The one rock artist James Hetfield couldn’t stand: “It would drive me up the wall”
Most musicians don’t get into the business strictly for a desire to be rich. The flashes in the pan might be interested in getting a song on the radio for one summer and then fading into obscurity, but the greatest of all time usually have some sort of fire in them that goes beyond playing a couple of songs on the weekend with their buddies. It’s something that’s calling them to pick up that instrument, but that doesn’t mean that James Hetfield had to necessarily enjoy everything that he was playing.
Because when listening to Metallica, it’s not like they are making the most eclectic music out there. The band has the word ‘metal’ in their name, for God’s sake, and as much as they might have tried to switch things up now and again, they always worked at their best when they pumping out the heaviest riffs they could and Hetfield was barking like a dog when spitting out lyrics like ‘Battery’ and ‘Master of Puppets’.
But there were some moments where they could loosen, and Garage Inc gave them a brilliant opportunity to work with the right kinds of songs for them. They had started life as a cover band before, and since they had come off of their most experimental albums like Load and ReLoad, it wasn’t out of the question for them to start working on songs that had a little less edge to them, but Hetfield wanted to draw the line at Bob Seger.
That was the easy-listening music reserved for dads, but Hetfield talked about muscling through that pain when doing justice to the song ‘Turn the Page’, saying, “I actually can’t stand Bob Seger. Nothing against him, but every time I would hear those records on the radio, I would go, ‘Play some Aerosmith or something’. I would just turn it off. It would drive me up the wall. But the song, especially, belonged to Metallica. We’re the road dogs, and that’s something we can really relate to.”
And it’s not like Hetfield didn’t have the voice for it, either. There are many parts of his career that lean a little bit towards country music, and while Seger isn’t precisely ingrained in the heartland as much as someone like Merele Haggard was back in the day, it was easy for a song like Hetfield’s ‘Mama Said’ to sit alongside Seger’s best ballads like ‘We’ve Got Tonight’ or ‘Night Moves’.
If the band were going to do the song justice, it would be on their terms. There were moments when the song might have been too mellow for their taste, but as long as they replaced the backing track with their roaring guitars, it was bound to be a match in heaven. But when combined with Kirk Hammett’s wah-wah guitar mimicking the iconic saxophone line, everyone knew there was something different.
This was a band trying to reinvent themselves through the lens of other artists, and if there was anyone who would have been the most proud, it would have been Cliff Burton. The bassist may have no longer been around, but since he listened to everything from Kate Bush to REM alongside his favourite metal records, he would have been happy to see his bandmates take chances on songs by Nick Cave or Lynyrd Skynyrd.
But more than anything, ‘Turn the Page’ captures the kind of universal language that anyone touring around the world can understand. Everyone knows how gruelling the touring life gets, and as much as Metallica could have fumbled this by making this their version of ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’, they never forgot about adding the muscle back into every arrangement.
