Jason Newsted always wanted to fit in with Metallica. From the start, Jason was faced with a pretty big challenge and that was to be a great Metallica bassist and impress some of the hardest to impress fans that there are. The fans and the band were pretty relentless with Jason and they didn’t really let him get away with too much. Thankfully, Jason was able to pull it off despite what everyone else thought of his seemingly short lived career.
Jason Newsted collected a decent amount of money while he was with the band, but one thing irked him and pulled him apart. Just who did he think he is? Jason hit a huge peak for himself with The Black Album along with the rest of Metallica. The album would go on to be one of the biggest records of all time from then up until now. With this came (and remains) an amount of money that would make anyone very happy with what they did to generate it.
In a new interview with the Metallica fan-club magazine ‘So What!’, the band’s former bassist Jason Newsted was asked how he dealt with the huge commercial success of the 1991 self-titled album.
“All of us experienced some kind of swelly head at different levels for different amounts of time through this three-year span. [It was] inevitable and impossible for it not to happen… I remember me personally, when I went shopping with Kirk [Hammett] in Paris, and he took to me a couple of nice, nice stores, and I threw down a lot of money for some nice clothes and shoes and stuff. I’d never done that before. And I thought I was the shi*… So I did get caught in the moment.
I think that I’ve been really, really frugal with my earnings, and so that’s why I still have them. But I did have a couple of moments there. But that was the time — dropping all this money for wine and fancy shi*… And I think it lasted for about — I’d say five to six months, for myself, that it was just that ‘walking on air.’ Everywhere that you went, in the 55 countries that we played in, they’re waiting for you when you f**king there… What are you supposed to do?”
When Jason was asked how he got himself back to reality, Newsted said: “I think when I came back home on the one break to be with my girl again, I just realized that that’s not who I am. It just is not who I am. I pretended I was gonna get this fancy car and all that shit. I’m, like, ‘Dude, you know that you’d rather have a ’65 Mopar, ’68 Mopar than you would that fucking Lamborghini bullshi* anyway.’ But those guys were driving Porsches and fancy cars and stuff, and I’m, like, ‘I can afford that too.'”
