Rock stars and football players aren’t known for being sensitive…
The Kansas City Star
Rock stars and football players aren’t known for being sensitive. Tell one to get in touch with his feminine side and he’s more likely to punch you or grab your girlfriend than talk about his feelings.
Phil Towle makes a lot of money helping rock stars and athletes remain successful. He does that by coaching them. He gets them to sit down, and in a style that is part Tony Robbins and part Stuart Smalley (Al Franken’s fictional therapist), he encourages them to open up and work through or around the obstacles & anger, resentment, fear, insecurity & that are messing up their professional and personal lives.
My philosophy he told The Star recently, is that no matter where you are in life, the object always ought to be to maximize your potential.
That may sound like textbook advice you can get from any run-of-the-mill marriage counselor, priest or financial analyst. But that’s only Towle’s starting point. His destination is a place where his client not only sees the glass as half full, but he also appreciates the glass itself.
Towle, a former psychotherapist at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, calls himself a performance coach, the difference being an emphasis on strengths and positives, not someone’s weaknesses.
Among his clients: Chiefs head coach Dick Vermeil, who hired Towle when Vermeil returned to coaching professional football in St. Louis 1997-2000. He also worked with Vermeil’s staff and some of his Rams players. (During that time, Towle moved to Leawood; he moved to Northern California in 2003.)
Towle’s most famous clients these days are the members of Metallica, who hired him in 2001 to get through several personal and professional crises. His work with the band is chronicled in the documentary Some Kind of Monster which opens today at the Tivoli in Westport.
From his home in San Anselmo, Calif., Towle, 65, talked to The Star recently about the film and the process of getting macho men to contact their feminine sides.
How did you go from the St. Louis Rams to rock bands?
Well, Dick Vermeil’s son-in-law, Steve Barnett, is a vice president at Sony Records. One of Sony’s subsidiaries had the band Rage Against the Machine on its roster. Tom Morello, the guitarist in the band, is a devoted Rams fan, so we got to know each other at Rams games. At some point, he came to me and said, I know what you do. Our group is breaking up, and I’d like some help getting through the process. So I was hired by their management, Q-Prime, which is also Metallica’s management.
To most men, counseling or therapy is excruciating, like picking scabs off the brain. How do you coax athletes and rock stars into participating?
I think we’ve reached a point in our society where it’s permissible for men to talk about their inner feelings without feeling threatened. With Metallica I discovered there was this hunger for the most part to have permission to talk about real stuff. Metallica transformed itself because it was willing to go to what Lars called Level 5 which meant going deep and getting deeper.
James (Hetfield) is the poster boy for that. He was amazing. I’ve never met anyone who has been as dedicated to his transformation as he is. He has transformed his leadership from suffocating control to an open, loving democracy at no expense to the product.
You were present when Jason Newsted told the band he was leaving, though that scene isn’t in the film. How did that go down?
We’d been sitting around talking for about a half-hour when Jason says to me, I want to talk to the guys. Will you excuse me? So I went into the other room in the suite. I could hear all this pain resonating from the room they were in, and after about 10 minutes, I went back in. Jason says, I don’t want you in here. I said, I was hired to be here, to work with you guys and your issues, and I can’t in good faith stay in the other room. There was silence. Then Lars says, Let him stay.
They were all jarred so much that a family member for 14 years was leaving for various reasons. They said, We gotta do something about this. Here’s what I offered: Rather than invest energy in being pissed at Jason, use this thing to explore the underlying issues of discomfort and conflict that led to his leaving.
In a very dysfunctional family, Jason had the courage to stand up. He was the one who set in motion this process of calling everyone out. I’d read an old interview with Metallica in Playboy in which the band members separately trashed each other. So now the conflict had come to a head.
The situation changed even more dramatically when Hetfield went away to rehab. Did that blindside you, too, or were you expecting that?
It was very much out of the blue. My sense of what happened is much more heroic than it’s portrayed in the movie. The guys were so willing to push each other to Level 5, that it started to make a difference. … At some level, James realized that if he were going to continue this healing process, he could not exist the way he was.
But the band nearly didn’t exist because he left so abruptly.
But it stimulated another level of growth. After a while, we used it as fuel for more change. We all made a pact: James is going to go through a major change. When he gets back, we have to be ready. We weren’t in the trenches every day like he was, but we were working to keep up. The most obvious issue was the threat of dissolution. Is this the end of the band?
So he comes back, but things still are pretty volatile.
I was in complete awe of how he and his family dealt with the series of changes he made — incredibly deep, permanent changes while running and moving through life. He came back and let everyone else open up, let Lars to get his frustrations out in the open. There was so much stored-up anger. But anger is fear exploding. It’s a clue. It tells us people are afraid of something. When he was gone, the other guys were afraid that there wasn’t going to be a band, and angry that they were afraid and he was in control. Everyone was on hold. The most important time in the life of that band was the time James was away.
There’s a scene toward the end where you and James and Lars get into it over your continued role with the band. What happened there?
The band was going through a moment of indecision about whether to continue with me and on what terms. I needed an answer. I said I gotta know because I’m thinking about moving out here. Off camera we had talks about continuing. So I really felt a little ambushed. I felt I’d had one understanding where I’d do it part time to resolve some issues.
But it was also difficult for me to think about leaving. I was with this one client every day for almost 2 1/2 years. We started with 2- and 3-hour sessions, and then when things heated up as they made the album, I was in the studio every day. I just didn’t want to leave the process, the intimacy. And I thought we had a deal in place. But, you know, the thing to come out of that was Lars coming to James’ support. That really cemented things between them.
Do you still work with the band?
I do. I saw them open the tour then in Denmark and Paris. Just for some touch-up work, some fine-tuning.