Some kind of Metallica

Rock documentaries are an interesting bunch. Inevitably, in our glossy age, they take the confessional form, following the narratological arcs so favored by programs like E "True Hollywood Story" or VH1's "Behind the Music." We're all modern-day Hegelians with the lather-rinse-repeat regularity of rise, sucess, excess, hubris, catastrophe, repeat. (Perhaps this explains the inexplicable popularity of Scarface among members of the recording industry and professional athletes, at least as documented by MTV's "Cribs." There is certainly a gleeful, hyperkinetic exuberance to Pacino's meteoric rise and unimaginative decline into cocaine addiction, paranoia, and violent murder. But I digress.) Invariably, criticism of rock documentaries focuses on how glamorous the band's life is made out to be, what a petulant bunch of idiots the band's members are (not enjoying their fame enough for our taste, are they?) or how much the events in the documentary resemble events in the fabled, now nearly mythical 'mockumentary' This is Spinal Tap. To paraphrase Mr. Dylan professors and great lawyers feel obligated to regurgitate inane quotes from Spinal Tap at particularly inopportune moments. Haven't we, as a civilization, heard enough times already that "it" (whatever it is, a new car, a new cuisinart, a material posession of some merit and consumptory pleasure) "goes to 11?" But again, I digress. You will, I aver, see what I mean.

I.

The much maligned heavy metal band Metallica has a rabid and terribly nostalgic following. Any conversation with a serious Metallica fan (and I don't mean dainty poncers like Curt Minerd or Eric Engler who labor under the amusing delusion that their crapulent S&M classical-art-rock collaboration with the poor San Francisco Symphony Orchestra is the pinacle of their career) will inevitably devolve into pointless bickering about exactly when the bastards sold out. Some will say it was when Dave left. Some will say it was when they softened up and made the melodic piece of crap Ride the Lightning. Some will be smartasses and claim, post-modernly, that they had always already sold out. In any case, everyone will agree that the Black Album was a definitive selling out (especially when they hired the Bon Jovi producer and haplessly named buffoon with great hair Bob Rock). In any case, the '90s were a decade of disapointment for the true, the proud, the tattoed folk with eardrums hammered flat from listening to "Whiplash" too many times (turned up to 11, yes, and I'm not sorry at all.) Metallica was treading water, getting fat from having sold 90+ million albums, and doing all that conventional stuff people tend to do when they get rich and happy, like having children and accumulating extensive land holdings.

So what's the point? Not much except to say that the band, in 2001, was pretty rudderless. James Hetfield was a pretty soused alcoholic, Lars Ulrich is an overgrown man-child who is simultaneously petulant and demanding, and Kirk Hammett is some kind of Buddhist saint, rather spacy but clearly a genuinely nice guy. How do I know this? Well, for the whole production of the aggressively mediocre St. Anger disc Metallica was seeing a shrink (charging a cool $40,000 bones or clams or whatever you call them a month) and letting a documentary team film them.

The result? Some Kind of Monster, the real-life documentary that just might, on balance, end up being a better rock documentary than This is Spinal Tap! I've got a compendium of various reviews to follow: Slate, A.O. Scott, TheOnion AV Club, and the Village Voice. David Edelstein of Slate begins his review thus:

It sounds like a swipe at Metallica to compare the smashing new documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (IFC Films) to a nonfiction remake of This Is Spinal Tap (1984). But it's more of a testament to how smart that landmark mockumentary was.

A.O. Scott pays tribute to the mockumentary in his second body paragraph:

Early in 2001, Metallica, one of the longest-lived and most popular heavy-metal bands, went into a converted military barracks in San Francisco to begin working on a new album....

At first the idea of a rock band in therapy sounds unlikely, if not downright comical, like ''This Is Spinal Tap'' with a screenplay by Janet Malcolm. And hearing James Hetfield, Metallica's ferocious, sometimes fearsome lead singer, talking about his feelings with Lars Ulrich, the band's baby-faced drummer, can be a little jarring. But Metallica's music is rooted in strong, unruly emotions, and it has been, for many fans, a kind of therapy in its own right.

Thankfully, Nathan Rabin is able to write a couple of paragraphs without referencing the albatros Spinal Tap but the same cannot be said of Chuck Eddy at the Voice:

Lars deserves bonus points for being shorter than his wife, and his remark that the band's "in a bit of a shit sandwich" wins the most-blatant–Spinal Tap–reference award....

Psychobabbling $40,000-a-month shrink Phil Towle occupies the David St. Hubbins's girlfriend role; he never quite draws Zodiac-sign portraits of band members, but his implicit suggestion that they try being Kraut-rockers in "meditative mode" would've made him a more useful producer than biz-sucking slimeball Bob Rock.

I want to put away my hammer for a minute and do some close reading, though. The reviews all hit upon a common point: Metallica isn't a bunch of rock gods but just a couple overgrown kids who have been sufficiently insulated by money, power, and prestige that they've never really had to grow up. Hetfield, before he goes into rehab, ditches his son's birthday to go bear hunting in Siberia and his lame attempts to justify the fact that he was downing stoli shots--you know, for the birthday--instead of actually being there begin to verge on the pathetic. Lars is hardly a shit-kicking metalhead but rather a wealthy art collector and former tennis star, and one of the more amusing sequences in the film feature him knocking back cocktails with his wife (easily 6 inches taller than him) while his excellent modern art collection (including a Basquiat that sells for 5 million) goes on the block at Christie's. In some ways the finer grain that the film gives you of these rock stars illustrates just how accidental their fame is. They're just a bunch of guys with some talents, some synthetic potential, and their mega-stardom is inexplicable. There's no reason, as Dave Mustaine (Metallica and Megadeath) seems to think, that there's anything besides luck in what separates a modestly sucessful band from a hugely sucessful band. Them's the breaks, I guess. But that's what's humanizing about the film: it adds transparency to rock musicianship, reveals the squables and sulking and arguments and powerplays that occur behind the curtain and before METALLICA struts out on stage in front of 100,000 watts of amplification.

II.

Back to Edelstein again.

The documentary was intended as a relatively straightforward look at the making of an album (it would be St. Anger), the first in years for a group that, in its 20-year history, has sold nearly a hundred million records. But as the film begins, that old black magic isn't there. The longtime bassist, Jason Newsted, has decamped after feeling artistically suffocated, leaving producer Bob Rock to fill in. More important, there's something eating the singer, James Hetfield, who's quarreling incessantly with the drummer and cofounder, Lars Ulrich.

The band members engage a therapist, Phil Towle, to help them talk through their problems, but Hetfield can't rise to the occasion—can't manufacture the adrenaline or endorphins or whatever it takes to make kick-ass heavy metal at age 40. There's a nasty exchange about Hetfield's guitar-playing, which Ulrich calls "stock," and then Hetfield takes off, slamming the door conclusively. The next thing anyone hears, he's in rehab—for, like, nine months.

That's a hell of a scene, Ulrich and Hetfield bickering like a married couple. It later turns out, as Ulrich engages in a bit of drum confessional, that Ulrich had always felt alienated from Hetfield and that he thought Hetfield was not only closer to Dave Mustaine but also unable to express any deep feelings of emotion for Ulrich unless it was after "42 beers." This, I'm afraid, is the real emotional center of Metallica and their problems--this tryptch of Dave, James and Lars. They're all disparted, now, no longer whole, aching, in an impossible way, to be together again, at the begining.

Will Hetfield be strong enough to endure the camera's scrutiny, now that he's so undefended? It's quite a contrast, this quiet, clean-and-sober fellow, sunk deeply into himself—his image intercut with shots of him in his prime as a Dionysian long-haired boozy metal titan. Suddenly, Hetfield's life is structured, his Metallica participation limited to four hours a day. But it's Ulrich who chafes against the restraints. He hates that Hetfield controls the recording process even passively, by his absence. The scene in which they have it out is a triumph of the therapeutic process: We see that this conflict goes so deep that it's like we're watching a marriage unravel. A marriage and a big, big business.

At some point, all successful rock bands must confront what Max Weber called "the bureaucratization of charismatic leadership." But isn't that bureaucracy what metal generally rails against? And what to do about that touchy-feely therapist, who starts to pass them lyrics and to fancy himself (they think) a part of the band: Must they shed him to regain their potency and be able to swagger on stage as true Metal Men? Hetfield raises the ultimate question in a climactic performance before inmates at San Quentin: Can you have aggression—the kind of head-banging fury that gave birth to heavy metal—without negative energy?

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is loose and uninsistent, yet these questions are always in front of us: The movie is brilliantly structured. (The structure is brilliant because it's barely visible.) It's about a youth culture that makes all aging graceless, a therapeutic culture that makes all aggression suspect, and a capitalist culture that makes the potential collapse of a zillion-dollar enterprise like Metallica the stuff of high drama.

Scott picks up on these threads as well. How, exactly, do you grow up when your fans want you to continue to channel their very adolescent rage? Hetfield poses these questions, more or less rhetorically, when the band films/plays at San Quentin. He tells the inmates, ferociously tattoed in tank tops and orange prison garb, held back by a thin line of uniformed guards with rifles, that he sucessfully channeled his rage into music, that he was angry enough to be in here with them. This reads as almost inauthentic but Hetfield is sincere, after his rehab, and learning freshly music as vocation and not just avocation.

For nearly 20 years, Mr. Ulrich, Mr. Hetfield and their various band mates have channeled the basic adolescent experiences of alienation, frustration and rage into melodramatic, at times self-consciously mythic squalls of sound. One of the insights ''Some Kind of Monster'' offers is just how much work this transformation requires, perhaps especially when it is undertaken not by teenage rebels but by family men in their early 40's.

The film takes for granted that rock 'n' roll, while it remains the soundtrack of youthful disaffection, has long since become a respectable middle-aged profession. Both Mr. Ulrich and Mr. Hetfield, the band's founding members, who started playing music together in the early 1980's, are married men with young children. They also behave, with each other, like a long-married couple who find themselves bored, dissatisfied and on the rocks.

Mr. Berlinger and Mr. Sinofsky have uncovered the mysterious dynamic of their collaboration, a relationship that is, superficially, both an artistic bond and a business partnership but that is also a deep, bubbling source of identity and anxiety for each man. Mr. Towle, a bald, platitudinous fellow who has soothed the battling egos of professional sports teams, thus becomes a kind of couples therapist for Mr. Ulrich and Mr. Hetfield. They are not the only people in the room -- Kirk Hammett, the band's guitarist, and Bob Rock, the producer and acting bassist, also participate in the sessions and have their own concerns and grievances -- but the band's genius, as well as its dysfunction, seems to grow out of the tension between the drummer and the singer.

Eddy's column is far less reverent than either Edelstein's or Scott's. He begins by attacking Metallica for becoming staid "has-beens."

Which is kinda true; once broken-childhood-surviving singer James Hetfield finally goes through rehab and starts insisting on working only four hours a day so he can make his daughter's ballet lessons, you feel sorry for the dork. But then you remember how crappy Aerosmith got after they knocked the monkey off their backs. Not to mention that Metallica haven't made a decent album of original songs for 16 years.

And you remember that "therapy rock" has been the dullest cliché on earth ever since Nirvana inspired emo, and that the whole idea that we're supposed to care about rock stars as people (as opposed to, say, makers of songs and riffs) is ridiculous, and that rare-vinyl-collecting tennis-prodigy geek turned Basquiat-collecting drummer Lars Ulrich and Buddhism-spoutingly mild-mannered half-Filipino hippie guitarist Kirk Hammett had never seemed remotely threatening in the first place, and that Lars's Napster-baiting period absolutely justified Metallica's recent legacy as the most hated band by their own fans in rock history, and that this group has been obsessed with suicidal tendencies and sanitariums and sundry other mental health issues ever since their beautiful "Fade to Black" in 1984, and it clicks: This flick is almost all old news.

Eddy's opprobrium reaches delicious heights:

In fact, from an opening blurb calling them the top touring band of the '90s through a concluding one where the album tops charts all over the world, much of Monster is just a two-and-a-half-hour puff piece about how "important" Metallica are and, worse, how much "integrity" they have. ("We've proven that you can make aggressive music without negative energy," gawd.) The first 45 minutes drag; things picks up once old-married-couple control freaks Lars and James start acting like they're gonna beat each other's brains out.

James is pleasingly paranoid once he's on the wagon; earlier and more vodka-marinated, after bragging about shooting a constipated bear in Russia, he returns to the studio and sings like a constipated bear, and nobody notices!

This is spicy, and I enjoy the right of younger, more aggressive critics to find fault in a band that has grown old enough to be (not just serve as) loco parentis for their fanbase. That's the essential conflict here, between growing older and growing up, between maintaining youthful intensity with a lifestyle that no longer permits group sex with groupies, cocaine, and destructive alcoholism. It is true, perhaps, that rock and roll is a young man's game and that any bands that survive into elder-statesmanhood are forever going to be seen as lame. This next paragraph is delightful:

But he's [Lars] not nearly as lovable as his ancient Danish dad, Torben—a bucktoothed, troll-bearded ex-Wimbledon third-rounder, jazz muso, painter, poet, filmmaker, and arts journalist who looks exactly like the wizard-of-the-rings mountain man inside Led Zep's Zoso gatefold. He's also the only person brave enough to tell Metallica their music sucks.

Eddy decries the Metallica marketing machine, though it is hard enough to believe that the band would comission a documentary actively critical of them, and through his delightfully acidic commentary he reaches the same conclusion that Edelstein and Scott have about the new, reformed, refashioned, post-therapy, Metallica: they're a bunch of middle-aged men.

Another dumb personnel decision occurs during new-bassist auditions: Metallica pass over impressive unknown Elena Repetto and perfectly doom-toned Unida/Kyuss stoner Scott Reeder for Suicidal Tendencies klutz Robert Trujillo, apparently for his rap-metal cred. Pretty amusing, though, when Trujillo, stuck in a room with all these lonely men discussing "feelings," suddenly realizes he joined a new age band. And pretty tragic when Kirk Hammett, clearly the movie's good guy despite badly needing assertiveness training, argues for guitar solos, to no avail.

Yes, that's the true marvelousness of the video, seeing the coming of age of a rock band.

III.

Chuck Eddy did point me at this hysterical review of St. Anger by a disgruntled fan, Colin Tappe.

With St. Anger’s hype machine working overtime inside my brain, I was gratified to say the least when I finally saw the video to the album’s single “St. Anger”.

The video is a fucking GEM, lemme tell ‘ya. Metallica are playing at San Quintin, and in between the band playing the single to a bunch of entertainment staved prisoners (Pick one of two of the following useless parenthetical interjections: a) talk about a CAPTIVE AUDIENCE! Gua-hu-hu OR b) “hmmm, should I get gang raped in woodshop or go and see the filming of the new Metallica video?”) there’re these short skits of minorities committing crimes and going to prison which resemble all those straight-to-video gang themed films that were so popular when Boyz In The Hood first came out.

As if Metallica finally tapping into the oft-neglected “incarcerated gang member” demographic isn’t good enough, the song, St. Anger is one of the biggest pieces of shit you’ll EVER hear on any airwaves. My jaw dropped when I first heard how AWFUL the thing sounded. I mean, I honestly can’t recall the last time I heard a single from a “Major Artist” like Metallica with such shitty production! Even the cable access Christian video shows would blush at the not-even-demo-worthy sound quality. Needless to say, “St. Anger”, and thus St. Anger were now weighing HEAVILY on my mind.

Hmmmm. Delightful.

The guitars are not only tuned way low, but mixed super quiet, so needless to say the bass is completely obscured in the non-mix. All you can hear is DRUMS, and VOCALS, which is fucking ABSURD because, as the cover of the CD indicates, THIS IS A FUCKING METALLICA ALBUM, and maybe it’s just me, but when you buy a FUCKING METALLICA ALBUM, you’re supposed to be able to hear the FUCKING GUITARS!!! What’s more is that, as you may have guessed, the drums and vocals are the worst fucking part! Completely ignoring Hetfield’s now-AWFUL pseudo (or is it post?)-Vedder et al. vocal style, the way which the vocals were actually recorded on the CD make them sound even WORSE, if one can imagine! Take the legitimately laughable vocal build on the opening cut “Frantic”; with each repetition of the chant “Frantic, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tock” Hetfield’s voice goes an octave higher and higher than he’s comfortable singing, so that by the end of his ranting Hetfield’s voice sounds as pubescent as his core audience. What’s more is that on closer examination, namely by watching the accompanying DVD of the rehearsals for St. Anger where Hetfield’s vocal build DOESN’T crack like a 13 year old Phil Anselmo, it seems that Bob was the one egging him on to go for those high notes.

...

Lyrically, it can only be expected to be written at a 6th grade reading level, with the emotional development of the writer not going too far out of that age range, but these guys must have been some pretty fucking stupid 6th graders, man! Some random excerpts; “Shoot me again/I ain’t dead yet”, “Can’t you help me be uncrazy?”, “Kill, kill, kill, kill”, and of course, one of the most baffling lyric to get actual radio airplay in a LONG time “I’m madly in anger with you.” Jeezis, I’ve heard of attempting to sound intellectual, and I’ve heard of pseudo-intellectual, but these guys must be TRYING to sound pseudo-intellectual. Like, ain’t these cats something like a half a fucking century old a piece? And they’re still wrestling with thesauruses to voice their “pain”? Christ, I hope if I ever get to this state of living off of fumes of nostalgia for my youth my retrogressive trip won’t be so fucking SQUARE sounding as these assholes.

So, that's a fan. Then again, Colin Tappe is so meta-post-Metallica that he doesn't even like their old stuff!

The thing is I’m not even a fan of Metallica’s old shit. “Those who can’t Slayer, Metallica” I’ve said on more than one occasion.

Truly, he has to be their ultimate fan. I bow before his superior intellect on this one. If to be a real fan of Metallica is to prefer their early work over their post 1991 stuff (somewhat analogous to having a preference to Van Halen over Van Hagar) then to be an ultimate fan is to not even like their old stuff at all. This is all so very delightful.

IV.

Speaking of Van Halen...I know that Neal C. Hannan (last seen on this blog with Buckethead) is a eu-fan, or at least as much of a eu-fan as someone that was in utero for their early work or as someone that confesses to taking pleasure in solo Sammy could be, and I'm fully aware that Van Halen will never get back together, and in all likelihood couldn't even be assembled in the same room for any appreciable length of time, but oh my, wouldn't that be fantastic? I do believe that our trusty filmmakers Berlinger and Sinofsky might have a calling in following around other great bands and just being the fly on the wall, so to speak. I'd love to see a Van Halen documentary in which the absolutely soused (speaking of someone that needs to go to rehab) Eddie Van Halen could tell the booze magnate (Cabo Wabo Tequila!) Sammy Hagar or the overly corpulent aging egomanic David Lee Roth that he was his favorite frontman. What a battle royale would ensue! That would make the glaring and pouting and pacing of Lars Ulrich seem so positively emo compared to the real rage that great enemies could incite.

I'd love to see John Paul Jones tell Jimmy Page that he was a fathead. I'd love to hear what Sir Paul McCartney really thought about John Lennon and Yoko. I'd be very curious what Tommy thought about Ozzy or if Daltrey thinks Pete is a pedophile (I mean, we've got an interview where he supports him, but what does he really think?)

I'm afraid, though, that this will all have to play out in the theatre of the mind. Then again, I don't mind that, all that much. The popcorn's cheap and nobody ever stands up in front of me to go to the bathroom. That, and the floor is always clean. Good times.

And Metallica? I've never been their biggest fan. I've enjoyed some of their stuff, less so others. I enjoyed Some Kind of Monster though, but perhaps for all the wrong reasons. I'm a big fan of schadenfreude, myself. Maybe I enjoy it a little too much. But it was a good time watching Metallica grow up and sort through their issues. Maybe they won't rock quite as hard as they used to. But they'll be able to reduce albums that their fans hate and compare unfavorably to what they did in the golden years and they'll continue to able to afford great art and horses to ride around their ranches on and expensive cars and all will be well.

What more can you really ask for?