“Couldn’t have stayed”: The Metallica album James Hetfield considered the end of an era
Most bands can’t spend their entire careers rewriting the same style of song. It might be nice to have tunes in one’s arsenal that can get that immediate response, but any musician is going to want to stretch after playing through the same set of riffs for hours on end for one tour after another. Even though Metallica was deadset on getting heavier and heavier as the years went on, James Hetfield knew that it was the true end of an era when they finished up one particuarly insane chapter of their catalogue.
Then again, it’s not like the thrash legends didn’t know how to switch things up whenever they got the chance. There had been moments where a song didn’t work here and there, but even for the thrash underground scene, no one was going to make a ballad like ‘Fade to Black’ or turn in something as musically sophisticated as ‘Orion’.
But after Master of Puppets, there were a lot of unknown factors still hanging in the air. Cliff Burton had already died in a bus accident by the time the band finished up their tour with newcomer Jason Newsted, and judging by the way that they treated him, it wasn’t like they were welcoming anyone with open arms to replace one of their musical brothers. That said, they were still learning, and one of the biggest challenges they had to face was outplaying everyone around them.
You have to remember that these were the days when artists like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani were taking over the world, so if Metallica wanted to share a stage with them, they had to make something that could compete with the virtuosos of the world. And from that frustration came And Justice For All, which was more complex, more brutal, and also more of an absolute mess than before.
Outside of the fact that the production is incredibly dry with hardly any bass, the majority of the songs don’t really know when to end. There are pieces of tunes like the title track that make for some of the most complex pieces of music in their catalogue, but every so often, there will come a time when even hardcore fans will be looking at their watches, wondering when they will actually get to the point.
And it turned out that Hetfield was on the side of those fans when the band tried to pair down their sound for The Black Album a few years later, saying, “I appreciate the fact that we did have the balls to do [The Black Album]. It had to be, it really did. You know, when I go back and I listen to And Justice For All, it couldn’t have stayed on that path. We needed to bring in another set of trusted ears. I think Cliff would have probably interjected some different stuff, getting his bass heard and some more musically challenging things, probably.”
As much as some fans hated the idea of watching their favourite band suddenly become radio superstars, Hetfield did have a small point there. There needed to be some sort of change because had they stayed on that path and made the sequel to And Justice For All, who the hell was going to be listening to a 12-minute song about as Hetfield barked away in the background?
That phase of their career needed to be stomped out, but that doesn’t diminish the beauty of tunes like ‘One’ and ‘Dyers Eve’ in their catalogue. The band had been on a path towards world domination, and if that meant abandoning their long runtimes and pairing down their lick library, that was what they were going to do.
