Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (38 page)

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 attention; 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’.