from Psychology Today issue dated 2004-10-13
Jon Bream, Star Tribune
July 25, 2003 MET25
When the you-know-what hit the fan, Metallica needed Dr. Phil.
The longtime heavy-metal kingpins didn’t call that Dr. Phil. They brought in sports psychologist Phil Towle, who has worked with pro football’s St. Louis Rams, an Olympic silver-medalist swimmer and other athletes.
Towle’s first session with Metallica was coincidentally the day bassist Jason Newsted unexpectedly announced he was quitting after 14 years. The members of the quartet were confused about dynamics, direction and decision-making. They clearly needed group therapy.
“Phil gets guys on the same team to stop letting their differences and their idiosyncrasies get in the way of the progress of the team,” said Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, whose 22-year-old band performs Sunday at the Metrodome. “He helped us try to understand who we were, where we were coming from, why things ended up the way they did with Jason.”
After several sessions with Towle, lead singer and chief control freak James Hetfield decided to head to treatment for alcohol issues. Meanwhile, the shrink continued to meet with Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and producer Bob Rock.
The group therapy intensified after Hetfield’s four-month stay ended. “We were getting to know each other again,” said Ulrich, 39, “or maybe getting to know each other for the first time, like my wife said when I came home one day. That’s pretty scary after 18 years.
“I know that sounds terribly black-and-white. It’s about being comfortable about opening sides of yourself up. There were certainly sides of James and a whole new truth and honesty. The facade of ‘Hi, I’m James Hetfield the lead singer of Metallica’ — that was left in rehab. What he came back with was more like, ‘Hi, I’m James Hetfield, human being on planet Earth.’ ”
Hetfield, who turns 40 next month, is not radically different onstage, Ulrich said, except that his patter is more sincere than scripted.
Towle, who had never seen Metallica in concert until this summer, disagrees. “I think that James is enjoying himself more,” he said last week. “People come up to me and say, ‘The band is having more fun.’ ”
Offstage, Hetfield has a different demeanor, Ulrich said. He uses intimidation less to control people and makes an effort to listen to the opinions of others. And he stays sober.
In retrospect, Ulrich thinks Metallica’s creative dilemma has been brewing for a long time. He thinks the reason the band made two albums of garage-rock (“Load” in ’96 and “Reload” in ’97) and a live album of Metallica classics with a symphony orchestra (“S&M” in ’99) was because the group “couldn’t make another original record until we’d spent some time going through all those issues unresolved in the past.”
Towle, 64, who calls himself a performance coach, helped the band members learn how to avoid dysfunction and strive for excellence. He also became part of the process of making a new album. He was with the band every day for a year, as a result of which he and his wife decided to move from Kansas City to San Francisco, where Metallica is based.
Towle would meet at 11 a.m. for group discussions with the three band members and producer Rock. Sometimes the sessions would drag on, and they’d never get into the recording studio. When it came time to write songs and record them, Towle was there, too, to “keep the creative juices flowing in an appropriate way.”
The new bassist
After recording “St. Anger” with Rock playing bass, Metallica auditioned bassists and involved Towle in the process. They hired Rob Trujillo, who had played with the punkish Suicidal Tendencies and with Ozzy Osbourne.
What does he bring to the band?
“Stability, enthusiasm, openness, spiritual energy,” Ulrich said. “He’s incredibly easy-going. Nothing fazes him. Seeing Metallica is probably tame to what he’s seen with Ozzy. He’s a little more of a traditional bass player than his predecessor. From where I sit, it’s a bit more inspiring.”
Newsted, who ironically took Trujillo’s old gig with Osbourne, “never had a creative voice in Metallica,” Ulrich said. “He was in permanent limbo. I’m amazed in that he lasted 14 years. If I was him, I would have left a lot earlier.”
He had succeeded founding bassist Cliff Burton, who had died in a bus accident in 1986. Part of the problem for Newsted was that he joined so soon after Burton’s death that the other band members hadn’t taken time to grieve, said Towle, a former psychotherapist who has spent 2 1/4 years with Metallica, including three weeks on tour this summer. (He had been recommended to Metallica after doing some sessions with Rage Against the Machine when its lead singer left and the members went on to form Audioslave.)
The new album
“St. Anger” is raw, like early Metallica records, and scary. And very human.
Even though 98 percent of the record was written after Hetfield returned from treatment, “this is not a rehab record,” Ulrich insisted. “It’s a record about vulnerability and weaknesses and addressing your own insecurities.”
Those topics were sparked by Hetfield’s self-searching in rehab but also, Ulrich said, because, “through a little bit of maturity, wisdom and parenthood, you just start getting to a point where it doesn’t have to be chest-beating all the time.”
Despite its harrowing vibe and ominous title, “St. Anger” was made during a period of happiness. Ulrich said the cliché that you can make an aggressive heavy-metal record only when you’re angry didn’t apply this time.
“This record was not made on negative energy, it was made on positive energy,” the drummer said. “Sometimes when you’re really happy you just want to scream even louder.”
Said Towle: “They weren’t suffering in the studio and bitching at each other. They weren’t fighting and feuding to gain the edge. The music didn’t come out of tension, it came out of the depths of their creativity, which indeed were naturally influenced by whatever has gone on in their lives, which includes a certain element of pain.”
Doomed domes?
Thus far on the Summer Sanitarium Tour, Metallica has been performing only a couple of numbers from “St. Anger.”
“You’ll hear the different palettes of what Metallica does,” Ulrich said en route to a recent show in New York. “It seems like the head space at the moment seems to be a little more connected to some of the earlier stuff. There’s a couple of things from the early days that we haven’t played for a long time.”
Ulrich said the stage for the tour is “probably the biggest stage we’ve ever played on. When Hetfield gets out to one end of the stage, he’s actually in a different time zone than Kirk, who’s over on the other side. In these enormo-domes, this stage gets you closer to the fans.”
Metallica will become the first act to play the Metrodome for a third time. The domed stadium is not known for its acoustic excellence.
“Up where we are, we’re a little less affected by that than the guys out in the audience,” the drummer said. “We just played the Silverdome and Skydome; it’s tougher in the indoor stadiums. Our soundman has been with us for 400 years; if anybody can pull it off, he can. The more bodies you put in there, the easier it becomes to control the sound.”
Or maybe Metallica should dispatch its own Dr. Phil to the Metrodome for some sound therapy.