When Metallica and Lou Reed unveiled their 2011 collaboration Lulu, Lou Reed told the world, "This is not a party record." This was something of an understatement.
By far the most polarising record in the Metallica catalogue, Lulu, inspired by the Lulu plays (Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box), written by German expressionist Frank Wedekind, is by any measure an intense, gruelling, listening experience. For a lot of Metallica fans listening to the record in 2011, it was simply too much - too dark, too abstract, too confusing, too beyond.
But, honestly, it's worth persevering with, not least for its epic closing track, the brooding, mournful Junior Dad, all magnificent 19 minutes and 28 seconds of it. As a droning string section creates the kind of cinematic soundscape that sounds like an extension of Cliff Burton's harmonic masterpiece Orion, Reed sings, "Hiccup, the dream is over. Get the coffee, turn the lights on. Say hello to junior dad. The greatest disappointment. Age withered him and changed him."
"Every time I hear it I'm overwhelmed by it," Reed told GQ magazine in 2011.
The song was deeply personal to Reed, to the extent that he refused to explain his lyrics.
"It's very difficult, that one," he told Mojo magazine's Keith Cameron. "I'll leave that one alone, for us. You heard it, it does what it does, some things you don't explain."
The song had a profound effect upon Metallica duo James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett, who both burst into tears upon hearing the finished version for the first time.
"I had just lost my father literally three or four weeks previous," Hammett told Mojo. "I had to run out of the control room, and I found myself standing in the kitchen, sobbing away. And something else extraordinary happened right after that. James came into the kitchen in the same condition - he was sobbing too. It was insane. He managed to take out both guitar players in Metallica in one fell swoop, with his amazingly poetic lyrics. And he came into the kitchen and he was laughing. He looked at James and I, and said: 'That's a good one, huh?'"
When GQ magazine mentioned Hetfield and Hammett's tears to Reed and the band, Reed replied, "Not just them..."
"All of us," Lars Ulrich added. "My dad was down there during the moment that you're talking about, and it was shared by everybody."
Last year, talking to Rolling Stone about Junior Dad, Kirk Hammett admitted, "I can’t listen to it, man. Brings me to tears."
"Lou Reed came in and saw us both crying in the kitchen," he remembered. "He’s smiling and he said, ‘I got you, didn’t I?'"
