Why Metallica’s S&M is the most important album in my life

On April 21, 1999, Metallica took the stage at Berkeley Community Theatre for the first of two historic shows.

The unusually intimate venue notwithstanding, the nights were made special not just by the four guys on stage, but by the 88 individuals also on stage, providing instrumental direction and back-up never before seen on a heavy metal stage.

At the time of this show, I was in Houston, Texas and was all of 12 years-old; absolutely killing it as a seventh grader at O’Donnell Middle School. Certainly not scholastically, but definitely as a class clown/sex god (that’s code for lady repellant).

My musical consciousness was only just coming online, with my dad, the preeminent rocker from the 1970s and 80s, providing a primary foundation of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, ZZ Top, AC/DC, Rush, Tom Petty, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Van Halen, Iron Maiden, Motley Crue, Robin Trower, and virtually any other sounds emanating from Houston’s twin rock radio titans — Rock 101 KLOL and 93.7 The Arrow.

He also had a membership with one of those $5 CD of the Month clubs, so he was abreast of bands that were current and making waves.

I was a bit of a musical nomad at the beginning. The first album I ever bought was Dookie by Green Day. I really loved Collective Soul, and I also really loved the Fugees.

I once tried to woo one of my sister’s friends by blasting Keith Sweat’s “Nobody” in the next room in hopes that she would be overcome by lust for me and my approximately 85 lbs body.

What’s that? You don’t quite remember that one? By all means, let’s dig up some of my old skeletons!

Best to do this now rather than when I run for president in 2036.

The first band I ever obsessed over was Creed.

Yeah.

I wasn’t aware of what grunge was, though I loved all of those bands from that era. Nor was I particularly aware of what post-grunge was, or what the underground nu-metal movement was about, but I was aware of it.

I wasn’t interested in, or completely aware of, musical history, theory, cliques, or any of the accompanying mob mentalities of certain genres of music. I just listened to what sounded good to me at the time.

As the story goes, sometime in the early summer of 1998, I committed petty theft of my dad’s CD collection and tossed Metallica’s self-titled “Black Album” onto the stereo system.

The motivation for that move had come from a moment in art class, just before the school year ended. There was a girl in my class who was really into KoRn and Marilyn Manson and stuff like that, and she owned that shit. She dressed in all black — black clothes, black makeup, black soul (unverified).

One day, she asks me if I listened to and liked KoRn. At this point, they were still very new. I had a buddy who loved ’em, but I hadn’t really heard much. But in order to seem knowledgeable and to be impressive, I said that I did.

After some brief intrusive questioning about what my favorite songs were, etc, she could smell the fraud through my flimsy, vague answers. She called me out in front of the rest of our tablemates. I was embarrassed and humiliated and could no longer focus on drawing a magnet portrait of myself for our fridge at home.

That led me to wonder — do I need a more well-defined musical identity? Surely this will come up again.

As for the album itself, every song hit me between the eyes, punched me in the stomach, and kicked me in the dick — in a good way. I was floored. I even made my mom stop vacuuming so that she too could hear “Wherever I May Roam”.

Dad only had 2–3 Metallica CDs, but then Garage Inc. came out, which he promptly purchased and let me borrow without his knowledge on many occasions.

Thanks, dad. Sorry not sorry.

Still, my own knowledge of who this band was and their past — and even recent -work was still scattered.

Enter: (no, not Sandman…)

On November 23, 1999, Metallica released a double-CD set of the recordings made from those two shows in April earlier that year. Along with it came a double-VHS set of the same gigs.

I can still see the cardboard display for the album at Media Play, the Best Buy precursor in Houston. Dad and I strolled up and dropped a pretty penny for the entire CD/VHS set I believe on either the day it was released or the next day.

I recall us driving down Highway 6 towards Westheimer as the CD played in dad’s van, even grabbing Burger King and eating it in the parking lot as we soaked in the 2 1/2 hour set.

Still a relative virgin to Metallica’s catalogue, my exposure to many of these songs, with a symphony backing them in a live setting, was my first-ever exposure to them. As I listened, I scanned the booklet and would see “Originally on Master of Puppets” or “…And Justice For All”, and so on.

We didn’t have the internet in our house yet, so I would ask my dad, “do you have this album? When was this one released? Can we buy this one?”

I was stunned at what I was hearing. Songs like “Master of Puppets”, “Of Wolf and Man”, “The Thing That Should Not Be”, “Fuel”, “Bleeding Me”, and “One” just blew me away. The power of the band and the sweeping majesty of the orchestra was almost guilty of sensory overload.

At that particular time, in late ’99, I was just entering the heavy metal community. Anyone who associates themselves as a metalhead undoubtedly knows that the community is both very welcoming and almost equally as narrow-minded and purposely shut-off.

On the one hand, they tell you that metal fans are the societal outcasts; the misfit toys on an island. They’re anti-establishment, anti-rules, anti-your mom, and definitely anti-your face.

But in a surprising twist, if you renege from the self-described welcoming metal establishment, then you’re a wimp, a pussy, a sell-out, not metal enough, blah blah blah. Fucking hell, there are people who genuinely believe that Metallica is NOT metal!

Depending on who you ask, Metallica died when they wrote “Fade To Black”, or when Cliff died, or when they made a video for “One”, or when they hired Bob Rock as producer for the Black Album, or after the Black Album, or when they cut their hair, released Load and ReLoad, sued Napster, etc.

I can’t tell you how important it was to hear, and see, the S&M record at that particular time.

It made such an impression on me. Just a big, hairy “this is what we’re going to do and we’re doing it because we can so eat a bag of dicks.”

Actual quote. By someone. Probably.

I couldn’t then, and still can’t now, wrap my head around how flawless this album is.

Metallica had worked with the conductor, Michael Kamen, way back in 1991 when Kamen did the orchestral score for “Nothing Else Matters” on the Black Album.

The orchestra is turned down quite a bit in the final mix on the album, but the band included on the “Sad But True” international single a b-side dubbed the “elevator version” of “Nothing Else Matters”, which is just Hetfield, one acoustic guitar, and the symphony.

Eight years later, the idea to perform a full concert with Kamen and a full orchestra was brought to life.

At the time, Metallica was at the tail-end of a decade where they were constantly taking fire from metal purists pissed at their artistic exploration and their seemingly head-on collision with mainstream pop culture.

Metallica was the biggest name in anything. It afforded them the chance to do anything. The songs comprising their 1990s albums were laid back, shorter, and less intricate than the thrash empire they had built in the 80s.

Songs like “Mama Said” and “Low Man’s Lyric” are as far from “Metal Militia” and “Creeping Death” as “A Boy Named Sue” or “Sweet Home Alabama”.

I would come to learn that S&M wasn’t some opening shot across the bow, but rather a firm and final grand statement — Metallica is what we, the band, say it is.

Nowadays, we’re used to Metallica taking chances whenever they want, and with whoever they want.

They made Lulu with Lou Reed. They performed with Lady Gaga. They made a feature film about their own internal struggles. They made another film that mixed concert footage with a fictional story, ala, Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains The Same.

But back in 1999, an album like S&M was pretty radical. It had been done in lighter tones — Deep Purple with an orchestra, Pink Floyd with an orchestra, Bob Dylan with an orchestra, etc. But Metallica?

It worked brilliantly.

After opening with an orchestral version of Ennio Morricone’s classic “The Ecstacy of Gold”, which has opened every Metallica show since the band formed, they launch into the Ride The Lightning instrumental finale, amping up the crowd as the band appears, one by one, on stage to finally augment the orchestra with our first taste of Metallica + orchestra. It’s beyond epic.

As the band cruises through the setlist, giving new life to old and new standards alike, the surprises were the two new songs, “No Leaf Clover” and “- Human”.

I instantly fell in love with “Clover”. It had a cool effect to it — heavy verses, soft chorus — and I loved how it seemed engineered for these shows. The orchestra blended beautifully with it and it felt grand and dramatic all at once.

“-Human” was the heavy rocker that just laid back and did a lot with very little. The orchestra follows suit outside of the heavy intro, doing a lot without doing much at all, with the string section playing music that, alone, sounds like the soundtrack to a horror film where someone is coming at the good guy with a knife. It’s simple, but effective. And heavy as fuck.

The music comprising this album is enough to make it one of the very best in my own collection, but the balls it took to make it and release it to the world and let it be judged on its own unique merits PLUS the timing of its creation PLUS just how fucking great it is makes this easily the most important record in my collection and in my life.

It revealed to me, early on, that you’re never too old, never too successful, and should never be too set in your own ways to step outside the box and try something nutty.

For a while, in spite of this record, I would identify myself as an exclusive metalhead. I hated hip-hop because I was supposed to. I hated pop because I was supposed to. I hated everything else because I was supposed to. But it didn’t last long and it never felt comfortable.

I love heavy metal, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t love all of it, and some of it is absolute horse piss. Golden nectar of the gods for some, horse piss for me. But I appreciate all music and its right to exist.

At a very early, formative age, Metallica showed me that you can dabble with genres and styles with impunity.

In the film’s 40-minute documentary, I learned that their former bassist, the late Cliff Burton, was heavily into classical music, punk rock, southern rock, and heavily promoted diverse and intricate styles of music that naturally clashed with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal influences that James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich championed during the band’s early years.

That clash led to a wild mix of influences and styles within the band, which gave them their sound. Their sound was unique because their influences were so varied and, on paper, random.

It was through this album that I learned how diverse the band was, and how sophisticated their sound really was. It piqued my interest into those influences, and then the music that influenced their influences, and so on.

The album was an exercise in pushing boundaries to exciting new places and fucking with expectations.

Music, like life, can take you a million new places and show you things you’ve never seen or imagined that you’d like, but you have to let yourself go there. Your only obstacle is you.

In a nutshell, S&M is the record that uncoiled that thread for me.

I love it and I jam it all the time. Just yesterday, I plucked out my nearly 20-year-old DVD copy of the show and put it on. A few songs no longer play well thanks to the overuse of the discs, but hopefully the band will rectify that with perhaps a blu-ray reissue? Maybe as part of their deluxe box set reissue series somewhere down the road?

Food for thought.

P.S. Here’s a clip of “Battery”, which closes the show. Fucking wicked.