed with sadness and emotion about what was about to go down, literally eight hours later.”

Lars paused. There were tears in his eyes. “I’m not saying that I wasn’t equally responsible for being part of making the decision [to fire you], but I just felt all this guilt and sadness. Because I really felt that when all the bullshit was stripped away, all the boasting, you were a really tender person. You had this really tender side of you that I was really attracted to, that I really felt comfortable with, you know what I mean?”

After three hours, the session was over. Lars said he’d drive Dave back to his hotel. I made a split-second decision not to follow them. It was probably the right thing to do, but I missed out on a weird moment of synchronicity When Lars started the car, the radio went on, tuned to one of the local rock stations, which, at that moment just happened to be playing Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” “We just laughed,” Lars said when he told the story at the start of the next day’s therapy session. “We went with it for five seconds, and then I leaned in to change the channel.” Lars found another rock station. Metallica’s “No Leaf Clover” blasted out of the speakers. Dave just smiled and turned off the radio. Maybe, once Lars was gone and Dave was alone, he began to beat his head and tell himself he fucked up. But somehow I don’t think so.
¹

During those strange few days, I had a few moments of my own that made me think of fate and chance. At some point, I don’t remember when, it hit me that the flight that went down in a Pennsylvania field, the one where passengers
fought with the hijackers to keep the plane from reaching its Washington, D.C., target, had originated in Newark and was bound for San Francisco. I remembered that I was originally supposed to leave Tuesday morning. Even then, I couldn’t recall why I had changed my ticket to leave the night before. (I flew out of JFK that day, not Newark, but Bruce and I had taken many Newark—San Francisco flights while making
Monster.)

Another moment occurred just as I was finally about to go back home. The day after the Mustaine session, planes were still grounded in San Francisco. I was desperate to do anything to feel less trapped. By then, there were no rental cars to be found in the Bay Area, so Wolfgang and I decided to drive our production van (rented on September 10) down to L.A., to see if we could get a flight out of LAX. That weekend, I kept getting seats on flights to New York that were subsequently canceled. My wife was in tears after every cancellation; she really needed me at home. As anyone who flew immediately after the flight ban was lifted will remember, airports seemed to be filled with more military personnel than passengers. Security was hellish. On Sunday, I was finally able to get a seat on the last flight to New York that evening. I sat there for hours, waiting for my flight and trying to chill out by listening to the Cure’s
Disintegration
over and over on my iPod (I really couldn’t handle Metallica’s music just then).

I was sitting there in the gloomy terminal, staring into space with my headphones on, when I felt an intense glare on me. It was almost like a warm light cutting through the airport’s harsh fluorescents. I glanced across the room and saw an attractive woman staring at me with an odd look on her face, almost like she was surprised to see me but also expected it all along. She got up and walked across the waiting area to introduce herself. I’m not sure how she recognized me, but I recognized her name. She used to run a small company that produced and occasionally distributed small, arty films. We wound up having one of those intense, bonding conversations people have when they find themselves stuck in an elevator … or waiting for hours to catch a flight after 9/11. We talked about what a strange, emotionally wrenching week we’d just had. She told me that she wanted to make a documentary about Kabbalah, the tradition of Jewish mysticism. She was a serious Kabbalah student and had a high-ranking position with the Kabbalah Centre. She had talked to many of the world’s most serious Kabbalah scholars about participating in the project, which she envisioned as the definitive Kabbalah film. She had approached the famous documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker about working with her, but
he wasn’t interested. She said I was the next person she had planned to approach. And here I was.