On the weekend I saw Some Kind of Monster, the documentary Metallica did about making their last album and I’d highly recommend it.  I know what you’re saying, “Um, do I look like a raving metal head?”  No you don’t and I’m not one either but stay with me before going back to listening to your Zamfir pan flute music.

 I got the impression that they brought in the cameras to grab some footage that could be jammed onto a concert DVD or something.  But instead the cameras caught the band coming into the studio after losing their bass player, spending a bunch of years apart with serious creative differences and no material.

Their management hired a $40k/month therapist who specializes in helping performers. Where the creative process had been driven by two of the band members in the past, he helped them figure out how to make it more cooperative, so they’d have a “now we’re all working on lyrics” time together.  And what a process it was, it looked pretty painful at times and the album still took 2 years to create.  With the challenges they had, it probably wouldn’t have been made at all without the intervention.

These guys worked hard on not just doing the “stock” thing but keeping it interesting and different and it meant being excruciatingly honest and going to the edge with each other.  Their challenge seemed to be about channelling the anger and emotion into the music and not at each other.  They even invited in the guy who was thrown out of the band in the early days who talks with heartwrenching emotion about his regrets for screwing up - it’s brutal to watch.  By the end the band has bonded in a way you can’t imagine at the beginning.  Once they finished the album they became a unified front dealing with all the external stuff that comes into play post-album release.

If you have any interest in music, it’s a great insight into the creative process.  They’d listen to the playbacks, find the nuggets in a song and nurture them into interesting hooks.  And the process seemed to be succesful, they ended up with 30 songs to choose from for the album.

The part that really got me was midway through, James, the lead singer goes into rehab and pretty much comes out a different person.  He goes from being sullen and disconnected to talking through some pretty heavy shit, which must have taken serious guts with the cameras rolling. 

You see him dealing with his “new life” trying to do things sober for the first time.  Pretty challenging for someone whose stage persona was all about consuming beer.  But at the end of the film there’s a bit from a concert where he’s really connecting with the audience and you can see that it’s more effective than the beer bit probably ever was.

So before going back to your Zamfir records, check it out.