LITTLE ROCK
It is a dark and sticky night as the headbangers begin to shuffle into the Alltel Arena. It's like a trailer for "Dawn of the Dead." These Arkansas zombies want their metal, and this is the last gig in North America before Metallica leaves for its summer-long European tour.
Outside, the venue blazes with lights, a beacon in the murk, and clouds of exceedingly intense bats dart around the loading docks occupied by the 15 trucks and six buses that ferry the band's elaborate stage set, lights, speakers, pyrotechnics and roadies from town to town. The drivers are smoking butts and drinking coffee. It is quiet. Too quiet.
Metallica frontman James Hetfield:
(Kathryn Wilson For The Washington Post)
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At the security post, a guard halts a reporter and barks into his walkie-talkie, and eventually a band aide appears bearing a plastic backstage pass picturing a winged angel of Hell in roped bondage, issuing a voiceless scream of rage or agony. On it are the words "Metallica 2003-04."
Oh, gentle reader, there was a time, in the past two decades, when a backstage pass to a Metallica concert was a thing of myth, a portal through the gates of rock-and-roll Valhalla into a feast of excess, where the Jagermeister flowed like a river and the groupies lined the hallways like pretty presents on Christmas morning, just begging to be unwrapped, and the world's most commercially successful metal band partied with the kind of reckless, petulant intensity that earned their famous moniker, "Alcoholica," which they embraced with a slurred scowl.
Those days are way over.
Down the freshly mopped fluorescent halls we go, turn left, turn right, and there is drummer Lars Ulrich, the Danish-born tennis prodigy who co-founded Metallica in 1981, looking fresh and toned, like he just returned from one of his daily five-mile runs. He is a short man with short hair, and wearing shorts.
"You're the reporter? Cool," Ulrich says and gives us a smile and his trademark little smirk. "Listen, I've got a few things to do, but make yourself at home, and I'll be back in a bit. Have some food."
Into the inner sanctum. The band's room. A table is laid with catered gourmet. Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett mumbles hello. He looks like the Count of Monte Cristo, the one in the movies, his black tresses gelled and glossy, perfect. With a ringed pinkie raised on a serving fork, he carefully spears a floret of steamed broccoli, which he plops upon a bed of brown rice. He sits beside his personal assistant, eating in measured bites. You can almost hear his arteries whistling a happy tune. We talk about his horse ranch in Northern California. The fresh air. The lure of the land.
Something is missing here, and it is a bar. "Ten years ago? At the height of the unhealthiness? There wouldn't be any food. There would have been a lot of booze, and that's what we were always worrying about: Do we have enough booze?" This is later, from lead singer and co-founder James Hetfield.
Now, Hammett contemplates his whole grains. Across the room, two of Ulrich's young children watch a "Shrek" DVD and play with toys, watched over by a nanny. Somewhere down the hall, the band's traveling chiropractor, whom they call "the witch doctor," leads crew members through a yoga session. One of the security entourage, with a shaved head and tight jeans -- a biker version of Mr. Clean -- eyeballs us. He waves us over and whispers: Shhhh, could you wait in the hallway? "This is their quiet time."
This is the band whose first album, in 1983, was "Kill 'Em All." If you didn't know the tumultuous, emotional changes these gods of metal have been through, it would not compute. "Quiet time" and "Metallica" would not have appeared in the same sentence. Until three years ago, when the wheels flew off the wagon, and the cameras began to roll.
You can learn all about it in the improbable, appalling and strangely stirring new documentary "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster," which opens in Washington on Friday. It's part Oprah, part "This Is Spinal Tap" (the classic spoof of metal bands), part insightful exploration into creativity and relationships. Two years of group therapy, compressed into 2 hours 22 minutes of film. It is a train wreck, lurid and mesmerizing, and you cannot take your eyes away from it.
On the Edge
Early in 2001, Metallica limped back into its San Francisco studio to record its first album of original songs in five years. The band was running on fumes, in danger of becoming a nostalgia act, like Kiss but without the Kabuki makeup and platform shoes.
