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How Metallica Overcame Adversity With ‘ … And Justice for All’

Metallica had to repeatedly prove the depth of their resiliency after the Sept. 27, 1986 death of bassist Cliff Burton .

This was first achieved by even having the strength to carry on and achieve the most victorious album-tour cycle of their young career in the face of that unspeakable tragedy; then by producing both a video tribute to Burton (‘Cliff ‘em All’) and finally, by breaking in his replacement, Jason Newsted , on 1987’s The $5.98 EP: Garage Days Re-Revisited .

The real test to Metallica’s inexorable career ascension, however, would rest on the success or failure of their fourth studio album, … And Justice for All , which arrived in stores on Aug. 25, 1988.

And what was the outcome? Well, commercially speaking, Justice  was a resounding triumph. It was built as much on the band’s overwhelming stage performances over the course of the world-spanning, 13-month Damaged Justice tour as it was on MTV’s heavy airplay of Metallica’s first true music video (devised for the morbid power ballad, "One"). Before too long it duly conquered mainstream radio and should have won the Grammy that was given to  Jethro Tull .

But, for all intents and purpose, Justice was, structurally speaking, essentially Master of Puppets on steroids. The long songs were longer (both the title track and the instrumental, "To Live Is to Die," nearly broke the 10-minute mark), the fast songs were faster (namely "Dyer's Eve"), the slow songs ("Harvester of Sorrow") were slower, the dark songs darker (lest we forget that "One" was beyond disturbing) and the technical displays, well, sometimes too technical.

What’s more, Metallica seemed to have lost not only Burton’s one-of-a-kind talent, but their trademarked sound’s distinctive bottom end. It was as though James Hetfield , Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett were subconsciously trying to punish Newsted for being chosen to take Burton’s place.

Listen to the title track from Metallica's '...And Justice for All'

As a result, … And Justice for All ’s somewhat flat and tinny production (the last overseen by stalwart band engineer, Flemming Rasmussen) lacked in power and, in retrospect, could almost be considered a distant precursor to St. Anger 's wholesale production disaster of historical propositions.

So while scores of new fans, shocked and awed by the band’s sheer songwriting invention, were showering thrash metal’s biggest ambassadors with acclaim, many die-hard fans who had accompanied their rise from Bay Area obscurity to global domination were enduring their first minor letdown. And that, in itself, was arguably less traumatic than seeing the scrappy underdogs they’d steadfastly championed for years, with no real hope of a major breakthrough, suddenly transformed into stars. The war had been won, but victory had changed one and all.

Whether you think  … And Justice for All  is the ultimate Metallica LP or the band’s first stumble, two facts are undeniable: The album pushed the thrash-metal template to its absolute limits in terms of songwriting ambition, instrumental technique and cerebral subject matter to the point that Metallica themselves felt the need to reinvent themselves and rebuild their sound from scratch for 1991’s Black Album .

Secondly, … And Justice for All  first introduced the notion of ambiguity into Metallica's heretofore rabidly unified fan base, because that deeply polarized debate would come to dominate discussions about all Metallica albums ever since – no matter which course their music took.

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...And Justice for All

Best New Reissue

By Sean T. Collins

November 3, 2018

…And Justice for All is the biggest metal band’s best album. I see you, Master of Puppets people , but I’ve strapped on the blindfold of Lady Justice and let the scales tip where they may: Justice wins. The songwriting of singer James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich is their most complex and vicious, retaining the power of their early thrash while jettisoning its simplistic schoolyard chants and avoiding the less-compelling hard rock tendencies to come. Use, abuse, experience, and enough beer and Jägermeister to make Keith Moon drive a luxury car into a swimming pool had tempered Hetfield’s reedy yell into something fuller and more forceful, with none of his later cigar-chomping bluster. The lyrics are a ground-level portrait of bureaucratic order pushing down on people too powerless to fight back. And the sound is nearly industrial in its ear-killing intensity, a piece of serrated steel designed to carve you and leave its nihilism in the wounds. Oh, and maybe you’ve heard this: You can’t hear the bass.

In celebration of its 30th anniversary, Justice has been remastered and re-released in a variety of formats—from a three-disc reissue with bonus material to a six-LP, four-DVD, 11-CD monstrosity that features a hardcover book of photos and liner notes and is stuffed with enough prints, patches, and assorted swag to fill a Christmas stocking. Three decades later, Justice arguably stands as the only Metallica album that’s as beloved as it is controversial. (The rest tend to skew one way or the other.) After the death of original bassist Cliff Burton in a 1986 bus accident, the band hired Jason Newsted as his replacement. They toured with him, recorded a covers EP with him, gave him moments in the spotlight on stage, and... absolutely buried him in the mix of Justice , his first-full length with Metallica. The result is the most abrasive-sounding album to sell over eight million copies ever. It’s as if, instead of adding canned crowd noises or fake room tone, Metallica preloaded it with tinnitus.

Newsted’s absence from the final mix is easy to explain, if not excuse. Some of the factors are innocuous: The three original members and the newcomer were not yet accustomed to each other’s playing styles, which led Newsted to track his basslines mostly to Hetfield’s rhythm guitar. Hetfield himself aimed for a low, pulverizing sound, eating up much of the range Newsted’s bass might have occupied. But reading the accounts of various producers, mixers, and engineers included in this set’s extensive notes suggests a more direct, less savory explanation: The bass isn’t there because the band, namely Ulrich and Hetfield, didn’t want it there.

Was this an extension of the extensive hazing to which “Newkid” was subjected by the band for years and which contributed to his departure years later? Was it an unspoken form of denial, processing Burton’s death by erasing his replacement in the studio? Was it simply a power trip by the band’s most dominant personality, Ulrich, whose vision for the sound of his own instrument was so specific and demanding that the people who helped realize it still speak about it with horror? The answer is likely “all of the above.”

But with the exception of producer Flemming Rasmussen, whose enthusiasm for Newsted’s largely unheard work makes him one of this story’s most endearing figures, and mixer Steve Thompson, who regrets having to follow Ulrich’s orders, all involved seem at peace now with the result. Even Newsted argues that “‘how it’s supposed to be’ is how it came out and what made a mark on the world.”

To the great credit of everyone involved, this reissue is no Star Wars Special Edition -style attempt to rewrite the past. You may hear a little more snap and pop and dimensionality here and there, but this is a restoration, not a revision. Everything that’s made Justice sound assaultive and insane for the past three decades—closer to Ministry’s “Stigmata,” released around the same time, than the band’s own “Enter Sandman” —remains. (Should the itch for more bass persist, YouTube can scratch it .) It’s tough to muster much anger that the remastered version isn’t …And Justice for Jason when Jason himself feels justice has been served.

Justice begins and ends at a breakneck pace. Opener “Blackened” serves the same role as “Battery” on Master of Puppets —ahead at full speed. It’s a meditation on nuclear annihilation and global extinction that, with a few tweaks, could apply to our worsening climate crisis: “Fire is the outcome of hypocrisy… Color our world blackened,” Hetfield shouts, his clipped words another piece of the percussive array. A screed about Hetfield’s “undying spite” for the parents who coddled him in conservatism, closer “Dyer’s Eve” is as intimate as “Blackened” is apocalyptic. As a parent now myself, I hear my own worst fears about tossing my children into “this hell you always knew” echoed.

Between those points, the songs are expansive affairs, in length (nearly all of them clock in beyond six minutes) and in the techniques Hetfield, Ulrich, and guitarist Kirk Hammett use to make their sociopolitical points. The riff of “The Shortest Straw,” a song about the victims of political hysteria, speeds atop the song like it’s trying to outrun the mob. The slower, near-sludge sound of “Harvester of Sorrow” reflects its first line: “My life suffocates.” The martial hook of anti-conformist anthem “Eye of the Beholder” fades in from the distance, like an approaching armored convoy. In a rare moment of humor that comports with the band’s hard-partying profile outside the studio, “The Frayed Ends of Sanity” incorporates the “ohh-WEE-ohh, YOOO-ohh” chant from The Wizard of Oz . LL Cool J must have been taking notes.

Justice ’s centerpiece is, of course, “One,” the nearly eight-minute song about a mutilated war veteran. It sparks like an extended fuse before exploding in its final minutes with a Hendrix-style “Machine Gun” simulation and a Hammett solo that sounds like a panic attack. Thanks to an almost comically uncompromising video that spliced no-nonsense, black-and-white footage of the band with harrowing scenes from an adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun , it’s the song that broke the band to the world, receiving heavy airplay on MTV despite having nothing in common with anything else on the network. Listening again, it’s amazing how little time and familiarity have dulled its impact. All its elements—from the dour four-note hook with which it begins to that gunfire burst—work as an experiential unit. You strap in and follow where it leads, even if that’s the “life in hell” of a limbless, eyeless, earless, voiceless shell of a man.

At nearly 10 minutes long and with a dozen different time signatures, the title track employs many of the same techniques. Lyrics about the utter unfairness of the American legal system convey despair with force. “Hammer of justice crushes you,” Hetfield asserts before the chorus runs, “Nothing can save us/Justice is lost/Justice is raped/Justice is gone.” But these are not the distant, doomsaying pronunciations of some gimlet-eyed observer. Hetfield is also trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and it’s getting to him, too. The chorus and the song itself conclude, “Find it so grim, so true, so real.” Hetfield draws out the last word as if to reassure himself that he is not hallucinating these horrors, that this is really happening. These humanizing touches give the otherwise impenetrable music a necessary air of vulnerability, a quality inaudible in the machinelike mix.

In that sense, “To Live Is to Die” stands as the Rosetta Stone for Justice . A lengthy, plodding instrumental with sections where the guitars simulate melancholy strings, it’s the band’s tribute to its late bassist and an artistic outlet for their sublimated grief. Burton himself (with help from either the German writer Paul Gerhardt or John Boorman’s King Arthur movie Excalibur ) provides the lyrics for the brief spoken-word passage, and they are bleaker than anything the band recorded before or since: “When a man lies, he murders some part of the world,” Hetfield murmurs as Burton’s voice from beyond. “These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives. All this I cannot bear to witness any longer. Cannot the Kingdom of Salvation take me home?” In “One,” the chorus runs, “Hold my breath as I wish for death”; here, Metallica mourn their late friend by posthumously publishing his own death wish. This isn’t The Black Album, but the spirit is as black as it gets.

Despite the demons present in Metallica’s work and the largely unspoken trauma inflicted by Burton’s death, they played on. Along with a deep dive into Hetfield’s vault of riff experiments, writing sessions, demo recordings, and B-sides that include many covers, the set features six concerts (and snippets of three more). These demonstrate Metallica’s determination to plow past their recent tragedy, a recurring theme in the liner-note interviews and a visible throughline in the book’s hundreds of playful photos from photographer Ross Halfin and others.

The recordings range from the previously released Seattle ’89 to a DVD of the bands performance at the tiny Delaware rock club The Stone Balloon. (Ulrich insisted on the gig just so he could say they’d played in every state). Though they vary in sound quality and though some include no more than a single Justice song, these sets document the group’s growing realization—audible in their blistering pace and Hetfield’s rising swagger—that they could blow any other band off the fucking stage. In his essay here, Sammy Hagar actually recounts that the pressure of having to follow Metallica on the Monsters of Rock Tour caused poor ol’ Dokken to break up.

It would cheapen the power of ...And Justice for All to say it speaks to our present moment in some uniquely prescient way. Metallica weren’t predicting the future; they were describing what they saw around them. It made them world conquerors for a reason. But if Justice sounds like Now as much as it did then, it only proves the album’s point. And by refusing to soften the blow and reshape the record’s sonic signature into something more ear-pleasing, this reissue correctly implies that the music stands the test of time as well as the words. It does justice to every nightmare note.

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How ...And Justice For All changed Metallica forever

Metallica's 1988 album was their step up to the big leagues. But things would never be the same again

Sometimes a breakthrough album becomes such a landmark that it gives an artist the freedom to subsequently do whatever they want. And equally, sometimes the logical next step is to make the follow-up to that breakthrough as similar as possible – a sequel that repeats the winning formula and cements their growing status with their core constituency of fans.

This was the position Metallica found themselves in when planning their fourth album: not just the follow-up to their breakthrough hit, Master Of Puppets , but also their first without bassist and old-soul Cliff Burton . The safe option would have been to make, in effect Master II – to both cash-in on their now established winning formula and prove that Burton’s replacement by Jason Newsted had been achieved seamlessly.

When, however, drummer Lars Ulrich and singer-guitarist James Hetfield came to sit down and talk about it one afternoon in October 1987, while winding through The Riff Tapes – the compilation of ideas that had emerged at soundcheck maybe, or odd musical movements Lars would hum and James would turn into chords on his guitar – they decided not to follow any of these rules and instead go for broke with something so completely different to what had come before as to be virtually unrecognisable from the Metallica template. Or rather, Lars did. 

High on the million-selling success around the world of the Garage Days Re-Revisited single EP, and unduly taken with the rule-breaking sound of the debut album from a bunch of LA ne’er-do-wells called Guns N’ Roses , released the same year, he felt the time had come for Metallica to jettison the thrash metal lifeboat and go for a whole new approach. James was inured to Lars’ non-stop talk of world domination and, still lost and unsure how to proceed without Cliff’s bullshit-o-meter to guide them, merely nodded his assent. They would just put the songs together as usual and see what came up, right? Wrong.

Certainly there was nothing new to their approach in that respect, the two working from home alone on a four-track, Kirk Hammett invited down at a later stage to consider his lead guitar parts, Jason not invited at all on the pretext that with only four tracks to work with there was no room for bass at that stage anyway. As a result, of the nine tracks eventually slated for the album – all essentially Hetfield-Ulrich compositions – just three would also bear Kirk’s surname, just one Jason’s, and one had Cliff’s: a posthumous work melded from “some bits and pieces” the bass player had left on tape, over which James intoned a four-line poem Cliff had also left behind entitled To Live Is To Die . In fact, the only big difference initially was the decision to record the album closer to home this time, in Los Angeles, a choice rooted, paradoxically, in a newfound conservatism – at least, away from the stage – and their sudden desire to be close to their various partners.

This was one aspect of their lives the young Metallica went out of their way to keep off-limits from the press, even the almost venally talkative Lars, who became uncharacteristically tongue-tied the first time he introduced me to his English-born wife, Debbie. A fun, fair-haired, girl from the Midlands, the two had met in London in 1984 and married early in 1987, during the brief hiatus when James was still nursing his broken wrist, the result of a skateboarding accident. It wasn’t that Lars hid his wife from the press, it just happened to be one of the very few things he didn’t talk about. Plus, ladies man Lars didn’t like to think of anyone cramping his style and while he clearly loved being around Debbie, the marriage was doomed to end just three years later.

These, after all, were Lars’ wild years and, with the band finally taking off, it was no time to be married to its principle party animal. As he later said, for a while they had considered naming their next album, Wild Chicks, Fast Cars and Lots of Drugs, such was the state of play in Metalliworld at the time. How could any homespun, working class English girl hope to compete with that?

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Kirk, too, had chosen just this moment to marry his pretty American girlfriend, Rebecca (Becky), the two tying the knot in December, just a few weeks before the band began work on the new album. From the outside, Kirk and Becky looked like the perfect couple, almost a mirror image of each other, with their long curly hair, elfin faces and large brown eyes. Becky was ditzy, airy-fairy, and fitted in neatly with Kirk’s own public persona as the spliff-sucking, comic book collecting, easy-going hippie minstrel. In fact there was a new edge starting to emerge in the guitarist’s character as he began living out his own rock star fantasies, and cocaine began to match marijuana as his drug of choice. Their marriage too would end after just a few short years.

Jason, who had split from his long-standing girlfriend Lauren Collins, a college student from Phoenix, shortly after joining Metallica, now became involved with a new girlfriend, Judy, who would become the first Mrs Newsted over the coming year, though they got divorced even quicker than Lars or Kirk, deciding they’d made a mistake almost immediately.

The only one who didn’t get married at this point was James and he, ironically, was the one perhaps most deeply in love. Indeed, his girlfriend Kristen Martinez would later inspire one of Metallica’s best-loved songs and one of the cornerstones of their far more widespread popularity in the 1990s, Nothing Else Matters . That, though, was the only time James even semi-acknowledged his affair with Kristen publicly, even going as far as to later claim not to have written the song about her at all, so deep was his hurt when they too broke up in the wake of Metallica’s now rocketing success.

That, however, was in the future. There were no love songs planned for the fourth Metallica album. Instead, Lars was determined to place the emphasis on a new, harder edge. Besotted with the Guns N’ Roses album, Appetite For Destruction , which contained so many swear words radio wouldn’t play it, most of all he wanted to ensure Metallica didn’t get left behind by what he called “the new dicks on the block.” He later recalled listening to the first single from the Appetite album, It’s So Easy on a flight home to San Francisco and being unable to believe the unashamed misogyny of the line, ‘Turn around bitch, I got a use for you…’ , nor the pay-off at the end of the final verse when singer Axl Rose yells: ‘Why don’t you just… fuck off!’

“It just blew my fuckin’ head off,” Lars excitedly told James. “It was the way Axl said it. It was so venomous. It was so fucking real and so fucking angry.” It was the start of an obsession with Axl and Guns N’ Roses that would eventually see both bands touring together, though it would not be one shared with James.

When it became apparent that Flemming Rasmussen, the producer who had overseen both Master Of Puppets and its equally barrier-crashing predecessor Ride The Lightning , would not be available as quickly as they would have liked, Lars, secretly delighted, seized on the situation to put forward a more exciting alternative: Mike Clink, the Baltimore-born producer who’d overseen the recording of Appetite For Destruction .

Clink had begun his career as an engineer at New York’s Record Plant studios, assisting producer Ron Nevison on hit albums by soft rock giants such as Jefferson Starship, Heart and, most notably, Survivor’s huge 1982 hit single and album, Eye Of The Tiger . Clink’s main attributes, according to GN’R guitarist Slash , were “incredible guitar sounds and a tremendous amount of patience.” Smart enough to realise the records he’d made before were essentially “pop albums”, he’d listened carefully when Slash had played him Aerosmith albums in preparation for the Appetite sessions. Interestingly, the album Axl had asked him to take special note of had been Metallica’s Ride The Lightning .

With One On One studios in North Hollywood booked for the first three months of 1988, Lars asked band manager Peter Mensch to put a deal together that would bring Clink in as producer on the new album. Clink, a shrewd operator looking for a project that would extend his newfound reputation as the go-to guy for cutting edge rock bands, was intrigued enough by the approach to accept at first time of asking. Nevertheless, on the surface it seemed an odd fit: Clink was known for capturing a looser, bluesy, as-live feel in the studio; Metallica known more for their almost icily precise sheet-metal riffs and machine-like rhythms.

Somehow it would be Clink’s job to marry the two. As he says now: “They hired me because they enjoyed [and] really liked the Guns N’ Roses records.” However, the message he got in his initial conversation with Mensch “was that they do things the Metallica way. And I didn’t really know what that was until I got into the middle of it.”

James was even less sure. He was no fan of the GN’R record. As far as James could see, Clink wasn’t anything special – just another of Lars’s passing fancies. He watched patiently though while they searched for a drum sound that seemed to match whatever requirements were going through both Lars’ and Mike’s heads, then lost patience when it came to his guitar sound. Although they managed to do what they always did at the start of an album and lay down a couple of rough-hewn covers in order to iron out any potential problems – in this case, Budgie’s Breadfan and Diamond Head’s The Prince – instead of smoothing out their differences, it only highlighted how far apart their thinking still was, especially between Hetfield and Clink. “I just flipped out,” said James, “couldn’t hang with it anymore.”

It put Clink in an awkward position. “As much as I believe they wanted me to put my magic on  the tracks,” he says, “I think that they were used to doing things on their own and doing it their own way.

“I always felt that I was in the wings, waiting until Flemming got free or they could convince him to work on the record [because] at that moment in time it just wasn’t working… They bristled at someone trying to tell them what to do. And I think it was as much my fault as their fault. You know, I had just come off of the Guns N’ Roses record and doing things my way, and having my say. And I kind of ran into a bit of a brick wall and it was difficult for me.”

Clink also felt that “the absence of Cliff was a little unsettling to them… in the back of their minds maybe they wanted something more familiar, because that was a big step without him.”

Whatever the real problem was, by the end of the third week recording, Lars was on the phone to Flemming, virtually begging him to rearrange his schedule and fly out to rescue the sessions. 

“Lars called me and said they were going nowhere and they were getting fed up with it and asked if I was available just in case,” says Rasmussen. “I told him I had a lot of gigs booked and if he needed me there I should know pretty fast… I got called up next day and he said come on over. Like, ‘When can you be here?’”

Arriving at One On One two weeks later, Rasmussen insisted the band start from scratch, keeping the rough cover versions, which could later be used as B-sides for singles, and just two of the drum tracks Clink had recorded with them, for the tracks Harvester Of Sorrow and The Shortest Straw . Flemming thinks it didn’t work with Clink because he “probably expected them to be more of a band-band where everybody played at the same time and you kind of took it from there. And they were nowhere near that at that time… 

“They were fucking around with guitar sounds and had been so for like two or three weeks, and James was really unpleased,” he laughs. “When I spoke to Lars, he said, ‘We’re not gonna do another Master. It’s gonna be more in your face. It’s gonna be as pumped and as upfront as possible’.”

The end result was – as Lars had ordered – the hardest-sounding Metallica album yet, titled … And Justice For All , after the final line from the US Declaration of Independence, used here as shock-horror metaphor for the more general theme of anger at injustice that permeates every track. The trouble was that angry noise appeared to be all there was to most of it, to the point of deadening the emotions it was trying so hard to evoke; a roomful of mirrors in which all the reflections are hideously distorted.

Indeed, the whole thing sounded strangely flat, the drums, busy but tinny, the guitars, revved-up but muted, the vocals almost uniformly shouted and aggressive. If this was Metallica becoming more in-your-face, the effect was to push all but the most avid, hear-no-evil fan away – as unlovely a creation as anything Dr Frankenstein had sewn and bolted together in his laboratory.

It was hard not to conclude that for the first time, Metallica was not playing by instinct but doing something it thought it should. Slayer ’s 1986 Rick Rubin -produced Reign In Blood had stolen the thrash crown, and Guns N’ Roses were now threatening to beat them to the punch when it came to subverting more mainstream rock tastes and Metallica were playing catch-up. With only Lars’ dreams and James’ nightmares to guide them, Cliff’s influence on Metallica would from this moment on be felt most powerfully by his absence. And, to begin with, they were utterly lost.

Writing about “mental anguish is what I like,” James would boast. “Physical pain is nothing compared to mental scarring – that shit sticks with you forever. People dying in your life always makes you think.” Had Cliff’s death become one of those things he’d thought about too much?

The first Metallica album clearly built for CD – with a total running time of over 65 minutes – the track sequencing still followed the same template as Ride and Master , beginning with a rallying-call opener, in this case Blackened , a howl of rage against the destruction of the environment, that was musically very much in the mould of Master opener Battery , and the only track on the album on which Newsted got a co-credit.

From there it was on to the self-consciously epic title track. Built around a quirky drum tattoo and the sound of marching guitars, James railing against how ‘Justice is lost/Justice is raped/Justice is gone…’ At almost 10 minutes long, Justice digs its own grave and buries itself, eliciting a huge sigh of relief from the listener when it finally – finally – slams to a halt. It’s not that it’s such a bad Metallica track – it would have shone more on Ride, perhaps, where the band was still establishing its credentials, and Hammett’s guitars, for which he receives the first of his three co-writing credits, are exemplary.

It’s just that the whole endeavour is so earnest, bitter, unrelenting, the unhappy sound of one man and his pain. Similarly, the samey-sounding tribute-to-Cliff instrumental To Live Is To Die , a sincere gesture rendered almost meaningless by the fact it’s the longest track on an album choked with tracks that outstayed their welcome.

The rest of the album – with one notable exception – continued along the same dark, tangled path. Again, it’s not that tracks like The Shortest Straw or The Frayed Ends Of Sanity are outright bad – both typically brutish rockers that would have taken pride on either of the first two Metallica albums – but after the sophisticated production and arrangements on Master and the warm, all-inclusive atmosphere of Garage Days , more was now expected of Metallica. Right at the moment they should have been delivering another sonic milestone, they had reverted to boorish type. Only what would have sounded scoldingly new four years before now sounded lumpen and off the pace.

Even the first single from the album, Harvester Of Sorrow , was horribly plodding. “Lyrically, this song is about someone who leads a very normal life, has a wife and three kids, and all of a sudden one day he just snaps and starts killing the people around him,” Lars explained at the time. If only the music had sounded even half as interesting. Still, it reached No.20 in the UK chart thanks to the by-now-huge Metallica fan base and the variety of formats Phonogram were now able to market the record in. 

The track fed next to US radio, but not physically released as a single, was Eye Of The Beholder . Coming straight after the title track on the album, it sounded simply like more of the same, its saving grace on radio that its faded-in staccato rhythm was attention-grabbing enough to sustain the listener through the first couple of minutes before its droning repetitiveness finally zeroed you out. ‘Do you see what I see,’ James intones solemnly, ‘truth is an offence…’  And nobody, it seemed, had dared tell the band the truth about their new album.

The exception to all this – the one gleaming diamond in the dirt – was the track One . This was Metallica’s most ambitious and successful musical experiment yet, and their most deeply affecting song. The macabre story of an infantryman who steps on a landmine and wakes to gradually discover he has lost everything – his arms and legs, his five senses – except his mind, which is now cast adrift, trapped in its own grim and impossible reality, One was both nightmare writ large and musically transcendent journey, a thrash metal Tommy in miniature. The protagonist’s descent into living hell, wordlessly begging for death – capable of being seen both as existential metaphor for the human condition and the solipsism of the rock star life – its frantic climax also served up a state of inarticulate teenage angst like no other rock song before or since.

Partially based on the 1939 Dalton Trumbo novel, Johnny Got His Gun , One had started as a song James was thinking about based on the notion of “just being a brain and nothing else” before Cliff Burnstein suggested he read Trumbo’s book. The story of Joe Bonham, a good-looking, all-American boy encouraged to fight in World War I by his patriotic father, Bonham loses his legs, eyes, ears, mouth and nose to a German shell. After coming to terms with his gruesome circumstances in hospital while surrounded by frankly horrified doctors and nurses, Bonham uses the only part of his physical being he is still able to control – his head – to tap out a message in Morse code: “Please kill me.” “James got a lot of input from that,” said Lars.

There was another important change to their strategy they’d decided on before going into the studio: unlike Master Of Puppets , there would be at least one recognisable single and – even more significantly – video on the next album. Despite their public posturing, ‘refusing’ to release singles, both James and Lars had come around to the idea of a regular Metallica single and video since the unexpected success that year of Garage Days and, in particular, the homemade Cliff ’Em All video.

That One might lend itself well for some sort of visual interpretation that would complement the music in an arresting, artistic way, was obvious from the start. They became even more excited by the idea when it emerged that Trumbo – a left-wing, pro-peace screenwriter hounded out of Hollywood during the McCarthy-era witch hunts of the fifties – had actually directed a film version of the book, released in 1971 at the height of the Vietnam War. Might they be able to utilise scenes from it for a possible future video?

According to Rasmussen, they had actually bought the rights to the movie “in order to use it in the video” before they had even begun recording with him. “It was not much of a movie but they liked the look of it and thought it would look great in a video.” They also utilised some of the special effects on the original soundtrack, layering the sound of machine gun fire and exploding landmines over the intro to the track. 

As Stairway To Heaven became for Led Zeppelin , One for Metallica represented the band at its musical apotheosis, containing all that was great and original about them in one long, incident-filled journey. From its quietly lush, heartrendingly melodic guitar intro to its steadily building mid-section, up to its volcanic, lights-out climax, its lyrics came straight to the terrifying point: ‘Hold my breath as I wish for death… Now the world is gone/I’m just one…’

This was not the standard rock stance of a Van Halen or Mötley Crüe , or even a Guns N’ Roses. This was revelation, a song utterly removed from its time and it’s unforeseen side-effect was to alter the circumstances surrounding Metallica forever. You didn’t have to be a Metallica fan to appreciate the artistry of One , anymore than you have to be a Zeppelin fan to adore Stairway . But if you were it was a milestone moment, one the band would arguably never equal.

Tellingly, the only other track after One that truly manages to transcend its laboured surrounds is the album’s shortest, Dyer’s Eve , its speedy razor-cut riff a moment of breathe-out relief after the tortuous slabs of prog-metal that precede it. The final track on the album, its success a mark of how heavy-handed the rest of the album sounds next to it.

It was also, interestingly, the first Hetfield lyric – ‘Dear Mother/Dear Father/What is this hell you have put me through?’ – in which the singer directly addresses some of the issues he carried from his repressed childhood.

“It’s basically about this kid who’s been hidden from the real world by his parents the whole time he was growing up, and now that he’s in the real world he can’t cope with it and is contemplating suicide,” Lars explained. “It’s basically a letter from the kid to his parents, asking them why they didn’t expose him to the real world…” 

It was an ominous foreshadow of the type of material James Hetfield would explore in deeper, more ghastly detail on the albums to come.

Ultimately, instead of being the radically different masterpiece Lars had envisaged, Justice was a sideways step at best – a miscalculation. At worst, it was a disfiguringly weird statement the band would all largely disown as time went by and better albums were made. Its only real saving grace, the extraordinary One – and the fact it united them in never wanting to make an album so bleak in its outlook or dire in its musical palate again. The days of Metallica the out-and-out heavy metal monster were now numbered.

The other mystifyingly weird thing about Justice was the production. As Rasmussen says, “The sound was totally dry… Thin and hard and loud.” In fact, the whole album seems curiously void of reverb, the special sauce used to make the most mediocre sound sparkle in a mix. Rasmussen doesn’t disagree but maintains he delivered “almost ninety-nine per cent” of the sound he was instructed to get.

“Everybody was really pleased with it once we’d finished and then about a month or so after people were starting not to be so pleased. But over the time it’s probably the album that’s influenced most metal bands ever.”

Maybe so. Certainly David Ellefson of Megadeth wouldn’t disagree. “Because it was so progressive, it was complicated. In the early days we all prided ourselves on how fast we played. Then there came a point where we prided ourselves on how complicated we could be. Musical intellectual pride or some bullshit, you know?” He laughs. “If there was just some bass in here this thing would be fuckin’ heavy, you know? Really heavy…”

As Ellefson suggests, the most glaring omission from the sound on …And Justice For All was any evidence of Jason Newsted’s bass, an unforgivable omission given that this was his first album with Metallica, and their first without Cliff Burton. 

Over the years there have been a variety of reasons given for this, from the accusation that Lars and James simply turned the sound of Jason’s bass down in the mix as another part of his hazing, to the suggestion that technically they simply didn’t leave enough room in there to hear Jason’s bass between James’ staccato rhythm guitar and Lars’ booming bass drum.

“I was so in the dirt,” said Newsted, speaking more than ten years later. “I was so disappointed when I heard the final mix. I basically blocked it out, like people do with shit. We were firing on all cylinders, and shit was happening. I was just rolling with it and going forward. What was I gonna do, say we gotta go remix it?” 

There were, he said, “still weird feelings going on… the first time we’d been in the studio for a real Metallica album, and Cliff’s not there.”

Working alone with assistant engineer Toby Wright, he had used the same bass set-up as he would for a gig. “There was no time taken about ‘you place this microphone here, and this one sounds better than that… should you use a pick, should you use your fingers?’ Any of the things that I know now.” Recording three or four songs in a day, “basically doubling James’ guitar parts,” he was in the studio alone for less than a week during the whole three month period the rest of the band were working with Rasmussen. “Usually nowadays I’d take a day per song. That’s what I do on albums… But back then I didn’t even know anything about that shit. Just played it and that was that, right?”

Mike Clink says the lack of bass was an issue even when he was working with them. “They weren’t leaving enough room… sonically, to fit the bass in. But that was their concept and I think that if Cliff had been there it might have been a bit different. But with the new member, I felt he didn’t have as much to say. I think he was just happy to be there, at that moment. I think Jason just said, ‘This is the way it is, let’s roll with it’.” He adds, “It’s also the sound of the guitar. It takes up a lot of room in the sonic spectrum. But ultimately that was the decision of the band and the mixer.”

Rasmussen makes the same point about the mix. “I know for a fact, since I recorded it, that there’s brilliant bass playing on that album.” 

Like Clink, however, Flemming was not responsible for the mix. That task fell to the production team of Mike Thompson and Steven Barbiero, whose previous credits included Whitney Houston, Madonna, the Stones, Prince, Cinderella, Tesla – and Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction .

Mixing took place during May 1988, at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, where James and Lars sat perched over Thompson and Barbiero’s shoulders. Interviewed at the time by Music & Sound Output magazine, Lars’ and James’ comments certainly back up Clink’s and Rasmussen’s claims that they – and not the producers – were the real architects behind the sound on Justice. 

Asked how it differed from Master , Hetfield said: “Drier… Everything’s way up front and there’s not a lot of ’verb or echo. We really went out of our way to make sure that what we put on the tape was what we wanted, so the mixing procedure would be as easy as possible.”

Both men complained they didn’t want it to be like Ride The Lightning where “Flemming was in a reverb daze.” More tellingly, asked what they had learned from the “upfront and raw” sound of the Garage Days EP , Lars specifically mentioned “that mix,” with James elaborating: “We learned that the bass is too loud.”

“And when is the bass too loud?” Lars chirped in.

“When you can hear it!” they answered together, laughing.

Whatever the truth, by the time mixing had begun in Woodstock, Metallica were already back out on the road, on the US version of the Monsters Of Rock festival : 25 dates at the biggest outdoor stadia in America, performing to upwards of 90,000 people a night; fourth on the bill below headliners Van Halen, the Scorpions and Dokken.

I travelled with the band for the opening two dates of the tour in Florida, at the Miami Orangebowl and the Tampa Stadium. “This has got to be the easiest trip we’ve ever done,” Lars laughingly told me. You could see what he meant. Although Metallica was on in the middle of the afternoon, they were the hot ‘breakout’ band of the tour and audiences were uniformly ecstatic. With just a 40-minute set to perform, the band also had an unusual amount of free time to fill. “I’ve been drinking since I woke up this morning,” James announced with a belch before they went on stage in Tampa, at the start of the tour.

There was now a small band of what they called their “tough tarts” at every show – girls waiting naked in the showers, girls in bikinis they’d given passes to the night before whose names they could no longer remember, girlfriends of boy fans offered to the band almost ritualistically.

“I couldn’t figure out why all of a sudden I was handsome,” said Kirk. “No one had ever treated me like that before in my life.” Both Kirk and Lars were starting to use cocaine more regularly too. Lars primarily, he said, because “it gave me another couple of hours drinking”, Kirk because it brought him out of his shell. And because he liked being out of his head, sitting there stoned gazing at horror movies, some on TV, some just playing out in front of him in real time in his hotel room.

The biggest drinker was still James, who would regularly polish off half a bottle of 70-proof Jägermeister. He was also into the vodka, though his brand had improved: he now favoured Absolut. “That whole tour was a big fog for me,” James later recalled. “It was bad coming back to some of those towns later, because there were a lot of dads and moms and husbands and boyfriends looking for me. Not good. People were hating me and I didn’t know why…”

He admitted that it wasn’t funny though when he got so drunk he became violent. “There’d be the happy stage. Then it would get ugly where the world is fucked and fuck you. I became… the clown, then the punk anarchist after that, wanting to smash everything and hurt people. I’d get into fights – sometimes with Lars. That’s how resentments would get released, pushing and shoving, throwing things at him… He wants to be the centre of attention all the time and that bothers me because I’m the same way. He’s out there charming people, and I’ll be intimidating so people will respect me that way.”

Meanwhile, the band’s reputation continued to grow with every appearance they made on the tour. When it became known that the Metallica T-shirt was selling more than any other bar the official event Tee, even headliners Van Halen began to take notice, singer Sammy Hagar making a big deal of coming over and spending “face time” with them both nights I was there.

…And Justice for All was finally released on September 5, just as Master Of Puppets was officially certified platinum. Master had taken 18 months to sell its first million copies in America – Justice would take just nine weeks, peaking at No.6, their highest US chart position yet. Reviews were uniformly positive in Britain where the album hit No.4. At record company level, though, there were serious concerns. Dave Thorne, the band’s A&R man at Phonogram, spent his time defending it to “large numbers of opinionated people in the record company [who] were coming knocking on my door going: ‘This record sounds shit, what’s the matter with it?’”

Nevertheless, the British and European legs of the Damaged Justice tour, as it was named, were a sell-out. The tour reached Britain in October, where they sold-out three nights at the Hammersmith Odeon. The big surprise of the tour was the band’s new stage show, their first attempt at anything elaborate, featuring a 20-foot replica of the album sleeve’s blindfolded and bound Statue Of Liberty – nicknamed Edna, after Iron Maiden ’s Eddie – which collapsed melodramatically at the endless climax to …And Justice For All each night, its head falling off as if guillotined.

This was the era of the heavy metal pantomime as acceptable stage spectacle – led by Maiden’s ubiquitous Eddie figure, now brought to life for the encores each night, and Dio’s even sillier dragon (nicknamed Denzel) which singer Ronnie James Dio would ‘do battle’ with onstage – and in this context Edna’s plummet to disgrace every night was almost dignified by comparison. Nevertheless, it could have its comic, Spinal Tap moments too, like the nights when the statue simply refused to collapse or just its head would roll off the stage into the audience, or half an arm would fall off, swaying gently before toppling onto the drum riser.

What really put the album over the top, though, was the success of One when it was released as a single in February 1989.

Filmed in a disused warehouse in Long Beach the video for One was a stunningly accomplished piece of work. Built around actual footage from the movie version of Johnny’s Got A Gun , starring Jason Robards, intercut with stark, strobe-lit shots of the band performing the song, the One video would do for Metallica what none of their records or live performances, with or without Cliff, had yet been able to: both enhance their reputation as musical innovators and reposition the band centrally as mainstream rock stars.

The full, unedited video was nearly eight minutes long. Like the single, however, it was also made available to TV in edited form, minus the film footage, with a fade on the final couple of minutes of music. Even then it was so at odds with prevailing trends in 80s’ rock video, one MTV executive told their co-manager Cliff Burnstein the only place One would be seen was on the news. In fact, the full One video was premiered on MTV on the night of 22 January, 1989, on that week’s edition of Headbanger’s Ball . It instantly became the No.1 most requested video on MTV.

By February, One had became the first Metallica single to reach the US Top 40, peaking at No.35, while in the UK it reached No.13. One also achieved another landmark for Metallica when it attracted the attention of that year’s Grammy academicians, the band becoming shortlisted for the newly created award of Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal Or Instrumental.

“One proved to us that things we thought of as evil aren’t as evil as we thought,” said Lars, “as long as we do it our way.”

The Grammys show took place at the Shrine Auditorium in LA on 22 February, where the band was invited to perform their much-discussed new song. It was a momentous occasion, the first time an unashamedly ‘heavy metal’ band had actually played live at the Grammys – even though it was the truncated, five-minute version of the song.

Shrouded in shadows, colours muted so that they looked almost black-and-white, it was a stupendous performance from a band that Kirk later admitted was “very nervous” playing for all the suits and ties. “We were like diplomats or representatives for this genre of music.” There was a sense of outrage, however, when the band missed out on the award itself, that honour inexplicably going to Jethro Tull for their Crest Of A Knave album – a decision so unexpected that none of Jethro Tull was there to accept it.

Metallica put a brave face on it, like the whole thing was beneath them – they even suggested adding a sticker to the Justice album with the words: Grammy Award Losers. But privately Lars was seething. “Let’s face it, they really fucked up,” he told me. “Jethro Tull best heavy metal band? I mean, fucking come on!”

I caught up with the band again during their five-date tour of Japan in May, where I saw them play two shows at the Yoyogi Oylimpic Pool arena in Tokyo. They had been on the road for the best part of a year by that point but apart from James’s stomach problems, which he appeared to be trying to alleviate by downing as much Sapporo beer and hot flasks of sake as he could, they seemed to be holding up well and in generally good spirits. Money had come in and they no longer lived together as one, but they still went out together as a gang – when they were on the road at least.

Late at night they went to the Lexington Queen, a well-known hangout for rock bands since the days of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, where it was said you could get a free drink just by mentioning guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s name.

I sat with the band having a meal, and listened as they talked about the new houses they had all recently purchased, or were in the process of procuring, on the solid advice of their accountants, ready for their return home as millionaires for the first time later that year. 

They were still new enough to wealth though to feign indifference, Lars protesting that he still drove around in “a piece of shit Honda”, James in a truck. Yet all I saw them in were limos and the private jet they travelled in while on tour in America – the same one previously used by Bon Jovi and before them Def Leppard . “We put some money back into how we travel while we’re on the road,” said Lars, “because we’re out there a long time and it just makes the whole thing easier.”

The more he went on, though, the more the others sniggered and made faces. “How about that house you just bought?” teased Kirk. “Where is it, like on a mountain?”

Lars looked at him, like ‘shut the fuck up’. It turned out the house he’d bought was situated so high on a hill he was considering having an elevator built just so people could get to his front door.

“Do it,” I said. “If you can afford it, why the hell not?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re right. I will…”

And he did.

Published in Classic Rock #252

Mick Wall is the UK's best-known rock writer, author and TV and radio programme maker, and is the author of numerous critically-acclaimed books, including definitive, bestselling titles on Led Zeppelin ( When Giants Walked the Earth ), Metallica ( Enter Night ), AC/DC ( Hell Ain't a Bad Place To Be ), Black Sabbath ( Symptom of the Universe ), Lou Reed, The Doors ( Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre ), Guns N' Roses and Lemmy. He lives in England.

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How Metallica’s …And Justice For All raised the bar for heavy metal

Following the death of Cliff Burton, Metallica found themselves at a crossroads in 1988. This is the story of the album that changed them – and metal – forever…

Viewed from the stage of LA’s Memorial Coliseum, Metallica ’s 1988 homecoming party appeared perilously close to becoming a full-scale riot. When James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich initially moved from Los Angeles in February 1983 to take up residency in San Francisco, they left behind a city almost wholly indifferent to their still-evolving musical experiments. But five years on, LA’s metal community welcomed back their prodigal sons with a reception bordering upon frenzy.

On July 24, Metallica’s first stadium show in the city – a fourth-on-the-bill booking on the Van Halen-headlined inaugural U.S. Monsters Of Rock tour – dissolved into chaos even as their traditional intro music, Ennio Morricone’s The Ecstasy Of Gold, was ringing out. Initially it was just those closest to the stage who left their allocated seats to rush to the front, but soon thousands more fans began streaming from the stands to join them, trampling down fences and knocking over security personnel. Five songs in, the band were forced to cut short a vicious Whiplash as a chair was hurled on to the stage; seconds later they departed for their own safety as yellow-shirted security staff struggled to contain an audience now hurling forward safety barriers, seats, bottles, plastic glasses and anything else they could lay their hands upon.

Six tense minutes passed, and a dozen arrests were made, before the quartet were permitted back onstage. By the time the four musicians thundered into a climactic Battery, it was evident to all in the stadium that this would be the undisputed high point of the day.

“Metallica is making the metal of the moment,” the reviewer from the LA Times duly noted, “and likely the future.”

Within the Monsters Of Rock caravan, Metallica’s growing strength and confidence was already a talking point. The tour, scheduled to visit 23 cities between May 27 and July 30, was barely one week old when Don Dokken, the frontman of LA hard rockers Dokken , requested that the daily running order be switched so that his band would not have to follow Metallica. “I know we’re making twice as much money as Metallica, but can you please put ’em on after us, because they’re killing us,” the singer implored Q Prime’s Cliff Burnstein, co-manager of both bands. Cliff’s refusal was not borne from simple favouritism: the fact was that Metallica needed to play as early in the day as possible to allow James and Lars time to catch regular flights to Bearsville in upstate New York to oversee the mixing of their eagerly-anticipated, and behind-schedule, fourth album, a collection roundly expected to propel the band into the mainstream.

“We were very determined,” bassist Jason Newsted recalled, “to be that American band that brought this kind of music to people.”

Such lofty ambition might have seemed extremely fanciful at the point where Metallica relocated to San Francisco in early 1983 but, largely fuelled by their hyperactive, precocious drummer’s vision, the quartet quickly developed an innate, irresistible belief in their own destiny. By the end of 1984, with Ride The Lightning having passed the 60,000 sales mark in Europe, Lars felt sufficiently emboldened by his band’s burgeoning success to tell UK underground metal fanzine Metal Forces that Metallica were set to usher in a new age for metal.

“Cliff Burnstein, who signed us to our management deal in the States, has this big belief that what we are doing will be the next big thing in heavy metal,” the drummer bullishly declared to long-time supporter Bernard Doe. “I honestly believe that the kids who are into Judas Priest , Iron Maiden , KISS , and [Twisted] Sister will take on what we’re doing. I’m not saying it’s something that’s going to happen overnight, but it could start developing and Metallica could be the front runners of a new branch of heavy metal.”

Two years on, as the peerless Master Of Puppets album notched up one million sales worldwide with no single, no promotional video and no daytime radio airplay, Metallica’s ascension into metal’s premier league seemed every bit as assured as Lars’ confident prediction. The back cover of the album featured a shot of the group onstage in front of 50,000 metalheads at the 1985 Day On The Green festival in Oakland, California: though the Bay Area band were not the event headliners, the image suggested that they believed this was where they rightfully belonged. Even the shocking death of bassist Cliff Burton in Sweden on September 27, 1986 only temporarily stalled their forward momentum: exactly one month and one day after Burton’s ashes were scattered in Castro Valley, California, Metallica were back onstage with Jason Newsted in his place.

Two of the most significant metal albums of the decade were released within that same five-week period. On September 29, 1986 Iron Maiden issued their sixth studio album, the bold, progressive and futuristic-sounding Somewhere In Time. On October 7, Slayer ’s third album, Reign In Blood, emerged, a recording of such ferocity, savagery and focused physicality that it instantly put a full stop on the thrash metal scene: it could not, and would not, be bettered. Metallica themselves had long since outgrown the genre, but the bar for forward-thinking, technically-dazzling, state-of-the-art heavy metal had assuredly been raised.

Yet if any album could be said to have informed the writing of Metallica’s fourth LP, albeit mainly in terms of emboldening the band to amplify their core strengths and push forward fearlessly, it was Appetite For Destruction . Asked recently by Rolling Stone magazine to select his 15 favourite hard rock and metal albums of all time, significantly Lars Ulrich chose Guns N’ Roses ’ feral, street-wise debut as his only pick from the second half of the 1980s. The drummer first heard Appetite… on a pre-release cassette on a flight from LA to New York, and recalled being blown away by the album’s “swagger and attitude… spite and anger”. “That was the beginning of something life-altering,” he told the magazine.

Back in LA, the two bands were introduced by a mutual business associate, and bonded over hard liquor and white powders. Though their friendship would become sorely tested by an incident-packed co-headlining stadium tour in the summer of 1992, in 1987 the two camps were sufficiently tight that Slash made his bedroom in Hollywood available to James Hetfield for an enthusiastic hook-up with a lady friend at the climax of what the GN’R guitarist recalled as a night of “outrageous partying”.

“At that time we were hovering on the fringes of the leftfield,” Lars later recalled. “The mainstream hadn’t caught up to us yet, so we all still felt like outsiders. We were alienated and awkward and disenfranchised, all just wanting a sense of belonging to something. So we found solace in strength in numbers with the bands that were weird and awkward like we were.”

Though Metallica were never going to follow Guns’ sonic blueprint, their obsession with Appetite… led them to instruct Q Prime to hire both the album’s producer, Mike Clink, and mix engineers Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero for their own forthcoming album.

Writing for that album began in October 1987. Given Cliff Burton’s huge impact upon the songwriting, dynamics and classically-inspired melodies on Ride The Lightning and Master Of Puppets, it must surely have been bittersweet for James, Lars and Kirk to return to the creative process with a riff authored by their ‘new kid’ bassist. But if Jason’s contribution to the spine of Blackened was more straight-ahead and direct than Cliff’s evocative opening to For Whom The Bell Tolls or the shimmering atmospherics of Orion, it undoubtedly delivered in terms of energy and impact. With hindsight, it’s evident though that Metallica’s core trio were not sufficiently adjusted to the loss of their friend to easily accept the reconfigured chemistry in the unit. Where Master Of Puppets was largely written with the four musicians convening in Lars’ garage in El Cerrito – a process replicated when Jason Newsted was ‘blooded’ with the cheerfully rough and raw $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited – in the autumn of 1987, the band’s two alpha males, Lars and James, determined that the new album’s songwriting sessions would work best with just the two of them entrusted with the process of identifying, structuring and arranging the best riffs from a stack of individually collated cassette tapes. It’s impossible to imagine that this approach would have been proposed, much less tolerated, had Cliff been still part of the group. It’s telling that, in highlighting Cliff’s contributions to To Live Is To Die, James and Lars were adamant that their late friend’s spirit should continue to infuse the process as in the past. Jason’s considerations were deemed secondary, if not wholly irrelevant.

“It was me and James running everything with an iron fist,” the drummer later admitted. Without the more subtle promptings of their former bassist, the new Metallica material became an exercise in bravado and athleticism.

“It was just us really showing off,” James said. “We’ve jammed six riffs into one song? Let’s make it eight. Let’s go crazy with it.”

“Some shit is strong enough to be the main idea of a tune,” Lars told music journalist Richard Gehr in 1988, laying bare the methodology. “Then we go through the tapes and try to find possible bridges, choruses, middle bits or whatever. After we have the skeleton of a song, we start getting a feel for what the song’s really like. Then we search for a title from a list of titles that fits with the riffing’s mood.”

If the process lacked the spontaneity and communal vibe of the Master Of Puppets sessions, it was nonetheless effective. In the wake of Blackened, the second track to come together was the hulking grind of Harvester Of Sorrow. Then, inspired by Venom’s Buried Alive and Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun, the epic One , a horrifying, harrowing tale of a soldier losing not only all four limbs, but the power of sight, speech and hearing. Within nine weeks, a total of nine songs had been demoed. The pair were not so blinkered as to rule out contributions made by their talented lead guitarist – Kirk Hammett would ultimately receive a co-writing credit on four tracks – but post-Blackened, Jason found himself frozen out of the process.

“We were waiting for [Jason] to write some big, epic stuff, but it never really came,” Kirk later recalled. “It was a nonstarter, in retrospect. It was great that he was there and was enthusiastic about it, but he didn’t make any huge contributions. I don’t know why that is, but it’s kind of just how the chips fell.”

“I knew my place,” reasoned Jason, ever the diplomat, “and I couldn’t write songs better than James.”

Q Prime blocked out three months in the band’s schedule, from late January ’88 to the beginning of May, for the recording of the album at One On One Studios in LA, leaving the group a three-week window to rehearse for their Monsters Of Rock excursion. Within days, however, the quartet realised they were struggling to connect with their new producer. While Mike Clink had done a masterful job in capturing Guns N’ Roses’ raw, live energy on tape, he was less suited to Metallica’s more complex, fastidious and idiosyncratic recording methods, where, at odds with convention, James Hetfield’s rhythm guitar was the bedrock on which the songs were built. With James and Lars soon convinced Clink was unsuited to the task ahead, calls were hurriedly made to Ride The Lightning/Master Of Puppets producer Flemming Rasmussen to salvage operations. In mid-February the Danish producer arrived at One On One just as Clink was packing up.

“It was a bit awkward, obviously,” Flemming recalled. “But he seemed like a nice guy. He didn’t hit me or anything.”

Though Flemming’s arrival was met with relief by his old friends, the sessions at One On One remained arduous and exhausting. James and Lars put in 12 to 14-hour days daily, patiently constructing songs more involved and labyrinthine than they’d ever previously recorded. Remarkably, neither the band’s two founding members nor the producer was present when Jason recorded his bass tracks, the new man being given a single day in the company of inexperienced studio engineer Toby Wright to nail the arrangements. Kirk wasn’t invited to participate until the final 10 days of the sessions, only adding to the stress: he would actually tape his final solo for the record, the middle solo on One, in New York’s Hit Factory studio on June 9, some five shows into the MOR tour. Flemming, meanwhile, had challenges of his own, namely trying to coax James to sing rather than grunt in key, a suggestion rebuffed by the frontman.

“He was a very angry young man,” Flemming later told this writer.

With the benefit of hindsight, and a little amateur psychiatry, one might wonder whether all the piss and vinegar in James Hetfield’s lyrics on what became …And Justice For All weren’t, in fact, a smokescreen for deeper, more personal issues. Years later, the singer referred to Metallica’s fourth album as “the complaining album,” noting “lyrically, we were really into social things, watching CNN and the news all the time, and realising that other people really do kinda control your life.” But even as he railed against environmental destruction (Blackened), political corruption (…And Justice For All) and censorship/political witch hunts (The Shortest Straw), James, no liberal snowflake, never seemed as engaged with his subject matter as he did when tackling the repressive nature of his own upbringing on the seething, splenetic Dyers Eve. One wonders whether, for the most part, his scattershot rage wasn’t at least partially rooted in the tormenting memory of seeing his friend Cliff lying lifeless on a Swedish highway.

September 5, 1988 saw the release of ...And Justice For All via Vertigo/Phonogram in the UK, and one day later on Elektra in the U.S.. The most immediately startling aspect of the album was the sterile, bone-dry production, with Jason Newsted’s bass, so up-front on the $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited, mixed down to the point of being practically inaudible. Flemming Rasmussen was horrified, laying the blame at the doorstep of Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero, who in turn pointed the finger squarely at Lars and James, particularly the drummer. For his part, Lars still maintains that the insult visited upon Jason Newsted was never malicious.

“It wasn’t [a case of] ‘Fuck this guy – let’s turn his bass down,’” he insisted. “It was more like, ‘We’re mixing, so let’s pat ourselves on the back and turn the rhythms and the drums up.’ But we basically kept turning everything else up until the bass disappeared.”

Whatever, no-one could deny that the album was uncompromising and another bold step forward for the band, taking the RTL/MOP template to the extreme. As predicted, ...Justice was an immediate success, debuting at Number 6 on the Billboard chart in the U.S. and at Number 4 in the UK.

“I can remember being pretty shocked when I was talking to a record company person after […Justice] was finished, right before it was released,” Kirk told Decibel magazine in 2011. “He was like – ‘Yeah man, it’s probably going to sell a million [copies] in the first couple of weeks.’ And I was like, ‘No way.’ I thought it was too heavy and too progressive and there was no way it would sell that much. But you know what? It sold more in those first two weeks than he even talked about. It was insane. All the right things happened at the right time. It was just our time, I guess.”

Now firmly in the spotlight, Metallica seized their moment. A decision was taken to permit film-makers Michael Salomon and Bill Pope to make a video for One, mixing a moody, stark performance of the song with footage from the 1971 film of Johnny Got His Gun. The result was a startling, often harrowing piece of art, with the song’s melodies mixed down in places to give prominence to the film’s storyline and dialogue.

“Pretty early on we felt we had something special on our hands,” Lars noted. “Whether it was great or shit, it meant something.”

The public clearly agreed: within weeks of its premiere on January 22, 1989, the video was the most popular clip on MTV. What could have been seen as a compromise by Metallica actually enhanced their reputation as artists with a singular vision and an unshakeable commitment to playing the game only by their own rules. This perception remained intact even when the Bay Area quartet accepted an invitation to perform at the 31st GRAMMY Awards ceremony one month later, on February 22. Even the most militantly anti-commercial Metallica fans seemed to recognise that, being nominated for the newly minted Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance (Vocal Or Instrumental) category for …And Justice For All, an opportunity to play the U.S. music industry’s most high profile event was too good an opportunity to shun.

Not that the band themselves didn’t have some initial concerns. “I thought, ‘Oh man, I don’t wanna be a part of this crap,’” James admitted. “But then it was, like, ‘Hey, this is an opportunity. You don’t get to do this every day, a chance to get on national TV and show all these boring fucks what we’re all about.’”

Ultimately, Metallica gained almost nothing from the show – their truncated performance of One was met with near silence in the auditorium, and they lost out to veteran English folk-rockers Jethro Tull on the night – but their tongue-in-cheek decision to sticker future pressings of …AJFA with the label ‘GRAMMY Award Losers’ ensured their credibility remained not just intact, but enhanced. Rather more importantly, by the time the 219-date Damaged Justice tour concluded in Brazil in October ’89, the band had sold two million albums in the U.S. alone, setting them up perfectly for a proper tilt at the stars with album number five.

From a present day perspective, one might argue that …Justice is Metallica’s most important album, both in terms of its influence, and the fact that it transported its creators from cult status to the heart of the mainstream music industry, laying the foundations upon which they would build so emphatically with 1991’s ‘Black Album’. Looking back on …And Justice For All for Rolling Stone on the occasion of the album’s 20th anniversary, both James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich were measured but clearly warm in their assessment of what is one of the undoubted cornerstones of their storied career.

“Sonically, it has its shortcomings,” James acknowledged, “but that is the one where we were able to step forward from …Puppets. Anywhere I go, whenever I ask someone what their favourite record is, someone’s bound to say …Justice.”

“…Justice obviously was a huge record for us,” Lars reflected. “We took the Ride The Lightning and Master Of Puppets concept as far as we could take it. That album sent us on this whole other merry way, because when we came back from touring on that record in 1989, we were like, ‘We have nothing more to offer on this side of Metallica,’ and that set us off on some other adventures…”

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With ‘… And Justice For All’, Metallica created a complex, powerful work, opening a door to a world it’s now impossible to imagine without them.

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Metallica have never been afraid to follow their own path. From debut album Kill ’Em All through to fourth album … And Justice For All they dared to push the frenetic limits of thrash metal. In the process, they set the blueprint for what would become speed metal; shocked everyone with the acoustic intro to second album, Ride The Lightning , and the casual inclusion of the balladic “Fade To Black;” and attracted major-label budgets and a big-time management company with 1986’s Master Of Puppets . All the while, the group exhibited the guts to experiment with song structures.

Listen to … And Justice For All .

For Master Of Puppets the thrash titans displayed a more controlled approach to songwriting, partly due to bassist Cliff Burton’s classical training; the realization came that sounding as heavy as a sack of bricks didn’t necessarily mean playing at breakneck speed. During extensive touring in support of the album, however, Burton was tragically killed in a bus crash after a show in Stockholm, on September 26. It was a devastation that could have finished the group.

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Metallica, however, believed the late bassist would have wanted them to carry on, and, with his family’s blessing, the San Francisco-based thrashers vowed to honor his legacy. A little over a month later – but not without 40 or more auditions – the band settled on Jason Newsted from little-known Phoenix, Arizona, thrashers Flotsam And Jetsam as their new bassist. His live debut came at the Country Club in Reseda, California, on November 8, 1986, while his first recording session bore the covers collection The $5.98 EP: Garage Days Re-Revisited . But Metallica’s next studio album would be the real test as to whether they could overcome the loss of the creative force and commanding presence that was Cliff Burton.

And so, on September 5, 1988, came … And Justice For All . The title itself is taken from the US Pledge Of Allegiance, so it’s unsurprising that, thematically, the album explores the concepts of justice and freedom through the themes of war and politics. Opening track ‘Blackened’ sets out the stall in the no-messing-around way Metallica had kicked off each previous album. Credited in part to Newsted, it cemented the bassist firmly in Metallica’s ranks.

On the title track, the Bay Area thrashers pushed unconventional song structures and arrangements to the extreme. The near-ten-minute epic builds from a gentle twin-guitar intro into an explosion of militaristic-style riffs, twisting and turning at will with short, sharp shocks of thrash flourishes and even Thin Lizzy -influenced guitar harmonies. Just when you think the song has settled into its stride it turns on its heel and casually throws the listener an unexpected curveball, setting a standard that continues through the likes of “Eye Of The Beholder” and “Frayed Ends Of Sanity.” The metal titans clearly weren’t chasing radio airplay with their fourth-long player; only one track clocked in under six minutes.

It’s ironic, then, that in the album’s third single, “One,” Metallica earned their first worldwide hit, claiming a Top 40 spot on the Billboard charts and breaking the Top 20 in the UK and Top 5 elsewhere in Europe. An anti-war song, “One” depicts a fallen war hero made quadriplegic, blind, deaf, and mute by a landmine, and is based on the Dalton Trumbo-directed movie Johnny Got His Gun . It was accompanied by Metallica’s first foray into music videos, which featured clips from the film after the band bought the rights to it.

If you were starting to think that they’d forgotten how to play heavy, “The Shortest Straw”’s bludgeoning opening riff is a stark reminder that no one does heavy quite like Metallica in this thrash metal maelstrom. And if there was a danger of over-complicated song structures taking over, they’re pared right back on “Harvester Of Sorrow,” which displays a new dimension of heaviness in its relative simplicity, effectively maintaining one riff and form throughout. “To Live Is To Die,” meanwhile, was created as a tribute to the late Cliff Burton and features basslines recorded before the musician’s untimely death. Then the whole epically creative opus draws to a frenetic conclusion with “Dyers Eve.”

… And Justice For All peaked at No.6 on the Billboard album chart and achieved platinum status two months later. After lingering on the charts for a mammoth 83 weeks, the album would earn Metallica their first Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance – which they famously lost to Jethro Tull . And yet, where … And Justice For All may once have never been made at all, Metallica created an album that opened the door to a world it’s now impossible to imagine without them.

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Metallica's '...And Justice for All': 10 Things You Didn't Know

By any standard of measure, ...And Justice for All was a huge album for Metallica . On a musical level, it remains their most complex, progressive and epic offering. On a thematic level, it stands as one of their most outraged, political and multi-layered statements. On a commercial level, it was a huge breakthrough, marking their best-selling album at the time, their first Grammy Award and their first-ever music video, for the all-time classic song "One." And on a personal level, it represented a huge comeback after the devastating death of bassist Cliff Burton .

Yet, the album continues to be controversial. Is it the band's last great full-length? Or is it a bloated self-indulgence that necessitated the stripped-down move that followed with the " Black Album "? And what happened to Jason Newsted's bass? Decades later, these questions linger, but what is certain is that ...And Justice for All is a verified classic and one of metal's most critical and influential offerings.

In continued appreciation of its nuances and innovation, here are 10 things you likely didn't know about Metallica's fourth studio album.

1. ...And Justice for All was mostly written in the "Garage Days" garage of Lars Ulrich's house in El Cerrito Metallica were booked to start writing the follow-up to Master of Puppets in the spring of 1987, as well as to play Saturday Night Live , when James Hetfield broke his arm in a skateboarding accident. They canceled SNL and their studio time, and once Hetfield recovered, they got back into shape by banging out the Garage Days Re-Revisited covers EP. It was also in that same garage that most of Justice came together. "[ James and I ] sat down with our usual riff tapes and spent the fall of '87 holed up out at my rental house on Carlson Boulevard in El Cerrito," Ulrich recalled to Decibel in 2008. "I think 'Blackened' came early, 'Harvester [of Sorrow]' came early, 'One' came early. ... the writing was pretty much me and James in the sweaty, shitty garage there on Carlson Boulevard."

2. The concept behind "One" dates back to the writing of Master of Puppets It's common knowledge that "One" was inspired by the book and movie Johnny Got His Gun , about a WWI soldier who wakes up to discover that he has become a prisoner in his own body after losing his arms, legs and entirely face to an artillery shell, and used clips from it for the song's music video. What's surprising is that the initial concept for the song predated the Metallica members' awareness that the book and movie even existed, and even predated the Justice sessions entirely. It was back when Metallica were working on Master of Puppets that Hetfield was first struck with the theme that would grow into the song. "James was talking to me about the idea of what it would be like if you were in this situation where you were basically like a living consciousness, like a basket case kind of situation, where you couldn't reach out and communicate to anyone around you," Ulrich said in a filmed interview around the time of the album's release. "You had no arms, no legs, couldn't obviously see, hear, or speak or anything like that. And it was just an idea we had back then, but never really gotten any further on."

When the band started working on Master' s follow-up, Ulrich mentioned the concept to the band's manager Cliff Burnstein, who was reminded of the 1939 anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun . He sent it to the band and Hetfield wrote his lyrics inspired by it. Metallica's other manager, Peter Mensch, eventually tracked down a copy of the 1971 film adaptation and screened it for the group, which led to them using scenes from it for their first-ever music video.

3. The opening of "One" was inspired by the proto–black-metal band Venom Metallica set the stage brilliantly for "One," leading into the cut with an extended ambient intro full of the sounds of war. It's an approach that takes on particularly vivid life in a live setting, where the band throw in smoke and lights to create a virtual battlefield on the stage. "The idea for the opening came from a Venom song called 'Buried Alive,'" he revealed in an interview with Guitar World , referencing the third track on the British extremists' seminal 1982 album Black Metal , a cut that, like "One," begins with a slow-burning, atmospheric prelude before the heavy riffage kicks in.

4. Kirk Hammett recorded the middle guitar solo to "One" between tour dates while the album was being mixed "I lost a lot of sleep over that set of guitar solos!" Hammett told Guitar World . In particular, the song's middle solo presented lots of problems and wasn't laid down in its final form until the 11th hour. "I must have recorded and rerecorded it about 15 million times," the guitarist recalled. "I wanted a middle ground between the really melodic solo at the beginning and the fiery solo at the end. I wanted that to sit very confidently within the song, but it sounded very unconfident, and I was never happy with it." Hammett was still unhappy with the solo even as the album was being mixed, and the band was out on the road with the Monsters of Rock tour. "One night, I flew from Philadelphia to New York City, and while everyone else was on their way to Washington, D.C., I went to the Hit Factory and rerecorded the solo again," he recalled. "I brought my guitar, I had one of my main amps sent to the studio, and I redid the solo there and finally nailed it. I was very, very happy about that! The next day, we played a show in Washington, D.C. It got panned by the critics, because we'd all only had about three hours of sleep and were exhausted. But I got a good solo the night before, so it was worth it!"

5. The opening riff to "Frayed Ends of Sanity" was inspired by a football marching band It was James Hetfield who thought to use the chant from Wizard of Oz to open the song "Frayed Ends of Sanity" — which Ulrich has described as the sound of "angry fucks marching in your head" — but maybe even more improbable was the source of inspiration behind the lurching riff that followed that chant. "James told me he got [ it ] from watching a marching band during a football game," Kirk Hammett revealed to Decibel . "Isn't that the craziest thing?"

6. Jason Newsted recorded his bass parts in one day, with no other band members present and before the album even had a producer Before they decided to work again with Danish producer Flemming Rasmussen (who had manned the boards for Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets ), Metallica considered enlisting Mike Clink, who was a hot name after helming Gun N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction . It was during this liminal period, when the band had yet to select a producer, that Metallica's new bassist entered the studio to record his parts, joined only by engineer Toby Wright, who would go on to record with Alice in Chains, Slayer, Korn and others, but at the time was, according to Newsted, "more like the guy who got coffee the guy we'd burn doobs with and stuff." Newsted laid down his parts in one day, and none of the other Metallica members were present. "For Justice , my situation was very ... awkward," he recalled to Decibel . "I had nothing to o with any of the other guys in the band when they recorded their parts and they had nothing to do with me on the actual day — notice I said, 'day,' singular — that I went into the studio to record my bass parts."

7. Ulrich and Hammett claim that turning down Newsted's bass in the mix was not part of his hazing Some fans stand by the belief that the bass on Justice was consciously turned down in the mix as part of the band's infamous hazing of Newsted — spoonfuls of wasabi and all — when he joined Metallica after Burton's death. In 2017 interview , producer Fleming Rasmussen even questioned whether this could be the case. "[ Ulrich and Hetfield ] heard the mix and they went, 'Alright, take the bass down, change this this this and this, and then take the bass down,'" he recalled. "So you can barely hear it. And then once they've done that they said, 'Take it another 3dB down.' Why they did that – I have no idea! It could be that they were still grieving about Cliff."

According to Ulrich and Hammett, however, Justice' s "missing" bass has more to do with the other band members wanting to draw attention to their own parts, rather than them trying to keep Newsted in his place. "It wasn't, 'Fuck this guy — let's turn down his ass down," Ulrich told Decibel. "It was more like, 'We're mixing, so let's pat ourselves on the back and turn the rhythms and the drums up.' But we basically kept turning everything else up until the bass disappeared." Hammett, meanwhile, pointed to the overlapping frequencies of Newsted's bass and Hetfield's guitar. "The bass frequncies in Jason's tone kinda interfered with the tone that James was trying to shoot for with his rhythm guitar sound, and every time the two blended togther, it just wasn't happening," he explained. "So the only thing left to do was turn the bass down in the mix."

8. The main riff to "To Live Is to Die" was written by Cliff Burton, as were half of its lyrics Justice was, of course, Metallica's first full-length since the shocking death of longtime member Cliff Burton, and the bassist's shadow loomed large, particularly on the (mostly) instrumental cut "To Live Is to Die." The song took its name from one of his favorite phrases and its main riff was his. "That was when we were writing Master of Puppets — that was one of his extra riffs we didn't have room for," Hetfield recalled. "It's heavy as fuck, man. Then the buildup, that's his, too."

As for the spoken-word lyrics to the song, those are attributed to Burton in the album's liner notes, but he only actually penned half of them. The first couplet — "When a man lies, he murders some part of the world/These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives" — was written by German poet Paul Gerhardt, while the second — "All this I cannot bear to witness any longer/Cannot the kingdom of salvation take me home?" — was Burton's. Indeed, the last line even appears on his gravestone.

9. ...And Justice for All takes its title from an Al Pacino movie In much the same way that Metallica had the core concept for "One" and then later discovered Johnny Got His Gun , which inspired them in how they fleshed out the initial idea, the band came to name their fourth album after the 1979 courtroom drama ...And Justice for All . The movie stars Al Pacino as an idealistic attorney wrangling with a corrupt and hypocritical judicial system, a plot that dovetails nicely with the themes of the album and particularly its title track. "We'd come up with the titles and the ideas of the song abd then we'd reference other material," Ulrich explained to Decibel . "So it wasn't like we'd watched ...And Justice for All and went, 'That'd be a great thing to write a song about.' Ir was more like we thought ...And Justice for All was a great title and a great subject, went looking for inspiration afterwards, and then checked out the movie."

10. James Hetfield came to hate the album "​​​​​​To me, the …And Justice For All album sounds horrible, awful, can't fucking stand it," James Hetfield told Uncut bluntly in 2007. "That was our fancy stage, showing off too much. We knew we had to move on and the Black Album was the opposite. So when me and Lars got back together after a short break, I said, 'We gotta really try and write some shorter, to-the-point songs.'"

Hetfield wasn't alone in feeling like Metallica had gone too fall off the proggy deep end with Justice . "We realized that the general consensus was that songs were too fucking long," Kirk Hammett revealed to Rolling Stone in 1991. "Everyone [ in the crowd ] would have these long faces, and I'd think, 'Goddamn, they're not enjoying it as much as we are ... I remember getting offstage one night after playing 'Justice' and one of us saying, 'Fuck, that's the last time we ever play that fucking song!'"

The band's increasingly alienation from Justice's proggy, technical epics cemented their desire to write shorter, simpler songs for the album's follow-up. And they would do just that, with no small amount of success, with a little record known as the " Black Album ."

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...And Justice for All (album)

• View history

...And Justice for All was released August 25, 1988 by Elektra Records and was the first album to feature bassist Jason Newsted and the last to feature a writing credit by late bassist Cliff Burton .

The album deals with many dark themes, including corruption, death, murder, blacklisting, and censorship. ...And Justice for All can be considered Metallica's most political album, although the band has refrained from taking much of a political stance throughout their history.

One of the defining elements of Justice is the extremely low levels of bass. At times bassist Jason Newsted 's playing is completely inaudible. This can be attributed to either poor production or a part of Newsted's "initiation" into the band. The relatively poor production on Justice compared to other albums by the band have led some to claim that the album is "flawed".

The front cover depicts the statue of Lady Justice (Doris) cracked, bound by ropes, her breasts exposed, and both of her scales filled with dollars. The words "…And Justice for All" are written in graffiti-like lettering to the right. The cover art was created by Stephen Gorman, based on a concept developed by James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich. ...And Justice for All was Metallica's final collaboration with longtime producer Flemming Rasmussen.

• 1 Background and production
• 2 Music and lyrics
• 3 Reception
• 4 Live performances
• 5.1 Japan Bonus Track
• 5.2 iTunes Bonus Tracks
• 5.3.1 Disc 1
• 5.3.2 Disc 2
• 5.3.3 Disc 3
• 5.3.4 Disc 4
• 5.3.5 Disc 5
• 5.3.6 Disc 6
• 5.3.7 Disc 7
• 5.3.8 Disc 8
• 5.3.9 Disc 9
• 7 Personnel
• 8 References

Background and production [ ]

...And Justice for All was co-produced by Flemming Rasmussen. Rasmussen, who had also co-produced the previous Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets albums, was initially unavailable. Metallica chose not to wait and started working with Mike Clink (who had caught attention as the producer of the Guns N' Roses album Appetite for Destruction ). But things did not work out as they forecasted: Clink was eventually replaced by Rasmussen once he had become available. Clink was credited for engineering the drums and for helping recording two cover songs ("Breadfan" and "The Prince") that were released as b-sides of the " Harvester of Sorrow ". The songs were later included on the compilation album Garage, Inc. in 1998.

Music and lyrics [ ]

The album's dark lyrical material features a conceptual uniformity around notions of political and legal injustice, as seen through the prism of war, censored speech, and nuclear brinkmanship. This is musically accompanied by what may be the most complex song structures in Metallica's discography. The arrangements are particularly complicated for a thrash metal album, being likened to progressive metal in their complexity. The album is also noted for its nearly-inaudible bass guitar (Newsted was quoted as saying " The Justice album wasn't something that really felt good for me, because you really can't hear the bass. ") and dry, sterile production, and therefore has been called a "slightly flawed masterpiece and the pinnacle of Metallica's progressive years" by Allmusic.com. Lars Ulrich described the songwriting process as "our CNN years", with him and James Hetfield watching the channel in search for song subjects - " I'd read about the blacklisting thing, we'd get a title, 'The Shortest Straw,' and a song would come out of that. "

Cliff Burton receives co-writers credit on "To Live Is to Die" as the bass line was a medley of unused bass recordings Burton had performed prior to his death. While the original recordings are not used on the track, the compositions are credited as written by Burton and are played by Metallica's bassist at the time, Jason Newsted. The words spoken towards the end of the song ("When a man lies, he murders some part of the world. These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives...") by Hetfield were written by German poet Paul Gerhardt, but are misattributed to Burton in the liner notes. Still, the second half of the speech ("All this I cannot bear to witness any longer. Cannot the kingdom of salvation take me home?") were written by Burton.

Reception [ ]

...And Justice for All was Metallica's best-selling album upon its release. Metallica released four singles, " Eye of the Beholder ", " Harvester of Sorrow ", " ...And Justice for All " and " One ". ...And Justice for All was Metallica's breakthrough album and reached number six on the Billboard 200. Though it was over-shadowed commercially by the band's following album Metallica (1991), ...And Justice for All confirmed Metallica's large-scale arena status.

The album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance in 1989, but with much controversy, it lost to Jethro Tull's Crest of a Knave . In 2007, the win was named one of the 10 biggest upsets in Grammy history by Entertainment Weekly . The guitar solo of "One" was ranked number seven in Guitar World's compilation of the 100 Greatest Guitar Solos of all time. In the same magazine's 2006 reader poll, …And Justice for All placed 12th on a list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Albums.

The album was ranked at number nine in IGN's Top 25 Metal Albums. The album is featured in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die . Kerrang! magazine listed the album at No. 42 among the "100 Greatest Heavy Metal Albums of All Time". Metallica released its first music video for "One", after years of resisting pressure to release music videos. The video had some controversy among their fans, who had valued the band's apparent opposition to MTV and other forms of mainstream commercial metal.

Live performances [ ]

Hammett noted the length of the songs being problematic for fans and the band. " Touring behind it, we realized that the general consensus was that songs were too fucking long ," he said. " One day after we played 'Justice' and got off the stage one of us said, 'we're never fucking playing that song again ." He is also quoted in an interview for SoWhat! magazine as saying " Justice' was a bit much for me. I couldn't stand watching the front row start to yawn by the eight or ninth minute ."

In spite of this, the song "One" quickly gained a permanent fixture in the band's live setlist since the release of the album. The only other song from ...And Justice for All that has come close to this is "Harvester of Sorrow", a song that was played live heavily after the album's release but has only begun to be played again recently. "Blackened" has also recently seen some exposure in the World Magnetic Tour and for the Sonisphere festival.

When the song "One" is played live, the war sounds heard at the beginning of the song are often lengthened to sometimes around two minutes instead of the original seventeen seconds. When the war sounds have reached a conclusion, after having a pitch-black stage, fire will erupt from various points of the stage.

Sixteen years after "Dyers Eve" was recorded, on March 5, 2004, the band performed the song in its entirety for the first time ever on the Madly in Anger With the World Tour at The Forum in Inglewood, California.

On June 28, 2007, Metallica played the title track for the first time since October 1989, in Lisbon on the first show of their Sick of The Studio '07 tour and made it a set-fixture for the remainder of that routing. In 2008–2010, "...And Justice for All" was played again on rare occasions during their World Magnetic Tour.

Also on September 19, 2009, "The Shortest Straw" made its way back into the setlists during its World Magnetic Tour after a 12-year absence at the Montreal Bell Center, not being played live since February 9, 1997.

On December 7, 2011, Metallica for the first time performed "To Live Is to Die" in its entirety during the exclusive 30 Years of Metallica concerts at The Fillmore in San Francisco, California.

After twenty-six years on May 28, 2014, "The Frayed Ends of Sanity" made it's live debut, becoming the last "Classic Metallica" song to be performed live in its entirety. The song had previously made live appearances as a quick jam on the Damaged Justice Tour , in the " Justice Medley " on the Wherever We May Roam Tour , and teasers of the intro riff at various other shows. Since it's initial debut the band has been playing it more frequently, as it's been played live many times in 2015 onward.

"Eye of the Beholder" has not been played live in its entirety since 1989. One such performance appears on Metallica's live extended play, Six Feet Down Under . It's noted that Lars doesn't like the song, much in the same way that James dislikes " Escape " from 1984's Ride the Lightning .

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• ...And Justice for All is only one of two albums that features more than four people receiving a songwriting credit. The other album being 1984's Ride the Lightning .

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• Lars Ulrich – Drums
• Metallica – producers
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• Mike Clink – drum engineer on "The Shortest Straw" and "Harvester of Sorrow"
• Toby Wright – additional engineer
• Steve Thompson, Michael Barbiero – mixing
• George Cowan – assistant engineer
• Bob Ludwig – mastering
• James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich – cover concept
• Stephen Gorman – cover art
• Pushead – illustrations
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Britney Spears says there has been ‘no justice’ after settling conservatorship case: ‘My family hurt me’

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Britney Spears says there’s been “no justice” for the ways her family “hurt” her after settling her conservatorship case.

The “Toxic” songstress uploaded a candid Instagram post Sunday, alleging the ways she’s been harmed without any consequences for her abusers.

“I was actually right about nerve damage in my back !!!” she wrote alongside a snap of her backside sans clothes. “I have to get acupuncture [sic] every day of my life now !!!”

“If people only knew how ive had to crawl to my own door one time !!!” the pop icon continued. “My family hurt me !!! There has been no justice and probably never will be !!!”

Spears, 42, alleged there was a group of unnamed people who sat and “did absolutely nothing” for “months” while she was being mistreated.

“The way I was brought up I was always taught the formative of right and wrong but the very two people who brought me up with that method hurt me !!!,” she added, seemingly referring to her parents Jamie and Lynne Spears.

The “Gimmie More” songstress alluded that she sometimes confronts her perpetrators on Instagram because she doesn’t believe it will be safe if she addressed them “face to face.”

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Britney concluded that she misses her home in Louisiana, where she used to live as a child .

“I wish I could visit but they took everything !!!” she wrote.

Britney’s emotional post comes days after she officially settled her conservatorship case with her estranged father.

“As she desired, her freedom now includes that she will no longer need to attend or be involved with court or entangled with legal proceedings in this matter,” her attorney, Mathew Rosengart, told Page Six Friday.

The legal arrangement, which was enacted in 2008 by Jamie, gave him control over his daughter’s financial, personal, professional and medical proceedings.

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Ahead of the conservatorship being terminated in November 2021 , Britney testified against Jamie , 71, claiming he forced her to get treatment in a rehab facility, where she was forced to strip naked in front of staff.

The pop princess also claimed she was forced to get an IUD to prevent her from having more kids.

Britney later opened up about her father’s role as her conservator in her 2023 memoir “The Woman in Me,” writing that he only saw her “as put on the earth for no other reason than to  help their cash flow.”

At the time, court filings supported her theory, showing Jamie paid himself about $6 million over the 13 years he served as his daughter’s conservator.

Britney continues to remain estranged from her father despite the patriarch’s ongoing health issues.

Meanwhile, her relationship with her mom and sister, Jamie Lynn Spears, 33, is on the mend .

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Mdou Moctar’s Guitar Is a Screaming Siren Against Africa’s Colonial Legacy

“Funeral for Justice,” the musician from Niger’s album due next month, amps up the urgency in his work: “I want you to know how serious this is.”

By Ben Sisario

“Funeral for Justice,” the new album by the African musician Mdou Moctar , opens with a blast of angry, snarling guitar and an accusation raised like a fist against the rulers of his native Niger and beyond.

“African leaders, hear my burning question,” Moctar sings, as his band churns with a ragged intensity reminiscent of vintage White Stripes. “Why does your ear only heed France and America?”

Over about a decade of touring in the West, Moctar, 40, has carved out a niche as a modern African guitar hero and one of the very few voices in the pop world calling attention to the struggles of the Tuareg people, a historically nomadic ethnic group in the Sahara region. On the guitar, he is a spellbinding psychedelic soloist, with a style that draws as much from Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen as from traditional Tuareg wedding dances, and he has earned an awed respect from some of rock’s most famous axe-wielders.

“Us guitar players in the West, we all have the same base vocabulary, the same handful of stereotypical licks,” Kirk Hammett of Metallica said in an interview. “But Mdou’s music, it’s almost free of that stuff. And because of that, it sounds more spontaneous. It sounds fresh. It’s amazing.”

Moctar’s last album, “ Afrique Victime ,” was on many music critics’ year-end lists in 2021, with Jon Pareles of The New York Times saying it “expands the sonic possibilities of Tuareg rock.” But “Funeral for Justice,” due May 3, amps up the urgency in his work. It is a cri de coeur of screaming guitars and lyrics decrying the legacy of colonialism in Niger and throughout Africa, where Western powers retain a strong but not always welcome influence, and political and economic instability are endemic hazards.

In a wide-ranging recent interview at the Manhattan offices of his record label, the lanky, bearded Moctar — who often wears a turban and robes onstage but was dressed in a teal hoodie and matching socks — described the political and social crisis behind his latest songs. Among those are “Oh France,” a bitter broadside against Niger’s former ruling power, which maintained a military presence there until late last year ; and “Modern Slaves,” inspired by the desperate, sometimes deadly, paths of African migrants in the West.

“What we’re seeing today is just a modernized version of colonialism, something that’s been inherited by the descendants of colonizers,” said Moctar, who spoke in English and French, with the help of an interpreter. “Of course, today it’s being done with modern technologies and more subtle ways of manipulating people.”

“It seems that only our raw resources that are extracted from the ground are free,” he added. “But our currency, which was created by others for us, is not welcome. And neither are we. Is that freedom? Is that justice? Is that equality?”

The problems of Niger, a landlocked desert nation in West Africa, may be little known to most Americans, and Google Translate is no help when it comes to Tamasheq, the Tuareg language that Moctar sings in (along with some French). But it could be time for Moctar to get his message heard widely. “Funeral for Justice,” his seventh LP, is the second one released by Matador Records, an indie-rock powerhouse with a legacy of acts like Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Liz Phair. Last summer, Moctar and his band performed at Central Park SummerStage, and earlier this month they played at Coachella, alongside stars like Lana Del Rey and Tyler, the Creator.

“I want to be calling out crimes or injustice in the world, and I want you to feel like the sound you’re hearing is someone calling out, ‘Help!’” he said. “If you hear a siren going ‘wee-oo, wee-oo,’ that tells you that something terrible is happening, right? So I want you to know how serious this is.”

MOCTAR’S ORIGINS ARE about as far from the Coachella stage as you can get.

He grew up in Tchintabaraden, near Niger’s western border with Mali, with minimal knowledge of Western pop culture. He said he was aware of Michael Jackson, Bob Marley and Celine Dion but knew little about them, calling them all “white,” which he defined as meaning “not from my hometown.” (“But Michael Jackson,” Moctar added with a sly smile, “when I see him, he is not dark, right?”)

Moctar built his first guitar using brake wires from a bicycle, and by the late 2000s he was tinkering with the fundamentals of desert blues — the sound the Tuaregs are known for — blending guitars with electronic tools like Auto-Tune and drum machines. One such hybrid track, “ Tahoultine ,” became a regional underground hit when people traded it via cellphones. In 2010, the tune made its way to Christopher Kirkley, an American who had quit his tech job and was traveling in West Africa and blogging about its musical culture.

Back home in Portland, Ore., Kirkley was fascinated by “Tahoultine,” but the song’s author was a mystery, identified on the track only as “Mdou” (pronounced EM-doo). After a year of online sleuthing, Kirkley finally made contact with Moctar and traveled back to Niger to meet him and discuss working together. One of the first things Moctar said to him, Kirkley recalled, was, “How do I get to tour?”

Kirkley became Moctar’s promoter, making five albums with Moctar on his small label, Sahel Sounds, and helping organize his first tours in Europe. In 2015, Kirkley raised $18,000 on Kickstarter to direct Moctar in a Tuareg remake of Prince’s “Purple Rain,” casting Moctar as a motorcycle-riding guitar rebel struggling to make his mark. Its title was “ Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai ,” or “Rain the Color of Blue With a Little Red in It” — Tamasheq, Moctar told Kirkley, has no word for purple.

On tour in Europe and the United States, Moctar played dive bars, D.I.Y. punk spaces and sedate world-music venues. With his band, he began to develop a sound that could wow any audience: hypnotic grooves built on the harmonic foundations that West African music shares with the blues, lit up by Moctar’s pyrotechnic solos — a type of shredding that, to Western ears, can sound completely uninhibited, like an inspired poet crying in some unknown language.

“When I compose my solos,” Moctar said, “I’m not trying to look for them very hard. It’s more that they come to me.”

By 2019, when Moctar released “Ilana (The Creator),” his last record on Sahel Sounds, he was touring more widely in the West, and his music was beginning to circulate among rock’s cognoscenti. Last summer, when military leaders staged a coup in Niger, temporarily closing the nation’s borders, the band was on tour in the United States, and a crowdfunding campaign was begun to support the members until they could return. The biggest donation — $10,000 — came from Jack White.

Moctar signed with Matador in 2020. To some extent, the rock market has been primed for an artist like him. About a decade ago, American indie labels signed a raft of African artists , including Blk Jks and Sidi Touré. And other Tuareg acts have made inroads, including Tinariwen, a Malian collective, and Bombino , a fellow Nigerien guitarist whose 2013 album “Nomad” was produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys.

Gerard Cosloy, a co-owner of Matador, acknowledged that language barriers are a problem not easily overcome in the selling of a rock band, but he said the label was committed to helping Moctar reach as wide an audience as possible.

“We’re going to find people one at a time, five at a time, 10 at a time,” Cosloy said. “And if this doesn’t achieve critical mass on the level of the biggest acts in the world, well, that’ll be something else that Mdou has in common with Pavement and Yo La Tengo.”

SINCE 2017, MOCTAR’S bassist and primary musical collaborator has been Mikey Coltun, 31, who grew up amid the punk scene in Washington, D.C., and, as a teenager, made a life-changing trip to Africa with his guitarist father. Moctar — who at one point during our interview excused himself for Islamic prayers — praised Coltun’s musicianship and added: “The fact that Mikey doesn’t smoke or drink helps us on tour.”

“Funeral for Justice” was recorded over five days in 2022 in a rented house near the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. Moctar’s band had been developing the songs on the road, and Coltun, who produced the album, wanted to capture the same spontaneity and fire of their live show. He encouraged Moctar to ignore the clock and “just play,” and told Souleymane Ibrahim, the drummer, to bash away without restraint.

“In the moments where I’m maybe speeding up a bit, I can read in the other members’ faces that I’m doing good,” Ibrahim said. “And that’s the moment where I want to go even more crazy.” (The band also includes Ahmoudou Madassane on rhythm guitar.)

Coltun took digital files of the band’s long jams and edited them into tighter cuts of four to five minutes. The result is more focused and intense than any of the band’s previous work. “This is a record that we couldn’t have made until now,” Coltun says. “There’s a trust that we have between the four of us.”

In the lyrics, Moctar attacks weak African leaders (“Occupiers are carving up your lands,” he sings, “gallantly marching all over your resources”) and calls for pride among the Tuareg, a people divided by national borders who have fought Niger over land and access to resources like uranium. In calling out France, Moctar says that his musical ancestors may have written more oblique complaints, but he prefers to name names.

“I would rather say the truth directly, even if it endangers me,” Moctar said, adding that he received death threats after voicing support for Niger’s ousted president, Mohamed Bazoum. Moctar said he was not in favor of the coup, but was glad that the new leaders asked the French to leave. “That’s a good thing in and of itself.”

The cover art for Moctar’s last three albums, including “Funeral for Justice,” established a sleek, retro visual brand for the group, adapting a classic rock look with African iconography including a purple-black pied crow — common in Niger — and various iterations of the continent’s horned shape.

All were created by Robert Beatty, a musician and artist in Lexington, Ky., who said that when he was first approached, for “Ilana,” the band gave a very specific brief, including the crow and the Cross of Agadez . The band also cited airbrushed rock albums from the late 1970s and early ’80s by Judas Priest, ELO and Journey, with a dramatic, cartoonish aesthetic and repeated motifs and characters.

For “Funeral for Justice,” Beatty depicted bleeding crows falling over a coffin surrounded by a rising tide of blood. As he sent drafts of the image for approval, Beatty said, the band made a request: “More blood! More blood!”

Despite the mythos, Moctar is a typically practical working musician. Cosloy, of Matador, said that at their first meeting Moctar asked specific questions about getting vinyl records pressed. And behind the scenes, Moctar’s career has also involved a standard music-industry story of a rising star shedding business partners along the way.

After the band’s profile was raised by “Ilana,” Moctar took on new management and began to negotiate with Matador. Kirkley, who said he never had any contracts with Moctar for his work on Sahel Sounds, was left out of the loop. After the deal was done, Moctar took his earlier recordings with him, which are now being released online by Matador. Kirkley said he has not spoken to Moctar since. “In retrospect,” he said, “I was really naïve to think that I could be friends with musicians on the label.”

When asked why left Sahel Sounds, Moctar said: “Matador offered me a new market and I found it interesting. It’s not me who’s trying to leave Sahel, it’s my music that has taken on dimension. And if you grow up, you have to change the size.”

Moctar is more interested in talking about how his music can convey the struggles of Niger and, possibly, change them. The specifics of the political situation there may be obscure to many Americans, but the anticolonial sentiment at the heart of his music may well register.

He criticizes the United States for maintaining a drone base in his country, ostensibly to help combat terrorism, though, he says, the American forces have accomplished little in that regard. He points to an attack in March 2021 by “criminals on motorbikes” near his home in the Tahoua area, which he says left 270 dead. (The U.S. State Department has reported an incident at that time in which “ terrorists ” killed an estimated 177 civilians in three villages there.)

“As long as Americans see the situation as acceptable the way it is now,” he said, “things don’t change.”

He added: “I’m coming from very far in a country in which people today are being killed every day with all this suffering, and I come to the U.S. to make people smile and dance. And it is a big effort. So what I would like is for people to then also want to help improve the lives of where I come from.”

Ben Sisario covers the music industry. He has been writing for The Times since 1998. More about Ben Sisario

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