by Ian Christe
With Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett themselves wearing makeup and playfully tongue kissing for cameras, Metallica took another step into the times by invading the successful Lollapalooza touring festival in 1996, sharing the bill with the Ramones, Soundgarden, Rancid, Screaming Trees, and a group of Shaolin fighting monks. In a world where punk temporarily reigned, Ulrich rallied to distinguish between his new allies and the Sex Pistols, who were undertaking a lucrative reunion tour at the same time. “I always thought the Sex Pistols were a little fluffy,” he says. “After all the small talk, there just really wasn’t all that much back there. I’d take the Ramones in a heartbeat.”
As Load had demonstrated a less strenuous approach to songwriting, Lollapalooza relieved Metallica of its heavy-touring dogma. “I look at this as the most fun you can have when you’re in a band,” Ulrich says, “playing outside in the summer in America for ninety minutes. It doesn’t get much more A-plus than this. Burnout is what happens when you have to do twenty-two gigs in Germany in November. Summer outdoors in America is pure, unadulterated fun.”
Alternative Kirk Hammett (King Django)
Metallica was cruising through a working vacation, and even before the Lollapalooza tour began Ulrich promised more of the same: “The stuff on Load is only half of what we’ve been recording in the studio. We more or less cut two records, so a second one should show up in about eighteen months. They just need some vocals and guitar bits here and there.”
More adventurous than its warmed-over predecessor, Reload, released in November 1997, was a slightly more committed attempt at branching out, even recruiting smoky-voiced Marianne Faithfull for a duet on “The Memory Remains.” “We’ve got such carte blanche at this point,” James Hetfield told VH1. Among the erratic suite of songs on Reload was “The Unforgiven II,” revisiting the outlaw theme from the Black Album. Inspired by Clint Eastwood’s antiwestern, the songs became personal anthems for Hetfield—now a grown man and not the pimple-faced ingrate whom Kerrang! had observed in 1985 drunkenly urinating on a television set that housed the face of cowboy actor John Wayne. Times—and political views—had changed.
With so much monkeying around, a long-brewing backlash and breaking away from Metallica was inevitable. Their former Megaforce label-mates Manowar had built a tremendous worldwide following by pounding solid iron for twenty years and did not view the conversion to martini metal charitably. Like Fates Warning, Overkill, Savatage, and other surviving power metal bands, Manowar never sacrificed traditional chops for the greater noise and speed of death metal. These were true-blue practitioners of the old school, for whom even thrash metal was something of a passing fad.
Manowar sweated out trends and a difficult record deal with Atlantic Records by touring abroad extensively and perfecting its oeuvre, pressing the rebel imagery of bikers and barbarians into a taut metal wafer for orthodox heavy metal communion. Even within the austere world of traditional metal, Manowar was a sealed entity—a group of self-made statues singing songs about blood, fire, steel, and patriarchy in absolute terms. For this band every adversity faced was a battle and every triumph a supreme victory against all odds. As decreed in the searing liner notes to Hell on Stage, an exhausting live double CD: “There is no ‘If’ in our world.” With the turning of Metallica they found a focus for their anger.
Manowar moved in and regrouped the crowd left to founder by the nonmetal Metallica. Touring for Louder Than Hell during a short-lived deal with Geffen Records, Manowar enacted a nightly stage ritual, one of a slew of stunts seemingly inspired by a Christian tent revival. Scouting the crowd for a youngster in a Metallica shirt, bassist Joey DeMaio would haul him onstage to mock those who “turned their backs on true metal.” When the fan was shamed thoroughly and near the verge of tears, the stern metal fighters would exchange his Metallica rags for a brand-new Manowar shirt, pass around a symbolic can of communal beer, then kick him back into the crowd—reborn a Manowar man.
Yet while heavy metal searched for a new center, fans were not necessarily interested in reliving the sword-wielding glories of Manowar’s classic canon. The band’s poser-crushing battle cries maintained tremendous popularity, yet they were confined in anachronisms. Instead heavy metal reached for new discoveries on the periphery, as the disappearance or apparent defection of its influential leaders pulled off the lid from the wide-ranging scene now scrambling in several seemingly incompatible directions. Even as black metal incited and inspired the underground the world over, other young bands from outside the hardcore metal loop took inspiration from the environment immediately around them.
With heavy metal marginalized during the mid-1990s, the influence of hardcore rap music on hard music was enormous. Even a stalwart independent label like Roadrunner, which hosted more than a dozen death metal acts just five years earlier, began throwing in its lot with rap metal bands who were seen as having commercial potential. In Biohazard, Dog Eat Dog, Machine Head, and Life of Agony, the label believed it had discovered bands who represented the anger and spite of hardcore punk, not just the hair coloring. By 1996, however, the fusion of hardcore and metal in these groups had become less remarkable than their rap-inflected vocals and attitude.
A show of hands: Pantera live in the 1990s
In this thuggish, combative form of metal, Pantera loomed large. As Pantera netted six gold albums between 1993 and 1996, newcomers Biohazard and Machine Head crept up the charts with a similar convulsive style— incorporating the pounding groove of rap music while sticking to a basic guitar-based thrash metal drive. These urban squads rolled from the streets of Brooklyn and Oakland, and their aggressive fusion took naturally to the indomitable influence of hardcore rap. At the same time pot-smoking, gun-praising rap group Cypress Hill met them halfway—treading tough turf with haunting, paranoid rhymes and versatile music by producer Mixmaster Muggs, a steady user of Black Sabbath samples. In turn, all of these acts influenced a brand-new smattering of little-known regional bands like Korn, Slipknot, and Limp Bizkit, all of whose self-released debut albums in the mid-1990s showed that the heavy metal spirit survived in ways that were increasingly hard to identify.
As its hair slowly grew back, Metallica rediscovered its metal roots. An elaborate stage show concocted for its 1997 North American tour reenacted the archly constructed reality in which the band now lived. Recalling James Hetfield’s dramatic accident in Montreal, a rigged piece of lighting exploded halfway through each nightly set, sending a flaming spotlight technician swinging through the air by a safety cable. With the deconstruction sequence and storyline initiated, lighting towers fell into a preset semicollapsed position, and roadies rushed to extinguish the flames. The lighting technician was toted away by stretcher to an ambulance waiting by the stage, while the sound system played a loop of crackling static noise.
Their equipment thus devastated, the band members pretended to improvise a makeshift solution to the catastrophe. Reconvening on a remote corner of the stage, where small, two-speaker combo guitar amps sat beneath a few bare lightbulbs, they bashed out a homey medley of “Four Horsemen” and other oldies from Kill ‘Em All. Slowly the soundman fortified the mix to proper arena volume. It was a tremendous event that played on disaster fantasies and told the story of the band’s now-legendary origins. More logistically complex than any of Iron Maiden’s mammoth stage sets of the 1980s, the production was pure Metallica genius, pretending to mock rock and roll convention even as it played into it wholeheartedly. Indeed, the special-effects company won a Designer of the Year award from the leading stagecraft industry magazine.
As Metallica kept itself entertained, they tapped the credit line of their creative carte blanche—and avoided writing new songs—with a return to heavy metal form. As Load and Reload were attempts to get back to basics by playing simple rock, Garage Inc. returned the band to its true origins: classic NWOBHM metal and hardcore punk. Since the Creeping Death EP in 1984 and the Garage Days Re-Revisited EP in 1987, the band had always had great luck with co
ver songs stroked with heaping quantities of trademark Hetfieldisms and Metallithrash. Now the double CD Garage Inc. made new payments on old artistic loans by exposing Metallica’s interests and influences to a new generation of listeners.
Combining one disk of sixteen previously available cuts with a second disk of new recordings, the Garage Inc. double CD gave Metallica a chance to further exhaust the catalog of Diamond Head and the Misfits, while throwing in a couple of overlooked classics by Black Sabbath and the British hardcore band Discharge. Wild cards were Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page,” Nick Cave’s “Loverman,” and an acoustic version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone"—with Kirk Hammett’s old friend from algebra class, Les Claypool, on banjo.
One simple cover from a band as full of riffs as Mercyful Fate did not suffice. Metallica worked five songs from the hallmark Melissa and a preceding EP into an eleven-minute medley. “They captured the essence and still sounded like Metallica,” says Fate singer King Diamond. “I was surprised when they did that. They thought our publisher would have told us, but it was Lars calling me out of the blue. He started playing the tape for me over the phone the first time, and my hair started standing on end. It was so authentic.”
Former Misfits leader Glenn Danzig willingly handed over permission to rerecord his songs after denying the same rights to the Misfits, now re-formed with a new singer and signed to Geffen. “Kirk Hammett called me before they did the covers album,” Danzig says, “and told me they wanted to play ‘Die Die My Darling,’ ‘Last Caress,’ and ‘Green Hell.’ It was cool with me.” Cooler yet was his percentage of royalties on the three songs from an unexpected 4 million CD sales of Garage Inc.
Since they did not play any of their own songs during a short tour to promote Garage Inc., Metallica fittingly hired a Metallica cover band called Battery as opening act. At Grammy time in 1999, Metallica took home the Hard Rock Performance award for Garage, Inc.’s “Whiskey in a Jar,” beating out a slew of new names, including Korn, Kid Rock, and Limp Bizkit. Metallica now represented the establishment vote—a familiar face when it came time to pick industry honors. Metallica’s millions had made rich men of many in the music business, and thousands of lawyers, photographers, security guards, and record-store clerks were served by the economy the band generated. This fifth Grammy was an especially sweet award, honoring a traditional Irish folk song that had been a hit in 1973 as played in Thin Lizzy by the late Phil Lynott, one of Cliff Burton’s favorite bassists and an underrecognized influence on countless metal greats.
Not content to retire and collect publishing checks from Metallica performances, the revived NWOBHM label Neat Records responded to Garage Inc. with Metallic-Era Vol. I and Metallic-Era Vol. II. These were collections of original versions of the Motor-head, Diamond Head, Holocaust, and other early British heavy metal tracks covered by Metallica. On the second volume Holocaust turned the tables with its own interpretation of “Master of Puppets.” Metallica had previously been treated to several reinterpretations of its music: first by the industrial band Die Krupps, then by Apocalyptica Plays Metallica by Four Cellos, a classical music project by a Finnish string quartet. The ECW Extreme Music wrestling soundtrack CD in 1998 offered the ultimate headbanging honor: a faithfully meaty cover of “Enter Sandman” by Motörhead.
Meanwhile, floating in the Persian Gulf on the aircraft carrier USS Constellation, naval and marine officers passed the time playing Metallica cover songs in a “classic alternative rock band” called One Ball Low. The film Paradise Lost proved that Metallica was popular with captive audiences, and the 5,000-person crew of the Constellation was no exception. Still, there was more than a little irony in soldiers copying songs by the band that wrote impassioned antiwar hymns like “Disposable Heroes” and “One.”
“Enter Sandman” was treated differently by the great-grandfather of Christian rock, Pat Boone. On his In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy CD, Boone found the schmaltz in twelve metal chestnuts, including Judas Priest’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” and Dio’s “Holy Diver.” “That was funny to hear ‘Holy Diver’ done that way,” says Ronnie James Dio. “I don’t think a lot of people got the joke, but he certainly did.” With the eamp factor cranked up to eleven, Boone erooned his way through the titanic themes, aeeompanied by baekup singers, a horn section, and an outrageously wimpy lead guitar.
METAL TRIBUTES
Dating back to the first records by Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, heavy metal used cover songs as a measure of its distance from what came before. The soaring voice of Rob Halford on Priest’s version of “Green Manalishi (with the Two-Pronged Crown)” sounded like it came from a different century than did the Fleetwood Mac original. With thrash metal, cover versions became a full-fledged mania, as Slayer covered Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” for the Less Than Zero sound track, Megadeth covered Nancy Sinatra, Exodus covered War, and Xentrix lamentably covered the theme from Ghostbusters. Metallica was among the most prodigious raiders and careful selectors of back catalog, illuminating obscure influences through limited-edition releases. In the late 1990s the practice extended to full-length albums of covers by major metal artists, as well as lesser tribute albums of metal greats by unknown bands. One tribute album was not enough for the most legendary, as Black Sabbath, Mercyful Fate, Metallica, Judas Priest, Slayer, Venom, and Iron Maiden tribute albums ran into multiple volumes.
aThe Masters’ Call
A Tribute to Abba (2000) With Therion, Morgana LeFay, and other tongue-in-cheek tributes
In Memory of Celtic Frost (1996) With Emperor, 13, Mayhem, Opeth
Nativity in Black: A Tribute to Black Sabbath (1994) Type O Negative proves it is possible to slow down “Black Sabbath”
Answering to the Masters
Pat Boone, No More Mr. Nice Guy: In a Metal Mood (1997) Easy-listening Metallica, Dio, and Judas Priest
Cutthroat, Rape Rape Rape (1998) Japanese attacks on Hirax, Mace, Exodus, and Warfare
Guns N’ Roses, The Spaghetti Incident? (1993) Primal-therapy LP covering Damned, Charles Manson, the Stooges, and Hanoi Rocks
Metallica, Garage Days Re-Revisited, the $5.98 EP (1987) Original covers of Holocaust, the Misfits, Killing Joke, and Budgie
Metallica, Garage Inc. (1998) Adds Nick Cave, Motörhead, Bob Seger, and Mercyful Fate
Overkill, Coverkill (1999) Thrash kings cop Motörhead, Kiss, Judas Priest, and the Sex Pistols
Rage Against the Machine, Renegades (2000) Taking Afrika Bambaata to the metal
Slayer, Undisputed Attitude (1996) Metal kings send alms to Minor Threat, Dr. Know, DI, and the Stooges
Six Feet Under, Graveyard Classics (2002) Cookie Monster does Venom, AC/DC, Exodus, and Accept
Vigilant and unamused, the religious right temporarily turned against the figurehead of wholesomeness, as Boone’s Gospel America program was suspended from the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Yet despite the Christian industry’s longtime bullying of politicians and corporations with threats of boycotts, their supposed blocking power looked anemic as In a Metal Mood became the first Pat Boone record to crack the Billboard 200 in more than thirty years.
After taking a beating in the mainstream during the 1990s, supporters of heavy metal were not surprised that the music still had market power. Dedicated back-catalog labels like CMC International and Spitfire Records snatched the opportunity to acquire from major labels at bargain prices the previously recorded back catalogs of Iron Maiden, Twisted Sister, and other faded giants “With the perceived heyday of metal long since gone by, the majors have turned their focus to other forms of music,” announced the Spitfire Records mission statement. “With the majors almost entirely out of the picture and the simple fact the record business is cyclical in nature, a growing trend back to the harder-edge music is emerging. Actually, metal and hard rock music have never gone away.”
Free from the marketing plans of large record companies, metal in the mid-1990s remained vital and self-directed. The spirit
persevered in a fresh generation intent on recombining heavy metal traditions reverently. Young bands like Hammerfall, Blind Guardian, and Iced Earth reverse-engineered the 1980s metal style into a vintage reproduction called legacy metal, combining the fantastic grandeur of straight-ahead bands like Fates Warning and Manowar with the fluency of German speed metal. To them, the early heavy metal pioneers had achieved immortal status—the faces of Ozzy, Halford, and Dio could be carved on an imaginery Mount Rushmore.
Other retro treatments demonstrated heavy metal’s often-underestimated ability to laugh at itself. As much as armor and long-winded pageantry, metal’s sense of irony was always part of its attraction. Cranium’s music in particular was a hyperactive master’s thesis on the joys of wearing leather and spikes. Worshipping mid-1980s speed metal records by Violence and Living Death, the band purified and pilloried the form. Speed Metal Slaughter featured as many outrageous riffs and silly solos as the entire Combat Records back catalog. On the antidisco “Slaughter on the Dance Floor” and the anthemic “Satanic Rescue Team,” vocalist Chainsaw Demon purposely exaggerated his European accent in tribute to the great voices of German speed metal.
Ohio’s Boulder took nearly the same approach, cramming Melvins and Motörhead riffs into a package adorned by Flying V guitars, tributes to Michael Schenker, and artwork sampled from old Riot albums. Boulder and Cranium both demonstrated a metal paradox: They gave their all without taking themselves too seriously. Not surprisingly, these bands emerged during a transitional time when Iron Maiden was oddly touring America in support of Ed Hunter, a video game starring its mascot.