The band James Hetfield called the enemy of Metallica: “Posing up a storm”
Heavy metal was always a far too general term to describe one genre of music. It’s hard to put a band like Rainbow in the same category as Poison, but when looking at the baseline of what each group makes, they still fall under that same umbrella more often than not. James Hetfield was always into the purest forms of metal, though, and while he eventually did go out on tour with Guns N’ Roses, he felt that they weren’t the kind of act he was looking to learn from.
For Hetfield, he had always come from the Black Sabbath school of writing guitar licks. Even if not every one of the songs made the most sense from a music theory perspective, each Metallica record usually had at least one track that sounded absolutely demented, almost as if Hetfield was doing everything he could to make Tony Iommi proud.
If Metallica were the offspring of bands like Sabbath, then the Guns N’ Roses were more in line with Aerosmith. In an era that was still dominated by glamorous rock stars focused on their looks more than their technical ability, tracks like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ reminded everyone why hard rock sounded good in the first place.
There was nothing wrong with cribbing notes from Aerosmith in Hetfield’s book, but his problem with Guns N’ Roses came back to how they conducted themselves. Sure, no rock and roll band was meant to be absolute saints behind the scenes, but Axl Rose’s attitude would soon start to ruin all of the group’s goodwill, either through how he conducted himself onstage or treating his bandmates like he was better than them.
That didn’t stop Lars Ulrich from fawning over them, with Hetfield telling Guitar World, “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.”
There’s no shame in trying to learn from newer bands, but it also didn’t come as a big surprise when it came back to both bands in the ass. When putting together a joint tour between both of them, Rose wrote the textbook on how not to behave on tour. Since this was the era where he played up his rock star persona, Rose thought it would be completely acceptable to show up to a gig late or not bother to show up at all, either.
No matter how many times that someone plays their rockstar card, nothing would get in the way of rowdy fans, who normally would riot every time they paid good money to see a joint show and only got a handful of songs out of the deal before Rose walked offstage. They certainly weren’t as inauthentic as the Poisons of the world, but even compared to the rock gods of old, Hetfield saw Rose as the kind of singer with a head too big to fit through an aeroplane hangar.
While Metallica have been known for making questionable career moves throughout their time together, touring with Guns N’ Roses may have been a learning experience for everyone. They weren’t nearly as much of an enemy as Hetfield probably thought, but their story is still a cautionary tale of everything an act shouldn’t do once they get famous.
