The metal legends James Hetfield could never get into: “It’s fine”
Everything that James Hetfield ever listened to usually needed to have some sort of grit behind it.
Even when he started becoming the glorified dad of heavy metal in his later years, some of the biggest detours that he ever went on usually involved getting into it with the biggest names in outlaw country like Merle Haggard whenever he worked outside of his comfort zone. But even when he joined the ranks of the greatest metal bands of all time, Hetfield was more than willing to admit when some bands weren’t for him whenever he turned on the radio.
Then again, it wasn’t hard for any member of Metallica to come within spitting distance of a band they didn’t like once they moved to Los Angeles in their early days. The entire Sunset Strip was made up of glam bands that were absolutely terrible in their eyes, and even if there were some great guitar riffs between all of them, Hetfield wasn’t going to be caught dead wearing spandex and trying on his best pouty face whenever he played his guitar. What you saw was what you got, and what you got hit everyone like a sledgehammer.
But despite Metallica being seen as one of the heaviest bands in the world, they never forgot about their sense of melody. Their biggest influences like Venom did have a lot more emphasis on the shock value behind a lot of their tunes, but even when Hetfield was singing about a giant Cthulhu monster rising from the sea on ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’, you could still sing along with every word that came out of his mouth.
That’s something you weren’t going to necessarily get out of the rest of the thrash scene, though. Some of the biggest names in the underground were still barely singers at the time of starting, and while the likes of Chuck Billy and Joey Belladonna gave fans more than their fair share of tough vocal performances, Slayer was where the dividing line came between fairweather metal fans and the most grizzled audiences the world had ever seen.
Slayer wasn’t looking to play nice with their audience, and despite everyone in the crowd leaving their shows with more than a few bruises and bloody noses, it was all in service to the heaviest riffs of all time. But aside from the actual riffs coming out of Kerry King’s guitar, Hetfield felt that songs that were all about destroying everything in sight and the horrors of the world wasn’t something he was interested in.
He had delved into lyrics about war on tracks like ‘One’, but Hetfield felt that it was better for him to stay away from Tom Araya’s lyric sheet when he could, saying in 1991, “The Slayer thing with Satan and tear-your-baby-up. Hopefully, no one’s going to go out and do [that]. People like it, it’s fine. Whatever blows your skirt up, as my dad would say. It just don’t blow mine up.” But by the time Hetfield was talking about Slayer, King had already made up his mind about the direction Metallica were going in.
The Black Album may have been one of metal’s greatest mainstream moments but compared to the heaviness that King was working with he felt that Metallica was turning into a rock band rather than a metal group at this point. He preferred to stay in his own lane and make the gnarliest riffs that anyone had ever laid down, and even if it meant staying out of the spotlight, that was fine by him.
Both bands were working with songs that had a darker edge to them, but Hetfield preferred to look at the darker situations that were happening in the real world. Anyone could have screamed about their love for Satan and been considered scary at the time, but Hetfield figured that the horrors of war and living with PTSD were much more interesting than the typical dark metal material.
