The “extremely evil” songwriter James Hetfield always idolised
There has always been a fascination with the darker side of life in rock and roll. As much as the early progenitors of the genre look quaint nowadays, some of the appeal of listening to this kind of music in the first place was because it felt like the kids were doing something dangerous, enjoying everyone from Elvis Presley to Little Richard. That was then, though, and heavy metal has firmly taken rock’s place as the most dangerous genre, and when it comes to its unholy scribes, James Hetfield can spot that darkness from a mile away.
But for a band named Metallica, not everything that Hetfield’s outfit did fit the standard definition of heavy metal. Sure, there are albums of theirs that deserve to be up there with Black Sabbath and Judas Priest as mandatory listening for any aspiring metalhead, but albums like Load and ReLoad were the first time that people got to see what other music made them tick, other than their favourite Diamond Head riffs. Then again, it’s not like Metallica were strictly metal from skin to core.
It was a big part of their sound, no doubt, but Cliff Burton was the first person who helped introduce them to other sides of music they hadn’t thought of. There would be the classics blaring out on the tour bus, but Burton was never afraid to turn the dial, and that meant listening to everyone from Lynyrd Skynyrd to Kate Bush to REM to JS Bach, if it made him perk up his ears.
So when the band finally decided to make a covers album, Garage Inc was a much different beast for them to tackle. Some metalheads could definitely get behind their covers of songs like ‘It’s Electric’ or all 11 minutes of a Mercyful Fate medley that they had planned out, but covering everyone from Thin Lizzy to Lynyrd Skynyrd to Bob Seger had more to do with how the songs felt rather than what they sounded like.
After all, the band were the ultimate road warriors, so having a song like ‘Turn the Page’ under their belt was fine. Each of the tunes fit within the standard confines of rock and roll, but even compared to the biggest metal frontmen in the world, Hetfield thought Nick Cave outdid anyone he had ever heard when he took on ‘Loverman’ for the first time.
Outside of his pristine baritone, Hetfield marvelled at just how demented Cave could make any song sound, saying, “Cave is extremely evil, whether he’s trying to be or not. I just love the feel of that song, and I knew we could do it properly, that we could do it justice.” So did they actually pull it off, right? Well, yes, and no, in some respects.
The original version of ‘Loverman’ all comes back to that vocal performance, and while the band do right by Hetfield by letting him embrace his macabre side, the whole thing can’t help but sound a little bit meatheaded when the grizzled guitars start storming in after those long pregnant pauses. It still works effectively, but anything that Metallica does is going to sound like them, regardless of who it is, even the leading figures in goth music.
That can be a good or a bad thing, depending on which market they were working to please. Not every Nick Cave fan would suddenly go out and buy Garage Inc, strictly for one song, but if Metallica could make something this edgy out of one of Cave’s songs, they could take anything on. It might seem like the craziest idea in the world, but you could probably manage to give them nothing but banjos and kazoos, and they could still make everything sound epic as hell.
