With producer Rick Rubin, the band returns with a new album and a reassuring sense of danger.
By Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 24, 2008
DALLAS -- IMAGINE THE smell of barbecue and methamphetamine under the Texas summer sun. This year, the Ozzfest festival -- an all-day celebration of brawny and sinister heavy metal music -- took its amplifiers to the Lone Star State, and tens of thousands of fans came from across the South and beyond to lose themselves in guitar-solo alchemy and skull-and-bone lyrics.
Backstage and a million miles away from the mosh, the four members of Metallica, the night's headline act, seemed to be surrounded by a bubble of calm. Mingling by a catering table, they chatted quietly with friends and family and sipped from bottles of water instead of whiskey as they waited for the masseuse to arrive. The only real tension came through the phone from New York and Los Angeles, where a deadline was looming. After two years of work, the final mix on their new album, "Death Magnetic," due Sept. 12, was just hours away from completion in Manhattan, and drummer Lars Ulrich was keeping tabs from Texas.
"Unless there is some major hiccup, today is the last day of creative input," said Ulrich, the compact, Danish-born musician who is the band's most outspoken member. "I'm one day from disowning the record. In the morning I can talk about it as part of my past. For months people have been asking me what the new record is like. I've told them, 'I don't know, I'm too close to it.' As of tomorrow maybe I can start answering."
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