...And Justice For All: The Album That Made Me

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In my early junior high era, Friday nights were for Casa Olé Mexican food at the mall before “20/20”. Between introversion and awkwardness, I didn’t have a John Hughes social calendar that needed attending to. So on Friday nights I really didn’t mind joining the ‘rents and sister for a Combinación Numero Dos and baskets of chips with red sauce. Up the mall arm from the restaurant was a Sam Goody. On some given Friday, before dinner, I bought “…And Justice For All,” Metallica’s fourth studio album. I had seen but 10 seconds of James Hetfield singing “Sanitarium” (from their third magnum opus “Master of Puppets”) on a clip from “MTV news,” and I thought: “I want more of that.”

When we got home, I retreated to my bedroom and popped the cassette into my Walkman Sport. It seemed to take forever but eventually the gorgeous backward-masked harmonic layering of “Blackened” opened as some hymn of the damned, before the guitar’s SOS tattoo took over and threw us into the dying spasms of Gaiacide (see also: Dan Simmons’ Hyperion).

This was the coolest band ever.

The Men Behind It

I’d soon round out my collection with their other albums, but it was Justice where I first really heard what each member was doing.

James Hetfield had found a remarkable place with his voice. It wasn’t the all-out thrash scream of the early records, and it wasn’t yet the arena-rock growl he’d settle into later — somewhere in between. He sounded like a man who meant it.

Kirk Hammett plays beautiful solos. I always thought Metallica was a metal band with a love of beauty. No surprises when I later learned they loved Kate Bush. His solos on Justice are shred-lite with groove — not the pure technique-for-technique’s-sake of the era, but actual melodic statements that went somewhere. You could learn them. You could feel why each note was there. Kirk made the guitar solo feel like it belonged to the song rather than interrupting it.

Jason Newsted’s bass is famously, criminally absent from the mix. Lars and James buried it in the production — reportedly a hazing of the new guy — and it’s one of the great acts of self-sabotage in rock history. On the rare moments you can hear it, on bootlegs and live recordings, it’s thunderous. The album would have been even better with his low end where it belonged. I’m not convinced that this travesty wasn’t half the reason people were so gleeful to pounce on Lars later.1

Lars I’ll leave for another day, but I have never felt so personally assaulted by a double-bass.

Also, mad respect for Flemming Rasmussen. That record wouldn’t have sounded like that without you. Those records wouldn’t have sounded so great without you.

What It Meant

There in that moment, with grunge rolling down from Seattle and frustrated Ohioans about to ball-gag culture with earnest industrial kink (Nine Inch Nails), Metallica stood singular. Their sound, built on gloriously crackling Mesa Boogie amps, Gibson and ESP guitars, and the merciless double bass drums…it was a powerful and intoxicating moment. When the Black Album arrived on CD a year or so later, they were still a huge band in my life. Even through the mainstream crossover, they were a factor. Four years later they’d be a non-event for me (ahem, “Load”) and then their legal misadventures made them positively unrelatable.

But that night, before “20/20,” this was the coolest band on the planet. I believed it completely.

Footnotes

  1. The rumor had always been that Lars was slumming or a tourist — a moneyed Dane who had been on a competitive tennis trajectory before heavy metal found him. I think that’s unfair but it was always a topic of discussion on BBS’ and the late-90’s internet. Cultural appropriation has always been a thing, but the fact that an egotistical Lars could have or would have so maligned Newsted seemed plausible. And that’s saying something.