(Radio.com) "They cut their hair!", "They're trying to be 'alternative!'", "They're selling out!" These are all things that Metallica fans were saying about the band's alleged new direction in 1996. And this was months before they even released their long awaited follow-up to "The Black Album," Load.

Before anyone heard a note of Metallica's new music, people were arguing about their new look. On April 10, 1996, Alice In Chains recorded their episode of MTV Unplugged at New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music. All four members of Metallica - James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and Jason Newstead - were in attendance. And they all had short hair. This was a big enough deal that, before the show, Alice's Mike Inez famously wrote "Friends Don't Let Friends Get Friends Haircuts" on his bass guitar.

Around the same time, it was announced that Metallica would be headlining Lollapalooza, the alternative-rock festival tour that had previously been headlined by Jane's Addiction, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Smashing Pumpkins.

I remember this pretty well, because I was working at a marketing company at the time, and the company specialized in heavy metal. And in 1996, metal was in flux; the prevailing wisdom in the music industry was that the genre was on its way out, and "alternative" was the new standard for rock music.

This put Metallica in a strange position, to say the least. They couldn't really disavow metal; it was literally in their name. And they were coming off of 1991's self-titled LP (known as "The Black Album"), the biggest album of their career, the one that saw them moving from thrash metal to more easily accessible hard rock. Would they change even more to fit in with the post-Nirvana world?

On the surface, it seemed like they did. There were the haircuts, of course. But the imagery went beyond that: they band had adopted many non-metal looks in their photo sessions, wearing eyeliner and going goth in some photos and adopting more of a rockabilly look in others. No longer were they working with metal photographer Ross Halfin; now they used Anton Corbin, more well known for the images he captured of U2 and Depeche Mode. Ulrich and Hammett even alluded to being bisexual. Meanwhile, Lars - always one to align himself with the band of the moment - started palling around with Oasis. Kick Hammett name dropped the Cocteau Twins, of all things. There was a lot of debate among fans about what this meant for Metallica, and what it meant for metal.

But what of the album itself? What about Load? Read more here.

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