Metallica: This Monster Lives

by Joe Berlinger

  Given the interesting differences and even more interesting parallels between the Ramones and Metallica, you might think the Ramones cover sessions would have shown up in Monster—especially since they marked James’s return to the fold. Well, they did—sort of. We struggled mightily in the editing room to find a way to include them, but we found ourselves faced with a bigger problem. One of the major themes of Monster was supposed to be the process of recording St. Anger, how songs go from being written and hashed out in jams all the way to the final editing and mixing. Circumstances dictated somewhat that we use “Some Kind of Monster” and “Frantic”—the former because it was the name of the film and the first song Metallica wrote during the St. Anger sessions, and the latter because it was the only song besides “St. Anger” that the band played on its 2003 summer tour, and we knew we wanted to use the “St. Anger” video shoot at San Quentin Prison, which would come near the end of the film, just before we showed footage from the summer tour. So we had two songs to work with in the editing room, a simple enough goal—perhaps even a mandatory one—for a movie about the making of a record, right? Except that with all the human drama we’d encountered, this basic plan was in danger of being lost in the mix, so to speak. So we decided to cheat a little bit. You see James entering the studio on his first day back, but we then cut to him working on “Frantic,” a session that happened about six weeks later. “Frantic” was a useful song to use for the return of James Hetfield. This was one of those points in the film where we decided to use Metallica’s music to comment on what Metallica was going through. The lyrics of the song clearly reflect James’s efforts to sort through his complex emotions following rehab, as well as the band’s larger struggle to make progress at a time when they seemed to take two steps back for every one step forward. Our use of “Frantic” is yet another example of the way “emotional truth” is more important than chronological accuracy in Some Kind of Monster.

  It wasn’t an easy decision for us. Cutting the Ramones session meant that we didn’t include any reference in Monster to the Ramones covers. Which meant we didn’t include the events of the particularly strange day, a month after the “fuck” session, when the guys in Metallica, slowly starting to cohere as a band once again, discussed which of the two Ramones songs they’d recorded should appear on the tribute album: “Commando” or “53rd and 3rd.” James reported that Metallica’s managers favored “53rd and 3rd,” with “Commando” slated for use as a Metallica B side. Kirk wanted to go with “Commando,” but Bob and Lars voted for “53rd and 3rd,” which Bob proclaimed to be the rawest and “garagiest” song Metallica had ever done. “There’s something cool about it,” he said. “Even the bad notes sound good. I think it will actually shock people, to be quite honest.”

  Courtesy of Annamaria DiSanto

  “It would show a lot of confidence,” Phil agreed, by this point unabashed in his willingness to offer musical guidance.

  They made a tentative decision to go with “53rd and 3rd.” It was an interesting choice. As he had for many Ramones songs, Dee Dee wrote the lyrics for both songs Metallica covered. “Commando” was an example of the Ramones’ comic-book fascination with war iconography (“Third rule is don’t talk to Commies / Fourth rule is eat Kosher salamis”), the opposite of the more somber approach to war of Metallica’s “One” (“Now that the war is through with me / I’m waking up, I cannot see”). “53rd” was the more personal song, detailing Dee Dee’s pre-Ramones stint as a male prostitute and drug addict (“You’re the one they never pick / Don’t it make you feel sick?”). Dee Dee always maintained that the Ramones saved his life, that without the band he would’ve surely drifted further into addiction and destitution. In 1989, after fifteen years with the Ramones, during which interpersonal problems within the band steadily escalated, Dee Dee left the band, just like the bassist of a certain hugely famous metal band would eleven years later.

  After Dee Dee left the Ramones, he spent the next several years embarking on a series of musical projects and other artistic endeavors while struggling with his drug use. By all accounts, he had been pretty clean for the last part of the ’90s. Maybe it was the shock to his system that caused his fatal overdose. His body was discovered on June 5, 2002, the day Metallica decided to give the world another “53rd and 3rd.”

  That was only part of the day’s weird convergences. The guys were just beginning to discuss a new development in the Jason Newsted story when Zach Harmon, HQ’s studio manager, came into the control room to break the news about Dee Dee. There was a stunned silence. Everyone just stared at Zach.

  Phil was the first to speak. I’m not sure he really knew who Dee Dee was, but he quickly deduced his importance. “Thanks, man. Oh, jeez …”

  “Wow,” James said.

  Kirk seemed to take it particularly hard. He was noticeably pale. “That is fucked up,” he said. “That is fucked up.” He got up and left the room.

  Bob finally spoke up. “What an interesting day.”

  “Drugs suck!” James said. “But, well, uh, bass players …” He tailed off.

  “So … Jason?” Bob prompted.

  As it turned out, on the day that one bassist from a hugely important band died, another arose from the dead (or at least from Echobrain). As we see in Monster, a reliable source from within Metallica’s inner sanctum had heard from another dependable source that Jason wanted to rejoin Metallica.

  Bob smiled. “My playing was that bad.”

  “No,” Phil corrected him. “It was that good.”

  “We popped his little bubble for a second,” James said. It’s a little open-ended what James actually meant, but I think he was referring to the fact that Jason had found that life without Metallica—and a life with a band that was not and probably never would be as big as Metallica—to be harder than he thought. As Cliff Burnstein later put it, “He lost his icon status when he left Metallica.”

  Phil compared what was going on to the aftermath of a divorce, when both parties struggle to find the right way to say good-bye to each other.

  “I guess I’ve always felt the divorce was final,” Lars said.

  “Yeah, but it isn’t for him,” Phil replied.

  “Right.”

  “Jason isn’t ready to say good-bye,” Phil continued. “I think he has to get together with his family one more time. Who knows—you guys might have feelings that you haven’t had to face, either. Who knows what you’re feeling? Look at Mustaine, man. Mustaine is still carrying that, years later.”

  “Inside, it feels really right to meet with him,” James said. “But my insides are also telling me that it will never really work out. There is some compassion I’m feeling for him, man. He jumped, and now he’s going to fall. He really wanted to do this thing, and he had the momentum behind him to get out there and do it, and get away from the machine, the rock star–y stuff that he thought he was trapped in.”

  I thought, Spoken like a man that had done a lot of thinking about the Metallica “machine” himself.

  James talked about a recent discussion he’d had with Jason. “We talked about his project. We talked about, you know, my amends, and my realization of how badly he was treated, and especially my fear of him doing side projects, and my insecurities. He seemed really happy. He said he was happy, and he wanted me to come see Echobrain. There was nothing that hinted he wanted to come back at all.”

  This was another one of those moments when Bruce and I were put in the awkward position of being conduits of information between Jason and the others. It was a position we always resisted—it’s not like we couldn’t wait to report back to Metallica what Jason had just said—but sometimes we’d inevitably find ourselves in the middle. I had interviewed Jason a few months earlier, and I wasn’t so sure the others were reading his intentions right. I certainly think Jason was somewhat sentimental about his years with the band (“Being able to say you’re in Metallica—I mean, top that,” he said during our interview), and I could sense that he
had some lingering doubts about his decision to leave. But he also told me that if James had invited him back within a few months of his leaving, Jason might have considered rejoining the band. If the invitation were to come now, however, Jason would say no. “Maybe a reunion tour in a couple of years or something” was the closest he got to imagining a future with Metallica.

  Kirk walked back in, looking morose.

  “Are you okay, man?” Lars asked. “Are you in a bad place?”

  “No, I’m fine.” He said he’d just been on the phone with Johnny Ramone. “He’s really upset.”

  “Were Johnny and Dee Dee still close?”

  “Yeah, Johnny said that a few months ago, he’d given Dee Dee his number for the first time in twenty years. They were always friends, but when Dee Dee left the band, he and Johnny were kind of pissed off at each other. But then, in 1995, Dee Dee said, ‘I want to rejoin the band for the last album.’”

  “It’s the same thing we’re talking about,” Phil said. Indeed, it was. In the interviews that Dee Dee gave during the last years of his life, he often said that being a Ramone would always be the proudest achievement of his life.

  “It’s kind of funny,” Kirk continued. “Johnny says he told him, ’First you leave the band and put us through all this anguish, and then you come back and want to rejoin the band. Well, C.J. [Ramone] is our bass player now.’ Kirk paused. “It’s just kind of weird that ’53rd and 3rd’ is the song we’re doing, because that’s Dee Dee’s song. Johnny just told me that it was about him.”

  “Really?” Lars said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did that just come up?”

  “Yeah, he was a male prostitute when he was seventeen or eighteen years old, trying to score drugs and so …” Kirk trailed off.

  “Well, maybe ‘53rd and 3rd’ is not only the way to go, but also something we can feel good about,” Lars said.

  They reminisced about a time when the Ramones and Metallica crossed paths at a Waffle House in Cincinnati while on tour, long enough ago that Cliff Burton, Metallica’s original bassist, was still alive.

  Talk turned back to Jason. His fate suddenly seemed weighted with significance. “Not to be morbid,” James said, “but I don’t want him to end up like Mustaine, stuck in life resenting where he could have been and hating us for it, or never resolving his stuff.”

  Though he mentioned Dave Mustaine, a better comparison was Dee Dee Ramone, who left the Ramones under his own volition.

  “I don’t want us to be the bad guy,” Lars said. “If we meet with him, and he basically says, like, ‘Please let me back in the band,’ and we decide that we want to carry on without him, I don’t want to feel like the bad guy in that situation.”

  “Are we talking about meeting with him?” Kirk asked. “I have to play catch-up.”

  “Phil basically suggested that at some point we sit down and talk with him, because for us, it might be a closed chapter, but for him it’s not.”

  Kirk nodded. “That’s respectful.”

  “You wouldn’t be doing it just for him,” Phil said. “It might give you a chance to say some things to Jason, trusting whatever came out. It might be a nice way to say good-bye to him. If he has a strong urge to get back in the band, it won’t stop him from being disappointed, but the integrity with which you handle yourselves with him will make [everyone] free to go forward.” Phil urged them to go into the meeting with no preconceived notions about how it would make everyone feel. “One of you might think, ‘Gee, it wouldn’t be so bad having him,’ or, ‘How would Bob feel about it?’ It could stir up countless different possibilities, opportunities to grow. What are we afraid of? It’s about just—”

  Lars cut him off. “We’re not afraid of anything,” he said, sounding a little defensive.

  “There’s nothing really to be scared of,” Kirk added. He recalled a date on the last Metallica tour when relations between Jason and the others had really reached an impasse. “It just brings me back to that one day in the hotel, when he was just so shut down, man. There was a fucking huge brick wall in front of him that none of us could get through, and it’s just, I mean …” He struggled to find the words. “The one question that I have is: Has any of that changed? Is the wall still there? Is it thicker? Taller?”

  James nodded. “Kirk asked a great question. Is that wall still there? I know we’ve all had a wall. Mine’s been pretty tall and thick, too, and I’ve seen people reaching over to grab me. Whether or not Jason’s wall is torn down, he’s still miles and miles behind us. Do we want to do that catch-up?” He looked around the table.

  “You’re tapping into what I’m feeling,” Lars said.

  “And me,” Kirk added. “I mean, we have something here that’s working really, really well right now, and do we really want to fuck with it? I don’t know if there’s room for Jason in this band—I mean, mentally, not physically or musically. Can he hang? Can we hang?”

  “I’m where James is,” Lars said. “I’m really happy with what we have, and I don’t think that Jason is a person capable of having this kind of intimacy.”

  James was silent for a moment. “I never doubt that anyone can get what we’ve got,” he said slowly. “’Cause I know I was in such a bad place, I never thought I could be where I’m at now.”

  I was surprised by Kirk’s hard-line position. I always got the impression that Jason had a closer relationship with Kirk than with James and Lars. My guess is that Kirk and Jason bonded over their shared frustration over not getting to air many musical ideas in Metallica. Lars’s skeptical attitude toward reintegrating Jason was understandable, since Jason had been so initially resistant to Phil, and Lars was probably now concerned that Jason could derail the therapeutic process.

  James, on the other hand, had only recently begun to approach Phil’s therapy with the same verve as Lars; like Jason, but to a lesser degree, James had initially been wary of therapy. Lars professed to be “where James is.” But where was James, exactly? “I never doubt that anyone can get what we’ve got.” That sounded like a new convert proclaiming that Jason could be “saved” by the same grueling process that James, a former skeptic, had undergone. It sounded almost like James—and, to some extent, the others—was saying that the guy he was when Jason left was not someone emotionally equipped to deal with the situation. This was more than just admitting that Jason had sort of gotten a raw deal. It also sounded like James was saying that this deal was the only deal the old James knew how to give, so maybe it would benefit everyone to give Jason a second chance. Were we seeing the old “if you’re not with me, you’re against me” James, or the new emotionally aware James?

  As it turned out, it was a little of both. James’s tendency to see things in black-and-white always made me nervous, since he was the Metallica member most likely, depending on his mood, to perceive our cameras as a direct threat—to his emotional health, his privacy, or his performance in the studio. Conversely, if he thought you were onboard with him, he was unfailingly loyal and supportive. So James did retain a bit of the mind-set that had caused him to tell Jason it was his way or the less glamorous Echobrain highway. Jason had shown his true colors and was thus banished from the kingdom for good. On the other hand, “I was in such a bad place, I never thought I could be where I’m at now.”

  As we all know, they decided not to welcome Jason back to the land of the living. The “surviving” members of Metallica ultimately thought of themselves as people who were now very different from Jason. They were miles ahead of him, and although the journey had brought them to a point where they were, ironically, more tolerant of Jason’s complaints about his treatment in Metallica, they decided he was just too far behind. This was completely understandable, although there was a bit of historical revisionism going on. Lars, for one, said he never shared James’s belief that James was unable to reach this enlightened state: “Even though you’re saying what you’re saying, I always had faith and trust in you, and maybe that’s what
always kept this alive.” Perhaps because the James-less period was so painful for Lars to recall, it looked to me like he wasn’t giving himself enough credit now for how much his feelings toward James had evolved since that time. If you go back to chapter 9, you’ll be reminded that Lars did have doubts in James’s ability to become a new person. “I’m skeptical of it happening on all fronts” was one of his more gloomy pronouncements from that period.

  At the time Dee Dee left the Ramones, the band was in such a state of interpersonal turmoil, the members would walk on and off the tour bus at different times to avoid looking at each other. Grudges and ongoing fights, especially between Dee Dee and Johnny, steadily wore the band down. Dee Dee sacrificed himself (he also tried to launch a career as a rapper, but that’s another story) and by leaving tore the band apart so it could heal. His eventual replacement, C.J. Ramone, became a permanent member of the family, to the extent that when Dee Dee returned many years later and asked for his job back, he no longer seemed like a sibling.