Metallica, from the inside out

These days, engaging in conversation with the musicians of Metallica is a little like entering a parallel universe.

These are the guys who set the standard for heavy metal -- and, motivated by fear of repeating themselves, kept it high for over 20 years. Their music is still loud, raw, angry, pulsating. Self-reflection has entered their lyrics, but the words still speak to rage, anger, disaffection, alienation. And the release of their most recent album, “St. Anger,” was accompanied by a video filmed in San Quentin.

But talk with them now about their lives and about “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster” -- the new documentary by Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger, which chronicles the creation of “St. Anger” over a 2 1/2-year period -- and they are polite, they listen to your question, look you in the eye and try to answer it.

As vocalist and lyricist, James Hetfield -- who came from a working-class, broken home in Downey -- bought into the image of surly frontman and lived his life offstage much as he lived it onstage, structuring it around Jagermeister and hangovers. A few years ago he told Playboy, “Metallica loves to be hated.” Now he talks about using “the excuse of my celebrity to not get the help I needed.” In an interview in New York recently, he talked about entering rehab first for his wife and kids and ultimately for himself.

“Even before we were in the band, we were outsiders, so that mentality sits really fine with us,” added lead guitarist Kirk Hammett in that Playboy interview. Now he’ll talk about Metallica’s “low point,” when bassist Jason Newsted left the band. “What drove him away from us was suffocation, lack of communication, lack of respect, any number of factors. We never communicated with each other on the level we needed to.”

And drummer Lars Ulrich -- the rich kid from Denmark who was vilified by fans when he spoke out against their downloading music free from Napster -- talks about how his Danish upbringing “taught him to be respectful” (Metallica?), about how working with performance-enhancement coach/therapist Phil Towle was “somewhere between helping save the band and saving the band.”

Ah-ha. Therapy. On camera. Join the Oprah parade. That’s why they’re talking about “tools to communicate,” “trust,” “honesty,” “focusing on the positive not the negative.”

For “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster” tracks not only the band’s making of “St. Anger” in converted military barracks in San Francisco, it also follows therapy sessions at the Ritz-Carlton led by Towle, who has worked with athletes and receives $40,000 a month for his work with Metallica.

The band jams, writes lyrics, experiments with guitar riffs, screams expletives a lot. Newsted leaves the band, Hetfield enters rehab for 10 months. Ulrich and Hetfield argue and make up. (Metallica’s “spark of genius,” Berlinger suggested last week, “is that clash of egos between James and Lars. Instead of yelling into Hetfield’s face, he’ll bang the drums in a certain way.”) The band hires a bass guitarist, Robert Trujillo. Former band member Dave Mustaine, who left the band in the early 1980s and became part of the successful Megadeth, tells Ulrich how painful it’s been living in Metallica’s shadow. Ulrich’s eyes well up with tears.

That Metallica’s bandmates were so willing to bear their angst and shed their tears in public is not surprising to Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. “The extent to which people have reinvented themselves through this public processing of emotions and public negotiations about their personal lives is unprecedented,” she says.

In the absence of the traditional “glues” that hold people together -- economics, community -- couples, families and even rock groups must “reconstruct ties on a more voluntary basis.” With Metallica, Coontz says, “that reckless individualism, that truculent, me-first, nobody’s-going-to-tread-on-me attitude has made them a very successful band. But it’s the antithesis of communicating.”

That Metallica has entered therapy is, according to Coontz, “an ironic spinoff of this change in our culture where people are seeking to find ways to keep relationships going in the absence of old constraints.”

Some scenes in the film are laughable: It’s hard to believe these heavy-metal guys are working with this therapist who wears pastel sweaters and comes across as a Walter Mitty who’s undergone est training. At one point Towle hands Hetfield lyrics he’s written; later Hetfield worries aloud to Ulrich that Towle thinks he’s a member of the band.

The film did not start out as Metallica’s baring of its soul but as a promotional video paid for by Elektra Records. “Then the [trouble started] in front of our cameras,” said Joe Berlinger.

Some of those early therapy sessions, Sinofsky added, were “like when you’re kids and you’re at a friend’s house and suddenly the mother and father start screaming at each other. You don’t know whether to stay or leave.”

“When James went off to rehab, we decided to keep the cameras rolling,” Hammett said. “If nothing else, we’d have a great film about the breakup of Metallica.”

During the filming -- they shot 1,600 hours -- there were “three processes” going on, Berlinger said: “a recording being made, therapy happening, a film being made,” all of which created “aesthetic and ethical issues.” They had to be journalists first, friends of the band second. They chose not to socialize with the band (cool as that would have been: Sinofsky was born in 1956, Berlinger in ‘62, so both are of a generation hard-wired to flock to rock stars). They didn’t want their filming to interfere with the group’s therapy, but some days Towle would ask them if there was anything in particular he should “bring up.” And the therapy was contagious; they began to reexamine their own relationship. “James and Lars are no different than Joe and Bruce,” Berlinger said.

The pair had successfully collaborated making documentaries such as “Brother’s Keeper” (1992) and “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills” (1996). The latter, in fact, is how the filmmakers met Metallica: The band allowed them to use its music free in “Paradise Lost,” which was set in Bible-thumping West Memphis, Ark., and centered on three male teens who wore black, listened to Metallica and were accused of murdering three young boys.

But then Berlinger and Sinofsky decided to work independently, and Berlinger directed the sequel to “The Blair Witch Project.” Critic Kenneth Turan was not alone when he wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the film was “inconsequential and forgettable.” “I was at the nadir of my life,” Berlinger said, “and Bruce showed his colors as a true friend.” It wasn’t long before they were working with Metallica.

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Keeping it real

Ulrich’s one request was that the filmmakers not “take cheap shots.” When Elektra Records suggested turning the footage into a half-hour reality series a la “The Osbournes,” the band members balked and reimbursed Elektra for the $2 million already spent on the film and then added another $2.3 million to complete it. Ulrich now credits the cameras for keeping them honest. Hammett isn’t crazy about leaving in the “intimate” scenes in which the band talks about finances but appreciates the film’s honesty. Hetfield, a self-described “control freak,” likens watching the film to rehab, where you “look at yourself as if it was another person.” Toward the end of the film, Ulrich marvels that the band has made aggressive music without negative energy.

“When I came out of rehab, I was afraid to pick up a guitar,” Hetfield acknowledged. “I thought maybe some body memory would bring back bad behavior. But really, I was afraid I couldn’t be creative.”

When he first met Hetfield, Sinofsky said he was “mean, intimidating, miserable to be around.” He now likes him but suggested that Hetfield’s past still fuels his music. “You can’t erase 39 years, you can reach back and feel those things again.” As Hetfield talked about “communicating the real me, and people not fleeing in terror,” he paused to chuckle, knowing how this must sound coming from him. And lest anyone think the band has gone totally touchy-feely, he added, “Look, we’re not sitting around a table every morning and saying, ‘How are you feeling?’ That would drive anyone insane.”

How will this new Metallica fare on the band’s next album? The group recently returned from a tour of Europe. “We’ve been fully functional going on tour and playing shows,” Hammett said. “But the studio’s a different environment, artistic-, creative-, relationship-wise.”

He paused and laughed softly, no doubt acknowledging the minefields that have faced the band, and said he’d like to harness that “same emotional territory” they had for “St. Anger.”

“But I don’t know,” he added. “It’s going to be interesting.”