by Ian Christe
It’s still always all about the singer and guitar player—and I was inspired by them.”
Members of the elaborate Queensryche from Bellevue, Washington, also survived in the 1990s by using their heads. The quintet debuted in 1984 as a classy Iron Maiden knockoff, and, much like Florida’s Savatage and Connecticut’s Fates Warning, they vaulted from an early power metal style into a heady new progressive metal realm— never dirtying their legs in the gutters of thrash metal. In 1988, while Voivod and Celtic Frost were undergoing similar changes, Queensryche abandoned black leather and chains and conceived the science-fiction-influenced mini-opera Operation: Mindcrime. With its successor, Empire, the group garnered multiple-platinum sales awards, enjoyed an enduring hit with “Silent Lucidity,” and fostered a maturing metal audience for whom literate musicianship mattered more than the image of heavy metal in the mainstream.
Hairy metal: Seattle’s Soundgarden
(Charles Peterson)
The runaway story in the Pacific Northwest in 1991 was not Queensryche, however, but the grunge phenomenon—first sighted in Soundgarden, whose late-1980s arrival ushered in the era of Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, and Nirvana. Presented on the regional Sub Pop Records label, these odd groups were bred in Seattle and neighboring Tacoma and Aberdeen—hard-rock strongholds where longhaired garage bands venerated forgotten 1970s groups like Grand Funk Railroad and Black Oak Arkansas, and threw in liberal doses of punk rock and heavy metal. Infused in the beer- and coffee-bar culture of the region, grunge was a distortion-rich musical hybrid that saluted the simple spirit of Blue Cheer and Stooges, along with the mountainous riffs of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Grunge bands also had a streak of record-store clerk in them, citing debts to jagged postpunk critical favorites like Gang of Four and the Minutemen.
Widening the emotional range of heavy music just as James Het-field was beginning to sing from the heart, grunge bands returned to more elementary ethics in the face of increasingly technical and flashy popular rock. Unlike hyperactive metalcore acts from the region, like the Accused and Wehrmacht, who crossed genres by aggressively stabbing forward, the self-effacing grunge slackers allowed metal influences to slowly steep into the mix. “I didn’t like Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath until after the punk rock thing,” explained Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil to Sheet Metal. “I hated heavy metal for years. I couldn’t even listen to my old Kiss and Aerosmith albums because I thought it stood for everything I hated about the rock industry and about all the jocks, musicians, and jerks in high school.”
Many of the grunge musicians were late bloomers, teenage punks who grew up and grew hair. They learned to love hard rock but were intent on not repeating its mistakes. With reactionary simplicity designed to overthrow former glam idols, grunge bands looked down the coast to Los Angeles with a philosophy best described as “if you can’t join them, beat them.” For instance, when Seattle glam metal group Mother Love Bone lost singer Andrew Wood to a heroin overdose on March 16, 1990, the members recruited singer Eddie Vedder and reformulated as Pearl Jam— wearing low-key sweatshirts and sneakers in place of leather jackets and silver boots.
Grunge groups saw themselves as upstarts attacking the excesses of heavy metal in recent years, and indeed these flannel-flying bands stepped into the void, replacing Warrant, Winger, and White Lion. Those lightweights had been hit hard by the popularity of Metallica, and now grunge helped wipe away the remains. Still, metal purists were reluctant to embrace the downscaling of image and musical technique. “Thank God I was in L.A.,” says David Wayne of Metal Church. “I didn’t mind grunge all that bad, but I missed guitar players who could play more than three-chord rock. I preferred my K. K. Downing and Glenn Tipton [of Judas Priest] dual-guitar riffs as opposed to Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ which is just okay.”
While Metal Church sat by and watched, a young and restless MTV audience segment already enamored of Soundgarden found salvation in Nirvana’s breakaway success Nevermind—a Beatles-influenced version of heavy metal screaming full throttle. Nirvana’s abrasive front man, Kurt Cobain, was a gifted and troubled songwriter raised on Celtic Frost and his local heroes Metal Church. “Kurt and [bassist] Krist Novoselic would listen to Celtic Frost and the Smithereens, and that’s what they imagined themselves to sound like,” said Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl to Stance. Though a redeeming figure to record companies and street punks alike, Cobain was too vulnerable—snapped in half by the dueling demands of the commercial machine in which he operated and the underground milieu with which he identified. After three albums the group’s revolutionary promise ended when Cobain was found dead of an apparent suicide, holding a shotgun in his lap on April 8, 1994.
Metallica soared above the fray, as their phenomenal success eclipsed musical trends. No longer coy about being filmed, the band blessed MTV with videos for “The Unforgiven,” “Nothing Else Matters,” and “Enter Sandman"—and album and CD sales continued to multiply spectacularly. For the first time, grandparents and homemakers were part of the Metallica fan base, and the band’s concert audience showed certain signs of gentrification. “When there’s fifty percent chicks in the house,” says Lars Ulrich, “that’s the sign of making it.”
Though officially rock stars beyond a doubt, Metallica continued to act as if nothing had changed. Taking its relationship with its audience to the point of micromanagement, Metallica coped with megaplatinum success by reaching out compulsively to the crowd. As a teenage superfan, Lars Ulrich had latched on to his idols in Diamond Head and Motörhead in an intensely personal way. Now as star drummer he reversed roles and offered Metallica fans similar access. Nine days before its official release, Metallica previewed the Black Album at a packed free listening party for 17,000 at Madison Square Garden. “The only annoying thing is that our album played the Garden before we did,” Ulrich told MTV News.
Metallica was amazing at getting the message through to its metal militia. First, the Metallica sessions were examined through a longform home video documenting the trials of nine months of recording. The film laid bare the working process: Lars Ulrich suggesting ideas, James Hetfield silently working through changes, Kirk Hammett glibly adapting to any situation at hand, and Jason Newsted apparently struggling to survive. Though forthcoming about the rigors of the musical process, the self-produced video hid well the debilitating downside of the yearlong recording ordeal: the grueling sessions had cost the band $1 million and ended three marriages.
The footage depicted a grown-up, more responsible Metallica—a far cry from the obnoxious exploits of Hetfield’s drunken punk band, Spastik Children. Contacted by the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the band invited teenage chemotherapy patient John Smith to the studio. Smith arrived with his family in tow, wearing a Ride the Lightning shirt and a bandanna over his hairless scalp. He plugged in his guitar and led Metallica through a sit-down version of “Four Horsemen,” a bright moment before his short life came to a close a few months later.
Each fan with whom the band had personal contact brought Metallica a hundred new converts. To make true believers out of crowds who had been introduced to the group casually through radio and videos, Metallica embarked on an incredible three-hundred-date world tour, from which another documentary was produced. Totaling four hours, the studio and tour documentaries, collectively titled A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica, were among several indulgences, committed in the name of the fans, which contrived to make the band appear larger-than-life for the first time. The music and methods defied all expert prognostication, as Metallica sales escalated steadily toward the eventual whopping tally of more than 20 million copies worldwide.
Such success irredeemably altered the relationship between performer and audience, but Metallica fought to preserve its informal rapport. Looking to “challenge the way that people see arena rock shows,” Lars Ulrich and the band devised the “Snake Pit,” a diamond-shaped stage containing two drum kits that slid into different configurations for each song. Instead of blas
ting at the audience from a fixed, fortified direction, the musicians would play a dynamic game of musical chairs through all the clock positions— giving every fan in the house an equal dose of face time. Adding to this unconventional in-the-round dynamic, the center of the Snake Pit was filled with 120 overwhelmed maniacs, handpicked for the crazed look in their eyes.
Meanwhile, in a separate section behind the soundboard, the band freely allowed recording devices, a nod to tape traders who exhaustively documented the band’s stage career. Even without inflatable dragons, Metallica’s touring machine now required a force of twelve semi trucks, six bus coaches, and a crew of sixty—not including Lars Ulrich’s bodyguards. Thus sustained, James Hetfield developed a permanent grin, the countenance of a man who was spending six nights a week running to meet the welcome cheers of ten thousand outstretched arms. It was all becoming very easy.
Major rewards were increasingly common. While making the Black Album in 1990, Metallica won its second Grammy for a toss-off recording of Queen’s “Stone Cold Crazy.” Recorded in half an hour, the track was included on an anniversary disk of current Elektra Records artists revisiting the label’s back catalog. With the help of its managers at Q Prime, Metallica was taking its first steps onto the red carpet of rock and roll royalty. At “A Concert for Life,” an April 1992 AIDS benefit in honor of deceased Queen singer Freddie Mercury, Metallica performed and socialized with rock aristocracy like Roger Daltrey and David Bowie. Of greatest personal importance to James Hetfield, he joined Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi and the three surviving members of Queen onstage at London’s Wembley Arena to perform “Stone Cold Crazy.”
In Guitar for the Practicing Musician, Black Sabbath bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler soon speculated on whether Metallica’s influence would eventually match that of Black Sabbath: “It’s hard to say because it’s so faddish now. It depends on what they do. Metallica is one of the best albums I ever heard. That’s a classic album. That’s the sort of music I really like listening to—something that is heavy but has got melody at the same time. It’s still in the Sabbath sort of vein. It’s not too extreme, where the singing sounds like he is puking. I like to hear an actual song, great riff, good vocal line and good lyrics. I’m too old-fashioned really, but it still works.”
While in London for the Wembley benefit, Metallica sketched the details of a mammoth tour with Guns N’ Roses. Though they exaggerated their differences to the press before the tour, the two were at kissing distance: Guns N’ Roses the nastiest and longest-lasting of the MTV-sponsored glambangers and Metallica the most public face of the metal underground. The first obstacle to this twenty-four-city multiplatinum metal matchup was indicative of the culture clash: whether the stage set would allow Axl Rose a fifty-foot “ego ramp” over the audience’s heads, or follow Metallica’s more accessible theater-in-the-round “Snake Pit” scheme.
Several 50,000-seat shows into the summer of 1992, Rose’s frequent fits and cancellations were straining the goodwill of everyone from backstage to the back rows. Eighty fans were arrested in Boston and a hundred injured after an ice-throwing war erupted during the long delay before Guns’ set. Then, in Montreal on August 9, James Hetfield walked into an exploding magnesium flare during the Ride the Lightning ballad “Fade to Black.” He suffered second-degree burns on his face, hands, arms, and legs. “James Hetfield looked like the torch that they bring up the stairs to light the Olympic fire,” Lars Ulrich told VH1. Added Jason Newsted with typical Metallica sensitivity, “His skin was bubbling like the Toxic Avenger.”
Pyrotechnic accidents were not uncommon in heavy metal— seven years earlier Cronos of black metal godfathers Venom had been nearly roasted to a crisp during one of his band’s bombastic shows. Neither was W.A.S.P.’s Blackie Lawless a stranger to flame. “You get in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he says, “and you’ll get your ass blown off, as James found out. One time my exploding codpiece got away from us and lifted me three feet off the ground. It burned all the hair off my legs and cracked the quarter-inch fiberglass codpiece so it would flex like an accordion. I don’t know any of the pyro guys working in Hollywood that have all their fingers or don’t have half their face blown off!”
Disorder reigned in Montreal as James Hetfield was rushed to a French-speaking hospital. Lars Ulrich the diplomat struggled to explain the situation to 50,000 confused and disappointed fans. As he apologized and promised a quick return to Montreal, all eyes turned to Metallica’s unruly coheadliners, now responsible for rescuing the night. Just after taking the stage, however, Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose stormed back to his dressing room. Rose complained of a damaged throat and refused to continue, though Jason Newsted recalls seeing him relaxing backstage with a cigarette and a flute of champagne. Metallica had fled Los Angeles long ago to escape such self-involved rock-star antics. The disenchanted fans made their own entertainment, trashing the concert hall and overturning cars. Eight policemen and at least ten concertgoers were injured in the fracas, and the Montreal Olympic Stadium took over $300,000 in damage.
Metallica was able to return to the road within a month of the incident. The tour survived despite skyrocketing insurance and security costs, most nights grossing more than $1 million at the box office. Incredibly, Pollstar ranked both the span of time Metallica spent with Guns N’ Roses and Metallica’s separate headlining tour among the ten highest-grossing tours of 1992. Though the pyro accident brought only a brief break in the band’s remarkable ten-year ascension, the following summer Metallica took its only vacation ever. Some events were still beyond its control. For the immediate future Metallica’s next move was thus prescribed: physical therapy for Het-field’s hand and much-needed rest and reassessment for the band, its pyro equipment, and its endless ambition.
Though grunge imitators wearing lumberjack shirts now outnumbered spandex pants on MTV, the Seattle scene did not bring down the metal successes of 1992, Metallica and Guns N’ Roses. The superstars remained superstars. In spite of Time magazine’s assessment of a great grunge takeover, Nirvana’s Nevermind sold only 5 million copies in America by the end of 1993, while the Black Album sold 7 million. This ratio tilted more extremely in Metallica’s favor as the 1990s progressed. Grunge could not even shake the hold of Hollywood bad boys Mötley Crüe, who squeezed another 7 million in sales out of the American public even after the release of Nevermind.
What grunge did accomplish in the early 1990s was making a large enough splash to permit the mainstream media an excuse to once again ignore heavy metal. With Judas Priest and Iron Maiden missing in action in the early 1990s, there was a feeling in the metal world that the triumph of Metallica superceded a golden era of heavy metal. There would never again be a decade like the 1980s, which saw the music rise from near oblivion to inescapable dominion. Though heavy metal in truth had yet to see its greatest financial success, the origin of heavy metal would always be tied to the time period of dragons, head-bangers, and spiked leather belts. Still eager to evolve, the metalheads looked forward—the world beyond in the 1990s remained a vast, inviting frontier.
XIV
Death Metal Deliverance
March 1985: Death records “Infernal Death” demo in West Florida
1989: Morbid Angel releases Altars of Madness
1992: Morbid Angel first death metal act on major label
1993: Earache inks deal with Sony/Columbia for Napalm Death, Carcass, Cathedral, Godflesh
1996: Cannibal Corpses Vile debuts in Billboard 200
After years of filling fanzine pages with his ambitious predictions, Lars “Motorbreath” Ulrich after the Black Album fell temporarily silent. With all that his band had achieved, the passionate cause of inspired metal had proven its righteousness. Yet the story was far from over. Throughout the rising and falling fortunes of metal, there remained an active underground, which by 1991 was thriving and impossible to ignore. The changes of the past several years left vacant space in the heavy metal scene that could never be filled b
y alternative metal synthesizer bands or grunge martyrs.
Rather than simplify its approach to attract new fans in the 1990s, Metallica’s familiar nemesis, Slayer, turned away from its increasingly lukewarm peers and concentrated its devastating efforts. Between Thanksgiving 1992 and Easter 1993, the third through fifth Slayer CDs, Reign in Blood, South of Heaven, and Seasons in the Abyss, were all certified gold in the United States. This indicated that at least half a million loyal U.S. fans considered the medium-rare metal of Metallica black too light a step. For such scourge as Slayer to succeed was a vote of confidence for new extremes.
With widespread awareness of tape trading—now a part of the Metallica legend—thousands of new fans continued to stream like rats into the deep cellars of metal. There, in obscurity, legions at the grass roots discovered that during the prior decade, while heavy metal modernized from Judas Priest to Metallica, a strong undercurrent was developing in darkness if not silence. The cult forms of black metal and grindcore had mated to breed an astonishing cast of exotic new idols—the early 1990s brought their ultimate fruition in the form of death metal.
Crude blueprints of death metal had been sketched since the appearance of Venom in 1981, leading to a solid foundation in the more skilled satanic metal of Slayer and Possessed. In the mid-1980s “Death Metal” was a Possessed song, and a 1984 German compilation LP called Death Metal featured the deathly Hellhammer among a slew of European speed metal bands. Staunch characters at the root of the evil form, Slayer held mighty sway over death metal’s development in the late 1980s. They laid the groundwork with ghoulish imagery; catastrophic, pyrotechnic riffs; Kerry King’s flailing, atonal guitar solos; and Dave Lombardo’s breathless double-bass drum rumble.