Cover Story: Pretty Hate Machine

"Besides," he says of the intro, the level of argument rising in his voice, "I thought it was supposed to be simple so that it sounds like some kid in his garage just trying to do his best."

Ulrich swings around in his chair, cackling. "Getting pretty intense in here, huh?" he announces. "Maybe we need some more ballads on the record."

That's the last thing Metallica need right now: more songs. Hetfield, Ulrich, Newsted and guitarist Kirk Hammett have been planning, writing, rehearsing and recording this album since the fall of 1994. It is now the second week of April 1996, nearly 18 months later. The no-bullshit, no-excuses deadline for mastering Load, Metallica's sixth studio LP, is May 1. The release date of June 4 is set in stone. Three weeks after that, the San Francisco-based arena-metal overlords open their controversial headlining stint on this year's is-it-or-isn't-it-alternative Lollapalooza tour.

The clock is ticking big-time — and these guys are still cutting tracks. Hetfield and Hammett haven't finished putting down guitar parts. Three of the album's 14 songs are missing lead vocals. Tapes are shuttled back and forth between two studios at Right Track and a third studio, Quad Recording, across the street, where additional mixing is going on. Even by Metallica's standards — the group's 1991 album, Metallica, which sold more than 12 million copies worldwide, took over 10 months and cost in excess of $1 million to make — this is fucking insane.

"The weight, the expectations of other people — that's all there, and that's all huge," admits Newsted during a session break one night, noting that he started learning the songs for Load 13 months before he put anything on tape. "We knew we had to make this record that people are gonna dig. But it still has to cover what we're feeling, what was coming out of James at that moment. It's not just a corporate trip: 'You guys gotta do this by that deadline.' It still comes from the core of Hetfield. He sings the songs he wants to play, whether 40 people like it or 40 million.

"The anticipation, the pressure — fuck yeah, that's there. But it doesn't weigh on us so heavy that we don't put out the music that we want to put out."

"It's Metallitime," explains Hammett cheerily. "We're the master procrastinators. We tend to work 80 percent of the time on the first 10 percent of the album and spend the other 20 percent of the time on the last 90 percent of the record. We tend to sweat and toil on the beginning of a record, and a lot of that has to do with establishing a stride that works for us. And sometimes establishing that momentum is very difficult."

Actually, nailing the Hetfield over-dub on "Wasting My Hate" is a breeze compared with the next evening's chore: cutting a simple, tingling Hammett guitar flourish in the moody verse sections of the epic grinder "Bleeding Me." Hammett does take after take — to no one's satisfaction. Ulrich feels the song needs something, but he can't quite articulate what that something is. Hetfield proposes a riff in the style of "Fade to Black," his meditation on hopelessness and suicide from Metallica's 1984 album, Ride the Lightning, but he and Hammett can't agree on where the beat should go.

"I finally said, 'You know, guys, we'd get a lot more done if there were less people around,' " Hammett recalls bemusedly the next day. "When those guys left the room, I got the part down just like that." He snaps his fingers. "Then they came back. I was working on something else, and I said, 'C'mon, guys, do you really need to be here?'

"By that time," says Hammett, "James was drinking: 'I'm just having a beer.' I looked up at Lars, and he was reading a magazine. Then my pizza came, and they helped themselves to my pizza. I just thought, 'Fuck, I can't get these guys out.' "

"I was fine not having the part there," Hetfield says later with characteristic frankness. "Then Lars comes in: 'There has to be something there. What's Kirk going to do right there?' Well, does he have to do anything? He can fucking smoke a cigar at that point.