Heavy Metal Justice

"I remember back when I stood outside for three hours waiting for autographs," says Hetfield later. "And when the star just hopped in his limo and took off, I'd think, 'You dick, I hate you.' I'd go home, rip down his posters. When there's a hundred kids outside, that don't bug me. They're there to see me. If they want my autograph, that's cool.

"We know where they're coming from," Hetfield says, because we've been there.

The phrase "But what about the kids?" is not a Metallica invention. Hetfield explains that the band's regular photographer, Ross Halfin, was on tour with Iron Maiden and that "he was telling one of their lighting guys, 'Hey, man, those red lights — you gotta get rid of them. They look like shit in photos.' And the lighting guy says, 'But what about the kids? The kids need red lights!"

So Metallica gives 'em red lights, autographs and more, including one of the few truly raging stage shows making the 1988-89 arena rounds. It's a fair trade, too. Because it's the kids who have bought over a million copies of Metallica's latest album, . . . And Justice for All, zooming it straight into the Billboard Top Ten. And it was the kids who put the band's 1984 LP, Ride the Lightning, its 1986 LP, Master of Puppets, and its 1987 "covers" EP, Garage Days Re-Revisited, in the gold- and platinum-record winners' circles. It was the underground maniacs who were banging their heads to Metallica's legendary demo tapes and bazooka-metal LP debut, Kill 'Em All, back in '82 and '83, doing a word-of-mouth blitz on this killer California band that played everything faster than the speed of light and didn't put on any jive rock-star airs. It was the newcomers who saw Metallica's roaring bottom-of-the-hill sets last summer on the Monsters of Rock stadium tour and then bought more than enough Metallica gear at the merchandise stands to embarrass the headliners.

For years, the mainstream rock press dismissed the band, in Kirk Hammett's words, as "ugly guys singing ugly things to ugly music." AOR radio, for the most part, still doesn't want to know about them. Yet with only the kids in their corner and their own proud refusal to play traditional industry tiddlywinks (make promo videos, keep songs to four minutes or less) to fall back on, they have nevertheless become one of America's biggest bands, heavy metal or otherwise. There's plenty of metal atop the charts these days; most of the bands play the industry game well, making radio-ready records that inevitably include the so-called power ballad, aimed squarely at the Top Forty housewives and their teenage daughters.

The members of Metallica can boast platinum sales with zero sellout, making records for themselves yet sating the collective hunger of America's metal militia. They know instinctively what kids want — because they are the kids. When the fledgling Metallica made its vinyl debut on the 1982 indie compilation LP Metal Massacre, founders James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich were barely out of high school. Raised on a steady Seventies diet of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, they were also psyched up by the new wave of street-smart British heavy-metal bands such as Diamond Head, Iron Maiden and the high-speed Motorhead. In turn, they created Metallica as a composite of everything they loved most about metal (the raunch, the volume, the physical release) and hated most about showbiz bullshit (spandex pants, songs about slaying dragons and painted ladies).