The band James Hetfield said was “everything” he wanted Metallica to be
When Metallica first got started, James Hetfield was the last one thinking that they were going to be global superstars.
No metal band outside of Black Sabbath had exactly become a household name on par with acts like Led Zeppelin, but as far as the thrash underground was concerned, that was only a good thing when bands like Slayer and Exodus started making waves. This was not music for the masses, but Hetfield and Lars Ulrich learned pretty quickly what could be done with the right tunes.
Although Metallica have basically turned themselves into the flagship band for metal to people that would never listen to the genre in their lives, that’s not a bad thing. There needed to be someone there to bring the genre to the masses, and while many people claimed that acts like Poison and Winger fell under the ‘metal’ banner when they first started making music, were any of their songs going to have a shot at competing with the likes of ‘Enter Sandman’ and ‘One’ back in the day?
But while The Black Album was the band’s ways of getting their foot in the door on the radio, it’s not like they were the most commercial band to begin with. They wrote long songs in their prime, and even if they had a bunch of hooks crammed into eight minutes, it’s not like they were going to cut out certain parts of ‘Master of Puppets’ or ‘Creeping Death’ for the radio format any time soon.
And the shorter songs in their catalogue at the time didn’t help much, either. Many people would have felt relief to hear a Metallica song under six minutes, but the fact that ‘Dyers Eve’ bludgeoned you at the end of And Justice For All pretty much guaranteed that it wouldn’t be sharing time on the underground stations next to the likes of The Cure or The Pixies. But Hetfield knew that if Judas Priest could do it, they could too.
While Priest was far from the most famous band in the world, they were one of the leading forces in metal at the time. Whereas Osbourne was the one constantly getting in trouble every single time he opened his mouth during the 1980s, the pure swagger behind a song like ‘You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’ was enough to get the band a staple slot on MTV and giving the genre a face on the charts for the first time.
Hetfield was into music that was much heavier, but he couldn’t deny that Priest was at the top of their list of influences, saying, “Judas Priest is everything we wanted to be as a band starting out. If someone asked you to define what Heavy Metal is, that’s one of the bands you’d show them.” But it’s more than the twin-guitar assault that resonated with Hetfield when he started building his first musical harmonies.
If you think about it, Judas Priest holds the title as the first ‘official’ metal band in many ways. Everyone from Sabbath to Zeppelin to Deep Purple gets the credit for helping found the genre when they first got the ball rolling, but since those bands never identified themselves as metal, Priest were the first to proudly claim the genre for themselves, complete with the whips, Rob Halford clad in leather and studs when he took to the stage, and singing about wanting to take on anything in their path.
Metallica may have been the ones taking that to its most logical conclusion when working on records like Ride the Lightning, but they never forgot the reason why they got permission to make that kind of music. There were plenty of avenues to go down in metal, but ‘Master of Puppets’ and ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’ would have never been possible were it not for songs like ‘Victim of Changes’ or ‘Beyond the Realms of Death’.
