“This ain’t your band”: the bands James Hetfield called his musical nemesis
Every generation of rock fans needs to have something to rebel against. Whether it was Elvis Presley going against the old-school of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra or punk rock going against everything that prog stood for, there was always room for people to work in some of their own strange sounds into the mix as a deliberate retort to everything else. However, while metal usually rebelled against anything that was mainstream, James Hetfield felt that Metallica had a pretty clear target when they were cultivating their audience.
When the band first started playing together, it was an amalgam of everything they had been listening to. Records by the likes of Black Sabbath were pretty much required listening for anyone who played with them, but Lars Ulrich was always in tune with the music coming over from England, embracing the New Wave of British Heavy Metal with his love of bands like Raven and Diamond Head.
If they were going to make themselves stand out, though, they wanted to make sure that they played harder and faster than anyone else. After all, this was the same band that cited bands like Motorhead as a primary influence, and they weren’t going to get anywhere if they played a song that was delicate and light right out of the gate. This was punk by way of metal, and Hetfield was the one responsible for that.
Although many members of the band considered Ramones a major influence, it all came down to the way that Hetfield was playing his guitar. He could fingerpick when he wanted to, but his relentless downpicking throughout the band’s early records was enough to give people tendonitis if they tried playing along with it without proper rehearsal. Their sound was certainly unique, but that wasn’t what people were listening to on the street.
“That developed our style. We were up onstage, [and] we wanted attention.”
James Hetfield
The band had already moved to San Francisco and was as far away from Los Angeles as they could because of the glam-metal movement. Some great acts had set the stage for that sound, like Van Halen and David Bowie, but as far as Hetfield was concerned, he was never going to go anywhere near a gig that was playing the likes of Poison and Motley Crue inside.
They had tried to make it in the same clubs that those bands were playing in, but Hetfield quickly realised that they needed to move on, saying, “If you came to see spandex and big hair, this ain’t your band, and that kind of became our war cry. That developed our style. We were up onstage, [and] we wanted attention. We’re going to play louder [and] we’re going to play faster.”
Metallica was far from the only one tired of that side of the metal scene. Looking at the way many of the other thrash bands developed their style, it became clear that there was a dividing line between both camps, with some artists entering the rock scene for the attention of the ladies and those who wanted to play as fast as possible and develop an Olympian-level of speed on their instruments.
While it was hard for a lot of bands to keep up with what Metallica were doing back in the day, Hetfield never concerned himself with what the rest of the thrash scene was doing. It was all about stomping out the music coming out of the Sunset Strip, and considering their eventual reign with The Black Album in the early 1990s, they seemed to have finally left all of their spandex-clad contemporaries in the dust.
