It’s the spring of 1996, and I’m in Right Track Recording studios in New York, where Metallica are putting the finishing touches to what will become Load.
Listening to the playback, I somewhat ungraciously suggest to Lars Ulrich that it sounds like Metallica have become the sort of mainstream rock band that their younger selves would have despised. The drummer gives an exaggerated and prolonged yawn.
“We’ve had that for years,” he scoffs. “When we put Fade To Black on Ride The Lightning, people were saying that Slayer were the alternative to Metallica because we were playing this acoustic garbage. People should get off their asses to topple us. Like, here’s a guitar – blow us away if you think you can.”
Throughout the 1990s, Metallica were determined to push creative boundaries and give themselves the freedom to stretch and redefine their sound.
“The minute you stop exploring, then just sit down and fucking die,” drummer Lars Ulrich declared bullishly ahead of the release of his band’s sixth album, giving advance warning that the San Francisco quartet had no intention of merely retreading familiar ground to serve up Metallica II.
Not for the first time in Metallica’s history, Load met with a vocal and vociferous backlash before the album even emerged, when the group unveiled a striking new image - Haircuts! Piercings! Eyeliner! Feather boas! – in promotional photos.
But when the album was released in June 1996, Metal Hammer declared it a triumph, awarding it 4.5 stars out of a possible five stars, and stating that the bold 14-song set confirmed that the band had “continued their evolution into the best heavy metal band of the modern age”.
And though he would later admit to some misgivings about the record, in 1996 frontman James Hetfield had little time for those who were unsettled or aggrieved by the band’s desire to keep moving forward.
“People run around and cry, ‘They didn’t make the music I wanted. His hair looks funny,’” James told Rolling Stone magazine. “Listen past all the bullshit. Listen to the tunes.”
Years later, Lars would look back on the album as “a big ‘Fuck you’… It was a challenge to the heavy metal community,” he said, “and I’m proud of that, because once in a while the heavy metal community needs a good fucking kick up its ass.”
In the end Load would go on to sell five million copies in the US alone – not Black Album numbers, but hardly a flop. With a hefty new multi-disc reissue having just landed, this is a good time to break down Metallica’s most misunderstood album track by track.
1. Ain't My Bitch
Let’s not sugarcoat it: Ain’t My Bitch represents the worst introduction to any Metallica album, ever. But, with the benefit of hindsight, you can divine the intention behind this bluesy bar-room brawl of a song – raw like mid-70s ZZ Top, and powered by the ‘fuck you’ spirit of early Motörhead, Ain’t My Bitch is all about defiant, ‘You want some?’ confrontation, perfectly summed up by James’s bellowed lyric ‘And now it’s time to kiss your ass goodbye!’
Metallica may have been the biggest metal band in the world at the time, but here they sound like the scrappy, snotty hooligans they were when James and Lars first got together in Los Angeles garages.
2. 2 X 4
Introduced to the world at a fanclub-only ‘secret’ show at London’s now-demolished LA2 club on August 23, 1995, three days before the quartet’s Escape From The Studio show at the Monsters Of Rock festival at Donington Park, 2 x 4 is the very definition of the ‘less is more’ attitude Metallica first took on board with The Black Album.
Heavily influenced by Southern rock linchpins Lynyrd Skynyrd and James’s buddies Corrosion Of Conformity, this was the new “greasy” Metallica sound that Lars enthused about when he talked up Load to the world’s media, but sadly this simplistic, basic boogie runs out of steam long before it reaches the halfway point of its frankly unnecessary five-and-a-half-minutes runtime.
3. The House That Jack Built
One of the most underrated songs on Load, The House Jack Built suffers somewhat from its placement as track three on the running order, initially sounding somewhat “stock” (to use a damning phrase later famously employed by Lars during the making of St. Anger) when following on from the album’s underwhelming opening songs.
Perhaps most notable musically for Kirk Hammett’s use of a ‘talk box’ effect, the song finds James musing on human frailty and mortality. Metallica have never performed this song live.
4. Until It Sleeps
Until It Sleeps represents the moment that Load truly kicks into a higher gear. A huge departure from Metallica’s signature sound and bearing the influences of Tom Waits and The Cure, it’s a Southern Gothic meditation upon death and grief.
The song’s lyrics were written by James in the wake of learning that his father Virgil had been diagnosed with incurable cancer. Virgil Hetfield passed away on February 29, 1996, before the album was completed. Until It Sleeps was the first single released from Load, and, at the time, was one of the songs most derided by purists who believed that the album represented a ‘sell out’ by the band.
“There were definitely some people who went out of their way to stand in front of me during Until It Sleeps and give me the finger, and go, like, ‘You suck,’” James recalled in a 1997 interview. “I’d blow ’em a kiss and they’d get steamed! It was great.”
5. King Nothing
The fourth single released from Load, the stomping King Nothing shares a certain amount of DNA with Enter Sandman, not least in its closing 10 seconds when James sings, ‘Off to never-never land.’
The echo with Metallica’s mainstream-penetrating 1991 anthem is deliberate – the message at the heart of King Nothing is that success and the fulfilment of dreams doesn’t necessarily equate to happiness. ‘Careful what you wish, you may regret it,’ James sings at one point. ‘Careful what you wish, you just might get it.’
The frontman had struggled with mental health and substance abuse issues from his teenage years, and, for those who were listening properly, King Nothing is an admission that such concerns are not erased when one seemingly attains everything one has ever wished for.
6. Hero Of The Day
Demoed in ‘The Dungeon’, the basement studio in Lars Ulrich’s house, on December 10, 1994, Hero Of The Day originally bore the working title Mouldy, as its central major key motif sounded to James and Lars like a riff Bob Mould – former leader of acclaimed 80s hardcore band Hüsker Dü – might have written.
The second single released from Load, Hero Of The Day remains one of its most striking and original compositions, a slow-burning, understated but undeniably powerful hymn to the human spirit, with its protagonist drawing upon reserves of strength in the face of adversity and hardship. Lyrics such as ‘So build the wall, behind it crawl, and hide until it’s light’ are James at his most empathetic, an acknowledgement that not all battles can be won by confrontation.
7. Bleeding Me
Concerning itself with themes of survival, fortitude, faith and renewal, Bleeding Me is one of James’s most open-hearted songs, with its lyrics written during a soul-searching winter hunting trip to rural Wyoming.
“Some wild shit happened up there,” James later suggested. “It inspires you… you can get way into yourself.”
Informed by thoughts of his dying father, and his own journey to adulthood, Bleeding Me sees the singer at his most raw, lyrically. ‘I’m digging my way to something / I’m digging my way to something better,’ he sings, his words shot through with a determination to shake off negative thoughts and the ghosts of the past.
Undeniably shaped by the frontman’s increasing admiration for the music crafted by mid-90s Corrosion Of Conformity, Bleeding Me remains one of the most powerful, superbly controlled songs in Metallica’s catalogue.
8. Cure
Such is the brilliance of Bleeding Me that whatever song followed it on was destined to be overshadowed. But even with that caveat, Cure is one of the weakest and least-engaging songs on the record, to the extent that it probably should have been left off Load entirely.
It starts off promisingly with James’s spoken word intro incorporating an intriguing lyrical idea (‘The man takes another bullet / He keeps them all within’) but quickly becomes aimless, its mediocre riff and uninspired rhythm plodding on without any sense of purpose. That Metallica have never played the song live tells its own story.
9. Poor Twisted Me
Poor Twisted Me is Metallica at their loosest and least uptight, serving up a Southern-fried honky-tonk rocker with a ‘woe is me’ lyric that verges on parody. It’s another song indebted to Lynyrd Skynyrd, with slide guitar, bluesy hooks and James living out his Southern outlaw fantasies.
Undoubtedly fun to record, and initially quite charming in its obvious musical hero worship, it’s another song that, with all due respect, really should have been consigned to the studio bin.
10. Wasting My Hate
The antsy Wasting My Hate was inspired by a story that country star Waylon Jennings shared with James. As the Metallica singer recalled in a 1996 interview with Rolling Stone, Waylon was eating in a café when he had a feeling that he was being stared out by a man sitting behind the wheel of a Cadillac in the parking lot. Waylon told James that he exchanged cold, hard stares with the man for a full 45 minutes before deciding to step outside and confront him… at which point he realised that his nemesis was actually sleeping, and not eyeballing him at all.
“Man, I just wasted all my hate on that guy,” the singer told James with a laugh.
This idea is at the core of this country-tinged rocker, which, clocking in at under four minutes, is the most succinct statement on Load. It’s a rather slight track, but pleasingly direct and hard to dislike, with a greasy, naggingly insistent riff.
11. Mama Said
One of the more controversial tracks on Load when the album was released, the melancholic Mama Said is an unashamed country and western ballad, influenced by Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Tuesday’s Gone.
In an interview with Mojo magazine, James revealed that the song is a reflection upon his relationship with his late mother, themed around a prodigal son returning home to make peace with his estranged parents, only to later realise that his mother has passed and his questions for her must remain unanswered.
That Metallica felt emboldened to include this song on Load is a measure of their confidence at the time, and their comfort in their own skin, and the passing of time has only strengthened the song’s subtle power.
12. Thorn Within
Another Load song that has never been played live, Thorn Within features one of the album’s coolest riffs, and most thoughtful lyrics, and yet never impacts as it might. Something of a sequel to the bitter, raging Dyer’s Eve from …And Justice For All, its lyric finds James at his most compassionate, mature and empathetic, with the song’s protagonist reflecting on memories of his upbringing and asking forgiveness for his own youthful hardheadness and lack of understanding. On a more tightly edited album, Thorn Within may have shone brighter.
13. Ronnie
Metallica’s version of Pearl Jam’s Jeremy, concerning itself with a school shooting in Washington State in the 1990s, this is one of the weakest songs they’ve ever recorded.
It’s a song aiming for gravitas and profundity that somehow ends up sounding trite, perhaps because, unlike Load’s stronger songs, James never sounds like he truly believes in the words he is singing. Once again, it bears the influence of Lynyrd Skynyrd, but never captures the heart or soulfulness with which the Jacksonville, Florida band’s best songs are imbued.
14. The Outlaw Torn
Arguably the greatest song that Metallica released in the 1990s, The Outlaw Torn is Load’s true masterpiece: an atmospheric, cinematic anthem that deals with loss, grief, pain and regret, without offering any easy solutions. Like an extension of The Unforgiven, The Outlaw Torn is a brooding, haunting, existential epic.
‘I wait my whole lifetime for you,’ sings James, like a man doomed to wander the Earth forever, searching in vain for answers, never attaining a state of peace. As great as it is here, however, the definitive version of the song can be found on the band’s first orchestral album, S&M, where it comes close to touching Ennio Morricone levels of genius.
The Load remastered limited edition deluxe box set is out now via Blackened Recordings
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