For Metallica, the 90s were just like the 80s – only in reverse. The 10 years it took them to go from unloved New Wave Of British Heavy Metal copyists, when they formed in LA in 1981, to globe-straddling multi-platinum-selling rock titans on a sales par with Michael Jackson and U2, with the release of their fifth album, Metallica, aka the Black Album, in 1991, saw them evolve faster than a speeding bullet.
The move from hair-metal LA to anything-goes San Francisco, occasioned by bringing in SF natives, bassist Cliff Burton and guitarist Kirk Hammett; the sparking of a whole new genre in rock – thrash metal – and in its wake close-but-no-cigar imitators such as Megadeth and Slayer; the ability to fit comfortably onto the front covers Kerrang!, NME, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and The Times of London, New York and LA; the death of Burton and the resulting exultation of a band afforded legend status before they’d even made a video; the conquering of first Britain then Europe then America then the rest of mankind.
They achieved all that between 1981 and 1991. Surely the next 10 years would follow a similarly skywards trajectory. All Metallica seemingly had to do was keep their eyes on the prize. Instead, they appeared to wilfully steer the great metal bird Metallica headlong into the ground, as they spent the 90s veering from one ‘controversial’ decision to another.
First they cut their long hair short, applied garish make-up, and lost more than half their global audience with release of the provocative post-Black Album Load (1996) and, more contentiously still, Reload (’97). Had Metallica gone grunge? Had Metallica sold out? Didn’t Metallica care about their metal-loving fans any more? What were Metallica thinking?
The answer to all those questions was: no. Metallica hadn’t changed their thinking at all. If anything they were staying true to their nature, pushing boundaries, riding their lightning back out to the edge again; exploring those places – musical, cultural – no other metal band would have considered. It was their defining characteristic: a gift and a curse that made Metallica both the only ‘thrash band’ to successfully transcend their origins – and singled them out for special punishment when these experiments exploded in their faces.
By 1998, when Metallica were now giving serious consideration to recording a rock-meets-classical album with a symphony orchestra, it felt almost as though they were on a kamikaze mission to kill or at least badly maim their career. Couldn’t they just make another one like the Black Album or, even better, Master Of Puppets? Another entirely thrash-based album the way Slayer and Megadeth and all the other comet-trailers did?
Actually, no they couldn’t. The boy for whom nothing was ever quite enough, drummer Lars Ulrich, wouldn’t let them. Instead, the 90s became the beginning of what singer/guitarist James Hetfield later described with more than a hint of sarcasm as “the great reinvention of Metallica”.
“It’s not like we all went out together for a group haircut,” said Lars, when I teased him about it. But in many ways that’s exactly what they did do. It was one thing seeing Kirk Hammett showing off his new body tattoos and face piercings; essential oil dabbing, comic-book collecting, dope-smoking Kirk had always leaned that way. Looking at James Hetfield, though, once the poster boy for shit-kicking no-fucking-around heavy dude-ness, in his newly pompadoured hairdo and thick black eyeliner, sitting there in a tight white vest and smoking a cigar, it seemed as though the whole world had tipped upside down.
The only one somewhat off the pace, as usual, had been the irreplaceable Cliff Burton’s replacement, Jason Newstead, who had cut his hair short some months before and was actually in the process of growing it back when the first Load publicity pictures were taken. For Jason, as with most hardcore Metallica fans, there was pushing the envelope, and then there was tearing it to pieces and tossing it in the air like confetti. For Jason, it was as though Lemmy had suddenly walked on stage wearing a long evening gown and tiara. Actually, it was more shocking than that. Lemmy would clearly have been joking; Metallica clearly were not.
As Lars explained: “I’m the one who will go and find out what goes on in Oasis-land or Guns N’ Roses-land or Alice In Chains-land. I’m so curious to see how other bands do things. It’s fun to sit down with Liam Gallagher and talk complete and utter nonsense about music.”
Musically, Kirk had also moved on. Not like Lars, into the emotional quicksand of grunge or the peacocking of Britpop, but towards more leftfield musical innovators such as Nine Inch Nails, Aphex Twin and The Prodigy, groups who positioned themselves as musical emissaries of the near future.
“You can only be what the public thinks you are for so long before it becomes boring,” Kirk remarked. Since the phenomenal success of the Black Album, he had “begun to feel quite objectified”.
It would become this mutual desire to multiply the range of Metallica’s inspirations that now drew the drummer and guitarist closer together. Both recently divorced, and more intent on “seeing what’s out there”, as Lars put it, their newfound bond also had the side effect of making James feel more isolated from the group’s central purpose. Kirk would later disingenuously characterise this period as “playing referee” between Lars and James, but the fact is he was never closer to Lars – or further away from James – than now.
By default, both James and Jason now became the metal purists of the band. For the first time, James was starting to see Jason’s side of things. “Why did we get him in the band if we didn’t like him?”
Nothing prepared them, though, for what Lars suggested next: a two-CD live album, recorded with the 90-piece San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the album punningly titled S&M (aka Symphony And Metallica). An ambitious collaborative project, arranged and conducted by celebrated film-score composer Michael Kamen, recorded over two nights at the Berkeley Community Theater, in April 1999, that presented a selection of Metallica songs rearranged for group and orchestra.
A metal band performing their music with a classical orchestra? James and Jason thought the whole thing ludicrous. Lars and Kirk pressed ahead with it.
It had been done before, of course, notably by Lars’s beloved Deep Purple, whose 1969 performance with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at London’s Royal Albert Hall had resulted in Purple’s live double album Concerto For Group And Orchestra.
Two years before, the Moody Blues melded the two into their Days Of Future Past album. The 70s was prime rock-meets-classical territory; led by prog-rock ‘virtuosos’ like Rick Wakeman, whose 1974 album Journey To The Centre Of The Earth combined rock ensemble, symphony orchestra and choir. Emerson, Lake & Palmer toured America with a full orchestra.
More recently, Roger Waters had performed Pink Floyd’s The Wall in Berlin with an East German symphony orchestra. Even the Scorpions had recorded an album with an orchestra, Moment Of Glory, which followed just months, in fact, after S&M.
Kamen, a 51-year-old American orchestral composer, conductor and arranger, had also worked previously with Pink Floyd, Queen, Eric Clapton, and David Bowie. It was after Kamen’s original introduction in 1991 by Metallica producer Bob Rock, who’d invited him to score an orchestral arrangement for Nothing Else Matters, that Kamen first suggested to Lars “some sort of collaboration”. Eight years later he got his wish.
According to Kamen, the idea was “to create a dialogue between two worlds that celebrate the power of music”. Apart from the financial motivation, which was certainly significant – the chance to record another five-million-selling album out of two nights’ live recording, along with the attendant redirection of buyers once again towards the band’s back catalogue – it was never really clear what Metallica actually hoped to achieve from the collaboration.
Kamen dutifully studied Metallica’s music for six months – the equivalent, he reckoned, of completing three film soundtracks – and scored arrangements for 21 of their songs, including two new Hetfield/Ulrich compositions: No Leaf Clover and Human. There was also a new arrangement of Ennio Morricone’s The Ecstasy Of Gold (part of the soundtrack to The Good The Bad And The Ugly) which had opened Metallica shows for years.
An initial rehearsal with the SFSO’s principal players was followed by two lengthy dress rehearsals with both band and full orchestra at the venue – for which harpist Douglas Roth arrived on a motorcycle, his tattooed arms clutching some Metallica CDs he wanted them to sign.
“There’s always [some] snotty old bastards giving you the evil eye, like: ‘Fuck, you guys are cavemen. Your music sucks,’” James complained. “But there were others that understood what we were trying to do; they could see that we fucking mean this shit, man. We have a passion in our music and our music is our life. They just grew up learning it different. They studied theory, and we studied UFO Live.”
As Kirk later said, however, Metallica’s interest in all forms of music, whether strictly metal or not, went all the way back to their former bass player Cliff Burton’s lasting influence on the band. “Cliff liked Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, he loved classical music and especially Bach, he was the one always pushing to try something new.”
The Berkeley Community Theatre had a longstanding reputation for staging rock artists in concert, and many were recorded and released as live albums, including artists of the stature of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and Frank Zappa, to name just a few. Its rust-coloured auditorium and green psychedelically swirling carpet were little changed from the heady days when guest speakers there included Lenny Bruce, Timothy Leary and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Outside they erected a large tent, which served as a temporary backstage area, including portable balustrades still wrapped in plastic. Lighting designer John Broderick was overheard explaining his strategy for the dramatic overture to Kamen: “You come on and it’s bland-bland-bland. The orchestra starts up and it’s bland-bland-bland. James comes on – bland-bland-bland. Then Jason comes on – bland-bland-bland. Then Lars hits the first drum beat, and BOOM! It’s the Fillmore, 1968.”
“Ah,” Kamen said, smiling. “So that was you. I simply assumed I was having a flashback.”
“Even without these shows,” Lars conceded, “I couldn’t have imagined at nineteen what my life would be like at thirty-five – being married, having a baby boy, the way my Motörhead records are gathering dust. I love to embrace ageing, especially because in rock’n’roll it’s such a negative thing to talk about. I know it’s a cliché in rock’n’roll to say ‘We do whatever the fuck we want,’ but I believe I can say it, for the first time, a hundred per cent truthfully. I don’t think we could have done this kind of project five years ago, because I don’t feel that we had the balls to do it.”
The shows themselves were a mixture of the sublime (witness the bow-tied orchestra member waving his tuba around in acknowledgement of the sea of devil-horn signs) to the ridiculous (see the goth girl in tight red vinyl dress, standing on her seat waving her black-gloved arms above her head in some strange invocation). Beware the colossal Hells Angel, doing anything he damn well pleases while the orchestra saw away at Sad But True.
Suddenly the days of Metallica tours featuring “the biggest cocaine mirror on the planet” on which a 20-foot line was carefully chopped into scoops as a treat for the crew, were over.
“If I felt that I could actually get the orchestra to snort speed and smash up their instruments,” a grinning Lars said, “I would.”
James claimed to be only dimly aware of the orchestra once the show started. “We don’t have them turned up in our monitors because they’re doing such wild, crazy and awesome things that it would really throw me off. But when the floor rumbles all of a sudden, I know something right is happening.”
To promote the S&M album and filmed-in-concert DVD, released in November 1999, Metallica also performed single concerts with orchestras in Berlin and New York. Questioned after the Berlin show, though, James laughed it off. When they were first presented with the idea, he said, “we thought: ‘Fuck, that’s got failure written all over it. It’s like fucking in church. Let’s do it!’”
Playing the whole thing down still further, he added: “It would be fun to take [the orchestra] on tour and watch them fall into the debauchery hole and completely turn into rock ruins. Taking them on the road and watching one beer turn into five beers and all of a sudden they’re in jail, divorced and hooked on heroin and smashing their cellos on stage.”
The two new songs – No Leaf Clover and Human – were also impressive, both more genuinely experimental than anything from the Load – Reload period, Clover a swaggering, emotional trial-by-fire with band and orchestra meshing to spectacular effect; Human a sweeping, atmospheric piece that somehow allows oboe and keyboards to sit snugly alongside the explosive guitars, drums and treated vocals.
The remaining 17 tracks, however, often highlight what an odd, difficult fit the two highly emotive forms of music make: One sounds neutered, Enter Sandman simply a mess. Even Nothing Else Matters – Kamen’s original entry point into Metallica’s music – sounds lacklustre, perfunctory. Others, such as Hero Of The Day, work better but only because the orchestra tends to be more in the background.
Ultimately, what may well have been a unique live experience becomes, on record and DVD, more like a beautifully shot home movie: fascinating for those who were there; something that doesn’t really stand up to repeated listening/viewing for those who weren’t.
Reviews of S&M were predictably lukewarm. In Britain, Q magazine was avuncular, describing it as “another just about forgivable flirtation with Spinal Tap-esque lunacy”. Rolling Stone claimed the album “creates the most crowded, ceiling-rattling basement rec room in rock… The effect is… one of timelessness.” Later, however, the magazine changed its mind, describing S&M as Metallica’s “very worst disc… just as useless as every other album on which a rock band plays their hits with an orchestra”.
Nevertheless, Metallica had another US No.1 album. In Britain, however, S&M didn’t even make the Top 30. No Leaf Clover was the only single from the album, but that wasn’t a hit even in America.
If as recording artists Metallica were now beginning to take on the appearance of jaded old gods, as concert masters they were still considered a top-drawer ticket, as monolithic and unmissable as the pyramids. So what if they would never make another album as good as Master Of Puppets or as popular as the Black Album, who cared if they had mislaid the plot artistically, they still kicked ass live, right, dude?
Looming on the millennial horizon: Jason quitting; suing Napster; the St Anger debacle; Some Kind Of Monster.
Compared to that, S&M seemed charming, almost innocent. Almost.
