Can Metallica Resurrect Puppets, Save Face?

According to James Hetfield, producer Rick Rubin wanted what every jilted Metallica fan wants: A return to the glory days. But is that possible, after everything that has happened to the band, and its once-proud loyalists? Even if it isn’t, the band is going to shoot for it anyway. Exhibit A? Master of Puppets is […]
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According to James Hetfield, producer Rick Rubin wanted what every jilted Metallica fan wants: A return to the glory days. But is that possible, after everything that has happened to the band, and its once-proud loyalists? Even if it isn't, the band is going to shoot for it anyway.

Exhibit A? Master of Puppets is popping up everywhere in the media assault for Metallica's latest effort Death Magnetic. The most revealing culprit lately is an interview Hetfield conducted for VH1 and MTV.

"[Rick Rubin] told us, 'Think back to Master of Puppets,'" Hetfield told VH1. "'What were you doing? What were you thinking? What were your influences? What bothered you? What was around you? Where did that hunger come from?'"

Rubin's psychoanalytic time travel had the goal of returning to band to its hungrier years. But that is hard to do when, for example, you're being interviewed by MTV, who wouldn't even talk to you back when you were making Master of Puppets. Or when you're stone-cold rich, auctioning your art collection and hating on downloaders who you believe are slicing off tiny chunks of your pie in the sky. Times have changed; trying to wind back the clock is a pose, and metalheads usually hate posers with a passion.

"Old-school metal is huge and coming back, and there's so many people wanting to play, and get riffy again, get solo," Hetfield claims. "It's like us starting overagain."

this audio or video is no longer availableExcept it isn't. Master of Puppets, like Sgt. Pepper's or Surfer Rosa or Endtroducing or any number of seminal sonic efforts, exploded at a particular nexus of time, culture and influence. Which is another way of saying that it cannot be retrieved or copied with success. It can only be improved upon, if that is possible. And even if it is, upgrading a career classic can be an artistic land mine. The fallout from this type of marketing, if it fails, can often make things worse.

Here's where we are right now: Metallica has squandered not just some of the goodwill of its own devoted fan base, but some of the 21st century's internet consumer base as well. It's going to have to do a lot more than pound out Master of Puppets II to find that hunger, and the goodwill it elicited, again.

In order for that to happen, Metallica will, literally, have to become hungry again. And that, my friends, might never happen.