The Death, Burial, And Resurrection Of Metallica
The Death, Burial, And Resurrection Of Metallica
By Todd Andrew Ballard
I was late to the Metallica party. In 1984, when their second studio album was released, I was 11 years old, standing in line at a Target with a vinyl copy of Michael Jackson’s Thriller in my hand. It was the first album I ever bought with my own money. I remember it well. For one, I went halfsies with my brother on the purchase, and secondly, all the other records in the house belonged to my mother. We grew up on Neil Diamond, Olivia Newton John, and Steve Miller Band. Michael Jackson was our own. This wasn’t mom’s music. This was ours.
I took to emulating Jackson, later obtaining a copy of Off The Wall. I would dance around my bedroom mimicking his every move with a fake leather jacket and a makeshift white glove, sans sequins. My brother and I learned to moonwalk and break dance after seeing Breakin’ and Beat Street and somehow acquiring an actual Breakin’ tutorial cassette.
But all of that changed when my brother, three years my senior, went to see Ozzy Osbourne in concert and came home with an album by an unknown band called Motley Crue. And a motley crew they were! When he popped the cassette in the deck and hit play on that record and the down strumming of the guitar from Live Wire hit my ears, something awakened inside of me. It truly was a Live Wire.
“I’m alive!” I sang along, over and over again.
I began acquiring as many Metal albums as I could. Soon my tape deck was full of Kiss, Twisted Sister, Ratt, Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Poison, Guns and Roses, Quiet Riot, Def Leppard, all the usual suspects of the time. But I kept going back to Live Wire. Sure, I absolutely loved Shout At The Devil and Girls, Girls, Girls, but there was something missing. The other bands I loved and listened to weren’t producing it either. By the time Skid Row emerged on the scene, I was lost in glam Metal, and forgot all about the beauty and speed of that riff from “Live Wire.”
But then something happened. I’m guessing it was sometime in late 1988, because I know it predated the release of the “One” video and the craze that began after the 31st Annual Grammy Awards in ‘89, when they performed “One” live. I had just become friends with a guy at school who was a huge Metal fan. He was the only person I know who had Slayer albums on display in his bedroom. (The fact that his parents allowed him to do that during the Satanic Panic blew my mind!) He brought “Master of Puppets” over to my house, and when the needle dropped on “Battery,” I was born again.
There was nothing like it, and there was no turning back. The song began with a classical guitar piece, sounding more like an orchestra than a heavy Metal album. Thirty-seven seconds in, guitars and drums slammed my ears. And then it happened . . . at 1:06, the down picking began and then the staccato. Chug, chug, chug . . . pause . . . chug, chug, chug. And on and on it went. It was an all-out assault, a literal battery of music that I never imagined existed. My buddy had cranked the volume to eleven, as they say, since my parents weren’t home. I felt like we were under attack. It didn’t sound like anything I had heard before, being my first foray into Speed Metal/Thrash. I was lost in it. It was electric. This was the real live wire I was looking for, the jolt of electricity, the pounding, the onslaught of pure Heavy Metal!
Because it wasn’t just Metal.It was truly heavy–the gravity of it was not lost on me even as a teenager. And the vocals! That vocal was the epitome of heavy Metal, gruff but shrill enough to break glass!
When I asked the name of the band and my buddy said, Metallica, I almost couldn’t believe my ears. Metallica? That’s the name of the band? Even their name was perfect! And to this day I still feel that way. Metallica has absolutely got to be the best, most straightforward band name for a heavy Metal band, which is perfect, because no one has done heavy Metal the way Metallica does. I’ve heard hundreds of heavy Metal bands at this point, but none of them, not a single one of them, has had the same impact on me as Metallica, or any Metal fan for that matter! Simply listen to the bands that came after Metallica, and all you hear is emulation.
But it wasn’t always so. Not for me, and not for hundreds upon hundreds of Metallica fans worldwide. Something improbable would happen to Metallica shortly after they put out their fourth studio album that would alienate their fan base and turn them into an anathema to heavy Metal fans everywhere.
Metallica became a really shit band for a very long time.
Some say the death of Metallica began with the death of their bass player and the split with their lead guitarist. I remember watching Cliff Em’ All and falling in love with Cliff Burton posthumously. My buddy bought the VHS at Karma Records, and we watched it together that afternoon as soon as we got home, clad in our Metallica t-shirts, skin-tight black denim pants, and Chuck Taylors. From the moment Burton stepped out of the stage to do that bass solo, “the major rager on the four-string motherfucker,” I was forever enchanted. He played that bass like he was playing lead guitar, creating sonics I had never heard or have ever heard again. But Metallica would lose him and lose their lead guitar player, Dave Mustaine, who would go on to create Megadeth.
The argument that the band died at this time is fair since Mustaine and Burton equally had a huge impact on the overall sound of Metallica with their writing of lead and bass parts respectively. When you listen to the first two albums, “Kill” and “RTL”, and then follow up with the third release, “Puppets”, there is a distinct sonic difference, most notably the production, but also the change in tempo and arrangements on numerous tracks. One could argue, however, the continuity of “The Four Horseman” (the first four Metallica studio LPs), since all four albums contain instrumentals and songs that clearly sound both Thrash and Rock Metal stylistically, rather than straight Speed Metal. For instance, none of these records sounds entirely like “Reign In Blood” by Slayer, though they contain elements of the quintessential sound.
Metallica returned to the studio in July of 1987 with a whole new lineup, featuring Kirk Hammett on lead and Jason Newsted on bass. This became THE Metallica lineup that most people know. Newsted would eventually depart. Historically, Metallica has been James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, and Kirk Hammett. This is undeniable, and all three take part in writing the music.
Hetfield is the lyricist, writes a lot of riffs and rhythms, and even writes solos. He writes the melodies as well, so most of the hooks from Metallica are all James. Hammett writes solos and riffs. Ulrich writes the drum parts and arrangements. So, all in all, Metallica, as we know them and have always known them, are these three guys.
The death of Metallica, for most fans, happened in 1991, with the release of their biggest-selling album of all time, their self-titled “Metallica”. What has historically become known as “The Black Album” (None more black!) sold over 30 million copies, garnering a whole new fan base and thrusting Metallica into mainstream Rock. The album was incredible, but it alienated actual Metallica fans worldwide. The band hired Bob Rock, a Rock producer, who famously produced Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood, and Aerosmith’s Permanent Vacation, among others. Fleming Rasmussen had produced the previous three albums from The Four Horseman canon. Rasmussen simply produced what Metallica wanted, while Rock actually influenced the band musically, challenging them to shorten their songs and write intentionally for radio format. As a musician, Rock actually changed the sound of Metallica.
Though it wasn’t all bad (there are some amazing Metallica songs on “The Black Album”) Metallic fans worldwide could not believe their ears. Even the vocals were entirely different! Hetfield had taken voice lessons after straining to sing songs while recording the album, so the iconic shrill was gone and replaced by a deeper, more guttural vocal that ended seemingly every line with a “Ruff!” or a “Woh-oh!” Fans would revel in mocking it publicly and then go home and listen to The Four Horsemen and secretly listen to the B-side of Black, enjoying the heavier tunes the Rock album had to offer. (And then there were the songs that Hetfield sang too beautiful to seemingly even be Hetfield! Fans initially supposed Lars or someone else was singing them!)
Though The Black Album is undeniably one of the best Rock/heavy Metal albums of all time, it was not anything like a Metallica album, and the fact that it would be followed by the three worst Metallica albums of all time – “Load”, “Reload”, and “St. Anger” – made it blasphemous to the pre-1990’s Metallica fanbase. Millions of people worldwide were now on the Metallica train, but most of Metallica’s original fan base had jumped the tracks. It was clear. Metallica wasn’t just lost; they were dead. They were a Hard Rock band now, having more in common with AC/DC than Slayer.
The late nineties offered some hope for the band, but it wouldn’t be until the mid 2000’s that a genuine resurrection would take place. The release of “S&M” in 1999, a symphonic rendering of songs off The Four Horseman, encouraged the original fan base that Metallica, as the band they knew, may one day resurface. A buzz began in online message boards and the chatter amongst fans seemed to be optimistic, but you could not have a real conversation with most fans without someone saying the now hackneyed phrase “Metallica only has four good albums.” And they said it with a lot of disappointment in their voice, because we all knew who Metallica could be. It was as though they were a child not living up to their full potential. We wanted so much more for the band than it seemed they even wanted for themselves.
So in 2004, Metallica as a band, for most, was laid to rest. It was documented completely in “Some Kind Of Monster”, a film that as a fan I couldn’t even watch. Like me, most fans couldn’t bear to see the band’s death played out before our very eyes on screen.
All that changed, however, in 2008. Metallica partnered with Rick Rubin, the producer of what can be considered the greatest Thrash album of all time, Slayer’s “Reign In Blood”. Up until Reign, Slayer had relied heavily on reverb and created “muddy” mixes that Rubin felt were “just a blur.” Rubin said there was no “punctuation” in Slayer’s music. Being a hip-hop producer, he focused on the loss of bass in the mix. Rubin even played a Metallica album to the engineer as an example of what he was looking for. In an interview with Rick Beato, Rubin said, “I had a theory. This [was] not based on being a musician [or] being a technical person. This is based on
being a fan and . . . just thoughts. So, when I hear very fast music like Metallica, the sounds are big, like on Rock records. The whole thing gets blurry, and you can’t really hear the fast tempos. If the music you’re playing is fast and if the sounds are big, there’s not enough space for those big sounds to happen next to each other. There’s no punctuation; it becomes a blur. [So] I played him a Metallica record as an example of what I thought was wrong and I said, ‘Would it be possible to record in such a way that it was hard-but everything was short, because it’s fast and we want there to be this?’ I didn’t want it to be a blur of bass, I wanted it to be a pulse.”
So, oddly enough, it would take the producer of arguably the quintessential Thrash record, who used Metallica’s very own recordings as examples to produce said record, to bring the band back to life. It actually makes sense, considering Rubin told the band they needed to “re-embrace being Metallica.” Rubin believed the band kept trying to reinvent themselves and had forgotten who they were, when all along, they were the most original Thrash band, and everyone loved them for it.
Rubin told Rolling Stone, “I tried to get them to re-engage with everything everybody fell in love with, with Metallica, in the first place. I got them to listen to the music that they were listening to at the time they made “Master of Puppets”, those influences. I asked them to live with those influences and spend more time playing together as a band.’
He continued: “They’d fallen into a trap of using the studio more as an instrument and punching in parts to get the perfection they were looking for than they were getting through raw performance power. It was about getting them to not try ideas by editing them together with a machine, but to try playing them in different orders to see what they felt like. And they really ended up getting back to being a band.
“Anytime Lars would want to sit at the computer and try and write, I would insist that he and the band would all play together. [Laughs] Some of it was just a habit for them. It’s easy to try a lot of ideas if you don’t have to play them. But if you’re playing one part and it’s going to go into the next part, you might play the first part or the second part slightly differently, and the way that they bleed into each other or oppose each other can happen in a way that’s musical. You can hear that here. That doesn’t happen when you randomly click pieces together.”
Rubin added: “The other writing experiment I challenged them with was, ‘Imagine there was no such band as Metallica. Imagine you guys are in the band that you are in, this band, and you’re going to play in a ‘Battle Of The Bands.’ You want to blow people away. What does that sound like? Without the baggage of thinking it needs to be any certain thing, what is the thing that you feel will tear the heads off of the audience?’ It really worked out good. I love that whole Death Magnetic album.”
The album with a cover featuring an open grave represents the resurrection of Metallica to their fan base. “Death Magnetic” would go on to become platinum, surpassing “St. Anger”, the previous album, in sales. In 2016 the band followed up with “Hardwired to Self Destruct”, and
then 2023’s “72 Seasons”, both amazing Thrash records in their own right. And the results are truly magnetic, reviving the original Metallica fan base.
Hetfield later said in an interview that Rubin was rarely physically there during the recording of “Magnetic”, allowing the band to write and record together as they once had, without the influence of someone outside the band trying to write their music. Rubin isn’t a musician or a recording engineer. He’s simply a fan, and that’s how he was able to resurrect the band–a fan giving the fans what they wanted all along–Metallica, the band we all fell in love with all those years ago.
Disclaimer: This article is solely the property of Todd Andrew Ballard. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this article, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
