Metallica: The Fan Backlash Against the Load Album

Hey everybody what's going on and welcome to Rock' N' Roll True Stories and today I want to talk about the fan backlash against Metallica as a 1996 album Load. So I have something to admit, I like the album a lot. In fact I like it a lot better than the Black album which I felt was vastly overrated.
But let's talk a bit about the history of the album and the fan reaction to it and I'd love to know what your guy's thoughts are on the record, and what are some of your favourite songs off of it.
Now Metallica for their 30 plus year career is a band that definitely is not steered away from controversy, or upsetting their fans whether, you know it was releasing the 91’ Black album, which showed the band changing their sound to become more commercial or released in 2003 Saint Anger or going after Napster at the end of the 90s, the beginning of the millennium, but without a doubt, one the most controversy moments in the band's history was the release of 1996 album Load.
So work on the album really began in the spring of 1994, that's when James Hadfield and Lars Ulrich, who would always be the primary songwriters in the band, they got together less than a year after they wrapped up their mammoth two and a half year long tour supporting their self-titled record.
So, a lot has changed since 1991 Bruce Dickinson and left Iron Maiden, Kurt Cobain was no longer around and grunge was starting to die down a bit and punk rock was starting to become much more mainstream with bands like Green Day and The Offspring having huge records in 1994, and even though the world around Metallica had changed, Metallica's writing duo of James and Lars didn't change the way they wrote songs together. In fact, the duo would revisit James's home-recorded riff tape cassette collection in order to identify riffs that might form the spine of new songs that would end up on the band's next record.
So they worked in a basement studio in Lar’s hilltop Marin County home, which was a facility that was dubbed the dungeon, so the guitarist and the drummer would start arranging and committing these ideas to tape. So on November 28 Streamline which was later retitled Wasting My Hate became the first new Metallica demo recorded in four years.
On November 30 of 1994, a second song, which was titled Load, which would later become King Nothing was tracked. So by the end of 1994, the band had three more songs recorded including Devils Dance, Fixer and Hero of the Day, and by Easter of 1995, the songwriting duo had already written 13 songs including the Outlaw Torn, which was previewed for a short period of time at Woodstock, and the ideas still kept coming in for the band.
So James explained, “All this material had built up on the road, there were bags and bags of tapes with riffs on them. Stuff we'd accumulated from five years of not writing. First, it was like okay, let's stop at 20 songs, then we would get going and say all right we'll stop at 30, it was effing crazy.”
Now Metallica would enter the Plant studios in May of 1995 to begin recording the album, and Black album producer Bob Rock would return to produce the record. So at the onset, James Lars laid out their desire that the new song should be much looser and more organic and more spontaneous than the band's previous work, and aimed at Bob Rock trying to accommodate by encouraging the four musicians to play off of one another in the studio. Experiment with different tunings textures and tones and to have them keep open minds in regards to the flow of ideas.
So to ensure that the band was not overwhelmed Bob Rock also suggested that they should focus upon roughly half of the 27 songs that were recorded at the dungeon, and there would be a time in the future to revisit the remaining material.
So Lars revealed we're almost having fun in the studio, and he said, “We're doing basically what we hoped for in our wildest imagination, which is not getting caught in some anal torment of precision and tightness and the new songs we're writing just called for a looser livelier type of thing. And we set our goal with the record to try and capture more of the spirit of the songs and worrying about the technical stuff.”
So the band would host a fan club members only show in August of 95’ as a warm-up for the band's headlining appearance at the Donington Music Festival. Now with this fan club members only show the bandwidth debut the songs Two by Four and Devil's Dance. And towards the end of 1995, James would end up taking some time away from the studio to go into the wilderness in Wyoming. He had been recently informed those father had advanced-stage cancer and would not beat the disease, and he wanted some alone time to process the news, so alone with his thoughts in a tent in the snow cover wilderness the singer used lead tip bullets to write down ideas that would later form some of his new albums most emotional and open-hearted lyrics.

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