Metallica’s Rocky L.A. Road

The members of Metallica, the veteran rock outfit known for intelligent and epic metal, say they have taken a beating. Their tormentor, however, is not a person--it is an entity, a sprawling center for music that is also ground zero for artist exploitation.

This perceived foe is not Napster, the Internet site that Metallica is famously chasing through the courts as a haven of piracy. No, this is a larger and more mercurial site--Los Angeles.

“We have such a bizarre ongoing love-hate relationship with L.A.,” says Lars Ulrich, the band’s drummer and most outspoken member. “It’s amazing. It’s an interesting thing to talk about, really, and I’m not sure I can understand it beyond being aware of how strange it is.”

When the members of Metallica take the stage Saturday for a show at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (as headliners of an extreme-rock bill that includes Kid Rock and Korn), they will be returning to their birthplace as a band and to a market that has alternately embraced and scorned them in their 19-year career.

“L.A. has been such a roller coaster for us,” says James Hetfield, the band’s L.A.-born lead singer. “Back when we started out, it wasn’t our favorite place, and that’s why we ended up in the Bay Area.”

Indeed, when Ulrich, who hails from Denmark, met Hetfield in May 1981 in Newport Beach, their common bond was a love of Motorhead, NWOBHM and other shaggy, thudding British metal squads--an ethos that didn’t jibe with the glam-tinged metal springing up on the Sunset Strip. They formed Metallica later that year and, within months, they fled the L.A. scene for the far friendlier crowds in San Francisco.

“The Bay Area was a whole different scene that liked us for our music and not our look,” Hetfield says. “But L.A. grew out of all that big-hair stuff, and it became great for us, absolutely great.”

The happy scenes from Metallica’s L.A. story included a chaotic afternoon 12 years ago this month, when the up-and-coming speed-metal band came to town as one of the supporting acts on the Van Halen-led Monsters of Rock tour. The all-day show at the Coliseum (the last time Metallica played the stadium) included near-riots when the band’s ominous, strafing guitars began playing.

“They were madmen,” recalls Sammy Hagar, then lead singer of Van Halen. “Van Halen was the big band, sure, but we didn’t have that insanity. You could see just by looking at the crowd that this was a band that was going to be huge. How good were they? Let’s just say they [expletive] killed Dokken. Dokken went on after them every night, and every single night they got killed. And Dokken broke up after that tour.”

Soon, Los Angeles was a Metallica stronghold, and the drumbeat was kept by radio station KNAC-FM. The radio station, now defunct, was a powerhouse, and Metallica and Guns N’ Roses were its stars. “That’s when we sold out five nights at the Forum in 1992,” Ulrich recalled, “and then--poof--the whole thing just washed away. KNAC was gone and L.A. became one of our weakest cities.”

The latest twist in this tale: The dominant Southern California rock station of today, KROQ-FM (106.7), added Metallica to its traditional mix of alternative rock two years ago, a move that is less than surprising considering that KROQ’s staple of “alternative” rock these days skews toward Limp Bizkit, Korn and the Offspring, bands that have far more in common with Metallica than the station’s past stalwarts, such as the Cure and Depeche Mode.

“So two or three years ago, we were struggling to sell out one night [at Irvine Meadows],” Ulrich says, “and then KROQ comes aboard and now we sell 70,000 tickets for the Coliseum. Amazing. It’s been quite a ride in L.A., a complete mind-[expletive]. It says a lot about the power of radio but also about the attention span of people, the transient nature of L.A., the way it changes all the time, people filtering in and out. And it also says a lot about this band’s way of surviving.”

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Survival is a theme threaded throughout the words of Ulrich and Hetfield, the leaders of this durable, dark locomotive of a rock band. The other two members, guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Jason Newsted, have been in the band for 17 and 14 years, respectively, but they clearly defer to the founders when it comes time to plot the group’s music, business and fate.

On a recent sweltering afternoon, the band gathered to rehearse in a spartan San Rafael studio tucked anonymously into a hardscrabble industrial district. All the members live in the Bay Area now, and Hetfield is the first to arrive.

Astride his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, the tall, bearded rocker looks fearsome behind his sunglasses as he motors through the front door and parks his hog in a carpeted corridor. Later, Ulrich, a compact man and high-energy talker, cruises up in his BMW sedan and looks like a weekend suburbanite with a penchant for black clothes.

Both Ulrich and Hetfield are 36 years old, the fathers of small children, and that has changed their mind-set. A few weeks ago, for instance, the two rockers met up to take their kids to a traveling stage show of “Blue’s Clues,” a gentle animated children’s television show Ulrich calls “complete genius.” The notoriously hard-partying days of the band have given way to a more businesslike approach to the road and to their music.

“The Korn guys, when we toured with them before, they’d come sit in our dressing room and say, ‘Tell that story again, the one about . . . whatever,’ ” Hetfield says, chuckling. “ I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Are we [expletive] old or what?’ I felt like Ozzy sitting there telling old Sabbath stories.”

Touring also takes its toll physically, mentally and spiritually, and those impacts may deepen with age. The band hit the road on June 23, and already there has been a pair of major crises. First, a fan died after an 80-foot fall from the stands in Baltimore, an “absolutely devastating” moment for the group, according to their joint statement on the incident. Then, last weekend, Hetfield’s chronic back problems flared up badly and forced him to miss three shows. The Metallica camp was hopeful that the medical situation would clear up by Saturday’s show.

When does the road become too much to handle? With an eye toward longevity, family and personal sanity, Metallica’s two leaders have abandoned the band’s tradition of huge world tours.

“The four of us are having fun together, still getting along together and respecting each other,” Hetfield says. “We also understand each other’s needs. Like Jason and Kirk may want to go on the road for two years again, but Lars and I can’t, we don’t want to. So now it’s about shorter, more potent stabs at the road and at the studio, you know, that’s real appealing to us. But there’s no end in sight.

“And whatever we do,” Hetfield adds, “we’ll do on our terms.”

Indeed, this band has carved a reputation as headstrong, stubborn artists who take their own path. That has put them at odds with music industry powers, other acts and even their own fans, most recently and notably with the Napster battle.

Behind the Group’s Anti-Napster Stance

Ulrich has stepped forward as the most vocal artist decrying Napster, a controversial Internet site that fosters the free exchange of MP3 music files. Napster links the computers of tens of thousands of online music fans, enabling them to search one another’s files and pluck out songs to add to their own collections. Fans of Napster call it the future of music that can be digitally downloaded and a boon to artists looking to gain fan attention. Ulrich and other critics, however, say it cheapens music, exploits artists and fosters an illegal activity.

Ulrich first heard about Napster when the band was in the studio earlier this year polishing the song “I Disappear” for the “M:I-2” soundtrack. Word reached the group that pilfered rough versions of the song were circulating on a music-swapping site, sparking their curiosity and, eventually, their wrath.

The group’s lawsuit and subsequent move to deliver the names of 30,000 Napster users they claim have illegally traded Metallica songs have created a furor in online and music communities. Other acts, such as Limp Bizkit, Slipknot and the Deftones, have publicly criticized the Metallica tack.

“We’re not pretending to be lawyer types,” Hetfield says. “We’re not out to change the world with this [expletive] here. We’re standing up for ourselves and any other artists that want to stand up with us.”

“There hasn’t been a lot of huge support. . . . A lot of artists out there are sitting back and waiting to see what happens.”

In the days since Hetfield made that comment, more music stars have stepped up. On Tuesday, full-page ads for a group called Artists Against Piracy ran in The Times and four of the nation’s other major newspapers. The ad listed the names of 67 artists, including Garth Brooks, Alanis Morissette, DMX and Christina Aguilera, and tells Metallica “they’re not alone.”

Still, none of those artists are likely to devote the time, resources and capital to the fight that Metallica has.

“They’re not the risk-takers we are,” Hetfield says. “And there are risks. There are a lot of fans out there who have gotten hugely pissed off.”

The fan anger is clear in the online chat rooms and bulletin boards where legions of former Metallica fans routinely rail against the band.

One site that qualifies perhaps as ground zero for the criticism, ironically, is the Internet incarnation of the band’s onetime Los Angeles supporter, KNAC, now KNAC.com. Again with that L.A. love-hate relationship. . . .

“Our traffic has doubled since this started, and the sheer amount of anger and heat is unbelievable,” says Lonn Friend, editor in chief of the site and a hard-rock authority with a long relationship with the band. “This issue has completely blown this band’s foundation, the fans that have followed them up from the underground days. . . . Now they look at Metallica and they see them as part of the other side, the establishment.”

Here’s the funny thing about the fan backlash against Metallica: No true fans should have been even slightly surprised that this would be the one band to step forward seeking justice for all.

Much of the online criticism claims that Metallica’s Napster stance is an ugly surprise because it contradicts its longtime tradition of allowing audience members to record all of its concerts, a page borrowed from the Grateful Dead’s book on building fan loyalty.

But allowing the concerts to be taped was a move the band made as a cantankerous, willful outfit that was willing to flout the wishes of its record label.

“It’s about choice,” explains an exasperated Ulrich. “It was our choice to let people record our shows. Napster never offered us a choice. From Day One with us, it has been about a complete, selfish control over our destiny and our art.”

Bucking Convention

The tendency of the band to micro-manage is well documented. They have a hand in every concert T-shirt logo design, every album cover, every stage prop and special effect. Earlier this year, they uprooted the Metallica fan club headquarters from Knoxville, Tenn., to move it to the Bay Area so they can have greater control over it and its glossy magazine.

The Napster stance also falls in line with another career decision that bucked convention: The group is one of the relatively few acts that has barred record clubs from including its albums in their catalogs. The royalty return rate on an album sold through music clubs such as Columbia House is much lower than retail, so Metallica (along with the Beatles, Pink Floyd and some others) has been steadfast in its refusal to participate.

The band has made several moves that have tested the resolve of fans who want the group to remain frozen in time as individuals and in image.

Metallica lost fans when the speed-metal sound of early albums like “Kill ‘Em All” gave way to more pop-structured (albeit still hard-edged) songs. They lost more a few years ago when they cut their hair before the release of the album “Load,” a grooming choice that caused an almost comical wave of angst among listeners.

They may have lost a few more with their last two albums, one a collection of cover versions of decades-old metal songs by largely esoteric bands and last year’s “S&M;,” an unlikely collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony.

“If there’s one thing people have misunderstood, it’s this whole thing that Metallica is ‘the people’s band,’ ” Ulrich says. “That’s something that’s been put upon us, not something we sought out. It happened because we never tried to play larger than life, but one of the main reasons people relate to what we do is because we are selfish. We don’t care what other people are going to think, and that keeps it honest. This ‘give people what they want’ syndrome--that’s selling out.”

Ulrich shakes his head and takes a deep drag off his cigarette. It’s almost time for rehearsal and that makes him happy--the road is beckoning and soon all this talk of Napster and Metallica’s mind-set will be set aside for loud, “ear-spanking” rock, as Hetfield calls it. Ulrich pauses to add one more thought, one more attempt to make people understand a band they should know better after 19 years.

“When you do what people want, that’s when it becomes product instead of an extension of your heart and soul,” he says. “Our history is littered with examples of our selfish, total, hard-core controlling of what we do. Our true fans, the ones that know us and our story, they’re not surprised. And they’ll follow us.”

BE THERE

Metallica, Korn, Kid Rock, Powerman 5000, System of a Down, Saturday at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, 3911 S. Figueroa St., 4 p.m. $45-$65. (213) 748-6136.