Metallica, Kerrang! 26 November, 2008
IT’S 6.30AM when the alarm rings on Lars Ulrich’s bedside table. In half an hour the same thing will happen in the bedrooms of James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett and Rob Trujillo. Hetfield will watch his wife rise before rolling over again for more sleep. Trujillo will contemplate the day ahead. Hammett will lie there for a while and, at first, remember the several glasses of champagne he drank last night before, secondly, regretting his hangover. But only Ulrich forces himself out of bed.
He rubs the sleep from his eyes, then pads down the hallway of his San Francisco home. He passes the bathroom, stepping in quietly to turn on the shower, then he carries on to the room of his ten-year old son where he will attempt to wake him. “That takes about 10 or 15 minutes. You actually have to turn the shower on first, then wake him up and put him in it,” he explains, before shaking his firstborn from his sleep and badgering him into the bathroom. Next he wakes his seven year old, leaving his partner Connie to handle his 18 month old baby.
He moves downstairs, opens the fridge, and takes out milk and strawberries. From a cupboard comes cereal and vitamins, which he lays out on the table as breakfast for his children. All the while, one eye is on the clock, the other on his kids. He knows that, in order to get them to school by precisely 8.13am – two minutes before they are due there – he must have them in the car by exactly 7.53am. Then he’ll drop them off, occasionally catching the gaze of the other parents who, a few years back, thought of him only as, “that guy in that band who doesn’t look like he washes much,” as he puts it. Now, however, it’s the sixth and seventh graders who try to catch glimpses of “that Metallica guy”.
The rest of Ulrich’s morning is, initially, busy. There’s a meeting with his wife and a property dealer about possibly selling some land of theirs with which they are currently doing nothing. There are calls to his office, details to arrange, things to sort out. So far, little has been made of the fact that, in less then 10 hours, the short man doing all the talking this morning will be sat in front of 21,000 people doing his day job. It’s perhaps this that sends Ulrich into bed, wearing the Calvin Klein shorts in which he always sleeps – “my silly little sleep shorts,” he calls them – for a quick nap.
Across town, Hammett has finished the yoga and meditation with which he starts each day. His house is quiet: his wife and children are in Hawaii – perhaps a reason the guitarist allowed himself to indulge in three or four too many drinks last night. Currently, the guitarist can be found pounding the streets on a three mile run. Trujillo, too, is up and about, getting his things together, preparing for the short trip to Salt Lake City later today. James Hetfield is still in bed asleep.
By 11.30am, Ulrich is awake once more and, like Hammett, is out running. A short one today: just half an hour. Then a shower, a hastily pulled on pair of jeans, a kiss goodbye for the wife as, by 2pm, he grabs the touring bag that he always leaves packed and ready. He steps into one of his cars – the only member of the band to eschew a chauffeur-driven limo – flicks the ignition, then wends his way through the San Francisco streets and highways until reaching the airport. He prefers to drive himself because he’s prone to being late. “I get to the airport ten minutes faster when I drive than when someone else does,” he explains.
Finally, he steps out onto the tarmac and strolls casually up the steps into Metallica’s private jet as it sits on the tarmac, a small plate of sushi inside waiting for him. Hetfield – his two daughters in tow – Hammett and Trujillo will be there too in the plane that, unlike in days gone by, is no longer called the Metallijet. This one is not theirs, rather it’s chartered for the simple reason that, as Hetfield says, “if it flies, floats or the other f: then rent it.”
Shortly the small jet will take off containing its cargo: four men who’ve been, at various times, friends, enemies, sparring partners, business partners, collaborators, conspirators, innovators and imitated. Four men who remain legends in many people’s eyes.
It will land in Salt Lake City and, for one night only, the town famous chiefly for its Mormon inhabitants and the salt lake that gives it its name, will have something else to put it on the map today. Because Metallica play there this evening and, tonight, there’s no bigger show in America.
AS THE surrounding mountains loom down over a town whose streets need only tumbleweed to complete its picture of emptiness, there’s one corner where there’s a whirl of activity. The area immediately surrounding the romance-free and imaginatively named EnergySolutions Arena – known locally, stubbornly so, as the Delta Centre – is abuzz. It’s there that eleven trucks and seven tour buses are parked. It’s there that roadies, promoters, caterers, lighting crews, waiters, secretaries, security guards, police, firemen, stage-hands and the eternal ephemera that support, surround and sustain a band on the road scurry.
It’s there that vans from three of the stations that broadcast to Salt Lake City’s crowded radio dials have set up temporary bases, aerials and centres of operation – blaring their message from roof-mounted speakers to the quiet streets beyond. It’s there that queues are already forming hours before the show will start, despite the fact that their seats are already allocated. It’s there that the anticipation slowly builds as one fan runs round and round the concourse outside this arena – more usually home to the Utah Jazz basketball team – and screams the words “METALLICA, METALLICA, METALLICA” over and over and over and over again while raising a scarf, football terrace style, over his head. It’s there that Metallica will play in just fewer than six hours and counting.
Through the back gate, and there’s more: more trucks, more people, more flight cases, more… stuff. There are guards on the back gate, old men who need to check everything. There are more guards walking down the back ramp – younger, fitter. There are yet more in an office by the door that actually leads inside. And once badges, passes and credentials are checked, there’s a long grey-brown concrete corridor that leads to a further warren of more of the same inside.
Gradually, you are getting near to the centre of the Metallica hub. Suddenly there are those pale flight cases seen in so many photo shoots, now stashed empty against a wall. Suddenly there are people with the serious faces that mean a show is coming here tonight and that work needs to be done.
Booming, bright, crackling and incessant is the sound of Ulrich’s drum kit being methodically sound-checked: each snare shot echoing <<Snap-ap-ap-ap-ap>> off the empty seats and walls of the airy arena within. Away from that, in the concrete ring of hallways that make up much of the bowels of the venue, are little rooms. There’s the production office – in fact, it seems, there are two. There are the dressing rooms of support bands Down and The Sword. There’s a catering room, a kitchen, an office (several of these), a TV room, a security booth and, as you progress, there are Metallica’s rooms: the Tuning and Attitude room (of which more later) and the Cyanide Café for specially chosen Metallica invitees. Finally, there’s their dressing room – just one, not the separate rooms for singer, guitarist, drummer and bassist that some bands prefer, but one room for all four together.
On all the walls, there are the Utah Jazz’s motivational messages, rallying calls for the basketball team, banners urging them to show no fear, to take the advice of Confucius, to believe in themselves. Fortunately, Metallica need no such mumbo-jumbo these days. Because, where once shrinks and doctors attended to their heads, now they need only each other’s company – because here they are, wheeling small suitcases behind them, as they walk towards their dressing room in a calm bubble through the blur of movement all around. And from this moment until they walk from the stage five hours later, they will not stop working once.
THESE DAYS, Metallica tour very differently to how they did in the past. Once, they would push themselves too hard, playing night after night, city after city. “There were times in the past when we didn’t know our own limits or our own parameters. We got ourselves into situations that were too much and too taxing,” is how Ulrich describes it. And those situations were tearing the band apart.
“It was pretty difficult,” remembers Hetfield. “But then we had lots of crutches to help us along: the drink, the drugs and whatever. They really didn’t help in the big picture but they seemed like the right move at the time. And, yeah, there are certain times those old things crop up. Your memory goes back when you come into a town that you’ve played before. You remember certain hotels where stuff happened. You glamorise a lot of it but you forget about how you felt the day after.”
Back in those days they would walk offstage and argue. They had a bass player who would pick apart their performances each night. “I mean no disrespect, but Jason [Newsted] took a lot of that stuff very seriously,” remembers Ulrich of their former bassist. “Sometimes he could get a little nasty in the dressing room afterwards, telling people, ‘You fucked up’. Life’s to short for that shit nowadays. I’m 44 years old. I can’t sit around arguing over who fucked up.”
It means lessons have been learned. No longer will Metallica leave their homes for months at a time. Now they tour one week on, one week off. They play only two nights in a row, then take a day off. And, if they are near enough to home, they take their private jet straight back to San Francisco each night and sleep in their own beds.
“It also helps that all four of us are dads now,” says Ulrich. “We all have the same urges to be with our families. It’s not like there are two guys who want to see their kids and two guys who want to do hookers and blow all night.”
They also have, now, a bass player who oozes positivity, who spends much of his time bringing out the best in his partners. “The unity of the band and the camaraderie is pretty strong,” says Hammett. “A lot of that has to do with having Rob in the band. He’s just super cool, really focussed and really progressive kind of guy. It’s invigorating to have someone in the band like that, rather than having someone sitting in the corner complaining and being in a foul mood all the time.”
There have been other changes too. Most important is that they mix their show up these days, that they do something different to the night before. “The UK has all these great venues so, when you play there, it’s special. But, when you play 150 gigs across America, it’s not always special. Trust me. The EnergySolutions Arena is not that different from where we’ll play tomorrow,” says Ulrich. “This can become dangerously close to a routine. And we’re only a week into it. Imagine what it’s like a year from now.
“But just because I might happen to be playing, say, my 112th gig of a tour, doesn’t make it the same for the audience. It’s probably their first gig. You want to be as much on fire and ready to throw down on 112 as at the first show. That’s what the fans depend on and it’s what we demand of ourselves. That’s why we change the setlist each night, that’s why we’re now playing in the round. It keeps you on your toes. Because if this gets routine, you just go home and fucking quit.”
IT MEANS the first order of business at any venue is for Ulrich – and it’s always Ulrich’s job – to write the setlist. He asks Hammett what he wants to play and, with a twinkle, the guitarist replies Disposable Heroes. “I wanted to come up with the most difficult, unrehearsed song I could think of,” he smiles later, “and he went for it!”
So Ulrich speaks to their lighting director, informing him of the changes that will need to be made to the show tonight, unaware that when he turns his back, the lighting director ambles off. “It’s like Napster all over again,” cracks the drummer. “I turn around and no-one’s behind me!”
Then there are meet and greets with fan club members and competition winners. Next to playing, it’s the best part of Ulrich’s day: “It’s very humbling because it puts perspective on your life. Sometimes, if you’re flying around in private planes and doing all this, you can lose track. So standing in front of those 20 kids every night reminds you of exactly why it is that you do it.”
Then there are journalists to speak to, phone interviews to conduct and, in Hetfield’s case, his children to feed. There are plans to make for later on the tour, hotels to research online for when they play in New York, massages to be undergone at the hands of Hammett’s cousin – the band’s chiropractor and holistic health advisor. Then there’s the decision as to whether to do a ‘runner’ after this evening’s show and fly straight to their next destination of Denver without taking showers, or whether they should take a ‘jogger’ and towel down, relax and take their time over things.
Next, there are meals to have in the Cyanide Café. Trujillo is detoxing, eating only the raw vegetables that Hammett’s cousin prepares; Hetfield eats with his daughters as they sit in front of Hannah Montana on the TV screen before Ulrich walks in, transfixed too by the adventures of Miss Montana. His is a plate of cut up steak and peas, the same meal he eats every night before going onstage: “It’s really boring but it gives me lots of protein so I can play heavy metal for the kids.”
And then – finally – there are the nerves.
“EVEN AFTER all this time, I get nerves,” says Hetfield. “Mostly it’s nervous excitement. It’s normally a positive thing. But sometimes if I’m tired or my head’s spinning from a flight, I can end up psyching myself out: ‘What if you forget the lyrics to this?’ ‘Oh, you forgot that riff’. I can really start hammering on myself.”
So they head into the Tuning and Attitude room to work the nerves from their body. It’s grey, small and partitioned by curtains and it’s in here that the world’s biggest metal band play will in front of an audience of just one: their sound engineer. Set up in a tight circle – Ulrich’s drums to the right, Hetfield’s microphone facing him, Hammett on a stool at the far end, Trujillo, legs splayed and fixed already, opposite – they begin to play.
There are jokes at first, smiles as the songs grind to a halt. There are smirks, the odd little comment, the occasional rolled eyeball as Hammett’s hands might slip from the frets, or Ulrich might miss a beat. For a band who have, over 27 years, played some of these songs thousands of times there are more slip-ups than you’d expect. “Well, if you don’t play a song for years, how are you expected to remember it?” laughs Hammett, who admits that, on occasions, he’s been forced to buy the occasional Metallica tab book to remember what he played. “Well, actually I sent someone else out to buy them – it would have been too embarrassing to have to go myself.”
They slip into Disposable Heroes, a song unplayed and unpractised for a while. There are some false starts, some discussion but then they ease into the verse and something magical happens. They all feel it too and, for a second, catch each other’s eyes, sharing infectious grins.
And slowly, surely, this turns into something else. The smiles become something steelier. The eyes lose that lightness around the edges. Trujillo begins to bang his head with an edge more aggression to each beat, Hetfield’s voice creeps ever nearer the menace on which his songs rely. Their tour manager puts his head around the door. “They’re all ready for you out there,” he says and the faces get ever more focussed.
With a look, they know they’re done: they’re ready. And they’ve changed. These four musicians who, minutes earlier, were just men are now Metallica. It’s in their strut; it’s in the crackle of electricity they seem to give off. As ever, it’s in those eyes.
They swagger, rather than stroll, down the grey-brown, backstage corridors now. They roll their shoulders, they plant their feet and they stare only ahead. Their chiropractor kneads Trujillo’s back as he walks. Then, suddenly, Hammett drops to the floor and bangs out 20 quick press-ups to get the blood going. And the pulses quicken.
Outside, in the arena, the chant begins, growing in volume. “Metallica! Metallica! METALLICA! METALLICA!”
Backstage, the final build up begins. Smartly, Metallica bend into a huddle. They wrap their arms around each other’s shoulders and bring their heads close in together. What they say stays between them but when they break, they do so with a violence, an explosion. Trujillo is pumped, banging his fists with anyone he catches eyes with – a steward, Kerrang!’s photographer, Kirk Hammett. Ulrich is pacing, bobbing and weaving, like a boxer readying for the fray. And Hetfield stands tall over it all, eyes fixed directly ahead.
With hearts racing, they step through the curtain that leads them out through the crowd and towards the stage. They step into the blackness that is more normally the home of Utah’s basketball team. They walk under the sign over the door that reads: ‘This Is Jazz Town’.
And they say to themselves: Not tonight, it’s not. Not tonight.
© Tom Bryant 2010
He rubs the sleep from his eyes, then pads down the hallway of his San Francisco home. He passes the bathroom, stepping in quietly to turn on the shower, then he carries on to the room of his ten-year old son where he will attempt to wake him. “That takes about 10 or 15 minutes. You actually have to turn the shower on first, then wake him up and put him in it,” he explains, before shaking his firstborn from his sleep and badgering him into the bathroom. Next he wakes his seven year old, leaving his partner Connie to handle his 18 month old baby.
He moves downstairs, opens the fridge, and takes out milk and strawberries. From a cupboard comes cereal and vitamins, which he lays out on the table as breakfast for his children. All the while, one eye is on the clock, the other on his kids. He knows that, in order to get them to school by precisely 8.13am – two minutes before they are due there – he must have them in the car by exactly 7.53am. Then he’ll drop them off, occasionally catching the gaze of the other parents who, a few years back, thought of him only as, “that guy in that band who doesn’t look like he washes much,” as he puts it. Now, however, it’s the sixth and seventh graders who try to catch glimpses of “that Metallica guy”.
The rest of Ulrich’s morning is, initially, busy. There’s a meeting with his wife and a property dealer about possibly selling some land of theirs with which they are currently doing nothing. There are calls to his office, details to arrange, things to sort out. So far, little has been made of the fact that, in less then 10 hours, the short man doing all the talking this morning will be sat in front of 21,000 people doing his day job. It’s perhaps this that sends Ulrich into bed, wearing the Calvin Klein shorts in which he always sleeps – “my silly little sleep shorts,” he calls them – for a quick nap.
Across town, Hammett has finished the yoga and meditation with which he starts each day. His house is quiet: his wife and children are in Hawaii – perhaps a reason the guitarist allowed himself to indulge in three or four too many drinks last night. Currently, the guitarist can be found pounding the streets on a three mile run. Trujillo, too, is up and about, getting his things together, preparing for the short trip to Salt Lake City later today. James Hetfield is still in bed asleep.
By 11.30am, Ulrich is awake once more and, like Hammett, is out running. A short one today: just half an hour. Then a shower, a hastily pulled on pair of jeans, a kiss goodbye for the wife as, by 2pm, he grabs the touring bag that he always leaves packed and ready. He steps into one of his cars – the only member of the band to eschew a chauffeur-driven limo – flicks the ignition, then wends his way through the San Francisco streets and highways until reaching the airport. He prefers to drive himself because he’s prone to being late. “I get to the airport ten minutes faster when I drive than when someone else does,” he explains.
Finally, he steps out onto the tarmac and strolls casually up the steps into Metallica’s private jet as it sits on the tarmac, a small plate of sushi inside waiting for him. Hetfield – his two daughters in tow – Hammett and Trujillo will be there too in the plane that, unlike in days gone by, is no longer called the Metallijet. This one is not theirs, rather it’s chartered for the simple reason that, as Hetfield says, “if it flies, floats or the other f: then rent it.”
Shortly the small jet will take off containing its cargo: four men who’ve been, at various times, friends, enemies, sparring partners, business partners, collaborators, conspirators, innovators and imitated. Four men who remain legends in many people’s eyes.
It will land in Salt Lake City and, for one night only, the town famous chiefly for its Mormon inhabitants and the salt lake that gives it its name, will have something else to put it on the map today. Because Metallica play there this evening and, tonight, there’s no bigger show in America.
AS THE surrounding mountains loom down over a town whose streets need only tumbleweed to complete its picture of emptiness, there’s one corner where there’s a whirl of activity. The area immediately surrounding the romance-free and imaginatively named EnergySolutions Arena – known locally, stubbornly so, as the Delta Centre – is abuzz. It’s there that eleven trucks and seven tour buses are parked. It’s there that roadies, promoters, caterers, lighting crews, waiters, secretaries, security guards, police, firemen, stage-hands and the eternal ephemera that support, surround and sustain a band on the road scurry.
It’s there that vans from three of the stations that broadcast to Salt Lake City’s crowded radio dials have set up temporary bases, aerials and centres of operation – blaring their message from roof-mounted speakers to the quiet streets beyond. It’s there that queues are already forming hours before the show will start, despite the fact that their seats are already allocated. It’s there that the anticipation slowly builds as one fan runs round and round the concourse outside this arena – more usually home to the Utah Jazz basketball team – and screams the words “METALLICA, METALLICA, METALLICA” over and over and over and over again while raising a scarf, football terrace style, over his head. It’s there that Metallica will play in just fewer than six hours and counting.
Through the back gate, and there’s more: more trucks, more people, more flight cases, more… stuff. There are guards on the back gate, old men who need to check everything. There are more guards walking down the back ramp – younger, fitter. There are yet more in an office by the door that actually leads inside. And once badges, passes and credentials are checked, there’s a long grey-brown concrete corridor that leads to a further warren of more of the same inside.
Gradually, you are getting near to the centre of the Metallica hub. Suddenly there are those pale flight cases seen in so many photo shoots, now stashed empty against a wall. Suddenly there are people with the serious faces that mean a show is coming here tonight and that work needs to be done.
Booming, bright, crackling and incessant is the sound of Ulrich’s drum kit being methodically sound-checked: each snare shot echoing <<Snap-ap-ap-ap-ap>> off the empty seats and walls of the airy arena within. Away from that, in the concrete ring of hallways that make up much of the bowels of the venue, are little rooms. There’s the production office – in fact, it seems, there are two. There are the dressing rooms of support bands Down and The Sword. There’s a catering room, a kitchen, an office (several of these), a TV room, a security booth and, as you progress, there are Metallica’s rooms: the Tuning and Attitude room (of which more later) and the Cyanide Café for specially chosen Metallica invitees. Finally, there’s their dressing room – just one, not the separate rooms for singer, guitarist, drummer and bassist that some bands prefer, but one room for all four together.
On all the walls, there are the Utah Jazz’s motivational messages, rallying calls for the basketball team, banners urging them to show no fear, to take the advice of Confucius, to believe in themselves. Fortunately, Metallica need no such mumbo-jumbo these days. Because, where once shrinks and doctors attended to their heads, now they need only each other’s company – because here they are, wheeling small suitcases behind them, as they walk towards their dressing room in a calm bubble through the blur of movement all around. And from this moment until they walk from the stage five hours later, they will not stop working once.
THESE DAYS, Metallica tour very differently to how they did in the past. Once, they would push themselves too hard, playing night after night, city after city. “There were times in the past when we didn’t know our own limits or our own parameters. We got ourselves into situations that were too much and too taxing,” is how Ulrich describes it. And those situations were tearing the band apart.
“It was pretty difficult,” remembers Hetfield. “But then we had lots of crutches to help us along: the drink, the drugs and whatever. They really didn’t help in the big picture but they seemed like the right move at the time. And, yeah, there are certain times those old things crop up. Your memory goes back when you come into a town that you’ve played before. You remember certain hotels where stuff happened. You glamorise a lot of it but you forget about how you felt the day after.”
Back in those days they would walk offstage and argue. They had a bass player who would pick apart their performances each night. “I mean no disrespect, but Jason [Newsted] took a lot of that stuff very seriously,” remembers Ulrich of their former bassist. “Sometimes he could get a little nasty in the dressing room afterwards, telling people, ‘You fucked up’. Life’s to short for that shit nowadays. I’m 44 years old. I can’t sit around arguing over who fucked up.”
It means lessons have been learned. No longer will Metallica leave their homes for months at a time. Now they tour one week on, one week off. They play only two nights in a row, then take a day off. And, if they are near enough to home, they take their private jet straight back to San Francisco each night and sleep in their own beds.
“It also helps that all four of us are dads now,” says Ulrich. “We all have the same urges to be with our families. It’s not like there are two guys who want to see their kids and two guys who want to do hookers and blow all night.”
They also have, now, a bass player who oozes positivity, who spends much of his time bringing out the best in his partners. “The unity of the band and the camaraderie is pretty strong,” says Hammett. “A lot of that has to do with having Rob in the band. He’s just super cool, really focussed and really progressive kind of guy. It’s invigorating to have someone in the band like that, rather than having someone sitting in the corner complaining and being in a foul mood all the time.”
There have been other changes too. Most important is that they mix their show up these days, that they do something different to the night before. “The UK has all these great venues so, when you play there, it’s special. But, when you play 150 gigs across America, it’s not always special. Trust me. The EnergySolutions Arena is not that different from where we’ll play tomorrow,” says Ulrich. “This can become dangerously close to a routine. And we’re only a week into it. Imagine what it’s like a year from now.
“But just because I might happen to be playing, say, my 112th gig of a tour, doesn’t make it the same for the audience. It’s probably their first gig. You want to be as much on fire and ready to throw down on 112 as at the first show. That’s what the fans depend on and it’s what we demand of ourselves. That’s why we change the setlist each night, that’s why we’re now playing in the round. It keeps you on your toes. Because if this gets routine, you just go home and fucking quit.”
IT MEANS the first order of business at any venue is for Ulrich – and it’s always Ulrich’s job – to write the setlist. He asks Hammett what he wants to play and, with a twinkle, the guitarist replies Disposable Heroes. “I wanted to come up with the most difficult, unrehearsed song I could think of,” he smiles later, “and he went for it!”
So Ulrich speaks to their lighting director, informing him of the changes that will need to be made to the show tonight, unaware that when he turns his back, the lighting director ambles off. “It’s like Napster all over again,” cracks the drummer. “I turn around and no-one’s behind me!”
Then there are meet and greets with fan club members and competition winners. Next to playing, it’s the best part of Ulrich’s day: “It’s very humbling because it puts perspective on your life. Sometimes, if you’re flying around in private planes and doing all this, you can lose track. So standing in front of those 20 kids every night reminds you of exactly why it is that you do it.”
Then there are journalists to speak to, phone interviews to conduct and, in Hetfield’s case, his children to feed. There are plans to make for later on the tour, hotels to research online for when they play in New York, massages to be undergone at the hands of Hammett’s cousin – the band’s chiropractor and holistic health advisor. Then there’s the decision as to whether to do a ‘runner’ after this evening’s show and fly straight to their next destination of Denver without taking showers, or whether they should take a ‘jogger’ and towel down, relax and take their time over things.
Next, there are meals to have in the Cyanide Café. Trujillo is detoxing, eating only the raw vegetables that Hammett’s cousin prepares; Hetfield eats with his daughters as they sit in front of Hannah Montana on the TV screen before Ulrich walks in, transfixed too by the adventures of Miss Montana. His is a plate of cut up steak and peas, the same meal he eats every night before going onstage: “It’s really boring but it gives me lots of protein so I can play heavy metal for the kids.”
And then – finally – there are the nerves.
“EVEN AFTER all this time, I get nerves,” says Hetfield. “Mostly it’s nervous excitement. It’s normally a positive thing. But sometimes if I’m tired or my head’s spinning from a flight, I can end up psyching myself out: ‘What if you forget the lyrics to this?’ ‘Oh, you forgot that riff’. I can really start hammering on myself.”
So they head into the Tuning and Attitude room to work the nerves from their body. It’s grey, small and partitioned by curtains and it’s in here that the world’s biggest metal band play will in front of an audience of just one: their sound engineer. Set up in a tight circle – Ulrich’s drums to the right, Hetfield’s microphone facing him, Hammett on a stool at the far end, Trujillo, legs splayed and fixed already, opposite – they begin to play.
There are jokes at first, smiles as the songs grind to a halt. There are smirks, the odd little comment, the occasional rolled eyeball as Hammett’s hands might slip from the frets, or Ulrich might miss a beat. For a band who have, over 27 years, played some of these songs thousands of times there are more slip-ups than you’d expect. “Well, if you don’t play a song for years, how are you expected to remember it?” laughs Hammett, who admits that, on occasions, he’s been forced to buy the occasional Metallica tab book to remember what he played. “Well, actually I sent someone else out to buy them – it would have been too embarrassing to have to go myself.”
They slip into Disposable Heroes, a song unplayed and unpractised for a while. There are some false starts, some discussion but then they ease into the verse and something magical happens. They all feel it too and, for a second, catch each other’s eyes, sharing infectious grins.
And slowly, surely, this turns into something else. The smiles become something steelier. The eyes lose that lightness around the edges. Trujillo begins to bang his head with an edge more aggression to each beat, Hetfield’s voice creeps ever nearer the menace on which his songs rely. Their tour manager puts his head around the door. “They’re all ready for you out there,” he says and the faces get ever more focussed.
With a look, they know they’re done: they’re ready. And they’ve changed. These four musicians who, minutes earlier, were just men are now Metallica. It’s in their strut; it’s in the crackle of electricity they seem to give off. As ever, it’s in those eyes.
They swagger, rather than stroll, down the grey-brown, backstage corridors now. They roll their shoulders, they plant their feet and they stare only ahead. Their chiropractor kneads Trujillo’s back as he walks. Then, suddenly, Hammett drops to the floor and bangs out 20 quick press-ups to get the blood going. And the pulses quicken.
Outside, in the arena, the chant begins, growing in volume. “Metallica! Metallica! METALLICA! METALLICA!”
Backstage, the final build up begins. Smartly, Metallica bend into a huddle. They wrap their arms around each other’s shoulders and bring their heads close in together. What they say stays between them but when they break, they do so with a violence, an explosion. Trujillo is pumped, banging his fists with anyone he catches eyes with – a steward, Kerrang!’s photographer, Kirk Hammett. Ulrich is pacing, bobbing and weaving, like a boxer readying for the fray. And Hetfield stands tall over it all, eyes fixed directly ahead.
With hearts racing, they step through the curtain that leads them out through the crowd and towards the stage. They step into the blackness that is more normally the home of Utah’s basketball team. They walk under the sign over the door that reads: ‘This Is Jazz Town’.
And they say to themselves: Not tonight, it’s not. Not tonight.
© Tom Bryant 2010
