‘Fixxxer’: the song that Metallica played live only once
Over time, the concept of the “flop era” becomes something of a litmus test for whether you’re a genuine fan of a band or artist. Getting through it may be a difficult time for the musician in question, where they get pilloried for releasing a musical Hindenburg. But give it a few years, and pretty much everything will find its defenders. Humbug by the Arctic Monkeys was a gigantic curveball that is now considered a blueprint for the rest of their career. Lady Gaga’s Artpop was dubbed “artflop” upon release and is now hailed among her best work. On the other side of the heaviness quota, Metallica basically have their entire late 1990s to stare at.
Which makes sense, as anything would be a step down from the absolute juggernaut that was The Black Album. Their self-titled fifth album wasn’t just big for a metal album. It wasn’t just big for a rock album, even. Powered by ‘Enter Sandman’, The Black Album did numbers that most mainstream pop sensations would run their dog through a thresher for, and the phenomenon continues to this day. According to Billboard, even in 2016, 25 years after its release, there had never been a week where Metallica’s Black Album hadn’t sold at least 1,000 copies in the United States.
How do you possibly follow that up? Well, as many artists who achieve that level of commercial success will attest to, you don’t. The band decided to double down on the more commercial side of The Black Album and released Load and Reload in 1996 and 1997, respectively. This was essentially a double album released in two parts, and, as if begging the press to make the Samson comparisons right off the bat, they cut their hair to do it. Shaving off the jagged edges that were rampant in their late 1980s-early ’90s peak to turn into, essentially, just another hard rock band.
At the very least, both records sold. They continued to do truly mind-boggling numbers for a metal band, but, at the time, everyone else was hurling themselves off the ‘Tallica train. Fans were scandalised that their “saviours of thrash” would sell out like this. Critics just shrugged. The metalheads were in stitches. For years, Load and Reload were bywords for mid-career mediocrity. These are the go-to examples of how, sometimes, the worst thing that can happen to a band is success. Then, something strange happened as those records approached their second decade of existence.
Around the time that the tide (wrongly) turned in favour of the Star Wars prequels, the same started being said of Load and Reload. They were no longer the sound of a band of millionaires floundering to stay relevant but bold sonic experiments containing some of the band’s most underrated songs. I bring up the Star Wars comparison here because what was actually happening was the same thing that has been happening with all those sorry celluloid mistakes—the people who grew up with them came of age and got social media accounts. That’s literally it.
Give the people who experienced ‘The Unforgiven II’ before its prequel a voice, and they, too, are going to be wrong about which is better. Yet, when they started going to the bat for those albums, others started agreeing with them. There were people defending songs from the albums that the band themselves left off the setlist when they toured the records. In fact, there was one song in particular that garnered a fervent fanbase despite the band never, ever playing it live until one fateful concert.
Reload’s closer ‘Fixxxer’ is an eight-minute thrash that comes the closest to achieving the two albums’ vision of “classic Metallica through a modern rock filter”. It’s a deeply personal number that the band themselves have basically never gone on record to talk about, but right from its release, it had its defenders. That legion of defenders got so big that, by the time of its live debut, it was one of the most demanded songs off the band’s back catalogue. However, due to the depth of its lyrical content and the technical demands of the song, it never took its bow on stage until the band’s 40th anniversary concerts in 2021.
That pair of shows at San Francisco’s Chase Center were live-streamed; so we can see in living colour that when the riff for ‘Fixxxer’ kicked in, it received one of the biggest reactions of the whole weekend. It’s tangible proof that if a band genuinely has the juice and can survive the slings and arrows of a ‘flop era’, the people will eventually come around to it. After all, it’s one thing for a pretty ace stormer of a track like ‘Fixxxer’ to find its audience. Wait ‘til you hear about all the St Anger apologists springing up lately!
