Into the Black

A queue of rock fans gathered on West Hollywood's fabled Sunset Strip is hardly an occurrence likely to make the evening news. But as a crowd convened on the evening of Sunday August 11, 1991, observers with a keen eye for detail would have noticed something different from the norm. Those waiting in a more or less orderly line on this notable thoroughfare were different from the usual faces familiar to 'The Strip'. For although this was still a rag-bag collection of young rock fans, these were people – mostly male – who looked as if they'd just come from a shift at a blue-collar workplace rather than a day spent in the company of stylists whose techniques suggested artisans who were losing their eyesight.

The hour was just a cigarette-break shy of midnight. For the first time in this new decade, Metallica were about to unveil a new studio album, a self-titled collection that had already come to be known as 'The Black Album'. As if this alone were not a cause for excitement, the band's decision to make their fifth album available to fans living in or near Hollywood gave the introduction of what was just one of literally hundreds of CDs released that year the feeling of a Special Occasion.

At one minute past midnight, fans were let loose on the shop floor of the West Hollywood branch of Tower Records, a one-storey building that looks more like a prefab shack than an emporium of the recorded arts. In 1991 'Tower on Sunset' was North America's most iconic record shop. As is the case with so many other record shops all over the world, today it is closed for business.

The idea of allowing patrons to purchase an album from midnight on its day of release was not new, although it was still relatively unusual. In 1987 U2 had introduced their blockbusting fifth album, The Joshua Tree, at the branch of Tower Records in South Kensington, London. The difference here, however, was that while fans of the Irish band comported themselves in a manner befitting those whose tastes ran to thoughtful and considered Celtic rock, Metallica's crowd behaved like a performers in a drunken am-dram production of Animal House.

Come the witching hour the scene within resembled a zoo in which the animals had been freed from their enclosures.

A film crew was on hand to capture the chaos. Hands lunged towards boxes of CDs and cassette tapes as sales registers beeped like a symphony of smoke alarms. The album was also being pumped at a volume sufficient to dent skulls through speakers positioned throughout the air-conditioned store. For those not gathered on Sunset Boulevard, local rock radio station K-ROQ broadcast news of the good-natured stramash.

For Metallica themselves – and for Lars Ulrich in particular – the symbolic chutzpah of this event would not have gone unnoticed. In August 1991 it had been almost nine years since the group had packed up their possessions and left Los Angeles for permanent exile in San Francisco. During their short LA existence the group had performed for small crowds in the city in which they had formed, their basketball boots finding little traction on LA's unforgiving thoroughfares. Metallica might have made their debut live appearance in West Hollywood (a two-set stand that comprised only the band's third and fourth concerts) supporting Barnsley's entirely unreconstructed Saxon, but in the time that had elapsed since this 1982 performance at the Whisky a Go Go – a club situated just yards from Tower Records –the quartet had not once returned to 'The Strip' as a live act. In these earliest of days Los Angeles had dismissed Metallica with the gravest insult in its arsenal – it ignored them.

'It was very lonely being Metallica in LA in 1982, that I can tell you,' was how Ulrich recalled those times.

But if his band had lost the battle with the city of Los Angeles, Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett and Jason Newsted were about to win the war.

Clutching a copy of 'The Black Album' in his hand, inside Tower Records a young fan breaks with convention. Rather than looking into the camera pointed at his face and screaming the word 'Metallica!' with as much force as his lungs will allow, instead he offers a thought that neatly encapsulates one of the core beliefs of millions of the band's fans.

'Finally,' he says, 'someone in metal is saying something right.'

With their fifth album, Metallica were also trying something new. 'The Black Album' saw the quartet reverse their juggernaut from out of the over-developed cul-de-sac in which they had parked themselves (and, seemingly, bricked themselves into) with 1988's constipated … And Justice for All set. This they did with a root-and-branch re-imagining of their songs, their style and their sound.

That this was so was established even before the album was released. As the one member of Metallica who can be said to have had 'a vision' – actually, 'the vision' – of what his band's next collection should sound like, Lars Ulrich also understood, as if by instinct, which song from the album should be its calling card. Almost a quarter of a century after the fact, it is unimaginable that the group would have chosen any song other than 'Enter Sandman' with which to kick open the doors of the Nineties. But the truth is that this was not something apparent to everyone in and around the Metallica camp. Towards the end of 'The Black Album's torturous nine-month recording sessions, Ulrich and Hetfield accompanied producer Bob Rock to a bar in Vancouver and were treated to the following opinion.

'You've got an incredible album,' said the Canadian. 'You've got, as far as I'm concerned, five or six songs that are going to be classics, both with your fans but also on the radio. But the first song [from] this album that should come out is "Holier Than Thou".'

Wrong. Dead wrong. By opting to introduce 'Enter Sandman' – a single which stage-dived its way to the top five in the UK singles chart – to fans and listeners of modern rock radio (as well as, emphatically, Music Television) Metallica treated the world to the most sumptuous and seductive introduction to a hit single since … actually, there is no since. With a growing sense of menace that builds the stage on which the signature riff penned by Kirk Hammett can shift air on an industrial scale, within days of becoming public 'Enter Sandman' had established itself as the first Metallica song to become known by people who previously had never before heard the group's name (and in many ways remains so to this day). With James Hetfield's masterful ear for fitting lyrics precisely into the available space, the words 'exit light' and 'enter night' evoke a man who sounds as if he is in control of such things. The effect is a minimalist chorus of maximum force. In little over five minutes, here Metallica had learned valuable new lessons in ways of harnessing a power that in the past had sometimes overwhelmed them.

On a musical level 'The Black Album' is unfailingly sophisticated. In each of the collection's twelve songs Metallica fight and win a battle against every instinct they had indulged on … And Justice for All. In place of tempo changes and the kind of endless curiosity normally reserved for police officers armed with a search warrant, the authors put their shoulders to creating aero-dynamism and the kind of spacious throb that comes packed with atmospheric pressure.

The word for all this was 'groove', which Lars Ulrich used in interviews at the time at least as much as he used his other favourite word, 'fuck'. Examples of this litter the album, from the cripplingly heavy 'Sad But True' to the monumental 'The God That Failed'. Even the almost uniformly mid-paced nature of 'The Black Album' served the band well by creating the impression that this was but one piece of music, a template of varying moods separated only by one or two seconds of silence every five or six minutes.

While this was the first Metallica album to sound entirely effortless, the truth is that it was anything but. Bob Rock's jibe during the recording process, that 'their friends in Anthrax and Megadeth' would tease them if they heard too much melody on the album, might have been deliciously barbed, but the producer's efforts in translating his charges' industrial strengths into an organic and magnificent whole were not without reward. True, 'The Black Album' was a release that cost a million dollars to record, but the results make this (at the time staggering) amount sound like a bargain. And while Metallica's fans and contemporaries might have questioned (at tireless length) the group's decision to employ 'pop metal' producer Bob Rock in the first place, the band themselves were free of doubt. As Hetfield explained, it was all about the sound. Even when working with bands whose music stood diametrically opposed to his own (such as was the case with Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe), Rock's work thundered and shone.

'The sound of the albums was great,' he said. As for everything else, he explained, 'The songs were crap and the bands were fucking gay.'

Lars Ulrich was in Budapest when he learned that 'The Black Album' had walloped its way to the top of the US Billboard album chart at the first time of asking, and where it would remain for the next month. Ulrich and his band mates were on tour as special guests to AC/DC on the Monsters of Rock caravan when he learned of his group's first no. 1 album anywhere in the world. In his room a fax arrived from the band's management company, Q Prime, in New York City. It stated, simply, that Metallica were atop the Billboard Hot 200. Ulrich considered the piece of paper he now held in his hand and wondered what it was that was delaying the attendant fireworks and marching band.

'You think one day some fucker's gonna tell you, "You have a no. 1 record in America", and the whole world will ejaculate,' he says. 'I stood there in my hotel room with this fax [which read] "You're number one" and it was, like, "Well, okay." It was just another fucking fax from the office.'

Alongside its success in the US, 'The Black Album' also debuted at the summit of the charts of no fewer than seven other countries – the UK and Australia among them – and was top five in a further five nations. By the end of the decade, Metallica was the eighth-best-selling album of the Nineties in the US, having spent more than four and a half years on the Billboard listings.

Not everyone could be said to be overly chuffed with what Metallica had achieved, though. Rock's joke about irate peers crying foul had a predictably prophetic ring. As has been seen, this was a group that was not only viewed as having responsibilities to their own artistic instincts (the only thing that mattered) but also a duty of care as standard bearers for a now rapidly stagnating thrash metal scene, as well as God knows what else. The response from old friends rapidly disappearing in Metallica's rear-view mirror may not have been universally dismissive, but much of it did carry with it what must have been for its targets an infuriating subtext of class treason.

Having gathered his thoughts for at least ninety seconds, Dave Mustaine offered his view that 'The Black Album' featured just one interesting song, this being 'The Unforgiven'. From the genre's noisiest outpost, Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo put down his drumsticks in order that he might throw his copy of Metallica's latest album down the stairs – literally.

'I can definitely understand people going, "Oh, 'Enter Sandman', 'Nothing Else Matters' – what happened?",' Lars Ulrich later reflected. '[But] if we had've made … And Justice for All [Part] II, that would have been the sell-out … We had a fear of being stuck. With some of our peers we saw that there was a Status Quo element that we saw was not for us.'

Metallica's capacity to disassociate themselves from hotbeds that were now leaving them cold remains unmatched. When it came to thrash metal, the notion that the genre had run its course was confirmed by the very fact that so many of its practitioners had so quickly come to adopt the reactionary and conformist mindset that their genre had challenged just a few years earlier. More than this, though, was the question of why on earth Metallica would wish to associate themselves with a community in creative decline? All of this stuff was in the past; while the future was one of open water and endless space.

Released in an extraordinary period for American rock – a six-week span that saw the release of Nirvana's Nevermind, Pearl Jam's Ten, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Guns N' Roses Use Your Illusion parts 1 and 2 – with 'The Black Album' Metallica went from being the world's most commercially significant cult band to being a mainstream concern.

But by coming to dine above the salt, the band learned quickly just how much things had changed. Despite having spent eight years talking to members of the press, in 1991 Ulrich discovered that these efforts counted for nothing. The truth was, there remained hundreds of journalists and publications that knew nothing of metal's now all-conquering heroes.

It seems surreal to recall these times but, in the days before the Internet, entertainment reporters were reliant on two or three sheets of paper supplied by a band's record label to provide them with a potted history of the group to whom they were about to speak. In the case of Metallica, it seems that some writers failed even to manage this. With a phone cradled to his ear, it was with equal measures of bewilderment and amusement that Ulrich noticed that many publications believed 'The Black Album' to be a debut.

Meanwhile, though, a better class of opinion-former was beginning to take note. Metallica being at no. 1 in the US meant attention from that country's pre-eminent music publication, Rolling Stone. While it would be wrong to say that the magazine founded by Jann Wenner in 1967 did not write about metal bands – Mötley Crüe, for one, had in the past graced the front page – given the choice, they would rather not. It is, though, to the magazine's credit that when it came to Metallica its editorial team recognised something different from the norm. That this was true had been signalled by a four-star review of 'The Black Album' that treated the collection with the respect it deserved, while avoiding exit-strategy caveats concerning the genre it represented.

Not content with this, Rolling Stone also placed Metallica on their cover on not one but two occasions during the album's two-year cycle. The first story came in the weeks following the CD's release, the point at which many in the wider musical world were still rubbing their eyes and attempting to make some kind of sense of the hairy, unsmiling men staring out at them.

'I know there were a lot of bands that went, "Oh yeah, Metallica – they sell a lot of records but they can't play or write songs,"' reported a gleeful Ulrich. 'I was just reading an interview with [The Cult front man] Ian Astbury where he said that going to a Metallica concert was one big wanking session with all these guys jerking each other off – and where's the femininity? Well, excuse me! So this is a big "Fuck you", not especially to Ian Astbury, but for all those people who felt that way for years and years, who came up and smiled to our faces, but as soon as they walked away they were laughing at us.'

Elsewhere, while Jason Newsted confessed, 'I never thought we'd have a no. 1 album playing the kind of music we do,' James Hetfield expounded on the notion that his band no longer felt compelled to defend their territory like wolves. Now, he explained, they were merely Dobermann Pinschers. 'We're just a little more confident,' was his opinion. 'We're not afraid to hear a suggestion and adapt it to our thing.'

'Before we didn't want to hear it,' he added. 'Now we'll hear it [and] then we'll say, "Fuck you!"'

For Rolling Stone, Hetfield was now a Person of Interest, and it was to the front man alone that Metallica's second Rolling Stone cover feature was dedicated. In a marriage of words and pictures that did everything right, the magazine showed just why it had maintained its position as market leader for more than a generation. The front cover was a master class. Shot by the Texan-born portrait photographer Mark Seliger, the image that screamed forth from magazine racks the world over saw a topless James Hetfield standing on flat and barren earth, his legs astride and teeth bared. He holds a black Gibson Explorer guitar next to a headline that reads, 'The leader of the free world speaks.'

With such a brazen statement, Rolling Stone recognised Hetfield as being a man of substance, if not always wisdom. Just as millions of metal fans suddenly found themselves drawn to Metallica's lyrics in a way that had never before been the case for any band of their kind, so too Rolling Stone recognised deep waters when they saw them. But while many fans of the band listened to the lyrics on 'The Black Album' and heard the voice of God, this was the God of the Old Testament. Sounding like a man who carries a gun, on songs such 'Wherever I May Roam' ('carved upon my stone, my body lies but still I roam'), 'Of Wolf and Man' ('I hunt therefore I am, harvest the land, taking of the fallen lamb') and 'The God That Failed' ('broken is the promise, betrayal, the healing hand held back by the deepened nail, follow the God that failed'), Hetfield gives the impression of a man who has taken the most fundamental of American principles and subtly adjusted it to his own ends: Give him liberty, or he'll give you death.

This motto was propelled recklessly to its logical conclusion on the most misguided – and, actually, most misunderstood – track on 'The Black Album', the hawkish 'Don't Tread On Me'. The point the song makes is simple, and not without some kind of logic – the most reliable way of maintaining peace is to make sure that one is always primed for war. This hard-headed outlook, however, is not the song's real problem. The problem is one of jingoism. The lifting of Leonard Bernstein's melody from the West Side Story song 'America' signals trouble only a few seconds after the song has started. But whereas West Side Story lyricist Stephen Sondheim pirouettes around the original melody with phrases such as 'automobile in America, chromium steel in America, wire-spoke wheel in America …' James Hetfield has only gracelessness to offer; not so much wire-spoked wheel as a tin ear. 'Love it or leave it,' he says of the country of his birth, as if these were the only two options available. He also speaks of liberty 'shining with brightness', which, to be fair, is a lot more impressive than a beacon of hope that shone with darkness. But just as the cliché and nonsense running wild through the song's verses threaten to torpedo 'Don't Tread On Me', the song reaches its conclusion in a chillingly convincing manner. As the music swells beneath him, Hetfield warns, 'touch me again with the words that you will hear evermore' before adding in a manner befitting a man with whom even the hardiest of fools would hesitate to tangle, 'Don't tread on me!'

On the evidence of this, one might assume that the safest way of speaking to Hetfield might be from behind bullet-proof glass. Appearances, though, often deceive, and the occasion of the Rolling Stone cover feature was the first time he had been subjected to the type of questions asked by a magazine that interviewed not just rock stars but also presidential candidates.