Story of the Album: Nothing channels pain, pleasure like Metallica

A letter to the members of 1984 Metallica: James, Kirk, Lars and Cliff – who I realize is not alive:

I did not listen to your band when I was 3 years old.

While you were making your second record, “Ride the Lightning,” some of America’s very first thrash metal, I was regularly riding in the front of my mom’s shopping cart, begging to feed the ducks on the way home.

You came later, Metallica: in the mid-’90s with MTV and my obsessive need to get inside my older brother’s bedroom when he was gone. I still remember holding his copy of “The Black Album” up to the light to see the coiled cobra printed in black ink on black paper. So edgy.

I’m sure Lars would have my head for this one, but don’t you think metal should be marketed to pre-pubescent suburban girls? I mean, it’s so dramatic, so overwrought, so shut-UP-Dad- you’re-embarrassing-me. I was a skinny dork in oversized glasses and extra-large braces, and the recklessness of your music made me smile. It was raw and senselessly angry – not completely unlike being a teenage girl. Does that make you mad to hear that? I hope not.

Anyway, I was in my 20s when “Ride the Lightning” – “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “Fade to Black,” “Escape” – took on new life. I started to understand your anger about love and life and all the things we do that make us so miserable. I wish I could explain to people the power and pain that come with being an angry person. I think you probably know what I mean.

There was a day though – May 26, 2010, to be exact – when your music changed. I got this email with the subject line “Stuff n Things” from one of my best friends, which contained this line: “I have a brain tumor. … big, too. 7cm x 3cm x 4cm.” When they pulled that thing out of his head, he slipped into a coma. He woke up to his hardest battle, his new body a live wire twitching in a rainstorm. He’d listen to your song “Fade to Black” on his back porch, staring into the trees and sobbing about what had become of him.

You’re there – old Metallica – when things fall apart. Last summer, at a time when it seemed almost everything in my life had collapsed, there you were.

It’s a summer night in Butte, heat still rising from the pavement, and a friend and I are walking past a bar filled with Hell’s Angels. She’s the only other girl I know who also has a long, storied love affair with heavy music. She pulls my arm, “They’re playing old school Metallica in there!” But it’s no jukebox – there’s a cover band there onstage, dressed up like you, Metallica. Like you in 1984! Playing you better than you can even play you anymore.

We’re two 30-something women, both with fairly good sense. So of course we run inside, throw elbows to get to the stage, tuck our eyeglasses into our pockets, wrench our hair out of ponytails and start headbanging. In this crowd of living, breathing criminal records, we were the only ones there who knew every word.

The next day, we laughed at the boiling hot pain shooting through our necks. We were out of practice. You made me remember something important, Metallica.

That this life is too damn short to headbang so infrequently.

Thanks,

Leah Sottile