Posted by SkaSkank
i have to agree with kublakhan the black album was their sellout album. People say that "no, they just got popular" , bullshit, they changed. I like early metallica.
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There's a huge difference between 'popular' and 'cross-over mainstream success.' Metallica was popular back in 84 when I first heard them. Granted, that popularity was confined to a pretty er...elite social group, me being one of them...greasy-haired head-bangers in mutilated jean jackets covered with band ephemera and rude slogans intended to piss of the usual suspects. As I recall, it was all about individual expression, and we stoners expressed all our individuality in a pretty homogeneous fashion; stepping back from it after almost 25 years, I can see that none of us were original, or even individual for that matter, in expressing our discontent. My individuality pretty much mirrored the individuality of the revolting teenager standing beside me. The only difference, perhaps, were our respective brands of cigarettes. I was always a Players Light man.
Anyhoo...Metallica's popularity came pretty early. They were selling shows and their tapes and, later, albums sold well. They were playing giant stadium festivals with some pretty big names.
Frankly...I wasn't much into them at that time. 1984...18 years old. I was still into Zeppelin. And Sabbath. BIG into Sabbath. Was always into AC/DC.
But the people I knew then were devoted Metallica fans. I remember one guy howling "Am I Evil" under an overpass while a train flashed by. We were all...6 of us, I think...cranked on some pretty serious acid, and this dude, 6'4" with electrified Robert Plant hair is screaming about burning shit and his thankless little bitch etc. etc. and I thought it was a bit scary. But in a funny sort of way. Dude's mother was indeed the meanest creature under the sun. Raging drunk. The only thing that prevented her from slapping her son around was that he was three times her size. They used to scream at each other through the heating vents, he up into the ceiling, she on the floor upstairs where she'd crouch with ear pressed into the vent so as to hear what her son was doing in the room below. Total psychos.
And then he'd crank on "Am I Evil" and yammer on about burning his mother alive. This is the same dude who got me into Venom. We dropped purple mike about 30 times that year, each and every Friday night for months. I don't know what we did on the other 22 Friday's. Probably window pane.
When Metallica released the Puppets album, mainstream success seemed destined. I knew a few football sport-ohs who owned that album and I'd see them at parties in their fucking varsity jackets bogarding and slobbering and hacking and wheezing their way through joints and then end up puking green sludge by the end of the night. As soon as Puppets came out, head-banging stoners were cool with the preppy jock set.
That was kinda fun for a while, mainly on account that a few of these sport-ohs...um, commissioned...us to get them drugs. Weed, hash, shrooms...that sort of shit. Which meant that that was how some of us got into selling drugs in the first place.
Now that I think of it, I blame Metallica for making dealers out of us. Puppets was the gateway to a life of crime.
I was supposed to see the tour, but Burton was killed. Even then it struck me as odd that they'd continue touring within a month of his death.
When Justice came out, Metallica did a video, and it with the song went into heavy rotation in mainstream markets. Much Music played the video constantly. Every fucking top 40 station played the song. Metallica was warming up the motorcycle; the shark pool was frothing.
When Bob Rock got behind the board, Metallica's end was assured. I distinctly remember chillin with my brother, himself a recovering Metallica fan, as Enter Sandman played on a Toronto station for the first time. No one said a word until the song was over. We looked at each other and he said, "That sure as fuck doesn't sound like any Metallica I know." He paused and we both said, simultaneously, "It sucks."
And it DID suck. Black was strictly commercial. It was about repositioning the band within a mainstream market. They became corporate. And their music represented a complete reversal of logic: they were making a product for sale.
When they ditched Newstead, it was done. The motorcycle had arched over the water, the shark snapped in futility, and the band landed on the other side in the land of mediocrity, never to return. They are one of those Legacy Acts, like Aerosmith, and The Stones.
Metallica is a Vegas act now.
