He and Hetfield purposefully monkeyed with the mix, he said. Lars Ulrich was less diplomatic in his remembrance. Jason and I were always battling for the same space in the mix.” My guitar sound ate up all the lower frequencies. “Also, my tone on ‘Justice’ was very scooped-all lows and highs, with very little midrange. Was the band merely hazing Newsted? Did they weaponize their grief, finding some solace in cruelty and humiliation? “First, Jason tended to double my rhythm guitar parts, so it was hard to tell where my guitar started and his bass left off,” the guitarist and vocalist James Hetfield explained to Guitar World, in 2008. Yet none of the band’s mixes is more notorious than “. . . And Justice for All,” which contains almost no discernible bass. It’s perhaps true that no band has suffered more from bungled production than Metallica. Sixteen months after Burton’s death, Metallica regrouped in Los Angeles, and got to work on “. . . And Justice for All.” I can’t even imagine what that was like and I never want to know.” Metallica eventually hired Jason Newsted, who was then playing with the thrash-metal band Flotsam and Jetsam, to replace Burton. And then they saw his legs sticking out from under the side of the bus and they fucking lost their minds. Everyone was trying to account for everybody else, and no one could find Cliff. In his autobiography, Scott Ian, a guitarist in the group Anthrax, which was on tour with Metallica when the crash happened, recounts what the rest of the band saw the night Burton died: “It was pitch black. The band’s tour bus skidded over a patch of black ice in rural Sweden and rolled off the road. In 1986, Metallica’s founding bassist, Cliff Burton, was killed in a grisly accident. It includes the original album (now remastered) on two 180-gram vinyl records and two CDs, three live LPs, a picture disk, eleven CDs and four DVDs of unreleased content, a tour laminate, a set of four patches (ready for your mom to iron onto your jean jacket), a print by the popular metal illustrator Pushead, a folder containing facsimiles of handwritten lyric sheets, and a hundred-and-twenty-page hardcover book. Anger endures.Įarlier this month, Metallica released an expanded boxed set to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of their fourth record, “. . . And Justice for All.” I have been digging through its contents for weeks, trying to log and make sense of its pleasures. There was once a time when metal was associated chiefly with wispy mustaches, muscle cars, and dismembering cats, but it feels worth acknowledging that it’s hardly an outlier genre: there is a proven and long-standing desire for whatever catharsis metal enables. Metallica has sold more than fifty-eight million albums since 1991, easily outpacing Whitney Houston, U2, Fleetwood Mac, and Eminem. In the early nineteen-eighties, when Metallica formed, in San Francisco, it was instrumental (alongside Anthrax, Megadeth, and Slayer) in developing and perfecting the subgenre of thrash metal, which borrows the aggression of heavy metal but is faster, sharper, and significantly more insane. I’m not sure there’s another American band quite as adept at reflecting a certain kind of masculine rage-a deep and splintering fear of helplessness. One would be forgiven for presuming that Metallica’s emotional range runs merely from pissed to super-pissed.
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