Metallica: This Monster Lives

by Joe Berlinger

  Courtesy of Bob Richman

  Metallica, despite everybody’s sunny disposition, had very recently been in a state much like the Ramones’ prior to Dee Dee’s departure. Jason had been gone for a little over a year, but as recently as two months earlier, during the days immediately following James’s return from rehab, James and Lars could hardly bear to be in the same room together. The “miles and miles” Metallica had put between them and Jason had been traveled in a sprint. Maybe there was hope that Jason could catch up.

  As I listened to Metallica talk about Dee Dee and Jason on this strange and tragic day, there were times I felt like Metallica were going to give Jason another chance. They didn’t, of course, and Jason once again became the sacrificial lamb. First his demise pushed Metallica into therapy, and now his continued absence allowed Metallica to finally mourn his predecessor. Given the events of the day, I wasn’t surprised when talk turned to Cliff Burton. In their own way, both Cliff and Jason have been Metallica’s “Dee Dee,” Cliff because he was a founding member who died too young, and Jason because his departure wound up uniting the band. By talking about Jason and realizing that he had had legitimate grievances when he decided to leave, Metallica could admit to themselves that Jason had never filled the hole left by the death of Cliff Burton. This was the day Phil gave the troops his “Cliff message” (as seen in Monster), which basically amounted to “Cherish each other today, because you never know.” I thought this was one of the most sincere and effective talks Phil delivered during his tenure with Metallica.

  “I’ll be quite honest,” Bob told the others that day. “I think the heart and soul of Metallica from this point on—and has been for a while, since Cliff died—is the three of you guys. You’re never going to find a permanent bass player.” I think in that moment Metallica feared that what Bob said was true, unless they changed their ways. They had never really accepted Jason as one of them because Jason was replacing the irreplaceable. They had never truly grieved for Cliff because they had never really acknowledged the hole he left, instead projecting onto Jason much of their anger and frustration over their loss. Jason’s presence allowed them to put off dealing with Cliff’s death, and now his absence would finally allow them to turn the page. The death of Dee Dee Ramone allowed Metallica to appreciate Jason and mourn Cliff.

  The strange cosmic confluence of Jason and Dee Dee made Metallica face some truths about themselves. After Phil speculated that what Jason might be going through was similar to the complex feelings of loss and regret that accompany a divorce, James agreed, using an analogy that sounded very personally relevant, given some of his recent struggles. “You know, you break up with some chick because [you think] another chick’s better,” he said. “And then you find out she’s not, and you want what you had then, so you go back for a one-night stand for comfort, for your own damn selfish comfort, not thinking about your other girlfriend. And you find out that it’s great for a second, but then it’s not—it’s gone. It’s like falling in love, something that clicks in your brain, but then all the old behaviors come back. If Jason hasn’t worked on those, it’s going to be …”

  Kirk completed the thought. “… the same.”

  “It’s going to disintegrate what we worked on,” James said. “It’s just going to stir up so much crap.”

  “It’s going to erode,” Kirk said.

  Phil wasn’t buying it. “I don’t think anything would stir up crap that you guys can’t handle,” he said. “I really believe that. It’s ironic. What Jason ostensibly wanted is what we now have, but his agenda at the time was, ‘I have to stand up for myself. I have to do what has been boiling inside me for a long time.’ When we started this process, Jason’s agenda was totally different from ours. I’m quite certain that Jason has the potential, like every human being, to be able to embrace something like this.1 I’m also quite certain that not everybody is ready to join a process like this…. We’re remarried now. You guys are remarried.”

  That was ultimately what Metallica took from that meeting: It was time to get a new bass player, one that would be as much a member of the Metallica family as Cliff had been. Phil wanted to know how they would deal with a new full-time family member: “If you add another person to the mix, how are you going to absorb that person? It’s going to be interesting. Just continue to strengthen everything internally like we’re doing. Just eat up these challenges, these opportunities, just bring them on. I feel the sense of a team getting ready. Bring on Jason, bring on this challenge, this issue. It gives us an opportunity to deepen ourselves, which you guys have really proven recently. There will be times when you’re frightened, but you’re not concerned about whether you’re going to survive as a band. Success will be measured by how willing you are to face each challenge, in your personal lives, and professionally, with each other. I think it’s exciting. If [talking to Jason] exposes some weakness in us, that’s wonderful—thank you, Jason. Bring on Mustaine, bring on Jason,—bring on anything. That’s how we find out who we are.”

  “Right on, coach!” James said.

  Phil laughed, aware that he sounded like he was giving a halftime pep talk. “Right, team! We’ve got thirty minutes out there. I know we’re down …”

  Kirk suddenly spoke up. “You know, the grass is always greener. The grass is always greener, and when you fall for that, you’re fucked.”

  “How does grass get green?” James mused.

  “It grows. You have to water it,” Kirk replied.

  “Fertilizer,” James added. Could he have been thinking of Jason? Maybe this was his way of admitting that Metallica had treated Jason like shit at times, but at least it helped them grow.

  Lars was growing restless. “Let’s not sit around for three hours talking about what we think is going on in [Jason’s] mind,” he said. “That’s a fucking waste of time.”

  Kirk concurred. He seemed to be shaking off some of the numbing shock of the day. “Let’s play some fucking music!”2

  CHAPTER 17

  SILENCE NO MORE

  Rock bands are, by their nature, volatile. Tempers flare, egos get stepped on, people pace angrily around Ping-Pong tables in studio rec rooms. Creating art with other people fosters extremely intimate relationships. Especially if your collective has decided, after twenty years, to democratize the process at the precise moment that the state of the relationship is at an all-time low. Lars is dead-on when he says that Monster is a movie about relationships, because a working band like Metallica is a rare combination of intense relationships that are both personal and professional. Working with your spouse at the same place of employment can create a certain claustrophobic tension in the relationship. (I consider myself a rare exception; my wife worked with me for eight years, which greatly strengthened our relationship.) Now imagine being married to three people and sharing a job with all of them. One reason I think Monster bears repeated viewings is that there are so many ways in which this complex nexus of relationships plays itself out. You can see it in little glances, the look on people’s faces, how they address each other—the hundreds of ways our behavior reveals our connection to the people in our lives.

  Most of us don’t work with the people we’re married to, but many of us feel like we’re married to the people we work with. It’s a fact of modern life that many people spend more time at their jobs than with their family That’s certainly been true for Bruce and me at times during our career. Fortunately for both of us, we have enormously supportive spouses who passionately believe in the work we do (though my wife does refer to herself as a “film widow”). Leaving Bruce to make Blair Witch 2 was like telling him, “I think we should see other people.” I was in denial about it at the time, but it really was like a divorce. What I’m saying is that I could relate to what Metallica was going through. Getting close to people is complicated. Staying close to people for twenty years takes work. For the first time in their lives, Metallica were trying to master this emotional calculus.

  In th
e period following James’s return, Metallica gradually began to coalesce as a band that was stronger than at any point in its history, but this was a rocky process. Lars yelling “fuck!” in James’s face was merely the most graphic and dramatic example of the tensions that existed within Metallica. There were many other moments when fault lines appeared—more than we could use. For example, during an all-band lyric-writing session we see James rolling his eyes at Lars, who is doodling cartoons on his pad in lieu of coming up with any reasonable lines. Later, we see Lars spitting water at our camera before laying down a particularly brutal double-kick-drum part on “Sweet Amber,” bristling when Bob wants him to do it again.

  It was Lars who most often expressed a general feeling of frustration not directed at any one target. One day, the staff at HQ threw a fortieth birthday party for Kirk. It had a tropical theme, and everyone showed up dressed for the occasion: shorts, Hawaiian shirts, even some leis. Even “Crazy Cabbie,” a radio personality who was putting together a profile of Metallica for New York radio station K-Rock, was there and in his beachwear best.1 For some reason, Lars never found out about the party. He arrived at HQ that day to find everyone there looking like they were ready for a day at the beach. Lars felt snubbed and stalked into another room with a plate of food to eat in silence. We followed with our camera. “Nobody throws me a birthday party,” he grumbled. A short time later, Phil came in to check on him and to see if he was okay Lars was in a morosely philosophical mood. “Life is an eternal birthday party for someone else,” he told a stoic Phil, and then added, “Life is a limp dick with an occasional blow job.” Phil, perhaps unsure how to respond to these witticisms, merely pointed out that Lars had made the decision to exclude himself from the fun everyone was having in the next room.

  Later that day, the band did a recording session. Lars was still irritable. He sat in the control room, seething, while Kirk, on the other side of the glass, struggled to lay down a part. Kirk became an easy target for Lars’s feelings of annoyance and jealousy about the party. “It’s like he never heard the fuckin’ song before,” he groused.

  “Maybe he’s hung over,” Bob offered.

  “He fuckin’ better be! Then it would be okay”

  Crazy Cabbie was still hanging around. Lars turned to him and said, “You know, it’s just six chords. It’s not that hard.”

  “It would be hard for me,” Cabbie said.

  Lars grimaced. “Yeah, but you’re not in the guitar-playing hall of fame.”

  Communicating the fractious nature of Metallica was easy compared to showing the small steps that revealed the band’s gradual coalescence in the months after the “fuck” session. Monster is a film about relationships, but not just the band members’ relationships with one another; it also examines Metallica’s evolving relationship with the outside world. Siblings may beat each other up, but they band together instantly the moment one of them is threatened by someone outside the family circle. Brother’s Keeper was as much about the Wards’ relationship to the town of Munnsville as it was about their relationship with each other. Before Delbert was arrested, most people in Munnsville were quietly contemptuous of the Wards, treating them like the village idiots. But once the police accused Delbert of murder, the town rallied to his defense. Something similar happened in Metallica-ville in the fall of 2002. At the urging of Metallica’s managers, Lars, James, and Kirk recorded some radio promos for use by the two companies that own most of the stations that have given Metallica significant airplay. As I think Monster makes very clear, Metallica wasn’t very happy with this decision, seeing it as a corporate sellout move. We used the scene of them goofing around and mocking the promos to demonstrate how the band was beginning to jell as a cohesive unit. The hated radio promos helped them by giving them an outside force to fight against. Once again, it was Metallica versus the world.

  Moments like this one, when you could actually see the band coming together rather than falling apart, were rare. Reconciliation tends to be less dramatic than dissolution. So it was with heavy hearts that we decided we didn’t have room in Monster for an event that occurred four months later, when the band united to reconnect with the world outside of the womblike safety of HQ and help James fulfill a lifelong dream at the same time. The sequence also led to yet another of the many weird synchronous experiences we had while making Monster, and ultimately triggered possibly the most emotional moment for Lars that we filmed but that you didn’t get to see.

  Metallica started to rally together when they collectively objected to recording a radio promo. The incident gave birth to the song “Sweet Amber.” (Courtesy of Niclas Swanlund)

  Over the years, Bruce and I have developed an editing room mantra: “Sometimes you gotta slay your babies.” Our approach to editing involves constructing the great scenes first and then building a film around those scenes. Someone making a more traditional scripted documentary or writing a fictional film usually works the opposite way, first setting up a structure and then choosing the material accordingly. We prefer our method, but it does have its limitations. Sometimes, as a film’s structure begins to suggest itself during the editing process, we find that no matter how much we’ve fallen in love with certain scenes we’ve already edited, they just don’t fit into the organically evolving film. Like rabbit farmers who refrain from naming their animals so that they’ll be easier to kill, we have to discipline ourselves not to love our cinematic babies too much, because there’s always a chance we’ll have to butcher them later.

  In Brother’s Keeper, for example, Roscoe Ward took us to some falls where he often came as a young man “to drink beer and whiskey.” The surroundings put him in a quiet and reflective mood, and he began telling us about some of the ailments that had befallen Bill, his deceased brother. As an isolated scene, it was great, but in the interests of the overall film, we had to let it go.2 In another doomed sequence, we filmed the Wards, who had never been more than twenty-five miles from their home, traveling to visit us in New York City. We spent a day getting great material of them absorbing the Staten Island Ferry, the World Trade Center, and Central Park. We had envisioned this material as a possible ending for the film, but in the editing room we decided that a scene that worked better was one we’d shot a day after the acquittal: the brothers trying to fix their tractor on the side of a road, and Roscoe bidding us farewell and urging us to visit again in the spring.

  Some Kind of Monster produced more babies than all our other films combined, and many, sadly, had to be put down. We instructed our editors to cull the best scenes from the material and worry about structure later. This edict caused some philosophical tension between us and David Zieff, our supervising editor, because he believed that what constitutes a “great” scene depends largely on a film’s overall structure. The problem with that approach on a film like Monster was that there was no obvious narrative thread. We were still shooting as he was editing, so the story could change daily. And because we were shooting so much, the babies just kept coming. We had to be ruthless killers. There was a lot of blood on our hands.3

  The baby whose death was most heartbreaking for me involved Metallica’s first performance since the return of James. On the second Sunday of 2003, James was at the Oakland Coliseum to witness the Oakland Raiders, his favorite football team since childhood, beat the New York Jets to advance to the AFC championship game against the Tennessee Titans. Talking with a friend at the game, he hit upon the idea of Metallica playing during the halftime show during next week’s game against Tennessee. On Monday, he brought it up during a band meeting at HQ. His impulsive idea took everyone by surprise.

  “So, who are they playing again?” Kirk asked.

  James sighed. “The Tennessee Titans.”

  “Hey, be patient with me,” Kirk implored. “I don’t know shit about this stuff.”

  Lars seemed similarly nonplussed, but recognized how much this meant to James. “If you want to do it, let’s do it.”

  Metallica’s manage
rs in New York were somewhat dubious. Bob would presumably play bass, but could he learn the songs in time? Would his presence confuse Metallica’s fans and complicate the search for a permanent bass player? With Bob onstage, who would supervise the live sound mix, since the game’s halftime festivities had not been planned with a big rock show in mind? After so much time apart, would Metallica sound too rusty? Despite all these questions, the managers were relieved to see James so thrilled about playing with Metallica. “The best reason to do this,” one of them told James, “is that you want to do it.”

  “For me, playing at an AFC championship is a big deal,” James said. “I was born with Raiders gear on.”

  As it turned out, Jay-Z and Beyoncé were already booked for the halftime show, leaving no room for Metallica. Bob suggested that Metallica play on a flatbed truck as a treat for the tailgaters before the game. The best plan, it seemed, was for the band to just show up in the pregame parking lot, unannounced and with no fanfare, and do a quick set to show their support for the Raiders. For a band used to maintaining obsessive control over its activities, Bob’s plan was a radical idea: just show up and play.

  This show would be Bob’s big day in the sun, his first live appearance with Metallica. I think management might have been concerned that a middle-aged producer like Bob Rock playing bass might somehow be detrimental to Metallica’s image (when the idea to film a pregame concert and broadcast it during halftime was still on the table, there had been talk of keeping Bob out of the frame), but it was also never clear exactly how Bob felt about being a temp in Metallica. We don’t really address this in Monster, but the issue was raised a few times in our presence. At Kirk’s birthday party, Crazy Cabbie wondered aloud, “Why doesn’t Bob just become the bass player?”