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Birth School Metallica Death

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
384 Seiten
Englisch
Faber & Fabererschienen am31.10.2013Main
Metallica have sold in excess of 100 million albums and won seven Grammys. Their journey from scuzzy Los Angeles garages to the stages of the world's biggest stadia has been an epic and often traumatic one, and one of the few truly great rock 'n' roll sagas. No music writers have been afforded greater access to Metallica over the years than Paul Brannigan and Ian Winwood, two former editors of Kerrang. Having conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with the band, they have between them gained an unparalleled knowledge of the group's history and an insiders' view of how their story has developed: they have ridden in the band's limos, flown on their private jet, joined them in the studio, been invited to the quartet's 'HQ' outside San Francisco and shared beers and stories with them in venues across the globe. There are countless memorable stories about the band never before seen in print, tales of bed-hopping and drug-taking and car-crashes and fist-fights and back-stabbing that occur when you mix testosterone and adrenaline, alcohol and egomania, talent and raw ambition.Perceptive, emotionally attached, and intellectually rigorous, Birth, School, Metallica, Death will be the essential and definitive story of this extraordinary band. Volume I takes us from the band's inception through to the recording and eve of release of their seminal, self-titled, 1991 album.mehr
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E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
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Produkt

KlappentextMetallica have sold in excess of 100 million albums and won seven Grammys. Their journey from scuzzy Los Angeles garages to the stages of the world's biggest stadia has been an epic and often traumatic one, and one of the few truly great rock 'n' roll sagas. No music writers have been afforded greater access to Metallica over the years than Paul Brannigan and Ian Winwood, two former editors of Kerrang. Having conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with the band, they have between them gained an unparalleled knowledge of the group's history and an insiders' view of how their story has developed: they have ridden in the band's limos, flown on their private jet, joined them in the studio, been invited to the quartet's 'HQ' outside San Francisco and shared beers and stories with them in venues across the globe. There are countless memorable stories about the band never before seen in print, tales of bed-hopping and drug-taking and car-crashes and fist-fights and back-stabbing that occur when you mix testosterone and adrenaline, alcohol and egomania, talent and raw ambition.Perceptive, emotionally attached, and intellectually rigorous, Birth, School, Metallica, Death will be the essential and definitive story of this extraordinary band. Volume I takes us from the band's inception through to the recording and eve of release of their seminal, self-titled, 1991 album.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9780571294169
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2013
Erscheinungsdatum31.10.2013
AuflageMain
Seiten384 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse2870 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.1299804
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe




1 - NO LIFE ´TIL LEATHER


On the bathroom wall of Metallica´s headquarters in San Rafael, California, there can be seen a photograph of the band as they appeared in 1982. Shot in the dressing room of one of the insalubrious San Francisco nightclubs where they served their apprenticeship, it captures four young men in the aftermath of a live show, stripped to the waist and bristling with attitude as they leer into the camera lens. Drenched with sweat, adrenaline and testosterone, it is a snapshot of teenage machismo so studied and gauche as to appear almost charming.

Today the image holds bitter-sweet memories for James Hetfield. When Metallica´s front man appraises the image, he can see beyond his band´s two-dimensional posturing and recall, with genuine warmth, a more innocent time, a time of youthful excitement, camaraderie and shared dreams. But, inevitably, his eyes are drawn to the centre of the frame, to the acne-scarred face of a sad, damaged teenager, ill at ease with the world and furiously unhappy with his place within it. And blacker memories are quick to surface, recollections of betrayal, abandonment and loss. It was, says Hetfield, a difficult time.

When it comes to telling stories, musicians are not always the most reliable of narrators. Beyond its blue-chip corporation boardrooms, the music business is run from offices full of the trickery provided by smoke and mirrors, where perception and reality rarely share desk space. In the battle to transform artists into brands, truth is often an early casualty, and musicians´ back stories are carefully manipulated, manicured and managed. But when James Hetfield rolls out one of the rock ´n´ roll industry´s favourite clichés, telling you that without music, without Metallica, he´d be dead, dead or in jail´, he does so without a flicker of a smile, without a trace of self-doubt. That boy in the photograph, he´ll tell you, was a really sad kid´ who had imploded with his own anger. Music, he says, cracked the shell´ he´d pulled around himself since early childhood, and became his escape and therapy and saviour´.

In the mid-Nineties Metallica´s front man commissioned the renowned Californian tattoo artist Jack Rudy to ink on his left forearm an image of an angel delivering a single musical note through tongues of flame into his outstretched hands. Within the piece, an image signifying struggle and salvation, are the Latin words Donum Dei - A gift from God´. And if the welter of motivational mantras tattooed elsewhere on James Hetfield´s upper body - Live To Win Dare To Fail, Carpe Diem Baby, Lead Us Not Into Temptation, Faith - are designed to act as road markings for his journey ahead, that one simple tribute serves to signal his gratitude for paths not taken.

A gift from God´ was the phrase that Virgil and Cynthia Hetfield employed when informing family and friends of the birth of their first-born son, James Alan, on August 3, 1963. Faith had brought the couple together as the decade of peace and love dawned. A truck driver by trade, with a modest haulage company of his own, Virgil Hetfield spent his Sunday mornings doing God´s work, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to the children of his adopted home town, Downey, California. Cynthia Hale (née Nourse) had initially accompanied her sons Christopher and David to Sunday School classes from a sense of parental obligation, but in the wake of the dissolution of her first marriage, Virgil Hetfield´s calm, thoughtful meditations on suffering and strength in adversity began to chime within her with a profound resonance. Romance soon blossomed. When the couple married in Nevada on July 8, 1961, Cynthia thanked her Lord and Saviour for delivering unto her a second chance of happiness.

On the face of it, the newly-weds were very different people. California-born Cynthia was vivacious, creative and liberal-minded, a thirty-one-year-old artist and graphic designer with a love of light opera and musical theatre; five years her senior, Virgil was taciturn, reserved and conservative, a broad-shouldered Nebraska-born grafter whose sole indulgence of frippery came in the form of his meticulously maintained goatee beard. But the couple shared an adherence to the Christian Science belief system, a curious blend of olde worlde Puritanism and superstitious mumbo-jumbo relying heavily upon faith in the healing power of Christ. They viewed their union as being part of God´s preordained plan.

Situated fifteen miles south-east of Hollywood, Downey at the dawn of the 1960s was, as now, a wholly unremarkable little town, devoid of glamour or intrigue, which suited Virgil and Cynthia just fine. But in the year of President John F. Kennedy´s assassination, with civil unrest spreading from state to state as the nascent civil rights movement gathered momentum, few American citizens were immune to escalating national tensions. From the moment baby James left hospital, then, his doting parents sought to cocoon him in cotton wool, as if their blue-eyed angel was made of fine bone china and Downey´s quiet suburban streets were under threat of invasion by barbarians wielding hammers. Where other truck drivers took their offspring on drives across state lines, bonding over AM radio songs as the asphalt rolled beneath their wheels, Virgil Hetfield determined that his son´s world should be safe, sheltered and snow-globe small. Each morning Cynthia clutched James to her side for the three-minute walk to Rio San Gabriel Elementary School; each afternoon she would be in place at its gates as classes discharged, shepherding her boy away from his classmates for the short walk home, lest a single misdirected strand of school yard badinage might despoil her child´s innocence.

Rio San Gabriel´s curriculum presented an early test to the family´s religious convictions. As Christian Scientists Cynthia and Virgil were duty bound to forswear health education, as their faith contends that the human body is merely the vessel that houses the soul of the believer: consequently, James´s teachers were informed that their son would not be permitted to attend health class, the school´s introductory science course. In place of this, each afternoon the youngster would be required to stand alone in the school hallway, or outside the principal´s office, drawing unwanted attention as passing students wondered aloud as to the nature of the actions that had resulted in this punishment. Word soon got around that young Hetfield was different´, a tag no child welcomes.

That alienated me from a lot of the kids at school,´ Hetfield recalled. Like when I wanted to get involved with something like football. You needed a physical from a doctor, and I would be like, I don´t believe in this, I have this little waiver saying I don´t need this. In a way, it was going against the rules, which I kinda like. But as a child, it really fucked with me as far as being different from other kids. You wanna be part of the gang, you wanna do the things they do.´

Virgil and Cynthia were largely too preoccupied to notice James´s growing isolation from his peers and the attendant anxiety this engendered. With the arrival of their first daughter, Deanna, in the summer of 1966 the couple now had four mouths to feed from a single income. As much as the head of the family assured his wife that God would provide, the Almighty wasn´t prepared to clock in at 6 a.m. each morning in order to drive an eighteen-wheel rig for minimum wage, so Virgil´s stints on the road expanded from days at a time into weeks. With her eldest boys having descended into the hormonal clusterfuck of adolescence, and her infant daughter reacting to Virgil´s prolonged absences with ever more rebellious behaviour, Cynthia considered her sensitive youngest son´s sullen silences the least of her worries. But in a bid to bond with the boy, and draw him out of his black moods, she suggested to James that he might enjoy piano lessons, just as she herself had as a child. If three years of tuition proved to be an utterly joyless experience for Hetfield - I hated it,´ he has stated baldly on more than one occasion - nonetheless in later years he was gracious enough to concede that it was not time entirely wasted, admitting, I am so glad it was somewhat forced upon me, because the act of left and right hand doing different things, and also singing at the same time, it gave me some inkling of what I do now.´

With his interest in music piqued, the child began experimenting with some of the other instruments lying around the family home. His half-brother David played drums in a rock ´n´ roll covers band called the Bitter End, while Christopher Hale, much taken by the developing singer-songwriter scene developing in the Los Angeles Canyons, flirted with acoustic guitar: neither instrument initially made much sense to James´s young ears, though the obvious irritation his exploratory noise-making caused other family members secretly delighted the youngster and served as some incentive to persevere. But it was the discovery of David Hale´s record collection that truly brought the power of music into focus for James. David had warned his half-brother countless times that the vinyl in the corner of their shared bedroom was off-limits to him, instructions which only served to inflame the younger boy´s curiosity. And so, one afternoon while David was at his accountancy class, nine-year-old James plucked up the courage to rummage through the dog-eared sleeves. He was drawn, like a magnet to metal´, to one album...


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