Enter Night, page 34
Arriving at One on One two weeks later, Rasmussen insisted the band start from scratch, keeping the rough cover versions, which could later be used as B-sides of singles, and just two of the drum tracks Clink had recorded with them, for the tracks ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ and ‘The Shortest Straw’. Flemming thinks it didn’t work with Clink because he ‘probably expected them to be more of a band-band where everybody played at the same time and you kind of took it from there. And they were nowhere near that at that time. They were fucking around with guitar sound and had been so for like two or three weeks, and James was really unpleased,’ he laughs. ‘When I spoke to Lars, he said, “We’re not gonna do another Master. It’s gonna be more in-your-face. It’s gonna be as pumped and as upfront as possible.”’
The end result was – as Lars had ordered – the hardest-sounding Metallica album yet, titled…And Justice for All, after the final line from the Declaration of Independence, used here as shock-horror metaphor for the more general theme of anger at injustice that permeates every track. The trouble was that angry noise appeared to be all there was to most of it, to the point of deadening the emotions it was trying so hard to evoke; a roomful of mirrors in which all the reflections are hideously distorted. Mostly, the whole thing just sounded flat, the drums, busy but tinny, the guitars, revved-up but muted, the vocals almost uniformly shouted and aggressive. If this was Metallica becoming more in-your-face, the effect was to push all but the most avid, hear-no-evil fan away; as unlovely a creation as anything Dr Frankenstein had sewn and bolted together in his laboratory.
It was hard not to conclude that for the first time, Metallica was not playing by instinct but doing something it thought it should – that with Slayer’s Reign in Blood having stolen the thrash crown they had so casually left lying around, and Guns N’ Roses now threatening to beat them to the punch when it came to subverting more mainstream rock tastes, Metallica were no longer leaders doing what came naturally but playing mental catch-up. Looking outside themselves for pointers to the way forward rather than lighting the path for others to follow. That with only Lars’ dreams and James’ nightmares to guide them, Cliff’s influence on Metallica would, from this moment on, be felt most powerfully by his absence. And that to begin with they were utterly lost. Writing about ‘mental anguish’ is ‘what I like’, James would boast: ‘Physical pain is nothing compared to mental scarring – that shit sticks with you for ever. People dying in your life always makes you think.’ Had Cliff’s death become one of those things he’d thought about too much?
The first Metallica album clearly built for CD – with a total running time of over sixty-five minutes – the track sequencing still followed the same template as Ride and Master, beginning with a rallying-call opener, in this case ‘Blackened’; lyrically a howl of rage against the destruction of the environment, musically very much in the mould of ‘Battery’, although less effective, and the only track on the album on which Newsted gets a co-credit. From there it was on to the self-consciously epic title track, one of the longest and most tedious songs the band would ever record. Built around a quirky Ulrich drum tattoo and the sound of marching guitars, with James railing against how ‘Justice is lost / Justice is raped / Justice is gone…’, at almost ten minutes long, ‘Justice’ digs its own grave and buries itself, eliciting a huge sigh of relief from the listener when it finally – finally – slams to a halt. It’s not that it’s such a bad Metallica track – it would have shone more brightly on Ride, perhaps, where the band was still establishing its credentials, and Hammett’s guitars, for which he receives the first of his three co-writing credits, are exemplary. It’s just that the whole endeavour is so earnest, bitter, unrelenting, that there is little of real excitement here, just the unhappy sound of one man and his pain. Similarly, the samey-sounding tribute-to-Cliff instrumental ‘To Live is to Die’ was a sincere gesture rendered almost meaningless by the fact that it’s the longest track on an album choked with tracks that outstay their welcome.
The rest of the album – with one notable exception – continued along the same dark, tangled path. Again, it’s not that tracks such as ‘The Shortest Straw’ or ‘The Frayed Ends of Sanity’ are outright bad – both typically brutish rockers that would have taken pride of place on Ride, perhaps – but after the sophisticated production and arrangements on Master and the warm, all-inclusive atmosphere of Garage Days, more was now expected of Metallica. Right at the moment they should have been delivering another sonic milestone, they had reverted to boorish type. What would have sounded scaldingly new four years before now sounded lumpen and off the pace.
Even the first single from the album, ‘Harvester of Sorrow’, was horribly plodding. ‘Lyrically, this song is about someone who leads a very normal life, has a wife and three kids, and all of a sudden one day, he just snaps and starts killing the people around him,’ Lars explained at the time. If only the music had sounded even half as interesting; the fact that it reached Number Twenty in the UK charts was probably down to the by-now-huge Metallica fan base that was ready to buy whatever the band did next, plus the variety of different formats Phonogram were now able to market the record in. Similarly, the next track fed to US radio, although not physically released as a single, ‘Eye of the Beholder’ – coming straight after the title track on the album, it sounded simply like more of the same, its saving grace on radio that its faded-in staccato rhythm was attention-grabbing enough to sustain the listener through the first couple of minutes before its droning repetitiveness finally zeroed you out. ‘Do you see what I see?’ James intones solemnly. ‘Truth is an offence…’, but clearly nobody had dared tell the band the truth about their new album.
The exception to all this – the sole gleaming diamond in the dirt – was the track ‘One’; Metallica’s most ambitious and successful musical experiment yet, and their most deeply affecting song. The macabre story of an infantryman who steps on a landmine and wakes to gradually discover he has lost everything – his arms and legs, his five senses – except his mind, which is now cast adrift, trapped in its own grim and impossible reality, ‘One’ was both nightmare writ large and musically transcendent journey. It was a thrash metal Tommy in miniature, depicting the protagonist’s descent into living hell, wordlessly begging for death, capable of being seen both as existential metaphor for the human condition and the solipsism of the rock star life, its frantic climax also serving to relate a state of inarticulate teenage angst like no other rock song before or since.
Partially based on the 1939 Dalton Trumbo novel, Johnny Got His Gun, ‘One’ had started as a song James was thinking about based on the notion of ‘just being a brain and nothing else’ before Cliff Burnstein suggested he read Trumbo’s book. The story of Joe Bonham, a good-looking, all-American boy encouraged to fight in World War I by his patriotic father, who urges him to ‘be brave’, when a German shell explodes near him, Bonham loses his legs, eyes, ears, mouth and nose. After coming to terms with his gruesome circumstances in hospital while surrounded by frankly horrified doctors and nurses, Bonham uses the only part of his physical being he is still able to control – his head – to tap out a message in Morse code: ‘Please kill me.’ ‘James got a lot of input from that,’ said Lars. So did Mensch and Burnstein when they heard the demo.
There was another important change to their strategy they’d decided on before going into the studio: unlike Master of Puppets, there would be at least one recognisable single and – even more significantly – video on the next album. Despite their public posturing, Dave Thorne says the question of singles had never been completely ruled out. ‘When I’d quizzed Mensch about it in the past, he’d always said, “Well, if the right opportunity comes along, the band might consider it.”’ Thorne speculates that it was probably Elektra who ‘they had a strong working relationship with’ that probably convinced them to at least give it a go. In fact, both James and Lars had come round to the idea of a regular Metallica single and video since the unexpected success that year of Garage Days and, in particular, Cliff ’Em All – the first clear indication they’d had that they didn’t need to make videos by anyone’s rules but their own. Mensch and Burnstein, who already understood the huge sales value of having a single and attendant video on MTV, were merely biding their time, waiting for the right moment to broach the subject again with Lars and James.
That moment came with the realisation that ‘One’ might lend itself well to some sort of visual interpretation that would complement the music in an arresting, artistic way. They became even more excited by the idea when it emerged that Trumbo – a left-wing, pro-peace screenwriter hounded out of Hollywood during the McCarthy-era witch hunts of the 1950s – had actually directed a film version of the book, released in 1971 at the height of the Vietnam War. Might they be able to utilise scenes from it for a possible future video? Burnstein wondered. According to Rasmussen, they had actually bought the rights to the movie ‘in order to use it in the video’ before they had even begun recording with him: ‘It was not much of a movie but they liked the look of it and thought it would look great in a video.’ They also utilised some of the special effects on the original soundtrack, layering the sound of machine-gun fire and exploding landmines over the intro to the track.
As ‘Stairway to Heaven’ became for Led Zeppelin and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for Queen, ‘One’ for Metallica represented the band at its musical apotheosis, containing all that was great and original about them in one incident-filled journey, from its quietly lush, heartrendingly melodic guitar intro to its steadily building mid-section, up to its volcanic, lights-out climax; its lyrics coming straight to the terrifying point: ‘Hold my breath as I wish for death…Now the world is gone / I’m just one…’ This was not the standard rock stance of a Van Halen or Mötley Crüe, or even a Guns N’ Roses. This was revelation, a song utterly removed from its time; its unforeseen side effect, to alter the circumstances surrounding Metallica for ever. You didn’t have to be a Metallica fan to appreciate the artistry of ‘One’, any more than you have to be a Zeppelin fan to adore ‘Stairway’. But if you were, it was a milestone moment; one the band would arguably never equal.
Tellingly, the only other track after ‘One’ that just about manages to transcend its laboured surrounds is the album’s shortest, ‘Dyer’s Eve’, its speedy razor-cut riff a moment of breathe-out relief after the tortuous slabs of prog-metal that precede it. The final track on the album, as climaxes go it’s good but not in the same game as ‘Damage, Inc.’, its success a mark of how heavy-handed the rest of the album sounds next to it. It was also, interestingly, the first Hetfield lyric – ‘Dear Mother / Dear Father / What is this hell you have put me through?’ – in which he directly addresses some of the issues of his repressed childhood: ‘It’s basically about this kid who’s been hidden from the real world by his parents the whole time he was growing up, and now that he’s in the real world he can’t cope with it and is contemplating suicide,’ Lars explained. ‘It’s basically a letter from the kid to his parents, asking them why they didn’t expose him to the real world…’ It would not be the last self-portrait from the pen of James Hetfield.
With its flat, wooden sound, its increasingly hollow-sounding anger, its less-palatable-because-it’s-more-real bitterness and, most of all, its horribly self-regarding posturing, instead of being the radically ‘different’ masterpiece Lars had envisaged, Justice was a sideways step at best, a miscalculation; at worst a disfiguringly weird statement they would all largely disown as time went by and better albums were made. Its only real saving grace was the extraordinary ‘One’ – and the fact that it united them in never again wanting to make an album so bleak in its outlook or dire in its musical palate. The days of Metallica the out-and-out heavy metal monster were now numbered.
The great irony was that the place where they seemingly aimed to be most innovatory was the area in which Justice sounds most unconvincing of all: the production. As Rasmussen says, ‘The sound was totally dry…thin and hard and loud.’ In fact, the whole album seems curiously void of reverb, the special sauce used to make the most mediocre sound sparkle in a mix. Rasmussen doesn’t disagree but maintains he delivered ‘almost ninety-nine per cent’ of the sound he was instructed to get: ‘Everybody was really pleased with it once we’d finished and then about a month or so after, people were starting not to be so pleased. But over time it’s probably the album that’s influenced most metal bands ever.’ Maybe so. Certainly David Ellefson of Megadeth wouldn’t disagree: ‘Because it was so progressive, it was complicated. In the early days we all prided ourselves on how fast we played. Then there came a point where we prided ourselves on how complicated we could be. Musical intellectual pride or some bullshit, you know?’ He laughs. ‘If there was just some bass in here this thing would be fuckin’ heavy, you know? Really heavy…’
As Ellefson suggests, the most glaring omission from the sound on…And Justice for All was any evidence of Jason Newsted’s bass; an unforgivable omission given that this was his first album with Metallica, and their first without Cliff Burton. Over the years there have been a variety of reasons given for this, from the accusation that Lars and James simply turned down the sound of Jason’s bass in the mix as another part of his hazing; to the suggestion that technically they simply didn’t leave enough room in there to hear Jason’s bass between James’ staccato rhythm guitar and Lars’ booming bass drum.
‘I was so in the dirt,’ said Newsted, speaking more than ten years later. ‘I was so disappointed when I heard the final mix. I basically blocked it out, like people do with shit. We were firing on all cylinders, and shit was happening. I was just rolling with it and going forward. What was I gonna do, say we gotta go remix it?’ There were, he said, ‘still weird feelings going on…the first time we’d been in the studio for a real Metallica album, and Cliff’s not there’. Working alone with assistant engineer Toby Wright, he had used the same bass set-up as he would for a gig: ‘There was no time taken about you place this microphone here, and this one sounds better than that…should you use a pick, should you use your fingers? Any of the things that I know now.’ Recording three or four songs in a day, ‘basically doubling James’ guitar parts’, he was in the studio alone for less than a week during the whole three-month period the rest of the band were working with Rasmussen. ‘Usually nowadays I’d take a day per song. That’s what I do on albums. But back then, I didn’t even know anything about that shit. Just played it and that was that, right?’
Mike Clink says the lack of bass was an issue even when he was working with them: ‘They weren’t leaving enough room…sonically, to fit the bass in. But that was their concept and I think that if Cliff had been there it might have been a bit different. But with the new member, I felt he didn’t have as much to say. I think he was just happy to be there, at that moment. I think Jason just said, “This is the way it is, let’s roll with it.”’ He adds, ‘It’s also the sound of the guitar. It takes up a lot of room in the sonic spectrum. But ultimately that was the decision of the band and the mixer.’ Rasmussen makes the same point about the mix. ‘I know for a fact, since I recorded it, that there’s brilliant bass-playing on that album.’ Like Clink, however, Flemming was not responsible for the mix. That task fell to the production team of Mike Thompson and Steven Barbiero, whose previous credits included Whitney Houston, Madonna, the Rolling Stones, Prince, Cinderella, Tesla – and Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction.
Mixing took place during May 1988, at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, where James and Lars sat perched over Thompson and Barbiero’s shoulders. Interviewed at the time by Music & Sound Output magazine, Lars’ and James’ comments certainly back up Clink’s and Rasmussen’s claims that they – and not the producers – were the real architects behind the sound on Justice. Asked how it differed from Master, Hetfield said: ‘Drier.’ He went on: ‘Everything’s way up front and there’s not a lot of ’verb or echo. We really went out of our way to make sure that what we put on the tape was what we wanted, so the mixing procedure would be as easy as possible.’ Both men complained that they didn’t want it to be like Ride the Lightning, where ‘Flemming was in a reverb daze’. More tellingly, asked what they had learned from the ‘upfront and raw’ sound of the Garage Days EP, Lars specifically mentioned ‘that mix’, with James elaborating: ‘We learned that the bass is too loud.’
‘And when is the bass too loud?’ Lars chirped in.
‘When you can hear it!’ they answered together, laughing.
Joey Vera, who’d turned down the chance to do the job Jason eventually got but who was genuinely close to James and Lars – and Cliff – says Jason was ‘more than capable’ but that he’d heard ‘James may have played the bass’ on much of Justice. He also dismisses the idea that it was part of the ongoing hazing process: ‘I’d be surprised if they did anything like that. It would be too malicious and too premeditated.’ Instead, he believes it may have been ‘this psychological way of them sort of hiding the fact that they were still recovering from what they went through [with Cliff’s death] and that they weren’t quite sure how to get out of it.’ Also, ‘They didn’t want any attention going away from the fact that they were ploughing ahead…and the way for them to do that, sonically, is to make the drums and the rhythm guitars the loudest thing you hear.’ He concluded, ‘When Cliff was gone they had to make it evident that, you know, the two of us is what you’re gonna hear…it was a way for them to sort of heal themselves. Like, you know, we need to be heard, this is how we’re gonna be doing it. They didn’t want to be distracted by who the new bass player was or how that role fit in sonically.’
Whatever the truth, by the time mixing had begun in Woodstock, Metallica was already back out on the road, on the US version of the Monsters of Rock festival: twenty-five dates at the biggest outdoor stadia in America, performing to upwards of 90,000 people a night; fourth on the bill below headliners Van Halen, the Scorpions and fellow Q Prime clients Dokken. I travelled with the band for the opening two dates of the tour in Florida, at the Miami Orangebowl and the Tampa Stadium. ‘This has got to be the easiest trip we’ve ever done,’ Lars laughingly told me. You could see what he meant. Although Metallica was on in the middle of the afternoon, they were the hot ‘break-out’ band of the tour and audiences were uniformly ecstatic. With just a forty-minute set to perform, the band also had an unusual amount of free time to fill. ‘I’ve been drinking since I woke up this morning,’ James announced with a belch before they went onstage in Tampa, at the start of the tour.
