‘…And Justice for All’: the bass-less Metallica album Lars Ulrich considers more athletic than musical
The story of Metallica has the sort of twists, turns and melodramas that would put a telenovela to shame. There’s ludicrous success and even more ludicrous excess. Some of the best heavy metal ever made and some of the worst. Fistfights, group therapy, chocolate addiction and, seemingly at the centre of it all, death. The bus crash that took the life of original bassist Cliff Burton left scars that have only recently begun to heal, and if you want proof of how badly it hurt them, look no further than the treatment of his replacement, Jason Newsted.
A lot of the time, when you take away the rock ‘n’ roll aspect of rock star bad behaviour, what remains is pretty pathetic. A bunch of stunted man-children, coddled by money and fame, using a position of privilege to lord their own authority over those around them. Sure, it’s compelling. Take away their tell-all book, The Dirt, and Mötley Crüe are literally nothing. It doesn’t stop it from being truly gross, and Metallica’s 1980s become a truly harrowing story when looked at in the cold light of day.
What Newsted went through was nothing less than a bunch of overgrown boys finding an outlet for their grief and guilt over losing a friend and hurting him in a fruitless attempt at finding peace. Metallica has never sounded like a peaceful place to be, but their treatment of Newsted went far beyond hazing to the point where it stopped being acts of individual bullying and began being active career sabotage.
By Burton’s passing, Metallica had already made their first masterpiece, Master of Puppets, so all eyes weren’t just on them because of the tragedy surrounding them; they were also on where they’d go next. Where they went next was …And Justice for All, which sounds like a tinny, churning mess. The songs are brilliant, but there’s a reason that, despite everything, it’s still the band’s second (and in many eyes, final) masterpiece.
So, what did Metallica do wrong?
It can’t be a coincidence that the record has absolutely no bass whatsoever. Newsted’s brilliant work is buried so low in the mix that the guitars and drums completely dominate him, a fitting tribute to his time in the band altogether. This was after he’d written the main riff to ‘Blackened’, by the way, one of the band’s most beloved songs to this day.
The truly humiliating thing is that James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich still can’t own up to their bullshit four decades later. In a Playboy interview conducted in 2004, Ulrich said he viewed …Justice as “the only record of ours that I’m not entirely comfortable with” but not for the obvious reason. No, instead, it’s because “It became about ability and almost athletics, rather than music.” You’ve almost got to admire the brass bollocks of the lad, that’s the kind of self-assurance you won’t get from a decade of reading The Secret.
It didn’t end there, either. Case in point, Steve Thompson was one of the engineers who mixed …Justice. In an interview with Blabbermouth, he spoke of being flown out to Metallica’s Rock And Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2009, where he said, “I’m sitting with Lars. He goes, ‘Hey, what happened to the bass in ‘Justice’?’ He actually asked me that. I wanted to cold cock him right there. It was a shame because I’m the one getting the shit for the lack of bass.”
The band have since taken a “well, it’s not ideal, but it worked!” attitude toward the album’s sound. I suppose you don’t become the biggest heavy metal band of all time by dwelling much on your mistakes, but you also don’t really become an adult. That would be depressing for any group of men on the wrong side of 60. Any, except a rock band. Figures.
