Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I

by Paul Brannigan

  When such a point of view is presented to Rasmussen himself, however, his response is unequivocal even by the standards of the plain-speaking Scandinavian.

  ‘The reason the album sounds like it does is down to the mix, not the production,’ he says. ‘But because of the way it was supposed to be set up with Mike Clink as producer, Steve Thompson and Mike Barbiero had already been hired as the people who were going to mix the record. The idea was to have the same team that did Appetite for Destruction. But it didn’t work out like that.’

  In summer 1988 Hetfield and Ulrich were artists incapable of taking direction. Worse yet, at this point in the group’s development each man’s opinion as to what would best serve Metallica’s creative whole was so self-fulfilling as to be self-defeating. Hetfield wanted his guitars be the album’s focal point, while Ulrich (for reasons that can only be described as ‘perverse’) desired that his drums stand front and centre stage.

  The first time the pair arrived at Bearsville Studios, Thompson and Barbiero handed the musicians a tape of a rough mix of the album that they themselves were pleased with. Believing that their work would act as the starting point from which a finished mix might emanate, instead the technicians were instructed that their efforts were unsatisfactory. In a manner suggesting a forearm transferring the pieces of a chess set from board to floor, Thompson and Barbiero were advised that, for a start, the bass guitar should be faded down by no fewer than three decibels. So determined were Metallica to revolutionise heavy metal that they were putting their name to an album that might as well have been titled ‘Small Bottom’.

  ‘I heard the mix and thought, “Where the fuck is the bass?”’ says Rasmussen, echoing a question that would resonate for more than a quarter of a century. ‘And it’s a shame as well because Jason was more than up to the job. His playing on that album is really, really good. The bass tracks he recorded are fabulous.’ He pauses for a second, considers something in the middle distance and laughs as if confronted by the sight of gallows. ‘I just wish that someone could have heard them,’ he says.

  Since that summer it has often been said that the lack of bass guitar evident on … And Justice for All is a personal slight to Newsted. At the time Ulrich was keen to assert that it could be explained by the fact that the tone of Hetfield’s rhythm guitar occupied the same frequency as that of his group’s newest member, thus eclipsing his contribution. While such reasoning amounts to more than mere obfuscation on the drummer’s part, at the same time such a sentiment serves to articulate the symptoms of a condition rather than its cause. At the time Hetfield and Ulrich treated its newest member as the manner they did for no more significant a reason than the fact that they could.

  ‘To answer [the] question about the intentional thing, maybe they were still exorcising that thing that they were still trying to deal with,’ says Newsted, once more confronted by the spectre of a ghost in flared denim jeans. ‘That was still present, absolutely. They didn’t know how to channel those feelings and those emotions at that time. It wasn’t something they had the capacity for. When you get young guys together and they all become millionaires by the age [of] twenty-five, you miss a few developmental stages that everyone else – people who live a less-accelerated lifestyle – go through. So the developmental things could’ve played a part in them just keeping the bass down rather than going through and listening to what was played good and what wasn’t played good.’

  Ulrich himself maintains that the slight visited upon Newsted ‘wasn’t intentional’.

  ‘It wasn’t [a case of] “Fuck this guy – let’s turn his bass down,”’ he says. ‘It was more like, “We’re mixing, so let’s pat ourselves on the back and turn the rhythms and the drums up.” But we basically kept turning everything else up until the bass disappeared.’

  Newsted regarded the decisions made during the mixing of … And Justice for All as lacking both clarity and a defined sense of purpose. But like the butler who sees all yet says nothing, at the time he kept his thoughts and ideas within his station.

  In retrospect Newsted would publicly question the wisdom of Hetfield and Ulrich ‘being drunk at three o’ clock in the afternoon’ at the same time as heading to work in ‘some studio in Upstate New York with a couple of cats [Thompson and Barbiero] who are getting paid real good and [couldn’t] really give a shit about being there or not at some times … guys who were assigned to make a certain product sound a certain way. This was a chance for Metallica to get on the radio, so they’re mixing with that kind of thing in mind – those were the kind of people who were hired to mix the record. Look at the credits – those were people who mixed radio songs. Those weren’t the guys who mixed Sepultura records.’

  One wonders just what kind of madness possessed either Metallica or their advisors into thinking that their presence would be permitted to grace the playlist of any American FM rock station. As Hetfield and Ulrich fumbled their way towards completing the mix on an album the sound of which would at the time leave some at Elektra Records keenly displeased, the realisation that the chances of anyone outside a handful of DJs putting any of these songs onto the air was vanishingly small must have crossed their minds.

  An album that would occupy two vinyl discs yet would not once be referred to as a ‘double album’, … And Justice for All is both a folie à deux shared by Hetfield and Ulrich as well as a logical interpretation of its authors’ sound as heard by the band themselves. Unlike virtually any other group, in the studio Metallica recorded the bass lines to their songs after those of the rhythm guitar, meaning that in a conventional sense the band had no rhythm section. Elsewhere, in concert Ulrich would beat his drums surrounded by monitors that carried only the sound of Hetfield’s guitars, a decision that contravened the conventional rock wisdom that the union between a drummer and a bass player provided the foundations upon which great bands are built. That Metallica could set their face against a principle as fundamentally held as this goes some way to explaining why in a period when the group’s bootstraps were tightening and where guidance went unsought, the sound of the music being recorded should contort to such an unbalanced degree.

  ‘It’s the only record of ours that I’m not entirely comfortable with,’ Ulrich would reflect fourteen years later. ‘It became about ability and almost athletics, rather than music.’ Elsewhere, the drummer would observe that with their fourth album ‘we’d taken that side of Metallica to the end – there was no place else to go with it.’

  Preceded by the twelve-inch single ‘Harvester of Sorrow’, … And Justice for All met its waiting public on September 5, 1988 (with the release coming a day later in the United States). Despite claiming afterwards that the length of the songs and the sound of the album left him feeling alienated, writing in Kerrang! in the dog days of August Xavier Russell appeared to have no such qualms regarding the quality and significance of the music he was hearing. ‘Here it is folks,’ began his review, ‘Metallika’s [sic] finest album since Kill ’Em All. Yeah, I kan’t [sic] believe it either, even though Lars himself recently told me that people have already been saying that … And Justice for All is THE METAL ALBUM OF THE ’80s!’ Clearly unconcerned that such a grandiose opening sentence might one day come to back to haunt him, Russell does go on to say that ‘the first thing you notice when you hear the album is Lars’ drum sound, which is really odd, and I kan’t [sic] quite put my finger on it.’ More than this, the critic admits that the production and mix of … And Justice for All combine to leave him feeling ‘baffled’, before quickly dismissing this bamboozlement with the shrug of a sentence, ‘It’s all part of the METALLISOUND – just listen to [the] opening snare beats on “Blackened” and you’ll see what I mean.’

  To the ears of many of Metallica’s core constituents, … And Justice for All is the third instalment in what has come to be viewed as a Holy Trinity. A number of adherents go further than this, however, and regard the album as being the last of the group’s releases to be worthy of credit or atte
ntion; a last hurrah before the well was poisoned by compromise and betrayal. To those who hold – actually, cling – to such an opinion, the nine songs that comprise Metallica’s final album of the Eighties would represent both the high-water mark and the calling of time on its creators’ position as being the standard-bearers for those who plied their trade on the front line of modern heavy metal.

  That an army of listeners should clutch so tightly to this notion is odd, not least because as an album … And Justice for All really isn’t very heavy at all. Anchored by a drum sound no more emphatic than the click of a playing card struck repeatedly by the spokes of a child’s bicycle, Metallica as represented here are a band the sound of which is dry and nagging rather than emboldened and emphatic. The preference of rhythm guitar parts over bass notes serves to inform a tonal range that is sufficiently airless as to seem vacuum-packed. With Hetfield’s dry (if largely effective) vocals and Hammett’s piercingly pronounced lead guitar solos, … And Justice for All’s preference for treble at the expense of bass is so pronounced as to make the theme for ‘Looney Tunes’ sound like the chimes of Big Ben.

  As befits an album as naggingly insistent as a car alarm, Metallica’s first album following the death of Cliff Burton is an often gruelling exercise. Taking the notion that ‘less is more’ and throwing it into the bins at the back of One On One Studios, the convolutions in the middle section of a song such ‘The Frayed Ends of Sanity’ – a composition the quality of which would be improved greatly were its duration trimmed by two or three minutes – are so complex that it comes as a surprise that the track ever finds its conclusion.

  Elsewhere, the band’s relentless meanderings become first numbing and then boring. There is something noble and persistent about Metallica’s refusal to conform to many of the conventions of modern rock music as it was heard in 1988, but such was the insistence of this mindset that often the group’s idiosyncrasies became arch and fussy. This tendency is particularly pronounced as it relates to Lars Ulrich. With the drums already egomaniacally loud in the mix, the Dane’s declination to locate and engage with any kind of a groove suggests that the man tasked with keeping time for Metallica is often is doing so while attempting to calm a bout of delirium tremens. As Ulrich leads the way into the sprawling middle section of the album’s title track, the listener is left wondering if the band to which he or she – at the time, almost invariably a ‘he’ – is listening have stolen an earth-shifter only to fall asleep at the wheel.

  There are many moments, however, when even their best efforts cannot obscure the brilliance of the material contained within … And Justice for All. Taking as its blueprint both ‘Fade to Black’ and ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’, ‘One’ provides a master class in the execution of dynamic possibilities, its authors guiding the listener from a hauntingly tranquil opening to a denouement the relentless precision of which suggests a sky filled with strafing bullets. This, though, seems as nothing when placed alongside the harnessed fury of ‘Dyers Eve’, a song that while adhering to thrash metal’s beats-per-minute ratio – and then some – also qualifies as one of Metallica’s most progressive compositions, with the music’s jagged rocks providing the perfect foil for a searing lyric narrated from a standpoint equidistant between violent rage and perfect vulnerability. Better still is the barracking tempo of the never fully unleashed ‘The Shortest Straw’, the musical arrangement of which suggests a rat careering through the walls of a maze that offers no chance of either reward or escape.

  This latter song had as its lyrical inspiration Victor S. Navasky’s masterful 1980 book, Naming Names, recommended to Hetfield by Cliff Burnstein; the track takes as its subject matter the ideological and intellectual civil war into which America descended in the post-war era with the House of Un-American Activities, the work of Senator Joe McCarthy and the blacklisting of artists as well of swathes of people working in Hollywood suspected of being communists (or of having socialistic sympathies), without due process and often without any foundation in truth. But ‘The Shortest Straw’ is not a song about such topics, rather one which takes this period of American history and shapes it into a lyric that somehow manages to distil the sense of paranoia and dread prevalent during this period and place it in a context the authors can claim to be their own. A knowledge of the activities of such characters as J. Edgar Hoover or Joe McCarthy is not a prerequisite for appreciating or ‘understanding’ Hetfield’s words. In this, the song is not driven by its subject but is rather merely informed by the universal emotions inherent in the tale, as with perfect economy the front man speaks of a ‘witch-hunt riding through’, and of ‘channels red, one word said, blacklisted, with vertigo make you dead’.

  One key distinction between Metallica and even the heaviest of metal bands plying a trade in 1988 was the gravitas of the group’s lyrics. For most acts of the type in the late 1980s, the words printed on a lyric sheet were merely an afterthought. Whether it be Iron Maiden spinning yarns of prophets peering into crystal balls in ‘Can I Play with Madness’ or Slayer revelling in the topic of abortion – ‘extraction, termination, pain’s agonising stain’ – on ‘Silent Scream’, the words sung were tailored to the bespoke specification of the music rather than from any kind of personal investment on the part of the lyricists themselves. For James Hetfield, though, the more words he wrote the more he revealed of his complex and troubled inner self. As these primal screams were hurled into the darkness, a sea of restless and disenfranchised listeners stirred with an attentiveness unreserved for other groups of their type.

  There were, though, exceptions to this rule. With a body of work featuring songs about such topics as the desire to escape from a mental hospital and a toll placed upon Egyptians levied in the form of a first-born son, it would be folly to suggest that Hetfield was not above dirtying his hands with heavy metal clichés. Worse yet, on some parts of … And Justice for All the writer appears to be suffering from a tin ear. Not for one moment of the nine minutes and forty-four seconds it takes for its authors to slog their way through the album’s title track does one believe that Hetfield is ever fully engaged with the subject about which he is singing. With its title cribbed from Norman Jewison’s 1979 film of the same name, as a sentiment expressed in song ‘… And Justice for All’ is as compelling as a legal argument filibustering its way from the floor of the House of Representatives. Brittle and artless, Hetfield sings of the ‘halls of justice [being] painted green’ and of ‘money talking’ before concluding that ‘justice is lost, justice is raped, justice is gone’, a ruling that fails to examine the plight of those who suffer from this state of affairs, or how. ‘It was,’ remembers Xavier Russell, ‘like Ross Halfin used to say: “Justice is this, Justice is that, Justice is nine and a half minutes long.”’

  ‘I call [… And Justice for All] the complaining album,’ recalls Hetfield. ‘Lyrically, we were really into social things, watching CNN and the news all the time, and realising that other people really do kinda control your life. The movie … And Justice For All turned our heads a little bit. We discovered how much money influences certain things, and discovered how things work in the United States. How things might seem okay on the outside, but internally, they’re corrupt.’

  Elsewhere, though, the front man’s recollections regarding his thoughts as expressed on … And Justice for All take a different form. ‘It’s not me sitting and reading the paper, going, “Oh, I have to write about terrorists; it’s a good subject, real popular now,” he says, before identifying ‘drinking’ as being the muse from which the album’s many bitter fruits would blossom.

  ‘Really [it was] drinking and thinking, [just] seeing what’s going on around me,’ Hetfield recalls.

  What is most striking, however, is not that Metallica chose to author songs concerning the environmental plight of the planet, or against those who should choose to attack one’s personal liberty, but how such topics should be articulated by a lyricist whose point of view was grim and tenaciously pessimistic.
By the time the album’s opening song, ‘Blackened’, has drawn to a close, Hetfield has had cause to employ the words ‘death’, ‘dead’ and ‘dying’ no fewer than ten times.

  Despite all this, or because of it, … And Justice for All flew out of the world’s record shops in numbers normally associated with albums propelled by hit singles. A week after its release, Metallica’s latest album debuted at no. 6 in the US Billboard Hot 200 and at no. 4 on the UK album chart. By the end of the year, the nine-song set would have found its way into the homes of 1.7 million listeners in the United States alone.

  ‘I can remember being pretty shocked when I was talking to a record company person after [… And Justice For All] was finished, right before it was actually released,’ remembers Kirk Hammett. ‘He was like, “Yeah man, it’s probably going to sell a million [copies] in the first couple of weeks.” And I was like, “No way.” And he was like, “Yes, way.” I thought it was too heavy and too progressive and there was no way it would sell that much. But you know what? It sold more in those first two weeks than he even talked about. We were [touring in] Europe when it was released, and it charted really high – the highest we’d ever charted in the States. It was insane. We just couldn’t believe it … it all just came together. All the right things happened at the right time. It was just our time, I guess.’

  Elsewhere, one of Hetfield’s most vivid memories of his group’s first million-selling album came when ‘some friends of mine called me up and went, “Hey man – I hear you went platinum!” [They said] “Just quit and come home, give up and start a new thing. The new thing is to quit.” Can you imagine [the headline]? “Metallica goes platinum and quits!”’

  Metallica, of course, were about to do no such thing. Propelled by unflinching music and the attentions of a fan base that was already beginning to take on the appearance of one of the most dedicated in modern music, the quartet merrily kicked and punched their way through walls with an ease that suggested no obstacle was sufficient to detain them. On September 24 the quartet arrived in Scotland for the first of two appearances at the Playhouse Theatre in Edinburgh in what would be the opening night of a fourteen-date tour of Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland. Supported by the muscular yet ominous thud of Danzig – the titular group founded by former Misfits and Samhain front man Glenn Danzig – the excursion saw the headliners improve their station by performing their first arena show on English soil (a date at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre on September 29) as well as finding themselves embedded beneath the Westway in London for a three-night stand at the Hammersmith Odeon, a venue no better suited to a band of Metallica’s hue than it had been two years earlier.