“A natural singer”: The artist so good it pissed James Hetfield off
No metal vocalist had to emphasise being the most impressive vocalist in the world. Aggression and power are half the battle in any great metal act, and as long as the singer has an impressive shout on them, that’s usually enough for people to be won over if they can deliver the right soaring voice over the riffs. While Metallica was never destined to be a vocal-oriented band, that didn’t mean that James Hetfield couldn’t get a little bit envious of his fellow metal warlords in the genre.
Then again, Hetfield was never supposed to be the singer throughout the band’s career. He was more than happy to belt out the majority of the tunes throughout their early years, but it was all done with the intent of them finding a new singer later, by which time it was too late, and Hetfield fell into the role of a frontman. But there were always those heroes that everyone tried to emulate in the metal sphere.
Although a band like Led Zeppelin was known for Robert Plant playing the ‘Golden God’, Hetfield was more interested in bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. And since there was no way anyone was going to have the strength nor lung capacity to do what Rob Halford was capable of, it was better that he move on to Ozzy Osbourne’s booming voice, which may as well have been like a haunting spirit draped across Tony Iommi’s licks.
As much as he’s considered a joke to anyone who watched The Osbournes, Ozzy was a force to be reckoned with in his prime, and hearing Hetfield try to do him justice on their version of ‘Sabbra Cadabra’ off Garage Inc shows how much attention he put into his craft. But even in metal, there are certain things you don’t touch, and one of them is usually Ronnie James Dio’s voice.
Dio may have been given a tough role to fill when replacing Osbourne in Black Sabbath, but the minute he opened his mouth to sing, he showed the world how much power he had behind his minuscule physique. Dio was looking to tell stories every time he sang, and no matter how much he rehearsed, Hetfield knew that there was no way to hit his superhuman levels of singing.
Even when taking better care of his voice, Hetfield remembered being jealous of how easy it was for Dio to pull off some of his classic runs, saying, “We did this medley of a bunch of different Dio songs, and I just realised how fucking amazing that guy was. And it pissed me off. He was just a natural singer, and he had a range that had power all the way through it, and he just continues to challenge me which is great.”
But that didn’t mean that Hetfield didn’t give a decent performance. On their ‘Ronnie Rising’ medley, a lot of their work involved them doing service to what he brought to metal, and even if it was far from the most gripping performance that Hetfield ever gave, most people understood that there was no way that he could pull out the big guns and let it loose like Dio had.
Because, really, every single metal vocalist should be looking at Ronnie James Dio’s work the same way that most guitarists look at Eddie Van Halen’s licks. Sure, it’s easy to copy them in some respects, but there’s no way that anyone is going to get anywhere close to the tone and the feel of that voice.
