Into the Black: The Inside Story of Metallica

By 1991 Metallica were huge stars. But a biography of the band shows dark clouds were on the horizon.

From left, Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo. Photo by Mick Hutson / Redferns

In 2013, when the authors of this tome titled Volume 1 of their Metallica study Birth, School, Metallica, Death, they said they were also fessing-up; jokingly delineating what would likely prove the key events of their respective lifespans. Unshakeable fans of the world's most successful heavy-metal band Paul Brannigan and Ian Winwood may be, but the second half of their erudite and witty Metallica saga is anything but a hagiography. "If Lars Ulrich said it, we were there to make some kind of sense of it," notes the pair, both seasoned music writers in the United Kingdom. In so doing, they flag up the considerable level of access they enjoyed during the years in question, and an ever-opinionated drummer's knack for saying the wrong thing.

Ulrich – "The Little Dane", as Brannigan and Winwood like to call him – is the Metallica member that those with no taste for the band's music love to hate. As Into the Black records, the millionaire musician's heavy-handed crusade against Napster and its associated file-sharers in the year 2000 – "If we have to start knocking on doors and confiscating hard drives then so be it" – endeared him to few, especially when set alongside Metallica's 110-million album sales and further Ulrich outbursts such as: "We're not [expletive] doing this for the [expletive] fans, we're doing it for ourselves."

Though Brannigan and Winwood retain some affection for Ulrich, they give it to him with both barrels re Napster, arguing that his “confiscating hard drives” tirade made him appear “pompous, smug and humourless”. Ultimately, they portray Metallica’s drummer as a ­monster talent somewhat undone, though perhaps not yet incorrigibly, by an unpalatable cocktail of ego, cocaine abuse and arrogance.

Still, the authors rightly contend that the basic principle Ulrich was defending during Napstergate – ie, the sanctity of copyright – was correct. “Too many people occupied themselves mocking the messenger while failing to heed the message,” they write, and US district judge Marilyn Patel, who in 2001 ruled that Napster should terminate all music downloads until it could prove that its technology for blocking copyrighted material was impregnable, was broadly in agreement. For all his flaws, Brannigan and Winwood argue, Ulrich foresaw the current state of affairs – a world in which recorded music has become devalued – far sooner than most.

In stark contrast to Ulrich, Metallica’s lead guitarist Kirk Hammett emerges as a bohemian and much more open-minded figure whom the authors rib for his “expensive hair”. It’s the band’s decidedly unreconstructed frontman and chief songwriter James Hetfield, though, “a man of substance, if not always wisdom”, who proves the most fascinating character study here.

Psychoanalysts would surely weigh the fact that, on his son Castor’s first birthday in 2001, Hetfield wasn’t at home with him in northern California, but rather shooting in Siberia, and clinking vodka shots over the bloodied carcasses of Russian bears. Consequently, it’s no surprise to read of the ultimatum Francesca Hetfield gave her alcoholic husband when (temporarily) turfing him from the family home: “You’re not coming back until you sort this out. You get some therapy. Not just the drinking … the disrespect, doing what you want whenever you want.”

The Metallica frontman’s deviancy didn’t come out of a vacuum, of course, and the authors are able to show how Hetfield’s upbringing – his parents Virgil and Cynthia divorced when he was 13 and were strict Christian Scientists whose beliefs outlawed medical intervention even when Cynthia was dying of cancer three years later – shaped both him and some of Metallica’s most striking lyrics. Material such as this upholds the “insider” mandate of the book’s title, as do the authors’ first-hand accounts of events aboard Metallica’s private jet, and within their backstage yoga room.

Naturally, The Black Album, the 1991 number 1 in the United States, wherein the “pristine brutality” of Metallica’s music gained an ingredient – groove – is explored in some detail. We also get front-row seats for the band’s ill-fated, 1992 co-headlining tour with Guns N’ Roses (Axl Rose’s shenanigans soon wreaked havoc), and for their daring 1999 dates at The Berkeley Community Theatre with The San Francisco Symphony (“When [conductor] Michael Kamen makes the sign of a pentagram [with his baton / fingers], that’s when I come in,” said Hetfield at the time).

The latter event was an artistic triumph, but Into the Black is often most entertaining when its authors explore Metallica's turkeys or faux pas. The band's notoriously poor 2003 album St Anger, for example, is described as having "a drum sound that is the musical equivalent of someone placing a tin bucket over your head and repeatedly hitting it with a trowel". Elsewhere, Brannigan and Winwood recount how Ulrich once expressed a desire to stay at the upmarket London store Selfridges, when he in fact meant the upmarket London hotel Claridge's. It's the kind of wicked little dig that most biographers would avoid.

The insights keep coming too, though, and the authors devote an enthralling chapter to the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's acclaimed 2004 study of a band close to meltdown.

By that point, Hetfield had entered rehab, as his wife Francesca so desired. The bassist Jason Newsted had quit the band, and Metallica’s heavyweight management company Q Prime had taken the very Californian, not very heavy-metal step of hiring the performance-enhancing coach Phil Towle to help ease strained relations between Hetfield, Ulrich and Hammett (Brannigan and Winwood interview Towle at length, and revealingly so).

Q Prime and Metallica had envisaged Berlinger and Sinofsky's film as a fairly innocuous "info­mercial", but the wrap that emerged, cut from about 1,602 hours of footage, was a different beast altogether. This Is Spinal Tap recast as a none-more-black comedy, Some Kind of Monster packed real emotional and artistic heft. Consequently, it changed the perceptions of those who'd viewed Metallica as lumpen heavy-metal bores.

'[Some Kind of Monster] groans with the weight of collective despair," note Brannigan and Winwood, "[with] acute anxieties, unchecked resentment and, sometimes, grandly amusing examples of personal folly and human fallibility." The pair also writes vividly about the film's most tense scene – where Ulrich grills Hetfield for what he sees as controlling, self-obsessed, judgemental behaviour.

“The only indication that Hetfield is even listening to what is being said,” write the authors, “comes with the slow and ­deliberate exhalation of air through his nose … the effect is reminiscent of a gun’s ­safety- catch clicking to its off setting.”

When a somewhat-healed ­Metallica eventually re-emerged with 2008's Death Magnetic, it was with the new bassist Robert Trujillo, who, in an act of typical Metallica ostentation, was earlier party to a one-million-dollar handshake.

From there, the book tracks Metallica's fortunes and activities to the present day, noting that they are "a band who are in the mainstream without ever quite being of it", and demonstrating that, despite a considerable downturn in productivity in recent years, "Metallica are still capable of wild and courageous ideas" (witness 2011's Lulu, their audacious, but near universally panned noise fest with the late Lou Reed).

Throughout the book, Brannigan and Winwood explore Metallica’s incident-crammed, sometimes controversial career perceptively and unflinchingly. In their acknowledgements, they reveal that Q Prime tried to stop certain interviewees from talking to them, adding: “That Metallica’s management – and perhaps even the band ­themselves – thought sufficiently highly of this book as to view [it] as a threat is something the authors view as a compliment.”

Still diehard fans despite way too many hours immersed in all things Metallica, the pair can’t quite dismiss the notion that the band might yet return with another great album, and when they pose the question “Is there life in the old gods yet?”, it’s with a genuine sense of hope. “Like millions of others,” Brannigan and Winwood conclude, dropping into a suitably histrionic vernacular, “we cannot kill the family that Metallica has found in us.”

James McNair writes for Mojo magazine and The Independent.