The one producer James Hetfield said got “the best” out of everyone: “He taps in”
Any great producer should always act like the unofficial member of the band half the time. Anyone can start to twiddle knobs in the studio and look like they have the group’s best interest when mixing, but James Hetfield knew any producer needed to have a good understanding of Metallica to have any of their albums get off the ground.
Looking through the thrash icons’ discography, though, not every great record that they made needed to have the best production behind everything. Everyone might like to clown on St Anger for the questionable mixing choices behind the scenes, but the sad fact is that And Justice For All had the same amount of messiness despite having much stronger songs across the entire record.
While Flemming Rasmussen knew the best way to get the raw sounds out of their music in their thrash days, the pairing of them with Bob Rock in the early 1990s was a match made in heaven. Most people didn’t know what lay ahead for them on St Anger, but given the fact that Rock had worked with everyone from Bon Jovi to Aerosmith in the past, he managed to turn their thrash-rock foundation into the sound of hard rock to come.
Not everything that they played on their 1990s records was meant for a mainstream audience, but when they did get vulnerable on ‘Nothing Else Matters’, people were much more likely to see what was underneath the surface when they heard other ballads like ‘The Unforgiven’ or ‘Fade to Black’. After St Anger bottomed out after one too many lacklustre riffs, though, they needed someone with fresh ears.
It’s not like Rock was a terrible producer at that point, but he had simply grown too close to the band. He approached the last album as their friend before anything else, and after spending years working with him, Rick Rubin was a great choice for them to switch things up. His track record may have been strange, producing everyone from Slayer to Beastie Boys to Johnny Cash, but Hetfield felt that was only a plus for them when they began working on Death Magnetic.
Everyone might have expected them to go back to their old tricks, but Hetfield felt that Rubin helped bring out the best of what Metallica could do, saying, “Rick Rubin is extremely good at getting the best out of any artist he’s worked with. He does [it] all. Somehow, he taps in. He’s got a good vibe, and a good ear, and we think we do too. So sometimes there’s a little bit of this — we like our things the way we like them, he likes his things the way he likes them — but with two great powers putting something together, I think we’ll come up with something pretty amazing.”
At this point in their career, the band really needed to be pushed. A lot of their previous records saw them trying desperately to piece their sound together, so now that they actually had something to prove, Rubin’s challenge for them to get to the root of their music resulted in the sturdiest songwriting that they had in years on tracks like ‘All Nightmare Long’ and ‘My Apocalypse’.
Like all Rubin-produced albums from around this time, Death Magnetic does fall victim to the loudness wars a little bit, but most fans can look past shoddy mixing choices when it comes to Metallica. They had seen their idols fall from grace in the years leading up to this, so it was a miracle to hear that they could actually sound like the metal icons that everyone remembered from the days of Master of Puppets.
