The band James Hetfield called Metallica’s musical enemy
When Metallica landed in San Francisco’s underground in the early 1980s, metal was suffering a crisis.
Commercially, heavy metal had never been more popular. Evolving from Black Sabbath and Deep Purple’s hefty blues sound forged in the early 1970s, through the sleeveless denim of Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Motörhead exploding on the charts by the decade’s close, a new crop of glammed-up and hairsprayed cartoon characters dialled down the heavy edge and eagerly embraced a glossier pop sheen to Billboard success.
Before long, Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, and a reborn peroxide Ozzy Osbourne found themselves the perfect animated characters of the new MTV machine hungry for flashy promos.
Not everybody dug metal’s new chapter, however. While David Lee Roth was performing his acrobatics in arenas across the country, a grottier, more pimpled metal variant began to rear its head across the 1980s, melding some of punk’s urgency with the metal masters’ complex scope to unleash the thrash antidote to the spandex buffoonery clogging the Hot 100. Leading the thrash wave were New York’s Anthrax, Los Angeles’ Megadeth and Slayer, and Metallica settled in the Bay Area.
Yet, the supposed ‘Big Four’ would turn to the ‘Big One’ by the 1990s. Refining their sound toward a tighter, more impactful heavy attack better suited to rock radio, 1991’s eponymous album would sell ungodly amounts, cutting a colossal commercial stature during grunge’s alternative explosion, snuffing out Whitesnake’s power ballads for good. Further fame found Metallica co-headlining a mammoth national tour with Guns N’ Roses, a band heralded as hard rock saviours a few years earlier, but swiftly considered old guard once Seattle had thrust the sleepy logging city on the world’s musical map.
It turned out that Metallica frontman James Hetfield harboured a more complicated relationship with Guns N’ Roses, and their singer Axl Rose, in a way that drummer Lars Ulrich paid no mind to. Such clashing personalities would flare up within the band, both musically and between the old metalheads who’d known each other since their teens.
“We were this band that was so anti-LA, anti-Hollywood, and Lars was out there posing, Hetfield revealed to Guitar World in 2009. “Guns N’ Roses to me were part of the enemy, and Lars was out there with them, posing up a storm. Lars is that way. He will be infatuated with certain people in his life and need to get into them. He likes learning things from people who have that something, and Axl had that.”
Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction debut in 1987 was similarly driven by an alienation with the metal climate Metallica was opposed to, cutting a much rawer and harder sound that the day’s MTV was used to. Yet, the band too straddled the Hollywood hellraising lifestyle, hanging out with the likes of Ratt and Mötley Crüe and leaning into the cartoon escapism with which Hetfield felt little resonance.
While Hetfield certainly partied, extravagance was never an indulgence he felt too comfortable with; the 1992 tour famously haemorrhaged Guns N’ Roses’ coffers due to their frontman’s expensive backstage decadence. Rose would eventually soldier on as the sole original member by the decade’s close, while Metallica would continue as a commercial monster, Ulrich’s taste for flamboyance pushing the band toward new styles and artistic ventures that tested the patience of longtime fans but ensured a survival unafforded to many of their peers.
