Sturm und Drang in Berlin

BLOOD-RED shafts of light. Smoke. Fumes. Ack-ack fire. In the centre of a huge auditorium, more than a hundred musicians crank out the William Hell Overture, swelled by 8000 odd German civilians adding their own clipped accents to this latest battle hymn of the Republic: "I can't remember anything/Can't tell if this is true or dream . . ."
It ain't Triumph Of The Will meets Spinal Tap, but it's close. The location is the Velodrome on Paul-Heyse Strasse in East Berlin, November 19, 1999, and your foreign correspondent is cowering in seat 29, row 9, block 3, as Metallica get medieval on our asses with 'One', accompanied by the massed ranks of the Berlin Symphoniker.
Playing in the round, the band are flanked on three sides by rows of brass, woodwind, string and percussion sections, as conductor Michael Kamen oversees the proceedings from his podium like a frizzy-haired Ahab at the prow, directing the musicians with precise, almost petite strokes of the baton. A mere metre or two from his elbow, Lars Ulrich, surrounded by plexi-glass shields, mills into his Tama drum kit with rather less subtlety, pounding out the Beavis 'n' Butthead-beloved staccato double-kick figure in sync with 101 dinner suits all sawing, sucking, blowing and beating like the salt mines are still open for business.
As pre-Millennial moments go, this is about as fuck-off as it gets.

The idea of Metallica - by definition the
world's biggest unreconstructed metal band (over 65 million in global sales puts the likes of Marilyn Manson in perspective) - teaming up with a full orchestra for a series of concerts and a live album seems at once vainglorious and inevitable.
Not that the Bach-Sabbath concept is an original one: few '70s survivors are likely to forgive or forget war crimes by the likes of Deep Purple, ELP or Rick Wakeman, relics of an era when rock musicians, simultaneously exhibiting delusions of grandeur and an innate inferiority complex, sought the critical kudos afforded by so-called 'higher' art forms.
Following similar wild goose chases taking place in the field of jazz-rock fusion, scores of cape-wearing, stringy-haired, bearded musos went looking for approval they didn't need from maestros who couldn't give it, forsaking the gonzo simplicity of 'Louie Louie' and '96 Tears' for 'Fanfare For The Common Man'. And it wasn't only the quavers and crochets that got appropriated - heavy rock and goth acts from Led Zeppelin to The Mission also bought into the most overblown Aryan imagery, citing Wagner's Ring Circle as a precedent for their pomposity, Mozart as mitigation for temper tantrums. Remember the Spinal Tap scene where Christopher Guest plays a classical piano piece for Rob Reiner?
Director: "What's that called?"
Guitarist: "'Lick My Love Pump'."
And yet, classical gas needn't always be flatulent. Serge Gainsbourg was inspired as much by the bust of Chopin on his piano as that of his one-time lover Brigitte Bardot. Spiritualized pilfered Johann Pachelbel's 'Canon In D' for Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, and more recently, The Art Of Noise delivered The Seduction Of Claude Debussy.
But still, it's typical of Metallica to trample across such musical minefields wearing hobnailed boots. Always the most fundamentalist of metal bands, their bullheadedness has frequently put them out of step and at loggerheads with any ideas of 'correctness' inside or outside the metal cabal.
Formed in California in 1982, this foursome were cranking out a ferociously tinny racket informed by New Wave Of British Heavy Metal bands like Diamond Head and Saxon, plus the scum-punk of Motorhead and The Anti Nowhere League, when all around them (Motley Crue, Ratt) were opting for the glam bunny school of harmonies 'n' hairspray.
The band toured relentlessly through the '80s, and despite scant support from radio or MTV, albums like Kill 'Em All, Ride The Lightning and Master Of Puppets sold at an exponential rate. All across America, hirsute stoners got bombed around the bong and discussed James Hetfield's Iron John/Darwinian-Nietszchian lyrics like Eng-Lit crits chew on Kant and Kierkegaard. However, tragedy struck in September 1986, when, on the way to a show in Copenhagen, the band's tour bus overturned, killing bassist Cliff Burton. They soldiered on, replacing Burton with Jason Newstead, recording . . . And Justice For All, and challenging the dogma of their more diehard supporters by finally shooting their first video, for 'One'.
Over the next few years, yet more taboo subjects would be breached - big ballads, country songs, corporate producers like Bob Rock - and despite disillusionment amongst certain sections of the fanbase, Metallica went from cult to mainstream to monolith.
In 1990, they released perhaps their most revered opus to date, the 'Black' album, which, boosted by the epic single 'Enter Sandman', sold over 600,000 copies in its first week of release in America alone, eventually reaching the 15 million mark. The subsequent world tour - 300 dates in 37 countries - established them as a bona fide phenomenon, not to mention generating legends like that of a 20-foot mirror being presented to the road crew (not, one assumes, for the purposes of hair crimping).
When the band returned with the Load album in 1996, the bullet belts, tour t-shirts, Cousin It hair and tribal paraphernalia of yore were nowhere to be seen. Sure, the newly shorn Hetfield and Newstead still looked like survivalists who liked nothing better than to bludgeon small animals before breakfast, but Ulrich and guitarist Kirk Hammet had somehow mutated into, if not the big-haired nellies they so despised in the early days, then the eyelinered, body-pierced cousins of Janes Addiction/Chilli Peppers guitarist Dave Navarro. Musically, the single 'Until It Sleeps' (and it's accompanying Bosch/Bacon-inspired video) suggested some metallurgic take on death-rock acts like The Cure or The Sisters Of Mercy. In keeping with the makeover, the band headlined Lollopalooza that summer, much to the consternation of their own supporters and the "alternative" crowd.
Since then, Metallica have continued to tour and record at a daunting rate, releasing ReLoad (comprised of overflow from the previous album), plus Garage Inc., a compilation of covers which sold more than five million copies. More notoriously, the band performed an unscheduled expletive-heavy version of ANL's 'So What' at the 1996 MTV Europe Music Awards, featured real live lesbians in the video for their version of 'Whiskey In The Jar' and launched a lawsuit against US lingerie company Victoria's Secret for selling a lipstick bearing the band's name.
"We won," bassist Jason Newstead tells me when we meet up for an interview in The Four Seasons hotel the day after the Berlin show. "We always win, my man. Our lawyer's middle name, he changed it to 'nuke-em' in 1984. Hasn't lost a case since."

The reason for our being in Berlin concerns the European launch of the new S...M album, recorded live with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra at a brace of concerts in Berkeley's Community Theatre last April. The shows were masterminded by Michael Kamen, best known as a film composer, but also a veteran minister at rock/classical shotgun weddings, having scored 'Nothing Else Matters' from the 'Black' album, and also worked with the likes of Bob Dylan, Pavarotti and Eric Clapton. By all accounts, those shows were a dazzling study in contrasts: rock chicks in ballgowns, tuxedo clad boffins sporting standard issue earplugs, tuba players flashing devil signs and timpanist David Herbert headbanging on the sly. The result is an album that largely succeeds against all odds.
Granted, on at least a third of the material the classical embellishments are not so much intrusive as surplus to requirements - Metallica create such a racket, they hardly leave room to add anything extra. But when it works, as on the 'Enter Sandman' coda, or the road-dog bravado of 'Wherever I May Roam', there are more than enough explosions to justify all the stunt men, with the SFSO creating a suitably windswept backdrop for James Hetfield's songs of macho ennui. And okay, it might be obvious to start harping on about the natural symmetry between this quartet's strum und drang and the OTT damn-the-torpedoes sensibilities of syphilitic 19th century classical composers, but it's also central to why this experiment doesn't blow up in their faces like the pyrotechnics that burnt Hetfield on stage in Montreal in 1992. Metallica embody the most extreme aspects of heavy metal, but also have the good sense to meet its intrinsic ridiculousness head on (the 'Black' album's cover intentionally alluded to Spinal Tap's Smell the Glove). Back in Berlin, Jason Newstead relishes the possibility of bad reviews.
"Oh, man, being hated is such a good thing sometimes," he reasons. "If somebody says we can't, then we're definitely going to. We're not out to win a whole other group of age 45-75 classical music listeners, we're not looking to diss any of the hardcore Metallica fans, we're doin' it 'cos it was fun to prove something for ourselves, educated in the school of Black Sabbath, matched with these people trained in the most proper music theory. We can stand on the same stage as them and do what we do and hold our own - it's a huge thing, man."
Plus, there are more recent precedents to consider than The Six Wives of Henry VIII; namely Apocalyptica, a Finnish string quartet who specialise in chamber arrangements of Metallica material.
"I think we had discussions about this before we knew those guys," Newstead reckons, "but for me, they're the best interpretation of Metallica music that there's been, and there's been a lot, from full on death metal in Scandinavia to Korean hard rock bands to Pat Boone. But now that you ask that, that was the first time it made me think about how beautiful . . . when Michael was going over the music with us, and he would say, 'There's four time signatures in that one bar of music, did you know that?' And the orchestra's supposed to follow that!"
As we've established, Metallica have more in common with the Euro-centric sensibilities of classical music than any American strain of heavy rock founded on warm scales scraped from the belly of the blues, or even the improvisational ooze of jazz. Maybe it's the fact that great Dane Lars Ulrich is the group's lynchpin, but they largely eschew solos or individual expression in favour of a Teutonically predetermined regime where each player subjugates himself to the running of The Machine, a sort of Zen-metal, if you will.
"Metallica has become more of a songwriting thing since the turn of '90," the bassist asserts. "The 'Black' album starting showing that. It wasn't just a wall of sound, one dimensional, all the guys playing the same riff at the same time. Cliff Burton was the only one of Metallica that was trained classically in any way, and he was a big fan of Bach. And if you look at 'The Call Of The Ktulu' off of Ride The Lightning, most of Cliff Burton's instrumental pieces refer to a lot of those tastes, he was quite a good piano player, so that's where (you get) a lot of that weaving and harmonies and long interludes of guitar, two or three minutes within a song."
True, Metallica tracks are often unwieldy, but they never meander. Rather, they are made up of rigidly defined movements, sometimes contrasted by pastoral passages that suggest English or German folk forms. Consequently, the live shows, with Hetfield barking out the lyrics like a drill sergeant, are closer to a military service than the smoke-'em-if-you-have-'em ambience of, say, the Fillmore West. Much rock music trips you out, inducing a hypnagogic state - Metallica wake you up with the shock of an adrenalin jab to the heart.
And during punk-metal thrashes like 'Battery' or 'Master Of Puppets', the symphonic sweep serves as the perfect contrast to the GBH being committed in the foreground. That Francis Ford Coppola attended the Berkeley gig in April is no surprise (that he flounced out after 15 minutes perhaps even less so): this is a very cinematic juxtaposition which suggests the classical/operatic scores used to offset mobster murders in The Godfather trilogy, or, if you want to juggle New Hollywood references, Jake La Motta's bestial brutality in Raging Bull.
"The one thing that I learned from this whole thing was that you have to be as good a listener as a player," Newstead testifies. "The orchestra were the pieces of the puzzle we put together, all point and counterpoint, man, that's what makes the whole thing just a churning machine. Our music to a lot of 'em is a barrage of sound, (but) I'll tell you what, after the San Francisco thing, I would say pretty much all of 'em were converted. We did a press conference two weeks before the show, and the harp player comes in, sleeveless shirt and tattoos, on a cool bike, and knew all Metallica's history: 'Been to shows, dude, since '86.'"
And as Kamen told the San Francisco Examiner prior to rehearsals for those initial concerts: "These guys are not the stereotypic heavy metal stars at all . . . technically, their music has many organic elements you find in the finest contemporary classics . . . they evoke someone like Shostakovich or Stravinsky - threatening, driving, huge."
Newstead echoes this, citing "Mozart and Bach and some Wagner, because of its darkness sometimes. I think Metallica has a lot of similarities when they start gettin' minor and ugly. Just the out and out heaviness of it."

Rewind to the Velodrome, where band and orchestra are tearing through 'Enter Sandman' with brass blaring, percussion concussing, and cellos, er, bellowing. Despite the spectacle however, the atmosphere is strangely formal, with everyone seated, none of the usual pyros, and at least half the decibel count of the quartet's last two Point gigs. And with the exception of Jason, the band are operating as a law unto themselves, with the Symphoniker turned down in their in-ear monitors (a concession to the suits, who no doubt would be blown offstage by the usual deafening wedges.).
Does Jason think the orchestra were freaked out by the Metallica audience?
"I think some of 'em were considerably," he replies. "You can try to warn them and make them aware of every possible element except for the Metallica crowd. And last night in Berlin, that was the most subdued Metallica crowd I have ever seen. There was a weird . . I don't know if wires were crossed with the security guys or what the fuck was going on, but it wasn't making me very happy, because when I would try for a response, and the people that wanted to got up and did their thing for a second, the dudes in the shirts would go and tell 'em to sit back down again. To them it was insanely loud and aggressive, to us it was mild."
This sense of martial law was highlighted by the vicious efficiency with which two burly security men manhandled an Armani-clad high-heeled Amazon out of the building as our party were entering. Her crime? Biting somebody backstage. Bearing in mind that old blowjobs-for-backstage-passes transaction, one has to wonder exactly where the injured party was bitten.
All this aside, the question on the lips of all the press corps bundled up in scarves and woolly hats is: why launch the new album with a show in Berlin as well as New York? Well, while Newstead admits that the location of the event was largely determined by the logistics of booking a prominent orchestra, there's no doubt that the city also bears its own significance.
Like, for instance, the fact that Michael Kamen's last high profile gig here was almost a decade ago, doing the honours for Roger Waters' commemoration of the fall of The Wall. But also, Metallica's music and the city's architecture have much in common - a sort of 1000-Years-Of-The-Reich/Grand-Guignol-gargoyle splendour. Even the city's metaphysicians carry big sticks, most famously the Angel of Victory which overlooks the thoroughfare west of the Brandenburg Gate, (the same one which dominates Wim Wenders' Wings Of Desire and Far Away, So Close, not to mention U2's 'Stay' video). In a city full of warmongering icons, it's the perfect symbol of benevolent but stern dominion.

Just don't mention the war. It must be pointed out that, as with most metal gigs, Metallica's Berlin performance had a definite Leni Riefenstahl vibe: tracks like 'For Whom The Bells Toll' might take a cosmetic peacenik anti-authoritarian stance, but they still co-opt the testosteronic militancy of any bootcamp - the male bonding, the gallows camaraderie.
'One' is perhaps the song that best addresses such ambiguities. On the face of it, a boys-own version of The Horror (a deaf, blind, mute amputee stews inside his own desensitised field hospital hell, silently pleading "Please God wake me!"), the grotesque premise somehow transcends all comic book trappings and becomes an Edgar Allen Poe-like exploration of inner-spatial psychodrama. On stage, when the percussion section occasionally fall out of sync with Ulrich, it only adds an (intentional or not) end-of-the-world atonality to the proceedings, kinda like God Speed You Black Emperor for Kerrang! fans, the four hoarse men of the apocalypse.
Also, ponder these four American rock 'n' rollers abroad, and think of bands like The Stones playing mostly to buzz-cut Marines stationed in the city throughout the '70s. Or more recently, US flyboys getting juiced up on Metallica before embarking on missions against Iraq in the Gulf War. When questioned about the latter, Newstead is as ambivalent as his band's lyrics.
"If the army represents innocent people being killed and all that shit, then I don't like that or agree with that," he says. "But if these guys' favourite music is Metallica, and that is their drug to take care of the job that they are ordered and payed for by their country to do, then I guess that's what they gotta do. But when they're listening to Metallica, they're not necessarily going out to kill people, they can be able to protect people too. And I bet you that if they go back home, when they're driving around in their Chevy in Ohio, they're playin' Metallica, not even thinking about the fuckin' army. How could you hold music responsible for any kind of thing like that? Just because the music's aggressive, it makes people wanna go out and kill? That's nuts."
Newstead may not have squared the circle here, but he has highlighted a double standard which rightly knights Hendrix as the patron angel of blacks in Vietnam, but condemns Metallica as essential redneck listening in the Middle East.
"I think if we took what factors are weighed into these guys' day-to-day," he continues, "it'd be pretty amazing to think that Metallica was the thing that kept them goin', kept them alive or even wanna be fuckin' there at all. They have to have something to drive them to do what they have committed themselves to do. Whether I agree with that or not, that is how they take food home to their family, that's how they make their money. There's so many things you have to weigh into it before you go: 'aggressive music (equals) shoot-a-tank-at-somebody'. Metallica can take people to lots of other places too, man. It's not just about heavy metal anymore, it's about all different things."

This is a philosophy the band plan to take into the studio with them next, when they begin sifting through tapes and writing material for a new album, due in 2001. There's talk of working with people like Brian Eno, Dr Dre and DJ Shadow, not to mention shaking up the band structure, a process which may include "serious brainstorming, less overdubs, just jamming, purity."
Newstead also speaks of collaborating with the likes of Ice Cube, Snoop and Dre on a 'heavy-hop' project ("the idea was to have the heaviest players for the music and the heaviest hoppers to do the rapping").
"I have done work with DJ Shadow on that kind of thing," he ventures, "and I learned twice as much from that experience as I did from the symphony experience. He's got such a touch, and he's so serious, so straight edge, it's amazing."
When asked how much impact such cross pollenations might have on Metallica, the bassist frames the changes thus: "We haven't got together to be in songwriting mode for five years. That's ages 31 through 36 for all of us, and a lot of shit took place in that time, so there could be some incredible music that's gonna come out."
Concerto for Heavy-Hop ... Orchestra? Just a thought. n
* S...M is out now on Universal.