What becomes of heavy metal rockers as they try to assert their hypermasculine posturing well into middle-age? The answer is clearly chronicled in the documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster in which we are afforded a close look at the tensions and anxieties of the world’s most successful heavy metal band. Having sold more than 90 million albums since 1981, packing more stadiums in the 1990s than any other rockers, Metallica has been the king of gonad-strutting metal rock for over twenty years. But the band mates’ “marriage” is strained under the weight of personality clashes, delusions of grandeur, spite, paranoia, self-pity, burnout, alcoholism, and mid-life identity crises as they try to make a comeback album titled St. Anger.
Their identity crisis is somewhat predictable. Think about being in your forties, being married with children, going to your kids’ open house, managing your tax shelter annuities and going in for regular colonoscopies, and then trying to reconcile all these adult responsibilities with your rock stage persona: A grizzly rocker going on stage night after night and trying to muster conviction as you thump your chest, shake your fist, and sing an anthem to male aggression, the raging fire inside your tumescent loins, defiance against authority, feelings of being persecuted, and the need to find, through rock and roll, solace in a world that has never understood you. The songs’ themes and lyrics resemble the kind of simple-rhyme “poetry” written by high school loners whose musings are confiscated by their teachers and then sent to the campus counselor who then puts the poems in their “Columbine File.”
It is only natural that these middle-age rockers are strained by the incompatibility of their middle-age life with their adolescent rock personas, but believing that the two worlds can be reconciled, Metallica hires, at a cost of 40 thousand a month, a “performance-enhancement coach,” Phil Towle. At sixty-five years of age and wearing Bill Cosby sweaters, Towle, a former psychotherapist, tries to settle the band members’ testy egos and depression with cloying, pretentious therapy speak and, from the touchy-feely narcissistic bromides and clichés uttered from the mouths of these middle-aged heavy metal rockers, we learn that Towle has insidiously gotten inside their heads. The Metallica band members cannot utter a sentence without beginning with the words, “I feel.” Everything is a “process.” Everyone has “boundaries.” They work on their “creative wave length,” “opening doors,” getting into their “stream of consciousness.” Towle finds it necessary to draft the band’s Mission Statement, which talks about their “collective journeys” and the true meaning of “family born of conflict and pain” and how they must all be “healers” who find “ultimate togetherness.” At one point as the band is snarling at each other and their new project is spiraling downward, Towle says, without irony, that they are the “co-producers of the process of slipping off the planet.” At another point he supervises a therapy session between the band and ex-member Dave Mustaine who, twenty years earlier, was kicked out for alcohol abuse, and has never forgiven them. Unable to see the role of his own alcoholism and his own reckless irresponsibility as the reason for his being ousted, Mustaine, who has enjoyed huge success in the heavy metal band Megadeath, is still bereaved. “Am I happy being number two?” he says to them, complaining that the millions he’s made with Megadeath is an insult compared to the many millions he should have made by being in the number-one band. He cannot let go. Over and over, he says, “What have I been through?”
We’re not sure how helpful Towne is in establishing any reconciliation between Mustaine and Metallica. But he does seem to be an able peace-maker between the band members, and their relative lack of strife allows them to get enough songs finished for their album. As they get closer to finishing St. Anger, however, they begin to question their dependence on Towle. Perhaps his intrusive presence is creating more problems than it is solving. But the cunning therapist finds a way to be “needed.” He has a way of making them feel guilty and ashamed every time they broach the subject of no longer needing his services and no matter how resolved they were to fire him, their attempts always fail. In fact, we get the impression that Towne will never leave Metallica whom, he has convinced, will need his services for all eternity. After all, without him, the great father figure, they are helpless children, prone to the excesses and indulgences of adolescence that could at any time push them over the edge. So what we have, then, is the Myth of Rock and Roll—machismo bluster as a thin veil over the fear of having never grown up. But Daddy Towne is there, for 40 thousand a month, to keep those fears at bay.
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