The accident behind Metallica song ‘Sad But True’
By the start of the 1990s, Metallica had already made a name for themselves as one of the most monumental metal bands to roam the Earth. Across their first four albums, metal fans were given a clinic in how to write dominating rock songs with a fury no one had ever heard before. However, once the band entered the next decade, they knew they had to shake it up.
Going into the studio for their self-titled Black Album, the band picked Bob Rock as the main producer for the project. Having turned in time working behind the board for artists like Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, Rock was a contentious pick amongst Metallica fans, thinking he would water the band down to radio-rock fodder.
Then again, the band were looking to write more straightforward songs anyhow, with Lars Ulrich stating in Classic Albums, “The goal was to write simple songs. Simple songs compared to where we had been before.” Despite Rock’s penchant for making rock staples, he was responsible for the band going heavier on one of their first singles.
For as much as fans cry “sell out” over the record, a handful of the best riffs from the project came from jams that the band had been working on since the days of Master of Puppets. One of those included the demo of what would become ‘Sad But True’, which was initially written at a much faster tempo.
As far as James Hetfield was concerned, the song needed to go heavier by slowing down the tempo, recalling, “This we argued about a lot because that riff sounded so happy when you tried to play it sped up. Even the vocals, they sound too rushed.”
Adopting a Sabbath-esque tone to the guitars, Hetfield’s decision to slow down the song led to one of the band’s greatest head-banging moments. There was one piece missing from the puzzle, though, and Rock suggested it after casually looking at the keys of each song on a sheet.
Speaking with Gibson, Rock noticed that every song was in the same key, explaining, “Maybe six songs in, I noticed that every song was in E. And I just went, ‘Why is everything in E?’ and James says, ‘It’s the lowest note’. So I said, ‘Sabbath detunes, and Motley detunes to D. Have you ever done that?’. So they detuned down to D, and the next song was ‘Sad But True’.”
The idea of detuning also played into one of the songs further down the album, ‘The God That Failed’. Even though Metallica were known for playing most of their tunes in standard tuning, tuning down would become a staple of their next few years, with most of Load and Reload being tuned a half-step lower than normal and St Anger going down to drop-C.
Though Rock had a tumultuous relationship with the band through the initial recording process, he remembers that one suggestion shifting the dynamic with the rest of the band, saying, “That’s just totally by accident where it happened. That’s why it sounds the way it does. They were like, Wow!’. They started to like me on that day just a little bit. I think they started having lunch with me.”
