...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 music store. For my younger generation friends, that’s like Spotify, but for physical media. On some given Friday in 1989, before dinner, I bought “…And Justice For All,” Metallica’s fourth studio album. I had seen but 4 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. To this day, Master of Puppets is still my favorite, 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. And while “One” was the crossover success on this record, “Blackened” (or perhaps “Shortest Straw”) captures what I think James sounds like.

“Faaahhhhr (“fire”)
to begin
whipping dance
of the dead
Blackened is the end

Just in that couplet you can hear the dynamics that defined James’ influences. “Fire” hints at his growl register and “end” hints at his Bruce Dickinson aspirations (Fair’s fair, James, no one matches Bruce, but you swung for the fences.”).

Also, the vocabulary density: hypocrisy, potency, humani-tay. These rhymes were not afraid of the dictionary.

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.

I had heard Joe Satriani’s Surfing With the Alien the year before, and when I found out Satch had taught Kirk it was a lightbulb moment. The grooviest of the groove shredders helped translate Hammett’s style into something that added an element of sass or even swagger to metal.

Jason Newsted’s bass is famously, criminally absent from the mix. I think the current state of the conspiracy is that 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.2

Lars I’ll leave for another day, but I have never felt so personally assaulted by a double-bass. According to research collated in the following video:

Flemming did analog edits to make sure that the drumming was machine-tight (can’t imagine that’s good for the ol’ Rasmussen/Ulrich relationship). The snare work is high, tight, crisp, and impossibly thin. It’s like being attacked by a rapier versus a broadsword. The low-end drums are battering you while you’re getting sliced to ribbon by the razorblade sound of the snare.

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 (Ride the…) lightning-infused Mesa Boogie amps, Gibson and ESP guitars, and the merciless double bass drums…it was a powerful and intoxicating sound. 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. And yes, Guns n’ Roses’ Slash had yet even more groove, but GnR were not metal nor was he a shredder. I’d go so far as to say he’s Janis Joplin if she had to use a guitar. And know what, I think he’d understand the compliment. The pinch harmonic opening phrase to “Paradise City” is Cicero breathing in before delivering In Catalinam. It is a vocal attack that looks like a child gamboling over a verdant hill. It is a triumph of feel over technique.
  2. 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. It was routinely a topic of discussion on BBS’ and the late-90’s internet as to whether Lars was authentic. There are whole books on the topic of cultural identity and appropriation — and even better Pulp songs. I opt for grace her: the muse speaks to whomever she will. I’ll not judge another man’s life narrative, and I’m not really sure it matters. Regardless, this this historical question provided ample support for the narrative that “Lars the Diva” was so petty that he hazed Newsted’s place in the mix of Justice out of existence. Whether true or false, we don’t know; but the fact that it’s still an active meme in YouTube comments today is a certain kind of damning take.