Metallica frontman comes clean about band's "winderness" years

Metallica frontman James Hetfield speaks frankly in a new interview with Classic Rock magazine about the band's so-called "wilderness" years, in the mid-to-latter 90s, during which drug use and disagreements over the group's image and sound nearly drove them apart. Hetfield says he was particularly uncomfortable with the change in the group's image around the release of its 1996 album Load. Hetfield explains, "The whole 'We need to reinvent ourselves' topic was up. Image isn't an evil thing to me, but if the image isn't you, it doesn't make much sense."

Hetfield says that he thinks drummer Lars Ulrich and guitarist Kirk Hammett were "after a U2 kind of vibe, Bono doing his alter-ego. I couldn't get into it. I would say at least half the pictures that were to be in the booklet, I yanked out. The cover went against what I was feeling. Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett were very into abstract art, pretending they were gay. I think they knew it bugged me. I think the cover of Load was just a p***-take around all that. I just went along with all this crazy stupid s***."

Hetfield claims that Ulrich and Hammett bonded over their drug use during that time and that the band's music suffered too, saying, "A lot of fans got turned off quite a bit by the music -- but mostly, I think, by the image."

Metallica bottomed out in the early part of this decade with the controversial St. Anger album and the documentary Some Kind of Monster, which chronicled how they nearly fell apart and how Hetfield himself got sober.

The group rebounded last year with the acclaimed Death Magnetic record, and Hetfield told us there was never really any chance of Metallica breaking up for good: "You know, St. Anger, the Monster movie, all the stuff that we went through -- once we got back together and started playing again, we knew that we were given some sort of gift to continue and not fall like many other bands have. So we've got to take care of this, and we're doing our extra best to do that."

Now, Hetfield says in Classic Rock, Metallica is a very balanced group: "The way things are now, Lars and I are one half of the scale with (bassist) Rob Trujillo and Kirk on the other. They're great people but they're okay with someone else driving. It does take that, I think -- they're very un-ego-driven and Lars and I are the other way, it seems."

Metallica is touring Europe all summer but will return home for a North American trek this fall.