“Watching him made me ill”: The artist that made James Hetfield sick to listen to
No one should be confined to listening to what musical genre for the rest of their lives. There comes a point where everyone needs to stretch out, and even the Young brothers knew how to mix things up with some blues tunes in between the massive pummeling power chords AC/DC was known for. Although James Hetfield was usually more than happy to play metal music, his heart was always in country music as well, and as far as he could tell, he had absolutely no time for Garth Brooks.
When Hetfield first started playing music, it was used as an outlet for emotion. All metal music might seem loud and dangerous to some people, but when listening to those early Metallica records like Kill Em All, Hetfield sounds like he’s ready for war every time he steps up to the microphone on ‘The Four Horsemen’ and ‘Metal Militia’.
By the time you get out of adolescence, most people want to slow things down a little bit, and Hetfield found his calling listening to the sounds of people like Merle Haggard and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Although country music didn’t always fit neatly into Metallica’s playbook, the Load era actually gave them some time to flirt with the style a bit on tunes like ‘Mama Said’ and ‘Low Man’s Lyric’.
Then again, no Metallica crossover was going to be able to compete with the numbers Brooks was racking up. Compared to the pop charts, Brooks was about as big as Michael Jackson in the 1990s, putting one massive hit on the charts like ‘The Thunder Rolls’ and ‘Friends In Low Places’. Although most people gravitated towards Shania Twain when Come On Over was released, Brooks’s raw sales are still among the highest in music history.
If someone wanted to actually get into his music, they would have to get through a fair bit of cheese first. Despite having a phenomenal voice and even a flair for rock and roll with his cover of Kiss’s ‘Hard Luck Woman’, some of his syrupy ballads could give Celine Dion a run for their money in terms of their ability to make grown adults weep, and that wasn’t what Hetfield was looking for.
He was interested in the kind of tunes that dealt with living like a cowboy, and all he saw in Brooks was a mockery of that behaviour, saying, “Country pop and Garth Brooks bugs the shit out of me. I can’t take it. Watching him do that HBO thing made me ill. It’s so planned out. Country shouldn’t be planned music. It’s the spur-of-the-moment, off-the-cuff thing that I dig.”
And that spontaneity may be why some of Metallica’s acoustic versions work out so well. While no one would be faulted for not wanting to listen to the St Anger version of ‘All Within My Hands’ ever again, the acoustic version that the band did years later actually makes you appreciate the song a lot better, especially now that Hetfield doesn’t sound like he’s going to go out murdering people in the streets after the song’s over.
There’s a time and place for country music, but as far as Hetfield could see, Garth Brooks was the authentic country that he was looking for. This was the kind of pop-flavoured music that felt like someone trying to jam some twang onto the radio by force.
