‘Lars and Kirk were pretending they were gay': The Metallica album that incensed their fans is back

I was just 24-years-old when I attained my most cherished, and most perfectly useless, claim to fame. On a broiling summer's evening in 1995, at the cramped Astoria 2 club on Charing Cross Road in London, I became one of just 900 people who saw Metallica perform their best-ever concert.
That summer, the San Franciscan quartet were still a year away from entering their career's second act. Known now as 'Nineties Metallica,' this epoch began with the release of Load, their complicated sixth studio album, which is this week re-released in stupendously lavish form. Containing no fewer than 16 discs, its 230 tracks include remixes, demos, outtakes, cover versions and live material from stages including the Astoria 2. Booklets and other paraphernalia are also included. All of it can be yours for just a penny shy of £250.
This bountiful edition serves as a reminder that few bands are as adept as Metallica at documenting their activities, and that almost none are as truly hopeless when it comes to editing themselves. It isn't simply a matter of bonus material, either. In its original form, Load runs to a minute shy of 80 minutes. Unveiled the following year, in 1997, its sister LP, Reload, is only a blush shorter. To put it kindly, both would have benefitted from a spot of judicious pruning.
At the time of its release, Load heralded a period of reinvention for Metallica. As well as ditching their famous logo – unheard of for a metal act – the accompanying cover artwork, a mixture of semen and cows' blood by the New York artist Andres Serrano, was said to represent the exhilarating pain of rebirth. Equally alarming, at least in a time before nu-metal upended the aesthetic rules completely, was the sight of the band returning to the fray with – brace yourselves – short hair.
Determined to push the envelope further, the artwork's inner sleeves feature photographs taken by Anton Corbijn of drummer Lars Ulrich and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett – always the group's progressive wing – sporting feather boas and make-up. As if fighting a rearguard action, vocalist and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield could be seen throwing devil horns in a leather jacket bearing a Slayer badge.
Recalling the tensions of Load's disputatious genesis, in a 2009 interview with Classic Rock magazine, Hetfield said that 'the whole 'We need to reinvent ourselves' topic was up [for debate]. Image isn't an evil thing to me, but if the image isn't you, it doesn't make much sense.' He then accused Ulrich and Hammett of going 'after a U2 kind of vibe, Bono doing his alter-ego.'
He continued: 'I couldn't get into it. I would say at least half the pictures that were to be in the booklet, I yanked out. The cover went against what I was feeling. Lars and Kirk were very into abstract art, pretending they were gay. I think they knew it bugged me. I think the cover of Load was just a piss-take around all that. I just went along with all this crazy stupid s--t.'
In the past, Metallica's finest moments had been defined by the energy and tension created by the sound of Hetfield and Ulrich butting heads. But the defining characteristic of Load is a loss of focus.
Contrivance, too, queers the deal. Having conquered the world of metal with world-class elan, Metallica's attempts at transforming themselves into a hard rock band were largely lamentable. They just weren't suited to playing it loose, or, as Lars Ulrich put it in what seemed like scores of interviews, of being 'greasy'. As such, the fingers-in-the-belt-loop stomp of songs such as Ronnie or the achingly thick-headed 2 X 4 marked their creative nadir.
There are some fine moments here, though. After months in therapy, Hetfield's determination to lay bare his troubled soul lent epics such as Bleeding Me and Outlaw Torn a remarkable gravitas. Long gone were the days when the singer poured his fear of a loss of agency into songs about being trapped under ice or strapped into an electric chair. With its chorus line of 'so tear me open but beware, there's things inside without a care', equally, Until It Sleeps was a lead hit single of substantial heft.
Metallica also needed to escape the corner into which they'd found themselves. The success of their previous LP, the eponymous record known to all as The Black Album and released five years earlier, was such that it exited the US chart only weeks before the arrival of Load. By becoming one of the most dominant bands in the world, the shadow of the past cast a pall over their route to the future.
In a creative sense, the problems facing the group were existential. As the official opposition to radio-friendly pop and hair metal, Metallica had spent much of the Eighties as outsiders who sold millions of albums without bothering, even, to release singles. When at last they did, with One in 1989, the song was paired with a video entirely antithetical to the visual candy floss served up by bands such as Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe. Featuring clips from the film Johnny Got His Gun, about a soldier who returns from war without arms, legs, or any of his senses, the clip proved so traumatising to one of my friends – who first saw it as a teenager – that he's unable to rewatch it even today.
Even when Metallica did deign to engage with the music industry on something like its own terms, the presence on the airwaves of hits such as Enter Sandman and The Unforgiven suggested the group had dragged the mainstream in their direction as much as the other way around. To put it simply, Metallica were simply too popular to be ignored. In a cover story from 1992, Rolling Stone headlined an interview with James Hetfield with 'the leader of the free world speaks'.
Despite claims from some quarters of having 'sold out', when the mood seized them, this exalted status did nothing to blunt the group's rabid ferocity. Versions of songs such as Battery and Whiplash, from the 1993 concert boxset Live Sh-t: Binge & Purge, are so wholly berserk that it seems unthinkable that one of the most popular acts in the world could make such a racket.
That Metallica should be applauded for dragging the centre of sonic gravity to such extremes is a given. All the same, the fact remained: as Load hovered into view, for the first time, these erstwhile insurrectionists had become the establishment.
'When The Black Album came out no one knew who Kurt Cobain was,' noted Lars Ulrich, in a 1996 interview with Kerrang! 'Just think about that for a minute.'
How true. In the five-year wait for Load to hit the racks the world of loud music had changed in unpredictable ways. Not only had an Alternative Revolution spearheaded by Nirvana tolled the bell for scores of hopeless hair metal groups, but punk rock, too, had flooded the mainstream. With the release of Dookie, in 1994, Green Day, like Metallica before them, became the latest band of outsiders from the Bay Area to have sold more than 10 million albums.
Metallica responded to the new environment well. For their first US tour in support of Load, the group were anointed headliners for the Lollapalooza festival, which had been created by Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell five years earlier. In what sounds like a very good day out, at the headliners' behest, the bill also featured Soundgarden, The Ramones, Screaming Trees, Rancid and the Cocteau Twins.
'In 1992 Lollapalooza was the alternative to our [notoriously excessive] tour with Guns N' Roses,' was Ulrich's take on the situation. 'But to me, Metallica and Lollapalooza in 1996 doesn't seem that strange. It was getting a little stagnant, because how alternative is Lollapalooza when in America the alternative is the mainstream?' For his part, Hetfield was rather more circumspect. 'People think way too f—ing much about our motivation,' he said.
For all of its misfires, the Nineties should be remembered as a period in which Metallica fizzed with fascinating ideas. In 1997, the launch of Reload heralded a public appearance, in Philadelphia, with the unbeatable title The Multi-Million Decibel March.
The following year, during a short tour in support of the cover versions album Garage Inc. on which the band played material by other artists, they satiated their audience's desire to hear songs such as Master Of Puppets by having a Metallica tribute act open the show.
This just happened to be the period during which Metallica found themselves hurtling towards a terrible fracture. Along with the departure of their bass player, Jason Newsted, the decision by Hetfield to disappear (unannounced) to rehab for months on end threw the future of the group into doubt.
That they later chose to bare these traumas to the world, in the form of the 2004 documentary Some Kind Of Monster, shows why this band was different, and braver, than others. Note the past tense, though. With the exception of the brutally uncommercial Lulu, a collaboration album with Lou Reed from 2011, risks of this kind are no longer taken.
Today, the motivating factors are money and nostalgia. A brand as much as a band, the men who changed the face of heavy music more than any other are now little more than a group of lavishly remunerated creative has-beens. Presently out on the road in the US and Canada, Metallica's remarkable, and remarkably successful, hustle of playing different setlists over two nights in stadiums across the country means that fans who wish to hear all of the band's most popular songs are required to pony up twice. Ticket prices for their UK tour next summer range from £181 to – and this is not a misprint – £2,095.
As someone who saw the group, in 1986, for little more than a fiver, it could be, of course, that I'm wrong to chafe at the unapologetic ruthlessness with which Metallica have set about testing the boundaries of what the market will stand. Somehow, though, I don't think so.
Which is why, for all its many faults, the new iteration of Load affords a compelling glimpse at a group that is vastly different from the one that exists today. In their arduous determination to find new ways with which to express themselves, and to bet the farm on an album that even their most loyal constituents afforded only a hesitant thumbs up, back then, Metallica were more than a remnant of the past.

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