“It’s been hard, Lars,” a choked-up Dave Mustaine, lead singer of Megadeth, tells Lars Ulrich, drummer for Metallica…
Posted: 04/15/04 @ 15:45 by Methead
‘It’s been hard, Lars,” a choked-up Dave Mustaine, lead singer of Megadeth, tells Lars Ulrich, drummer for Metallica. “Everything you touch turns to gold and everything I do backfires,” he says, going on to explain that he thinks people even shout “Metallica” at him on the street as a heckle.
Ulrich sits back and takes this in. “Do I feel guilt?” he wonders aloud.
“Have you thought about what I went through?” continues Mustaine. “Have you got any idea?”
Mustaine, who was one of the original members of Metallica, was fired from the band by Ulrich in 1983, and this touchy-feely therapy session is one of the stranger scenes in the new documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster.
Ulrich and Mustaine spend several hours discussing their pain, all of which is supervised by Phil Towle, Metallica’s therapist/ performance enhancement coach.
At the time of this meeting Towle had already been working with Metallica for a year, so it’s not a surprise that Ulrich was well versed in therapy-speak. Of course, Mustaine was too: While it’s not revealed in the documentary, Megadeth had also explored their group dysfunction in therapy for several years in the early Nineties.
“Most people think we’re going to anti-breakup therapy,” Mustaine was quoted as saying in Billboard. “That’s not what it’s about at all. It’s intellectually stimulating, and it’s innovative and challenging, and we learn more about ourselves and how we can be more cohesive as a unit.”
And these aren’t anomalies. Other bands, such as Aerosmith, Tesla, Motley Crue and Audioslave have reportedly spent time on the couch. Naturally, this causes one to ponder if the Beatles would still be together had they hired a shrink to mediate their Yoko Ono problem.
“That’s a historic scene,” says Joe Berlinger, one of the directors of the documentary. “It just shows the degree to which Lars was willing to explore his past and it’s an incredibly touching and moving scene. Lars has been accused of being incredibly egotistical in the past and yet here he is willing to hear the damage he caused somebody. And here’s Dave Mustaine, who is not quite Metallica, but he’s sold 15 million records and Megadeth is a world-renowned band and yet it’s not good enough for him. The long shadow of Metallica is still cast upon him.”
In 2001, bassist Jason Newstead announced he wanted to quit the band and, as a last-ditch effort to repair relations, management suggested therapy. Towle was originally brought in as a short-term fix and to smooth things over with Newstead, but two and half years later the 65-year-old performance enhancement coach from Kansas was meeting with the group every day.
Ultimately, Newstead left the band anyway and Towle says the first few months of therapy were spent dealing with that fallout. Then the remaining members — singer James Hetfield, guitarist Kirk Hammett, producer Bob Rock and Ulrich — began to delve into the resentments that had been building among them for years.
“And as we got healthier,” says Towle, “it forced personal issues to the surface and one was James’ personal unhappiness at a very deep level and the internal shifting in him forced him to make the decision to go into rehab.” At one point in their history Metallica earned the nickname Alcoholica.
Hetfield stayed away from the band for nearly a year, during which time Towle continued to meet with the others “to parallel the experience Hetfield was experiencing in rehab.”
Shortly after Hetfield’s return, the band decided they should see Towle every single day — first a therapy session, followed by studio work on their album — and for this they paid him US$40,000 a month.
This was a pittance, considering Metallica has sold more than 90 million albums worldwide (more than the Beatles, Madonna or Britney Spears) and priceless, as the band credits Towle with keeping them together, helping them finish their first studio album in five years and being functional enough to tour (he went with them for the first three weeks).
“My view of what happened is Phil absolutely saved the band,” says Berlinger. “If Phil was not there, Metallica would no longer exist. These guys needed some tools to communicate.”
Often when they started communicating, several hours would go by before they stopped. One edited, five-minute scene in which Ulrich paces and repeats the f-word was actually a two-hour monologue born of pent up frustration from his over 20-year friendship with Hetfield.
“I just think you are so self-absorbed,” Ulrich says, pacing around the studio kitchen. “You tell me I’m controlling, I think you’re controlling. You control all this even when you’re not here. I don’t understand you at all.” Later, Hetfield tells Ulrich he no longer enjoys being in a room playing music with him.
“There were a lot of power and leadership issues between Lars and James,” says Towle, who explains that Hammett was the most egoless of the group and thus needed help asserting himself.
“I found it incredibly inspiring,” says Berlinger, adding that Metallica’s foray into therapy helped him repair his friendship and partnership with the film’s co-director and producer, Bruce Sinofsky.
“If it was the Dave Matthews Band or some touchy-feely group, it wouldn’t have been as interesting, but the juxtaposition of these guys doing this was incredibly powerful. They are real human beings who needed to work on their shit. And it’s about realizing you can’t be an adolescent forever. These are guys who banged their heads and drank themselves silly and now they are fathers and yet they still want to make music and get out there.”
Every so often in the film, the band discusses canning Towle, but in the next season, he’s back in one of his soothing pastel sweaters. At one point, Hetfield candidly says, “Phil has been an angel to me. He has been sent to help me.”
And Metallica did a lot for Towle as well. During his work with the band, not only did he and his wife relocate from Kansas to San Francisco, he says he now has a better appreciation for heavy metal.
“I used to listen to all kinds of music like Iron Butterfly and Cream, but when it got to Nirvana and Metallica it was too gloomy and I was too old,” he says. “But the irony is I love the guys and it goes to show, if you get inside another human being you’re going to find spiritual truth and I was blessed to find that. My favourite song, of course, is Some Kind of Monster.”