The album that made James Hetfield want to leave Metallica: “I needed to step up”
Any band that’s been around for years normally knows each other like the back of their hand. Even if there can be some shakeups whenever they go into the studio, it’s easy to get around certain situations if you’re aware of everyone’s personal ticks or preferences for how a song should go before even strapping on a guitar or getting behind the microphone. As James Hetfield would come to find out on this album, though, he hardly knew anything about Metallica and would have been content to leave everything behind.
But when breaking down the group, Metallica is really the tale of Hetfield and Lars Ulrich. They were the ones who first bonded over the sounds of heavy metal coming from England. Even if they didn’t have the chops in the beginning, they moulded themselves into the dynamic duo that called the shots for the band, whether that was constructing songs like ‘Enter Sandman’ or commanding the crowd when they played live.
By the time Jason Newsted left, things had been thrown completely out of whack. No one in the band had ever left willingly, and after treating the glorified “new guy” like dirt for the past few years, the band was forced to confront their problems for the first time. As soon as Hetfield opened up, he was hardly ready for what people would say, eventually storming out of the band midway through work on St Anger.
It’s not hard to see why he was having problems, either. Looking back on the documentary Some Kind of Monster, he and Ulrich clearly weren’t getting along before he left, and if they were going to try to switch things up again as they did on Load and ReLoad, it was bound to be an uphill battle on either side.
Although Hetfield never questioned his loyalty to the fans, he didn’t know if he needed the band in his life anymore, saying, “I needed to step up and take care of myself. My life was filled with other things. Connecting with family again, trying to save my marriage and seeing my kids. I didn’t even know if I was going to be in the band anymore.”
Even in the documentary, the tension is visibly present on Hetfield’s face, first asking why the band is still filming everything and then getting into a heated discussion with Ulrich where he starts questioning whether they even enjoy being in a room together playing music. It’s more than a little bit of a tough watch, but the fact that they made the album St Anger is honestly a miracle.
That doesn’t mean it’s good, though. From start to finish, the by-product of their misery was an entire album full of emotional vomit, complete with Hetfield reaching far out of his range and doing the bare minimum to get the album done, which gets especially grating when Ulrich decided that the need for a snare drum was unnecessary.
At the same time, St Anger wasn’t an album meant to be celebrated the same way Master of Puppets was. This was made for the band members before any of the fans, and if suffering through this meant that we could see Metallica survive for a few more years, most fans wouldn’t have had that much of a problem.
