Birth School Metallica Death - Vol I (36 page)

‘I guess my best memory, when I break open those vaults, is [of] James and I sitting in the bedroom of my one-bedroom apartment in San Pablo, CA, with my four-track machine – the one I still do my stuff on – in front of us,’ recalls Newsted. ‘There’s a Damage Inc. poster on the wall … and I had the riff to [the song] “Blackened”. I showed James the fingering for it, and we just started working on the song. We both still had long hair, thought the same way and listened to the same music. When I went away, he’d babysit my cats; when he went away, I’d babysit his cats. We both had one-bedroom apartments, and they were both equidistant on either side from Lars’s garage, where we made “…
Garage Days
…” We were all living in the El Cerrito area, and we had a very gang-oriented, Ramones-oriented thing happening. We had that mentality very intact. Everybody was pretty much a straight ahead metalhead. We were very determined to be that American band that brought this kind of music to [the] people.’

Newsted’s role in Metallica has often been described in rather sniffy terms as being that of a ‘fan boy’. The bassist’s perspective took in not only the dynamic of the group of which he was a member but also its affinity with, and even responsibilities to, its audience.

‘Blackened’ was the first song the group worked on, and they did so as a quartet in a process Ulrich describes as ‘the famous, you know, “Let’s get everybody together and try to work on stuff.”’

‘But it never really went anywhere,’ remembers the drummer. ‘Over the course of Metallica’s career, whenever we get too many people to be part of the writing thing, it always ends up being not so good.’

Instead Hetfield and Ulrich squirrelled themselves away in the drummer’s garage, listening to riffs recorded on tapes and editing the notes and chord-progressions into place. Such was the complexity of the structure of each of the compositions that began to emerge that Hetfield resorted to making written charts
in order to help him to commit each song’s component parts to memory. ‘Back then,’ remembers Ulrich, ‘we just tried to cram as much shit into the songs as possible. But it wasn’t like we had to keep cramming until they were nine minutes long. It was more like, “Wow, this is pretty cool.”’

The pieces of music were given names: in the slipstream of ‘Blackened’ came ‘Harvester of Sorrow’. Elsewhere, inspired by a conversation Hetfield had once shared with Cliff Burton, regarding the horror of the notion of a soldier returning from war bereft not only of all four limbs but of the powers of sight, speech and hearing, the third song to emerge from the songwriting session was given the title ‘One’. Later in the process, the front man partnered a lyric that addressed the fury of a childhood blighted by parental suffocation to music that was as frenetically paced as it was tightly controlled; this song was christened ‘Dyers Eve’. Elsewhere, a patiently expansive composition featuring an eight-line poem written by Cliff Burton, titled ‘To Live Is To Die’, would battle the song ‘… And Justice for All’ for the title of Metallica’s longest composition to date, and at sixteen seconds shy of ten minutes would win by four seconds. As if by way of consolation, the latter song would be afforded title track status on Metallica’s fourth album.

‘The writing was pretty much me and James in the sweaty, stinking garage there on Carlson Boulevard,’ remembers Ulrich.

This process inevitably locked itself into the classic Metallica form, where Hetfield would author many of the riffs while Ulrich would concern himself with the invariably undervalued task of placing these parts into an order that sometimes adhered to and occasionally subverted traditional notions of song structure. The pair showed a willingness to utilise sections written by Hammett – the lead guitarist’s name appears on the writing credits of five of …
And Justice for All
’s nine compositions – but only if such sections met the editorial standards the pair had set for
the band. The lead guitarist’s own estimation of the worth of his contributions was without consequence. As for Newsted, ‘Blackened’ is the only selection on the first Metallica album on which he appeared to feature his name as co-author.

‘We were waiting for [Jason] to write some big, epic stuff, but it never really came,’ recalls Hammett. ‘It was kind of weird. It was a non-starter, in retrospect. It was great that he was there and was enthusiastic about it, but he didn’t make any huge contributions. The only thing he really came up with was the riff in “Blackened”, and in retrospect that was pretty much the biggest contribution he ever made to the band. I don’t know why that is, but it’s kind of just how the chips fell.’

‘I knew my place,’ reasoned Newsted, ‘and I couldn’t write songs better than James.’

With the blueprints laid out on demo tape, Metallica convened at Burt Bacharach’s One On One Studios on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood in the first week of January 1988 in order to begin the process of recording their fourth album. In pursuit of this aim, the quartet hired the services of Mike Clink, a producer who at the time was coming into season as the man who had harnessed the raw energy of Guns N’ Roses and translated this into the multi-platinum form of that band’s debut album
Appetite for Destruction,
released the previous summer.

Events, however, would not proceed smoothly. As had become tradition, Metallica chose to acclimatise to the studio environment by recording a pair of cover versions, in this case Diamond Head’s ‘The Prince’ and Budgie’s ‘Breadfan’. While Clink may have been the ‘hottest’ producer in rock at that time, to the eyes and ears of Hetfield and Ulrich, it only took the completion of these two tracks to realise he wasn’t up to this particular job.

‘We realised that working with Clink wasn’t working out,’ says Ulrich, remembering that the producer ‘was a super nice guy’ but that the ‘vibe’ in the studio ‘just wasn’t happening’.

Viewed today, the marriage between Metallica and Mike Clink seems like a union fraught with potential difficulty, if not one certain to fail. As timeless and revered as
Appetite for Destruction
would prove to be – and with more than 40 million copies sold, the fifteen-song set outstrips Metallica’s most commercially successful release by some distance – as with the Sex Pistols’
Never Mind the Bollocks
the collection is a textbook example of the classic debut album. Mike Clink did not so much produce Guns N’ Roses as he did translate the quintet’s sound as heard in the clubs of West Hollywood and replicate it authentically onto the unforgiving parameters of a five-inch compact disc. But as the producer found them in the first month of 1988, Metallica were an entirely different proposition from Guns N’ Roses. Theirs was a union of greater complexity, both in terms of the music it played and of the relationship that existed between the band’s two alpha males.

In order to salvage the situation, Lars Ulrich made a telephone call to a man to whom he could speak in Danish. Listening from his home in Copenhagen, Flemming Rasmussen was asked by his countryman if he might be both willing and able to fill the vacuum left by the departure of Mike Clink. The producer answered that he was, but that to fulfil this brief he would require that accommodation in Los Angeles be provided for his entire family (the Rasmussen household had expanded to four with the birth of a second child on December 10) and that, as was the case with
Master of Puppets
, part of the technician’s fee be registered as a royalty against each copy of the album sold. With these terms agreed, on February 14, 1988, the Rasmussen family flew from the bitter winter of Copenhagen to the sunlit temperance of southern California. With the kind of timing more suited to the pen of a dramatist, the Dane made his entrance into One On One Studios as Clink was packing up his belongings and leaving.

‘I remember him being in the studio as I arrived,’ recalls Rasmussen. ‘It was a bit awkward, obviously. But he seemed like a nice guy. He didn’t hit me or anything.’

Between first entering the recording complex and returning to Copenhagen in May, Rasmussen enjoyed just three rest days, and for each of these he was placed on standby in case his charges decided to open the microphones at One On One at short, or no, notice. During the early days of the recording sessions, the parties – usually Hetfield and Ulrich together with their producer – would convene at 11 a.m. and work for between twelve and fourteen hours. As the time of departure stretched to a point where late at night changed shifts with early the next morning, so too the time of the next day’s sessions would be punted back an hour. It is difficult to tell whether or not Rasmussen is joking when he says that towards the end of the making of …
And Justice for All
the recording sessions ‘were starting at five o’clock in the morning’, but there is no doubting the rictus smile that accompanies the revelation that during his time in Los Angeles the producer ‘didn’t get much sleep – not much sleep at all’.

As work progressed on the nine songs that would eventually comprise …
And Justice for All
, Metallica appointed their latest collection the humorous working title ‘Wild Chicks and Fast Cars and Lots of Drugs’. As the proverb asserts, this was a case of many a true word being spoken in jest. Newsted has revealed that during this period Ulrich and Hammett were ‘experimenting’ with ‘powders’, although how one can differentiate between the drummer before and after a line of cocaine is a question that lacks a convincing answer. Elsewhere Ulrich plunged himself into the Hollywood night life like the twenty-something major-league rock star he was fast becoming. And in Hollywood in the late Eighties the drummer had found his
métier
. For while Metallica may have fled the City of Angels and placed much noisy distance between themselves and the kind of groups represented on
Sunset Boulevard, when it came to savouring the pleasures and trappings of permanent adolescence that attracted themselves to such groups, the returning exiles were not quite so sniffy.

‘One time in LA, Lars was determined that I would go with him to Nikki Sixx’s porno party,’ remembers Ross Halfin, who at the time lived in Los Angeles with journalist Mick Wall. ‘After drinking sake all night in a sushi bar we drove around Bel Air and Lars said to my date, who was speeding, “Why don’t you go a bit faster?” As he said this we whacked the kerb, spun around in the road, hit the opposite kerb and somersaulted, landing upside down, half in the road and half in someone’s garden. I remember it all seemed to happen in slow motion. I looked around the car and everyone was okay. We crawled out of the window with my date screaming “My car!” as it was going up in flames. Three police cars arrived. I’m thinking, “Oh shit … we’re wasted …” They handcuffed and carted my date off to jail, and the sergeant looks at Lars and said, “I have scraped people off this corner. There is not a mark on any of you. Remember this, [because] God is watching you.” He then ordered us a couple of cabs. Lars rang me at 6 a.m. saying, “Did that really happen?”’

During the recording Metallica and Rasmussen were staying at an apartment complex close to the then iconic and now closed Tower Records shop on Sunset Boulevard. Each day producer and band would travel in the same car to One On One Studios, pausing on the way to buy bottles of pop and snacks. Rasmussen remembers that Hetfield and Ulrich were present in the studio ‘pretty much all the time’. ‘Look, here’s a picture of Lars doing his favourite thing,’ says the producer, showing the authors a photograph of the drummer in the mixing room speaking on the phone – and that Hammett and Newsted were on hand only for the purposes of the recording of each musician’s individual contributions.

‘The …
Justice
… album was probably the epitome of the Lars and James show, in terms of the writing, the recording, the
mixing, the whole thing,’ remembers Ulrich. (Interesting that the drummer should choose to refer to the union with Hetfield by placing his colleague’s name second in relation to his own.) ‘It was’, he says, ‘me and James running everything with an iron fist.’

However, when it came to the soon to be widely discussed contributions of Metallica’s newest member, neither Hetfield, Ulrich
or
Rasmussen regarded the event as being an occasion worthy of their presence.

‘We made [Jason] do all the bass tracks on his own, actually, so he could do his thing,’ says the producer, in a tone of voice that suggests this memory is nothing more than an afterthought. For the bass player himself though, the recollection is as telling as it was troubling.

‘For …
Justice
…, my situation was very awkward,’ recalls the musician. ‘I had nothing to do 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 … I was put in a room with Toby Wright, who at the time was second or third engineer at One On One. He was more like the guy who got coffee, the guy we’d [smoke joints] with and stuff.’ Wright would go on to further his name with bands such as Slayer and next-generation metal innovators Korn, but in the first months of 1988 the technician’s seniority of position paled even when placed alongside that of the musician he was commissioned to record. Like the last two drinkers at a singles bar, the pair made the best of it.

‘I walked in, Toby rolled the tape and I played the songs,’ remembers the bassist. ‘We started with “Blackened” because that’s the one I knew the best. The rest of the songs were like a double-black diamond level of difficulty in terms of technical demands. I wasn’t used to having fourteen or eighteen parts in a song, but I was ready for it. I can’t remember exactly how much
we played the songs together [as a band] before I went in there – I just remember learning the songs myself off the tapes that I had of the drums and the guitars. So I played the tape, recorded my parts, loaded up my shit [at the end of the session] and that was it.’

As events would transpire, when listeners first heard …
And Justice for All
on its release, the question they would unite in asking was whether Newsted had played on the album at all, but that was a shock the bassist still had in store.