Inside Metallica's "Death Magnetic': From Near–Break Up to Triumphant Comeback | Revolver

Inside Metallica's "Death Magnetic': From Near–Break Up to Triumphant Comeback

Having survived the tumult around 'St. Anger,' the world's biggest metal band returns with a new sense of purpose
MetallicaToLive.png, Clay Patrick Mcbride
photograph by Clay Patrick Mcbride

"You guys suck."

It's three words that Metallica frontman James Hetfield, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, and bass player Rob Trujillo probably don't hear very often. Especially not to their faces…and when they're onstage to boot. But here they are, soundchecking with an instrumental rendition of their Misfits cover, "Die Die Die," in a tiny, maybe 150-person-capacity Nashville, Tennessee, dive club very accurately named the Basement, and dead center in front of them is their heckler, leaning on the barrier, chewing gum, his hips cocked in a posture rife with attitude.

Who does this guy think he is?

Hearing the taunt, Hetfield, Hammett, and Trujillo look up, squinting through the glare of the stagelights to identify their antagonist. After a second they see him and recognize him. His name? Lars Ulrich.

Unbeknownst to his bandmates, the Metallica drummer has slipped into the darkened venue, fashionably late. His jacket glistens with fresh raindrops—seconds ago, outside, the heavens let loose a sudden June shower, and the long line of Metallica fan-club members waiting along the Basement's driveway are doubtless getting soaked to the bone.

Recognizing Ulrich, his bandmates laugh. Their drummer's kidding, of course. Despite what the many haters may say—that Metallica haven't made a good record since 1990's "The Black Album," or, even worse, since 1988's …And Justice For All; that they came off like pussies in the 2004 documentary Some Kind of Monster, which showed the band teetering on the brink of break-up, with Hetfield entering rehab and the bandmates almost unable to talk to each other without "performance-enhancing coach" Phil Towle in the room—Metallica categorically do not suck. Their rip-roaring new epic of an album, Death Magnetic (Warner Bros.), proves it. As does their positively electric performance tonight in the Basement.

A secret gig announced only to members of the MetClub, the show is set up to be one for the ages. But after years of playing stadiums, leaning on massive sound systems, jumbotron monitors, and pyrotechnics, a band of Metallica's size could easily be exposed as a toothless relic in an intimate venue where precision and intensity are the only currency. Not these guys. The band kicks off the show with "No Remorse," off Kill 'Em All, a fitting opener since, according to Hetfield, the last time Metallica played a club this small was when they toured for that album, their now legendary 1983 full-length debut. A fitting opener, too, since Metallica show little to no remorse over the course of the 45-minute-plus set, throwing themselves fully into every note of whiplashing classics like "Sanitarium," "Harvester of Sorrow," and "Sad But True," sending sweat, hair, and fists flying. Dead center, clenching down on the barrier, where Ulrich taunted his bandmates just minutes before, stands 20-something Ron from New York, who had been following Metallica around on the European tour they just flew back from earlier today. He counts this as his 102nd Metallica gig. Afterwards, when asked if any one of those many shows stands out, he answers without hesitation: "This one!"

About two-thirds into the set, Ulrich scrambles up from behind his drums and takes Hammett's mic. "I just want to say, you guys have supported us for so long here in the Basement," he salutes the crowd, tongue in cheek, "but tonight there are people here from Warner Bros., so maybe, with your help, we can finally get out of the Basement—though we love it here—and get a fucking record deal!"

It's a telling joke. Having come about as close to breaking up as a group can get during the making of their last album, 2003's St. Anger, Metallica almost seem reborn as a new, much younger band. Garage days revisited, indeed. Part of this impression is simply the optical illusion of seeing them incongruously playing such a minuscule club. Part of it is that the longtime members—Hetfield, Hammett, and Ulrich, all in their mid-40s—are in better mental, spiritual, and physical health than they have been in years. But most of it is that, as the bandmates themselves point out, having peered into the abyss, they've come away with a renewed love for what they do and a hunger to keep doing it. Maybe nowhere is this clearer than on Death Magnetic, a record created with the explicit mission statement of trying to tap into just that sort of youthful passion and drive. As Hetfield describes the "mantra" given to them by producer Rick Rubin: "Go back to what you were thinking at the time of Master of Puppets. You're writing a set list to impress a record company. You want to get signed. Here's your showcase list. Be hungry."

The result is Metallica's fastest, most ferocious album in decades, full of "Battery"-like velocity, headspinning riff-o-rama, sinuous Thin Lizzy–esque dual-guitar harmonies, off-kilter rhythms and time signature shifts that harken to Meshuggah, and, unlike St. Anger, guitar solos, lots of them. And amid all the blast and bluster, there are some of the dynamic touchstones of their classic triptych, Ride the Lightning, Master, and Justice—there's an acoustic ballad that becomes crushingly heavy like its forbears, "Fade to Black" and "One," and there's even an instrumental track à la "The Call of Ktulu," "Orion," and "To Live Is to Die."

As for the album's lyrics, Hetfield reclaimed the task of penning those alone, relishing the opportunity to confront his demons one-on-one again after the group-writing stream-of-consciousness free-for-all of St. Anger. "I really wanted to crawl back into 'the cave' and kind of get scared, just dark and scared," he says when Revolver sits down with him in one of the band's tour buses after the Basement show. The towering frontman is clearly still juiced from the performance, shifting restlessly in his seat, his eyes scanning his surroundings. He's just finished vocal warm-downs, in particular an exercise he calls "horse lips"; he demonstrates, flapping his mouth in a way that can best be described as, well, horse lips. "It's funny now that I go in the cave and I'm OK. I know where the exit is."

Hetfield exited this time with a batch of songs exploring, in various ways, his band's brush with mortality and resulting new life. "A lot of the album revolves around the near-death experience we had, you know, the near-death of Metallica," he says. "I read an interview with Johnny Cash about his near-death experience where he actually saw the light and the tunnel and all kinds of stuff you see in the movies. He was telling it like it is; I don't think Johnny Cash would lie. And he was telling that story, and he came back and said how grateful he was and how amazing life had become. He was able to really breathe it in and to see people and to feel things deeper than he had ever felt. I found that really intriguing and somehow identified with it because of the band's almost-breakup. So, there's some of that, and there's some of the people that hadn't come back from the light; there's a lot of rock martyrs or heavy-metal warriors that have died, that didn't make it because they couldn't handle it. You know, like a Layne Staley [of Alice in Chains, who OD'd on a mix of heroin and cocaine in 2002]. All of the people that have fallen into the mist of the road and relied too much on the crutches, and they take them."

It's clear from how the frontman talks about this subject that it's a very personal one—not so long ago, he, too, relied excessively on one of those crutches: alcohol. More than any single member in Metallica, maybe more than the band itself, Hetfield stands reborn.

"James was a little bit fragile when I first joined the band, you know, almost five years ago. It seemed to me like sometimes you're walking a tightrope with him, or thin ice," recalls Trujillo of Hetfield, who was, at the time, fresh out of rehab. "It seems like now he's kind of got his juju back. He's sober, and that's a beautiful thing for him. He's solid with his family and it's amazing to see. He just seems more free-spirited and really psyched and excited about writing the songs and really focused on his riffage and his lyrics. He's not afraid to stay in the studio until one in the morning and play guitar and get things right."

But as happy as everyone is for Hetfield to be sober, and as much as he himself knows that being so has probably saved his life, he's a little unsure about whether it's made "getting things right" easier or harder. "It's made me stronger, I think, in the fact that I don't have to rely on an outside source or something," Hetfield says of sobriety's impact on his creative process. "I can go into the cave; it helps when I'm at home or I'm somewhere where no one's around. You know, I used to create the cave by drinking, and I don't need to do that. But there are certainly plenty of times where I think it would be so much easier if I was just not me, or if I drank and became some other thing, I'd be freer. Then I think it through and I realize I don't want to be something else or someone else. I want to be me. Or at least the me I think I know. Why pretend otherwise when I'm trying to connect with people? It's not cool connecting with someone because they think you're someone else. So, I go back and forth with that, you know. I'm less creative, I'm more creative. It's greater, it's not so great. So, you know, overthinking for sure. But more and more trusting the ability to be creative without cloudiness."

When Rick Rubin sat down with Metallica two years ago to begin work on Death Magnetic and laid down his mission statement, his mantra—"Go back to what you were thinking in Master of Puppets"—Lars Ulrich says there was "some fear and some trepidation" on the part of himself and his bandmates "about going back and kind of taking a look at what we used to do." They had brought in the legendary producer, the man behind landmark metal albums like Slayer's Reign in Blood, Danzig's Danzig, Slipknot's Vol. 3 (The Subliminal Verses), and System of a Down's Toxicity, to try and shake things up after 15-some years of working with Bob Rock, who, by Hetfield's own admission, had basically "become a part of the band." Now maybe Rubin was trying to shake things up too much.

"On the Justice tour in '89 —I can't remember what show it was—we're playing these fucking songs, they're 10 minutes long. It's one math-metal exercise after another, and we've gone back to the dressing room and we all sat and looked at each other and were just like 'What the fuck is this? Why are we putting ourselves through this stuff?'" Ulrich explains. "Basically, the whole thing becomes about not fucking up. I mean, we go out onstage every night with one goal in mind, which is to not fuck up. We made a promise to each other that we were gonna go in a completely different direction and we were just gonna get away from that. That's been, you know, 16 years where we, I don't know if 'ran away from it' is the right phrase, but I could tell you, at least for me, that I did everything I could to not go back there. Everything I could to not repeat what those records were."

But once the band members overcame their initial reservations—learning to, as Hammett says, "not be afraid to look into our past and take out the best elements of our past and use them, because we own them. We invented that shit"—they found they could embrace the experiment. "There was a lot of self-referencing going on all across the board: in the songwriting, in the performance, in the recording, in the attitude, in the problem solving," Hammett continues. "A lot of times we would say, 'What would we do in the '80s?' And we were able to mine our own material for fresh new ideas. And you know, no matter how much we try to play it like it was on, say, the second album, it'll always be different because we're playing it now, and it's a different context and we're different musicians."

Similarly, Ulrich is eager to point out that Death Magnetic is not simply a throwback. He describes the writing process as the band members "being inspired by those records again" while remaining careful not to "turn into, no disrespect, but classic rock." Trujillo thinks they've succeeded: "Yes, there's elements of the speed, of the riff, of the heaviness of that old-school stuff, but there's definitely at times a bounce and a groove thing going on, too, that represents what is happening, like, now."

While the other Metallica dudes also seem confident that they've created an album that simultaneously references their classic albums and keeps a foot in the present tense, they're still digesting their experience working with Rubin. All four agree that one of the best things about the producer is that, as Hammett says, "You never see him." Rubin would mostly leave the band to its work, only coming in every six weeks to two months to check up on their progress and give his opinions. As for those opinions…

"The thing that I really like about Rick is he's the most blunt person you'll ever meet," says Ulrich. "When it comes to music, it's really simple: Either he likes it or it's fucking shit. And I kind of like the bluntness of it. I mean, sometimes, it's a little crazy. I was sitting one day listening to some drum tracks, and I'd play one version for him and he goes, 'That's so bad it makes me want to kill myself. Literally. I hope I never hear that again. That's depressingly bad.' OK. So, I play him the other version, and it's the same thing he just heard except it has, like, two different drum fills. Other than that, they're identical, all right? I play him the second version. 'That's fucking on fire! That's great!' And you're just kind of sitting there going, Huh?"

"There was a little jostling for position, you know," says Hetfield of dealing with Rubin's sometimes mystifying directions. "'Oh, he says this and I don't agree with it. I wouldn't do it that way. How does he know? He doesn't know metal. He's saying that's metal; that's not metal.'" "A couple of times we had to take the reins," Ulrich adds, "and it feels good to do that. It feels like we can always rely on that when we really need to. Me and Hetfield can step up and kind of be like, 'Don't fuck with Metallica,' because at the end of the day, that's us."

And if ever Metallica's identity—and very existence—was in doubt, now it seems crystal clear; as Ulrich says, Metallica "is us": him, Hetfield, Hammett, and Trujillo, not just a band but a family, one that has been through some dysfunctional times but is now tighter and stronger than it has been in many years. The drummer's taunt before the Basement show seems to confirm this in itself—"You guys suck" likely wouldn't have been so funny back in the Some Kind of Monster days, and it probably would have started a fight, not been greeted with chuckles.

"You know, it's awesome, the fact that after 27 years we can get along," says Ulrich, "that we can fucking sit in the same dressing room—we still use the same dressing room—take showers within minutes of each other. I mean, think about it a second, the horror stories you hear of other bands who can't even be in the same city at the same time. We actually go and have dinner together, we actually hang out. We sit down and talk to each other. It's pretty cool. But don't spend too much time on the shower thing. I can see where you're going with it: Fucking James and Lars in the shower. Those guys. I knew they were fucking gay all along," he laughs. "But it's a rare thing. We really do appreciate it, and that's not some next-level psychobabble, found-God type of thing."

The bandmates each credit various developments for their current harmony—their lead singer's sobriety, the addition of the easygoing Trujillo, the fact that they have all become parents (Hammett had his first child during the making of Death Magnetic and, at the time of these interviews, was expecting his second in a week)—but they all point to St. Anger as having been a crucial element, even if they may have individually hated the lack of solos or the collaborative lyric-writing. St. Anger "had to happen," says Hetfield. "It was a stripping down of walls. A kind of regrouping. A vulnerable time; vulnerable with each other and seeing how vulnerable we could get without someone slipping and punching you in the gut when you're not looking."

Having pulled through, the Metallica family can now shift their attention to enjoying their extended family: the fans. And down in the Basement, even as the band absolutely tears up the tiny space, a familial vibe prevails. Between songs, the bandmates joke around with each other and the crowd, distributing high-fives and bottles of water—or maybe not; as Hetfield wisecracks at one point to a fan guzzling down the liquid, "Are you sure that's water? It looks a little yellow to me." Hetfield also calls out Ron from New York, whom he recognizes from the front row, dead center, of the last 100-plus Metallica shows. And maybe the intimate family feeling here is not so surprising; these are, after all, 150 or so of Metallica's most diehard fans, and this is the fucking Basement.

 What is surprising is how that vibe somehow carries over to Metallica's gig the next day: headlining the main stage of the Bonnaroo Music Festival in nearby Manchester, Tennessee, in front of some 80,000 people. Once a hippie fest dominated by jam bands, this year's installment features not only Metallica but also everyone from Pearl Jam, Mastodon, and the Sword to rap star Kanye West, all-female tribute band Lez Zeppelin, and possibly Metallica's strangest, if awesomest, opening act ever, comedian Chris Rock. When, a few songs in, Hetfield asks the crowd how many people have never seen Metallica before, amazingly, it seems like almost all 80,000 raise their hands (except, of course, for Ron from New York, whom we spot on the ginormous stage-side monitors, front row, dead center, locked down on the barrier). Apparently, even the biggest metal band in the world has more new fans to adopt into their family. And by the end of their final encore song, "Seek and Destroy" (to which two hippie chicks are seen hula-hooping), Hetfield tells the crowd, "Metallica loves you, baby. Metallica loves you," and it seems pretty clear that the feeling is mutual, and that the band's extended family has, indeed, just been extended by at least a few thousand happy souls.