The verse that James Hetfield is most proud of: “It’s almost Jimmy Page!”
James Hetfield is a man who never seems to be too far from a swinging saloon door. The frontman has a bold, fearsome aura, and he used it to muscle a new genre of music into shape. “We were playing music that we wanted to hear,” he states matter of factly about Metallica’s invention of thrash metal. “It’s as simple as that. People don’t understand how important things are in the moment when you’re doing them until later on, which is great, because if we thought it was that important we would’ve screwed it up,” he told The Project.
Now, well into their career, with a position profound enough for Elton John to be crowning ‘Nothing Else Matters’ one of the best songs that has ever been written, Metallica still stand out as a singular force in rock. And yet, a dichotomy still remains because Hetfield still thinks they have an “underground” feel, but they have also sold well over 125 million albums around the world. So, when he looks back at the band’s legacy and creations therein, he is somewhat surprised by the body of work.
When looking back on the band’s career, he struggled to comprehend the songs he is most proud of. “We’ve all accomplished some great things,” he said, “With different feels. There are some songs that we kind of forget about that are pretty amazing.” He then rattled off a reel of his favourites: “I think ‘Bleeding Me’ is one of those moments. I think ‘Outlaw Torn’, I think ‘Fixer’. A little bit of those epic-y… kind of like instrumentals with lyrics.”
Then, when considering this near-orchestral approach to poetic thrash, Hetfield leads onto the verse that he can happily proclaim as his proudest moment in music. “The third verse in ‘Unforgiven II’. When it breaks down and there’s that wah-wah-wah, the little wah, I’m playing this part and Bob Rock is doing the wah, it was like, ‘Wow, we’re professional now!’ It sounds… it’s almost like Jimmy Page.”
He concludes, “We were entering the realm of Zeppelin at that point.”
Led Zeppelin were a pivotal force in inspiring Hetfield to pick up a guitar and start making music in the first place, and one of the greatest moments of his life came when he found out Page was, in fact, a fan of Metallica, so walking in their footsteps must have felt profound when they crafted the song. Travelling back to their roots almost inadvertently in a jam also happens to be pretty much a textbook appraisal of the frontman’s decree that they simply play music that they’d like to hear.
The original version of ‘The Unforgiven’ arrived on their eponymous fifth album. However, the band could never give up on honing the power ballad, so they turned out a sequel in 1997 on Reload, and later, the trilogy was complete with the release of ‘The Unforgiven III’ in 2008 on Death Magnetic. And it all started with the band subverting their usual tenet of a melodic verse transitioning into a thrashing chorus. The result allowed the song greater space for development, evidenced by the fact that they since had a couple of extra bites at the cherry.
Played on a B-bender guitar, Hetfield is able to waltz the verse along with a sense of experimentation, creating a maelstrom of sound that enraptures the listener and clearly the players, too. It’s the sort of track that can whisk you into a snow globe of swirling half notes and should come with a warning not to operate heavy machinery while listening. With such profundity in the welter, it has almost become somewhat of a sacred entity too, with the band side-lining one of their proudest achievements for 17 years before bringing it back into the live fold in 2015.
