“Search no more”: How Black Sabbath became a saviour to James Hetfield
The entire world of metal can really be traced back to the time before and after Metallica crash-landed on the music scene.
While hard rock and metal had been major forces well before the band started, the riffs James Hetfield pumped out were miles above anything that you were going to hear out of Judas Priest or Iron Maiden around the same time. He was one of the most precise rhythm players in all of rock and roll, but Hetfield still felt slightly inferior compared to what his idols had been known for doing when metal was first starting to get born in the early 1970s.
Then again, the biggest claim to fame that Hetfield has is his habit of playing downstrokes. No one else could have had the same endurance that he has whenever he pumps out the band’s riffs, and anyone who still considers rhythm guitar to be the less talented member of any group should test themselves by seeing how long they can keep up with the riff to ‘Master of Puppets’ playing with downstrokes.
A lot of that came from the more biting tone that he got out of the guitar, but it was also from years of listening to punk bands as well. Hetfield didn’t want to be tied to metal for the rest of his life, and while he has had his moment of embracing his inner country star when working on some of his songs like ‘Mama Said’, Cliff Burton was already introducing them to the greatest punk bands, which probably explains why Hetfield picks the same way that Johnny Ramone used to do.
But even if speed was a key factor, the important part was making songs that sounded a lot more dangerous than anything else. They had grown up in the same scene that had birthed bands like Slayer, and while they were far faster than Metallica ever could be, Hetfield knew that his favourite bands like Black Sabbath didn’t need to make the fastest riffs to be considered one of the best metal bands of all time.
In fact, a lot of Sabbath’s records aren’t about showing that much flash at all, but when you lock into the groove of their songs, it feels like you’re hearing something you’re not supposed to be listening to. Tony Iommi had a way of making truly demented riffs, and even when looking at the other metal bands out there, Hetfield knew that there was no sense of competing with anything that Sabbath did.
Other bands can certainly follow in their footsteps, but Hetfield knew that every riff he played was done in service to what Iommi started, saying, “My older brother and I shared a room and he was off at college and I would ransack his whole catalogue. Then I came across the very first Black Sabbath album. I put it on and got totally sucked into it. I didn’t need to listen to any other music after that. Nothing else compared to that. Just sitting there staring at that slightly white green witch and hearing the first song ‘Black Sabbath’ was like ‘Search no more, this is it.’”
But if you trace it back to that first Sabbath record, their namesake track does have a lot of the key elements of what Hetfield does in its outro. Iommi is downpicking every single note on that ending riff, and while it’s not exactly a main feature of his playing at this point, you can hear the relentless energy that would become a mainstay in Metallica’s catalogue, especially when they started working on tunes like ‘Symptom of the Universe’ later down the line.
So while every other band might try to make songs that are heavier than the person next to them, the whole appeal of Sabbath is the same kind of appeal that The Beatles have over most popular music. People can certainly go in a different direction compared to what they did, but when it comes to the legacy of heavy metal, you can’t really think of a time before Sabbath for truly demented music.
