June 29, 1990: Deep in the guts of Toronto’s CNE Stadium, four shaggy, sweaty, booze-swilling horsemen of the apocalypse are hatching a cultural coup. James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Lars Ulrich, and Jason Newsted just opened up for Aerosmith, their childhood heroes. Judging by the muffled roars emanating from the arena, Steven Tyler’s got the world wrapped around his finger. The same will be said for Metallica within a year’s time. They won’t settle for anything less than a supervillain death grip.
Granted, Metallica’s approach up to this point has proven hugely successful, a byzantine war machine powered by a spartan tactic Ulrich will later outline to critic David Masciotra as simply: “not fucking up.” Judging from their generous album sales, sold-out tours, Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental Grammy nomination, and hard-won laurels despite crickets from the establishment, “not fucking up” should ensure that their wallets remain as stuffed as the arenas.
But these are the guys who gave us Kill ’Em All; they won’t stop until they’ve slayed Poison, Mötley Crüe, Ratt, and every last one of those platinum-blonde, spandex-wearing false heirs to the heavy metal throne with their own weapons: massive riffs, clean vocals, sharp arrangements, and layered mixes that gush from the speakers like knife wounds. They’ll even tap Bob Rock—the man behind Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, an anti-Metallica album if there ever was one—to ensure the heist goes off without a hitch.
Naturally, Metallica will name this declaration of war and independence after themselves. It’s the best-selling album of the past 25 years, with currently over 20 million copies sold worldwide, more than Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A. or Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. Even if you handed out three Black Albums to every citizen in Ulrich’s native Denmark, you’d be left with a warehouse full of CDs. Few bands have achieved such ubiquity so that if you know literally one thing about metal music, it is the six-note opening riff to “Enter Sandman.”
Though Metallica were neither unknowns nor underdogs when they recorded their fifth studio album Metallica, the status quo as dictated by music critics, disc jockeys, and MTV framed them as such. Throughout the ’80s, Metallica and their Big Four peers—Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax—challenged metal’s emergent portrait of pomp by way of extreme fundamentalism. In her 1992 book Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology, Deena Weinstein compared thrash metal to the Protestant Reformation, framing it as a reaction to corruption: “Both movements [the Reformation and thrash metal],” she wrote, “charged that the established form had become corrupt through extravagance, and both supported a return to the essential message, stripped bare of all adornment.”
Metallica’s rapid ascent throughout the latter half of the decade—from Golden State basement fiends, to Big Four figureheads, to Grammy nominees—shattered the cultural status quo. The group’s first studio three albums—1983’s Kill ’Em All, 1984’s Ride the Lightning, and 1986’s Master of Puppets—are a trio of bloodthirsty, whip-smart chimeras. Their din bears traces of blues, punk, hard rock, progressive jams, and—thanks to bassist Cliff Burton’s virtuosic strivings—even classical music. By identifying the genres’ cathartic common ground and amping up the drama, Metallica reframed the heavy metal revival as a serious movement, as opposed to a perennial retread.
Burton’s tragic death in September 1986 intensified Metallica’s ambition. Shortly after Burton’s death, they’d recruited a new bassist, Flotsam and Jetsam frontman (and lifelong Metallica fan) Jason Newsted; and two years later, they released ...And Justice For All. Between its extensive runtimes, unusual time signatures, and arcane arrangements, it remains a fan-favorite whose genius is often overshadowed by the fact that it sounds like it was recorded through a tin can. Its ramshackle mixing kills the dynamic frisson: Hetfield and Hammett’s dueling riffs collapse into a static, mind-numbing roar; Ulrich’s fills hit like raindrops instead of the usual mortars; Newsted’s bass lines are nearly impossible to make out, positioned so far back in the mix that a group of fans took it upon themselves to release a bootleg, bass-boosted version of the album titled ...And Justice For Jason.
Nevertheless, ...And Justice For All positioned Metallica within striking distance of the mainstream. The LP debuted at No. 6 on the Billboard Charts—a feat practically unheard of for a metal band at the time—and went platinum within nine weeks. It was their most successful crossover to date thanks to its music video for “One,” which got them on MTV. And yet, remarkably, the band looked back on their latest triumph with disappointment. As Metallica’s fanbase grew, more non-metalheads came into the fold. This influx of casual listeners created a communication gap, which was particularly evident in concert. Speaking with Masciotra, Ulrich identified the album’s associated “Damaged Justice” tour as the end of the honeymoon and, arguably, Metallica as most people knew it. “Early on the tour, we started wondering why the songs were so long, progressive, and all-over-the-place,” he said. “We felt that the material did not connect well live because it was too introverted and cerebral.”
In Ulrich’s view, Metallica had taken the progressive side as far as they could. The only way for the band to move on was to look back, to invoke the bad-asses who’d inspired them, and so many others, to pick up guitars and drumsticks in the first place: barnstormers like Motörhead, Black Sabbath, the Rolling Stones, and so on.
Also, the next album needed to not sound like shit. In a huge leap of faith, Metallica began their years-long relationship with Bob Rock—a straight-shooting, detail-oriented guitar band guru who’d manned the boards for Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, and other arena mainstays—to take the reins on production. He accepted their offer after witnessing them live: “I had bought the Justice record, and I just didn’t get it,” he later told Masciotra of the album, which he described as thin. “Then when I saw them play live after the Cult, and they walked off stage, I thought, ‘That’s not the band on the Justice record.’”
Far and wide, Rock’s production comprises Metallica’s greatest source of controversy. While it may be tempting to paint Rock as a sinister interloper, Adam Dubin’s behind-the-scenes documentary A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica positions him, instead, as a grizzled studio sherpa nudging the band away from clunky performances or technical mishaps, often to considerable pushback from his charges. “Lars, will you make the next couple versions a little more peppery off the top? A little more weight into it?” he says Ulrich at one point, like a parent asking his son to clean his room. Lars seethes, “If you want weight, I’m your fucking guy!” Elsewhere, he reminds Hetfield to sing and play at the same time, only to get another tantrum in response: “You wanna hear it with vocals? Go sing it.”
The producer left a new mark on the group: he turned Hetfield from an untrained screamer to a seasoned rock singer, pushed the frontman to step up his lyrical game and brought Newsted out of the shadows, recasting him as the stoic yin to Ulrich’s frenzied yang.
And then, of course, there’s his showstopping mix: the subject of countless late-night road-tests and in-studio arguments, and the long-awaited antidote to the muddled palettes of Metallica albums past. Nowhere is this more evident than in the intro to “Enter Sandman”: Hammett’s riff creeps in from the background, a night-stalker inching closer by the minute. Hetfield swoops in behind him, the violent churn intensifies and, upon Ulrich and Newsted’s entry, finally overflows in a froth: cacophonous, chilling, and definitively anthemic.
Metallica’s twelve tracks may be sorted into three categories: angsty arena anthems, furrowed-brow ballads, and tamer, hybridized takes on Metallica’s famous pit-starters. Aside from “Holier Than Thou” and “Through the Never,” which offer red meat for the black-leathered fans of old, the album skews simplistic, melodically and lyrically. Whereas Ride the Lightning and ...And Justice for All prioritized instrumental stunts over melody, Metallica bets it all on Hetfield, a paradigm shift made all the more noticeable by his bandmates’ restraint. Instead of firing off fills, Ulrich keeps it simple, locked in 4/4 throughout (“It’s a little bit like building a house,” he crows in A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica, chest puffed, shit-eating grin on his face, “If you have a good foundation, then…”) Newsted mostly swears by the root notes, but gives millions of would-be bassists their first homework assignment with “My Friend of Misery”’s percolating refrain. While he’s given plenty of room to show off his solos (”Don’t Tread on Me” and “Of Wolf and Man” are particularly fiendish), Hammett’s riffs skew tamer, more deliberate, and subservient to the Hetfield’s pained yowls.
Hetfield pivots between devastating croons and razor-throated yells like a seasoned “American Idol” contestant. “I’m your dream/I’m your eyes/I’m your pain” he sneers on “Sad But True,” a song Rock labelled the heavy metal “Kashmir.” This technique inevitably draws the listener’s focus to Hetfield’s lyrics, which, while perfectly suited for stadium sing-a-longs, aren’t exactly Pulitzer material. You can see the low-hanging rhymes coming from a mile away—“real” and “feel,” “be” and “see,” “you” and “do.” More damningly, it saps his revealing personal narratives of their latent emotional heft.
“The God That Failed” is a bittersweet ode to Hetfield’s mother, a Christian Scientist who succumbed to cancer because she refused to treat it through any means other than faith. And yet, for every devastating couplet (”The healing hand held back the deepened nail/Follow the God that failed”), there’s two chunks of clunky poetry not far behind (”Find your peace/Find your say/Find the smooth road on your way”; “Pride you took/Pride you feel/Pride that you felt when you’d kneel.”)
The simplicity proves far more successful on “Nothing Else Matters,” an acoustic ballad which, however ham-fisted, stands as one of the album’s most revolutionary moments. Here, smack dab in the center of metal’s hyper-masculine universe, we have one of the genre’s most fearsome luminaries singing the praises not of Satan, sex, or the good sweet leaf, but rather a woman. Given the overarching cultural context, Hetfield’s insistence that he’s “Never cared for what they say/Never cared for games they play/Never cared for what they do/Never cared for what they know” scans as a middle finger to all the meatheads who think intimacy and metal are mutually exclusive. His solo acts as the band’s closing argument, undeniable proof that vulnerability could both rock and sell.
August 12, 1991: At midnight, the coup officially begins. The metalheads don their old concert tees and rush, rapt and stoned, to their nearest record store, where they await Metallica’s fifth album coming in droves. The makers of A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica are on hand to chronicle one such release party, and ask the faithful for their thoughts on this monumental album, and what they think it all means. “Reality, man…some shit you just can’t change.” responds one particularly impassioned mullet-man, shouting over his equally-stoked friend. “Listening to the words, it talks about people who, I don’t know, either can’t forgive, or the people that die unforgiven by others,” a soft-spoken young woman posits, reverent, as if contemplating a Rothko.
Just like Metallica’s lyrics, the band’s fans’ insights scan as invariably vague, slightly naive, and unflinchingly, impossibly earnest. It’s only appropriate that these remarks comprise A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica’s opening scene: They’re candids of the Black Album’s power as a tabula rasa for a young, embittered generation, saddled with their parents’ wars and religious scorn. When the hesher in the “Metal Up Your Ass” t-shirt proclaims, “My parents don’t think anything about Metallica, they just ignore it,” he’s really gesturing to a generational victory: Mom and Dad with their heads in the sand, while the kids raise hell and make history.
Heavy metal had officially set up shop on the main stage. As if to prove their point, they hit the road in 1992 with Guns N’ Roses (the only band who rivaled their power at the time; their contemporaneously released albums Use Your Illusion I and II moved 14 million units altogether) for a massive, effects-heavy arena outing. During the band’s run-through of “Fade to Black” at the August 8 stop in Montreal, Hetfield lost track of the band’s complicated pyrotechnics setup and found himself standing atop an erupting grate, leaving the frontman with second- and third-degree burns and forcing his band to the sidelines for several days.
