The one musician who defined America for James Hetfield: “Gotta fly the flag”
When James Hetfield formed Metallica back in the 1980s, the entire metal genre was still finding out what it wanted to be.
Black Sabbath and Deep Purple had started everything back in the 1970s, but when looking at the other kinds of rock and roll that were happening at the time, the new wave of British heavy metal was still fairly underground compared to what was coming out of the punk movement and the new wave scenes at the time. But even after being defined by their trademark genre, Hetfield wasn’t afraid to listen to music that was a bit outside of his usual wheelhouse.
No artist gets to where they are without having a few tonal shifts every now and again, but it’s not like Hetfield was ever going to come out with anything too risque. Sorry to those five people who probably killed to hear what his synthwave album might have sounded like, but Hetfield knew what he was about, and that was centred around making the heaviest riffs that he ever could whenever he picked up a guitar.
But the greatest musicians in the world do have those few moments where they can switch things up, and Load was the first time that we got to hear what that sounded like. Not everyone liked the idea that the band cut their hair, and there were more than a few fans who called them sellouts for even trying to make something different, but it’s not like Hetfield was ever going to change the way he wrote. He could change his vocal style, sure, but a lot of the best moments on their records usually came from him trying out different spaces within his voice.
Half of The Black Album was about him learning how to be a singer, and even if that required him going through his fair share of vocal lessons, he still came out sounding like himself at the end of the day. But aside from the half-hearted attempts on Load to sound like people like Layne Staley or Billy Corgan, you can hear a lot of old-school country in the way that he delivers a lot of his ballads.
‘Mama Said’ is a straight country tune, and that came from Hetfield listening to some of the giants of the genre back in the day. He was a fan of what he heard out of people like Waylon Jennings whenever he made those downtempo songs, but he felt that no one else captured what he wanted out of country music like Johnny Cash. For starters, Cash was known as one of the darkest country stars in the world, and that suited Hetfield’s taste in music just fine when he heard his tunes.
So when he got the opportunity to work with Rick Rubin on Death Magnetic, Hetfield said that a lot of the reason why he chose the bearded producer was down to his work with Cash during the final years of his life, saying, “[He presented classic artists] again and gave them another chance to speak. Especially Johnny Cash. Johnny was totally screwed by his record company, and kind of disappeared. It’s like, ‘Come on, Johnny Cash is America. This has to rise to the top again, somehow. Gotta fly the flag!’”
And that kind of darkness seems to suit Hetfield’s brand of rock and roll pretty well too. Cash was never going to be singing along to a track like ‘Whiplash’, but when you look at the way that Hetfield approached a lot of his vocals, there’s a good chance that Cash could have done a decent version of a song like ‘One’ or even ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’ had he done a complete facelift of the song just like he did for Soundgarden’s ‘Rusty Cage’.
But more than anything, Cash was the symbol for what kids like Hetfield thought living like a troubadour was supposed to be. He did have his sensitive side now and again, but the idea of someone going through life with their boots on and middle finger held aloft in the air could fit any country star just as well as some leather-clad metal icon.
