The Memory Remains: Metallica recap Death Magnetic

As Metallica eye an overdue date with Scotland, Kirk Hammett explains how the thrash legends emerged from one of the most public meltdowns in rock 'n' roll history to deliver their biggest album in the last decade...

Feature by Dave Kerr | 03 Mar 2009

"We're not trying to be something big and fancy. It's just us, doing what we do. Let's keep it that way."

— Cliff Burton, Cliff 'Em All

Without a doubt, Metallica’s greatest gambit was setting their sights beyond the threshold of thrash metal. Although 1991’s Black Album was a runaway success in the face of the impending grunge movement’s ubiquity, household recognition arrived at a cost. Remixed three times and stalled for almost a year, the sessions for the album reportedly cost the band $1 million and ended three marriages; a sobering period in the aftermath of the carefree hedonism they enjoyed during their early ascent. Then the Corbijn-friendly posturing, the orchestras, the all-star Skynyrd jams and the slowing of their collective hand saw to it that the by now stadium-dwelling Metallica’s following was split neatly down the middle for the remainder of the nineties.

But last year’s Death Magnetic saw the San Franciscan quartet making serious moves to reconnect with what made them great to begin with, though some might say that 2003’s St Anger was a misguided lunge at achieving the same result (sans guitar solos, as the zeitgeist dictated). Of course, their immense popularity may have never waned, but the 2003 documentary Some Kind of Monster (the star of which was a polo-necked shrink who believed he was in the band by the film's end) pulled the mask away from a band in turmoil as its members wrestled with egos, middle-age and the dissonance between a die-hard fan base with mixed feelings about Metallica's direction and Lars Ulrich’s public battle with Napster. “The jury’s out on whether it helped us or not, but I’d like to think that some good came out of it,” says guitarist Kirk Hammett. “As for any other motion picture projects…there’s nothing on the immediate horizon, thank you.”

So what gave Death Magnetic the edge? Enter Rick Rubin: a producer synonymous with the provision of creative guidance to fallen icons and innovative new artists alike. With Hammett’s praise for Rubin’s discography finding significance in almost everything he’s touched, the bearded mogul’s responsibility for the output of latter day Metallica cannot be underestimated: ”Going into it, one of the reasons we were so enthusiastic about working with Rick is because he worked on a few metal albums around that period three or four years ago that were pretty cool in our book – the Slipknot album and the two System of a Down albums, then there’s the Mars Volta debut - that obviously elevated his status a few notches in our eyes. He’s relevant and in the present, but of course, he’s done a lot – like the Slayer albums, the Danzig albums, the Johnny Cash albums – I love them all.”

Outwith the studio, Rubin preached a more leisurely recording regime than the band had become accustomed to under predecessor Bob Rock, recommending they revisit a mindset untapped for decades: “Rick had a bunch of non-musical ideas that really made a difference in the whole recording and creative processes,” says Hammett. “The one thing that he constantly stressed was to ‘just relax, have fun with all this’, and we did exactly that. He also told us that his favourite Metallica material is the stuff we did in the eighties and that whatever we were thinking of doing, listening to, eating or reading in the eighties – he asked us if it was possible to access what influenced us back then while we were creating music for now.”

Whether Rubin’s infiltration of the band’s collective thought process forced them to reprise a lifestyle of skateboarding, Saxon records and Sherbet Dips is undisclosed, but Hammett asserts it was a worthwhile exercise that set the wheels in motion: “It started off as a bit of an experiment that we tried for two songs and the results we got were just fantastic, so we took that concept, ran with it and really used it to work with the rest of the material. From there things just got better and better, and the result is Death Magnetic.”

Retrospect is a pastime Hammett engages in gladly, despite facing both corporate and mortal adversity – MTV flatly refused to play their early videos, and the tragic death of bassist Cliff Burton in 1986 would take the wind out of their sails – though the eighties ultimately saw a fledgling Metallica at their innovative best and riding high on the fortunes it brought them. Speaking in a 1987 interview, drummer Lars Ulrich would famously suggest that the record to follow the seminal Master of Puppets should be called Wild Chicks And Fast Cars And Lots of Drugs. “We were like kids in a candy store on our first headlining arena tour,” recalls Hammett. “We had the girls, the music, and we had the cash to afford just about anything we thought we might’ve needed back then. Who isn’t going to help themselves to all that? You’d have to be nuts, comatose or brain-dead not to.”

MTV swallowed its pride, the underground was heard and a mainstream critical landslide commenced. Enough accolades have subsequently been showered on the band throughout its career to collapse the sturdiest of mantelpieces, but among their intimidating roll call of plaudits – nine Grammys, an upcoming induction into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of fame this April – is a rare honour bestowed upon them by the Mayor of San Francisco in 1999 when he declared the 7th of April ‘Official Metallica Day’. “It was pretty funny,” says Hammett. “We all kind of looked at each other and said ‘hey, it’s Metallica day, does this mean if I run a red light I won’t get a ticket?’”

With great fame comes superhuman expectation, a curse Hammett suggests has led to the greatest misconception of all: “That we’re inaccessible. A lot of people think because we are who we are that we’re hard to get to, or arrogant, or standoffish, but we’re none of that. We’re a lot more approachable than people think, but our whole organisation is so professional that we need our time to focus on what we need to do, but after the show we like to hang out with everyone and have a drink, have a laugh, just like anyone else.”

It’s a precious minute to socialise that the band will surely appreciate as a world tour calls time on other leisurely pursuits for the next year. And although he alludes that there’s no hurry to push another record any time soon – “well, we do have a few songs that are just kind of sitting around, but I don’t know what’s going to happen to those” - Hammett insists that living on the road until summer 2010 is quite enough to keep them occupied: “Just making it through that in one piece is the ultimate goal.”

When questioned about the intangible quality that makes for Metallica’s enduring appeal, Hammett offers a simple philosophy: “First and foremost, it’s just the strength of the material. The songs and the music really speak for themselves; they’ve become their own entity. I mean, when we’re all dead and gone, those songs will still be speaking to people. There’s something in our music that just clicks with the human psyche. It’s just the way it is. It’s the way we play, it’s the performance, the way we say the things that we do. It’s the chemistry between us and it’s bigger than the four of us.”

Although the fallout over the ‘brick-walled’ mix of Death Magnetic will undoubtedly become a bone of contention to rival the ‘no bass’ scandal of ...And Justice For All, what’s undisputable is that Metallica have rewarded the good will of their fans and proven that the redemptive, cyclical nature of guitar rock can still yield surprises. Thus, the Four Horsemen take to the world stage with heads held high. As if we ever doubted them. Ahem, as you were...

Metallica play SECC, Glasgow on 26 March.

http://www.metallica.com