Instead, Lars was determined to place the emphasis on a new, harder edge. There were no love songs planned for the fourth Metallica album. That, though, was the only time James even semi-acknowledged his affair with Kristen publicly, even going as far as to later claim not to have written the song about her at all, so deep was his hurt when they too broke up in the wake of Metallica’s now rocketing success. Indeed, his girlfriend Kristen Martinez would later inspire one of Metallica’s best-loved songs and one of the cornerstones of their far more widespread popularity in the 1990s, Nothing Else Matters. The only one who didn’t get married at this point was James and he, ironically, was the one perhaps most deeply in love. Metallica live in 1988 (Image credit: Getty Images) Jason, who had split from his long-standing girlfriend Lauren Collins, a college student from Phoenix, shortly after joining Metallica, now became involved with a new girlfriend, Judy, who would become the first Mrs Newsted over the coming year, though they got divorced even quicker than Lars or Kirk, deciding they’d made a mistake almost immediately. Their marriage too would end after just a few short years. In fact there was a new edge starting to emerge in the guitarist’s character as he began living out his own rock star fantasies, and cocaine began to match marijuana as his drug of choice. Becky was ditzy, airy-fairy, and fitted in neatly with Kirk’s own public persona as the spliff-sucking, comic book collecting, easy-going hippie minstrel. From the outside, Kirk and Becky looked like the perfect couple, almost a mirror image of each other, with their long curly hair, elfin faces and large brown eyes. Kirk, too, had chosen just this moment to marry his pretty American girlfriend, Rebecca (Becky), the two tying the knot in December, just a few weeks before the band began work on the new album. How could any homespun, working class English girl hope to compete with that? As he later said, for a while they had considered naming their next album, Wild Chicks, Fast Cars and Lots of Drugs, such was the state of play in Metalliworld at the time. These, after all, were Lars’ wild years and, with the band finally taking off, it was no time to be married to its principle party animal. Plus, ladies man Lars didn’t like to think of anyone cramping his style and while he clearly loved being around Debbie, the marriage was doomed to end just three years later. It wasn’t that Lars hid his wife from the press, it just happened to be one of the very few things he didn’t talk about. A fun, fair-haired, girl from the Midlands, the two had met in London in 1984 and married early in 1987, during the brief hiatus when James was still nursing his broken wrist, the result of a skateboarding accident. This was one aspect of their lives the young Metallica went out of their way to keep off-limits from the press, even the almost venally talkative Lars, who became uncharacteristically tongue-tied the first time he introduced me to his English-born wife, Debbie. In fact, the only big difference initially was the decision to record the album closer to home this time, in Los Angeles, a choice rooted, paradoxically, in a newfound conservatism – at least, away from the stage – and their sudden desire to be close to their various partners. As a result, of the nine tracks eventually slated for the album – all essentially Hetfield-Ulrich compositions – just three would also bear Kirk’s surname, just one Jason’s, and one had Cliff’s: a posthumous work melded from “some bits and pieces” the bass player had left on tape, over which James intoned a four-line poem Cliff had also left behind entitled To Live Is To Die. Metallica in 1988: (from left) Jame Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Jason Newstead, Kirk Hammett (Image credit: Getty Images)Ĭertainly there was nothing new to their approach in that respect, the two working from home alone on a four-track, Kirk Hammett invited down at a later stage to consider his lead guitar parts, Jason not invited at all on the pretext that with only four tracks to work with there was no room for bass at that stage anyway.
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