Banatom's Blog

Death Magnetic

banatom — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:21:53 +0000

talent? music, DVDs, videosIs it necessary for some people?” That song, tentatively titled “Shine” (“Everything looks the same/ In the shine of a midnight revolver”), Live in Melbourne did not get on Death Magnetic, but its reverberations did, in songs like “The Various Artists Day That Never Comes” and “Cyanide” (“Suicide/I’ve already died/It’s just the funeral I’m waiting for”).
“I remember20 Funerals 4 Cops 20 Problems 1 Solution in an interview with Cliff,” Hetfield says, “when someone asked, ‘What’s Metallica’s mission?’ he said, ‘Conquer the world and self-destruct.’ I’m like, ‘What? What year is this gonna be?’ But that was an interest¬ing answer because it was the way we felt: Burn the candle as hot and long as you can. We never knew we’d be around this long.”
Hetfield believes Death Magnetic is actually an album about fear. “There are people drawn to death,” he says. “The other side of the magnet is people push away from it. They are afraid. They don’t want to talk about it. It

Hetfield

banatom — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:17:44 +0000

Hetfield eventually came back Submit Ticket with what Rubin called “gut spill”: jagged, abstract bursts of verse, charged with raw terror and challenge, about death,Server Statusparticularly suicide. “I hear the crowdPromotional Code screaming, ‘Die, die, die,’ every night [in "Creeping Death"] – that has been in our vocabulary for a long time,” Hetfield acknowledges. But Hammett was an un-witting inspiration this time when he brought a photograph of Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley to the control room at HQ_, Metallica’s Bay Area studio, after Staley was found dead of a drug overdose in 2002. “That picture was there for a long time,” Hammett says. “I think it pervaded James’ psyche.”
“I did not know Layne,” Hetfield says. “I met him a few times. I know [Alice in Chains guitarist] Jerry Cantrell quite well and learned about Layne through him. And I could see some of the things Jerry went through to keep that band together.
“After what I went through,” Hetfield says, “I started writing a song based around a Layne Staley type, a rock &? roll martyr magnetized by death. Why did he choose that path, someone with such

Al Pacino

banatom — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:02:16 +0000

through so much with Posted his mother and his whole upbring¬ing. When he customizing went through everything that’s in the movie, he found a way to dismantle that character and bring more of himself up front.”RocketThemeTemplate
Ulrich, in turn, learned to back off. Early in the making of Death Mag¬netic, he talked with Hetfield about re¬turning not only to the sound of their mid-Eighties albums but the storytell¬ing in those songs, often triggered by films and books. “James has always written the words,” Ulrich says, “but the ideas came from both of us, initiat¬ed by things we shared. . . . And Justice for All – we spent two hours watching Al Pacino in a courtroom [in the 1979 film of that name]. ‘Creeping Death’ -that was The Ten Commandments. We talked about having movie night again, once a week.” Ulrich even showed Hetfield the “un-fucking-believable” 2004 German film Der Urtengang (Downfall), about Hitler’s last days. “But I could see it wasn’t connecting. I was confused, slightly disappointed.
But I realized I had to let him go off on this by himself.”

Ulrich fired

banatom — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:53:00 +0000

enough to be brothers, not far Name Brands enough to be parental. For Lars and I,Systems & Components this is the closest we get to having brothers.” But like siblings, “we battle for the steering wheel,” and agreement does not come easy. “Compromise” – Video · Digital Hetfield says the word with distaste – “sounds weak.”
Life between the two founders “has always been a strain,” says Hammett, who joined Metallica in 1983, after Het¬field and Ulrich fired original guitarist Dave Mustaine. “There was a real bad spat in the first couple of months I was in the band-James pushing Lars, and Lars flying into his cymbals. It wasn’t about anything important – who drank someone else’s booze. I’ll never forget it, because it erupted so quickly, in sec¬onds. I’m between them-’Guys, mellow out!’ – and Cliff Burton is sitting there with a big smirk on his face, amused as hell, like he’d pulled up a seat at a box¬ing match.”
“I think the guy is a genius,” Ulrich says sharply of Hetfield, daring you to contradict him. “I also have to deal with that genius. Looking back on it, James Hetfield, the growly guy, was a character he put up to protect the vul¬nerable kid who went

Forgiveness

banatom — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:45:19 +0000

“Metalliea is music storage a band where, when you go on toun you train for it,” says Tmjillo. ‘Tve had to hire a trainer who has me mnning cones and doing drills download on a football field?’

will Music Factory happen to all of us, and we will all face it alone. How do you deal with it? And how can I get comfort from this?” According to Hammett, one of the other titles considered for the album was Songs of Suicide and Forgiveness.
Ulrich is glad he bagged movie night. “It’s poetry,” he says of Hetfield’s lyrics for the record, “unfiltered, unedited. It’s what’s in his heart, in his spine.” The drummer has also learned something new about his friend.
“He’s a lot more tormented than I realized,” Ulrich says. “The fact that he carries that shit around in him – I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”
T
HE OVERNIGHT FLIGHT to Copenhagen on Ul-rich’s jet, after Metallica’s show in Riga, is about 90 minutes – plenty of time for a parade of trays full of fresh fruit, raw’tuna appetizers, tiramisu and flutes of champagne. The small plane is full of Ulrich’s family and guests, almost a dozen people, including his two sons by a former marriage, Myles, 9, and Layne, 7. (Ulrich and Nielsen also have a year-old son, Bryce.) There is Ulrich’s old schoolmate Peter Von Wowern, now an engineer; and artist-musician Franz Beckerlee and his wife. Beckerlee was the guitarist in Gasolin’, the top Danish rock band in the Seventies, and is a long¬time Ulrich family friend. “I saw Lars make his first hit on a drum,” he says while waiting to board in Riga. Lars, then eight months old, crawled across a floor and smacked a toy drum with his hand. “Look at him now.”
It has been an exhausting night. After the concert, the entire Metal¬lica entourage stopped at a Riga airport hotel, where the four members took over a room for a long band conference and a phone meeting with Rubin. But on the plane, which doesn’t take off until 2 a.m., Ulrich is as energetic as he