Through The Never

Recently I saw Metallica’s most recent “concert movie”, Through The Never.   It’s 80% concert film and 20% “goofy story about a roadie who fights bad people.”  Something like that.  Something gay, stupid, irrelevant, and only meant to pull an iota of attention away from the band so it’s not just a concert movie, which in fact it is.

            It would be tempting to claim that Metallica “jumped the shark” after Cliff Burton died in 1986, but that would ignore how important …And Justice For All was, and I still maintain that Metallica (the self-titled fifth album, aka “The Black Album”) is really just more of the same, just a little less self-indulgent.  It’s like with Def Leppard:  compare High N’Dry to Pyromania, and the latter looks more commercial.  But compare both to Hysteria….Anyhow.   For all his issues, Jason Newsted really wasn’t all that bad a bassist, even if he wasn’t Cliff.

            But from Load through Death Man-getic, Metallica has been….plastic….insincere….phony.   The distortion is still on, but the real-ness is gone.   “Some Kind of Monster”?   Difficult to watch or endure, but if the movie’s intent was to assure the fans that the band was still “real”, it didn’t work.   Oddly, I don’t find Lulu, their collaboration with Lou Reed, as part of this; ironically, their most “commercial” effort also looks like their most sincere, and the other albums, while indeniably heavy and thrashy, still have a barely articulable yet nonetheless perceptible and discernable phoniness.   The haircuts and Kirk’s guyliner simply put into a picture what a 1,000 song lyric words couldn’t accomplish.

            Finally, there’s that business of the “roadie” (probably a professional stuntman) catching fire during the show and being put out, followed by the band pretending to be back in their shithole in San Francisco in the early days – back when Dave Mustaine was the lead guitarist and Cliff was still helping to call the shots.   It takes no imagination to figure that if Cliff was still with the band, none of the Load >> Death Man-getic crap would have happened.  There would be no “Some Kind of Monster”.  And had they tried to pull it off anyway, Cliff would have joined Megadeth.   Why isn’t “Cliff ‘Em All” on Blu-ray?  Is it because much of the source material is so low budget and crappy, or is it because they want to forget that period?   

            We saw Metallica at Donington in 1985 – with Cliff Burton.  It was the Ride The Lightning tour, and they were early on the bill.  The crowd was throwing dirt, bottles, beer, piss, whatever they could get their hands on.  You’re throwing shit at CLIFF BURTON?  Shame on you.   Were you also singing along with Fish later on?  Probably.  Well then, you should love Lulu.