“For our sanity”: The moment Metallica almost sold out, according to Lars Ulrich
No band should ever build their career off of limiting their options. The whole point behind any great musician is their ability to work in many different mediums, and the idea of restricting themselves strictly for the sake of staying musically pure is one of the worst arguments that can ever be made. And while Lars Ulrich is usually proud to rep for metal every time he steps out onstage with Metallica, he knew that some pieces of his career were going to be off the table.
When looking at the kind of career that the band has had, though, it doesn’t seem like they say no when thinking outside the box. They have completed many different side missions that classic bands undergo, like the mandatory covers album or breaking out the orchestra when performing some of their classic pieces, but there are also things that fans may have preferred that the band kept to themselves, like St Anger or Lulu.
But that wasn’t how Ulrich thought. He envisioned Metallica as being bigger than any average heavy metal act, and while there were some moments where things didn’t go their way, they always had the uncanny ability to pick themselves up and keep moving in the right direction after every setback. Then again, it’d be hard to call an album as divisive as The Black Album a true setback.
Sure, there were plenty of people who hated to see Metallica on the album charts, but it’s not like they were cashing in to serve the masses. They were as heavy as they ever were, and while that meant some purists having to choke down a tune like ‘Nothing Else Matters’, was it really that much of a sacrifice when tunes like ‘Through the Never’ and ‘Of Wolf and Man’ were on the record?
“That’s a very strong word.”
Lars Ulrich
If anything, the problem that the band had usually came from how they conducted themselves up until that point. They had been spending most of the 1980s finetuning themselves to the point where they could do no wrong, so when they reached And Justice For All, they couldn’t have been any tighter if they tried. It was time to loosen up, and Ulrich knew it long before ‘Enter Sandman’ entered the conversation.
Later on, when talking about The Black Album, Ulrich argued that going back to And Justice For All would have been a huge mistake, saying, “When [people] used the word ‘betrayal’. That’s a very strong word. I can certainly understand that people would feel ‘Oh my God, ‘Enter Sandman’? What happened?’. But that’s what we had to do for our own sanity because if we had made And Justice For All Part 2, then that would have been the sell-out.”
That’s not to say there wasn’t room for the band to flesh out that sound later down the line. A lot of the complaints about their fourth outing was that there was little to no bottom end amid all the complex tunes, and when they finally returned to their classic sound on albums like Death Magnetic, tracks like ‘All Nightmare Long’ hit the listener like a slap in the face that way that a track like ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ was supposed to.
Metal purists were always going to hate what they did when tunes like ‘The Unforgiven’ and ‘Nothing Else Matters’ became staples on the radio, but it was worth it for them to hold onto their artistic selves. Because if they already made fantastic ballads like ‘Fade to Black’ and ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’, they owed it to themselves to see where that side of their sound could have gone later.
