‘And Justice for All’: the Metallica album that made their mixer want to quit
It’s 1988 and Metallica‘s Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield have just asked for Jason Newsted’s bass to be turned down to a practically inaudible level – a decision that would be heavily criticised, and associated, with the band’s fourth studio album, And Justice for All, thereafter.
Speaking in an interview with Loudwire nearly 30 years later, the band’s mixing engineer, Steve Thompson, gave his own account of the moment in which the controversial decision was made. “Now he goes, ‘See the bass guitar? And I said, ‘Yeah, great part, man. He killed it’,” Thompson recalled. “He said, ‘I want you to bring down the bass where you can barely audibly hear it in the mix.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding, right?’ He said, ‘No, bring it down.’ I bring it down to that level, and he says, ‘Now drop it down another five dB.’ I turned around and looked at Hetfield and said, ‘He’s serious?’ It just blew me away.”
The band first recruited Newsted following the tragic death of Cliff Burton in a bus accident in 1986. The bassist first appeared on a string of covers, including Diamond Head’s ‘Helpless’, under the name of ‘Master J Newkid’. It was after this self-produced release that the band took to the studio to begin recording for their fourth album.
According to Rolling Stone, if you look in the And Justice for All tablature books, Newsted’s notation mirrors Hetfield’s – something the bassist later suggested contributed to Ulrich and Hetfield’s decision. “It ended up with everything being in the same frequency – my bass and James’ guitar battling for the same frequency,” Newsted told Jefferey Easton in 2013. “If I had known then what I know now, it would have been different.”
While it has been debated whether the bass was turned down out of bitterness, given that Newsted claimed the band humiliated him when he first joined, Ulrich told Decibel that the decision was not intentional. “Justice was the James and Lars show from beginning to end, but it wasn’t ‘Fuck this guy — let’s turn his bass down,'” he said. “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.”
Although Thompson admired the band and wanted, more than anything, “to take Master of Puppets and blow that away”, Ulrich’s instruction had a greater impact than just pissing Newsted off. “At the end of the day, if the band want something regardless of what I think or say, it’s their record, they have to have final say – I get that,” Thompson said. “But I was so pissed off the way this was sounding, I called up my managers, and I said: ‘I love this band, but their direction, I’m not going to be happy with. Find somebody else to do this record.'”
But Thompson, known for his work with Guns N’ Roses and John Lennon, was told he couldn’t leave the project. Despite eventually being persuaded to mix the album, Thompson still regrets not being able to include the bass as he initially heard it.
Years later, at Metallica’s induction to the Hall of Fame, Ulrich would come up to Thompson and say, “We did have bass on that record, didn’t we?” to which he replied, “You’re kidding me. You’re absolutely kidding me” – a memory the Metallica mixer won’t be forgetting anytime soon.
