Metallica: Still Heavy After All These Years

Metallica are a changed band from the one that went through group therapy and nearly broke up while making St. Anger, a weirdness captured in the documentary Some Kind of Monster. "I was nervous because of what I saw in that movie," Rubin confesses. "But I found a unified force that had come to terms with all of the stuff that got dredged up." Hetfield, who went into rehab during the St. Anger sessions, remains on "the clean-and-sober path," as he puts it. And Metallica worked on the new album in bursts of several weeks to minimize time away from their families (all four band members are now fathers). "Making records in the Nineties wasn't a lot of fun," Ulrich says. "On this one, we made ourselves a promise: to have as civil an experience as possible."

They started, as usual, with the so-called "riff tapes" — licks and ideas from individual members or recorded during the group's tuning-room jams backstage, then sorted into songs mostly by Hetfield and Ulrich, Metallica's primary writers since they started the band in 1981. It took the quartet all of 2006 to hone hundreds of riff tapes into 26 songs, then pick the half worth recording. Rubin visited Metallica at their San Rafael, California, studio every few weeks to listen to what was working and tell the group what wasn't. "There was so much material," Hammett says, "that James and I regularly had to ask each other, 'Which title was this riff going to?' Riffs moved all over the place."

But when Metallica set up at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, in March and April 2007 to record basic tracks, the band cut everything live, in straight-through takes. "Rick wasn't interested in whether we played the songs perfectly," Ulrich says. "He cared about whether we played together or not. He would say, 'You guys are on fire.' Or 'You guys suck. If you don't get it together in the next two takes, go home.' "

Hetfield finally started recording vocals in February of this year. He says he is not yet sure what his lyrics are about — "The big picture doesn't become clear until a year or two later" — but knows what he's writing is very different from what he sang in mid-Eighties songs like "Damage, Inc." and "Whiplash." "Those things were mainly about playing live," Hetfield says. "Battery" [on Master of Puppets] was from my days on Battery Street [in San Francisco]." He then points to a new song, the frenetic "My Apocalypse." "It fits me now," he says, "whether it's the end of something for me or an end I see coming. I've got kids. I don't want that for them. The warrior aspect, to survive — I'm hooked into that right now."

After more than two years working on this record, Rubin has learned at least one lesson for the future. "There's no reason it can't be much faster," he says, laughing. "Before this one, my favorite Metallica records were the Garage records [the 1987 covers EP, Garage Days Re-revisited, and the expanded 1998 version, Garage Inc.]. They sound the most like a band, and those were made very quickly. That may be the next step we try."

[From Issue 1055 — June 26, 2008]