justice tour metallica

• Latest News

‘Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star’: A Sonic Youth Masterpiece

‘fish rising’: the maiden solo voyage of steve hillage, ‘addicted to love’: america couldn’t get enough of robert palmer, ‘operation: mindcrime’: queensrÿche’s lofty concept album, ‘open up and say… ahh’: how a little pain yielded big gains for poison, ‘lovin’ you’: minnie riperton soars, with stevie wonder’s help, ‘wings over america’ tour: paul mccartney’s prodigious wingspan, ‘stax: soulsville u.s.a.’ to premiere on hbo, billy idol performs ‘rebel yell’ on nbc’s ‘today’, gracie abrams returns with new single ‘risk’, julius rodriguez announces new album ‘evergreen’, the john lennon estate teams with lumenate for ‘meditation mixes’ of ‘mind games’, pearl jam and zane lowe talk new record ‘dark matter’, ghost’s feature film ‘rite here rite now’ will premiere this june, watch metallica perform on their ‘damaged justice’ tour of 1989.

The footage from the latest in the ‘Metallica Mondays’ video series was originally captured on drummer Lars Ulrich’s camcorder.

Published on

Metallica have broadcast the latest episode of their ‘Metallica Mondays’ series – this time going back to 1989 and their Damaged Justice tour. The show took place on September 23 at Irvine, California – the final stop on Metallica’s North American tour that year.

Damaged Justice was Metallica’s fourth concert tour. It began on September 11, 1988 and ended on October 8, 1989. The name is believed to be inspired either by the cover of the band’s fourth studio album …And Justice for All , or by the song “Damage, Inc.” from the group’s previous album , Master of Puppets .

Both of the August 29 and 30, 1989 shows in Seattle, Washington were also recorded and “Harvester of Sorrow”, “One”, “Breadfan” and “Last Caress” were used for The Good, The Bad and The Live . The same mix of these shows used here was used on the digital re-masters of the band’s first four albums when uploaded to digital retailers, though a different set of songs were used in this case, two from the respective album. In 1993, these concerts were re-mixed and released as video in the box set Live S_t: Binge & Purge.

‘Electric Warlock’: How Rob Zombie Once Again Wove His Dark Magic

Unlike the past 18 Metallica Mondays, however, the latest instalment wasn’t pro-shot and was instead recorded on drummer Lars Ulrich’s camcorder, with the sound taken directly from the soundboard. You can check the Damaged Justice footage out below.

Metallica Mondays are streamed on both the band’s official YouTube channel and Facebook page at 8pm ET (1am BST) every week, with fans able to donate cash live to Metallica’s All Within My Hands foundation during the broadcast.

In other Metallica news, the band are preparing to released their S&M2 live album on August 28 on standard 4LP vinyl, ccoloured vinyl, 2CD, DVD, Blu-ray, and Deluxe Box set, with Metallica previously sharing “All Within My Hands” and “Nothing Else Matters” from the record.

The performances were captured during Metallica’s two shows with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra at the city’s Chase Centre in September 2019 – two nights which celebrated the 20th anniversary of the original S&M album.

S&M2 is out on August 28 and can be pre-ordered here .

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Inside the Tour That Made Metallica Megastars

By Kory Grow

When Lars Ulrich reflects on Metallica ‘s massive Damaged Justice tour now, he marvels that they were able to pull it off at all. “No band as extreme as ours had ever done a full arena tour,” he says. “So it was definitely a crapshoot, and it paid off.”

“Those were the years that we proved ourselves,” Jason Newsted , the band’s bassist at the time, says. “We were firing on all cylinders. Once the ‘One’ video came out, we were ready for it and the world was ready for Metallica.”

Only five years had passed since Metallica had released their debut LP, 1983’s Kill ‘Em All , and in that time they had clawed their way up from the L.A. club circuit through heavy touring and sheer determination since radio and MTV wouldn’t touch them. But when they put out their fourth LP, … And Justice for All — with its labyrinthine arrangements, walloping riffs and brutal indictments of the political world — they somehow struck a nerve with the world at large. It was 180-degrees from the spandex-wearing balladeers and Led Zeppelin copycats ruling the rock charts, and it came at the right time. By the time they finished the tour that followed — as documented in a recent super-deluxe box set reissue of the Justice album — they would be ready to become megastars.

“There was nothing about those years that was instant,” Ulrich says. “Everything felt like this slow build. We put out the first record, the second record was bigger, the third record was bigger — everything was gradual. When I think back to those years, it was like a glacier. It just moved and moved.”

The band was already a force to be reckoned with in Europe, thanks to dogged touring on the continent in the early Eighties, and they had won over thousands of fans around the U.S. while opening for Ozzy Osbourne in 1986. After the shocking death of their original bassist, Cliff Burton , while on a headlining run in Europe, they recruited Newsted and went back out on the road almost immediately. They broke him in on the recording front with an EP of cover songs in 1987, Garage Days Re-Revisited , and hit the studio again in the early part of 1988 to make … And Justice for All , the LP that would open the door for them to the mainstream. Its songs chronicled corruption in Washington, D.C. (“Eye of the Beholder,” the title track), the horrors of war (“One”) and personal hells (“Dyers Eve”), and they were set to lengthy batteries of pugilistic drums and machine-gun guitar riffs. So when the group learned it would be playing arenas around the U.S., its members were skeptical.

As Ulrich recalls: “Our manager, Cliff [Burnstein], was like, ‘We’re gonna be doing an arena tour,’ and I was like, ‘Seriously, are you sure about that?’ A band like Metallica? OK, fine. We could do L.A., New York, San Francisco, but are we gonna penetrate the American heartland? That’s probably not a great idea. He was like, ‘No, trust me on this. I’m feeling it.'”

Editor’s picks

Every awful thing trump has promised to do in a second term, the 250 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest albums of all time, the 50 worst decisions in movie history.

Although the Damaged Justice tour officially kicked off in the U.S. in Toledo on November 15th, 1988 (after dates in Europe), Newsted says the true starting point for the tour was earlier in the year when they were second on the bill for the Monsters of Rock tour. They would go on early in the afternoon to warm the stage up for Dokken, the Scorpions and Van Halen.

The bassist knew they were on the verge of a breakthrough when they played the Los Angeles Coliseum in July of ’88, and there were already 50 to 60,000 people in the 80,000-capacity stadium when they went on at 2 p.m. When the band’s go-to intro music started playing, “The Ecstasy of Gold” from Ennio Morricone’s score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly , all they could see was a swarm. “It was like a giant toilet flushing,” Newsted says. “All of the people came down out of the bowl and onto the floor.” The mosh pit had 200 people in it. But it was hard for the fans since the concert promoter had placed rows of folding chairs, all bound together, on the field.

“We get to the fifth or sixth song, which was ‘Whiplash,’ and they started tearing the seats up,” Newsted recalls. “They started passing the rows of chairs, five or six hooked together at a time, over their heads like a crowdsurfer and you’d see it coming all the way from three quarters of the field towards us. They were coming by the hundreds and they’d hand them to the security guards when they got up to the barricade. The security guards were overwhelmed. Where do we put these hundreds of seats that were bent and broken with pieces of hair and shoes on them, as they come up? So we had to stop a verse and a half into ‘Whiplash’ and walk offstage.

“So we get behind the PA and start watching and for five or seven minutes, they’re cleaning the field of the chairs,” Newsted continues. “Once those seven minutes were finished, the chairs were gone and in a big pile in the parking lot behind the stage. They looked like a record burning or a book burning, like a pyre. So we came back on, and James goes, ‘Two, three, four, bam!’ and we pick up right where we left off — “Whiplash!” and it went freaking bonkers. Those pits turned into 500 people, and they’re all across the field whirling and dust kicking up. And that was at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. By the time Dokken were ready to come on, it was like, ‘Uh, love you, guys, but good luck. Follow that!'”

Review: Metallica's Breakthrough LP '...And Justice For All' Gets A Revealing Deep-Reissue

Metallica's 'and justice for all': what happened to the bass, metallica's lars ulrich: what i learned from my band's 'day of service'.

For Newsted, who’d entered the band at its darkest period, that tour was a dream come true. “There was negative things that were sensationalized over the years,” he says, possibly referring to the hazing he underwent when he joined or the way his playing was turned down on Justice , “but there was so much more positive, happy, camaraderie and brotherhood. Nobody wanted to be the weak link in the group. Everybody wanted to kick ass as a unit. It was so very dreamy. I didn’t sleep. That’s when my insomnia started. I’m still 30 years into insomnia now.”

The Monsters of Rock tour was like boot camp for Newsted. He met his heroes (“I still had posters on my wall of Eddie Van Halen and the Scorpions in my apartment in 1987 and 1988,” he says) and he learned how to sustain himself on tour. “By being around the guys that invented partying in the Eighties — Van Halen, the Scorpions and Dokken — you would walk on a crew bus, and I won’t mention which band’s, and there’s a pile of blow on the table in the front lounge and a pile of blow on the table in the back lounge,” he recalls. “Nobody ever sleeps. When we flew, they’d be crashed out across whole rows of seats and can’t fucking move. I look over at my hero, all red and swollen, and I’m like, ‘Guess what I’m not gonna do? That . You’re never gonna see me like that.’ Between that tour in ’88 and the reiteration of that in ’93 with Guns N’ Roses, we learned what not to do in a bunch of different ways. You see those kinds of antics and you’re like, ‘Man, what the fuck? I wish I wouldn’t have known that.’ But it taught me to be cool. I was done with all my stupid shit — powders and all that — by ’89 so I learned from those guys not to do any of that.”

By the time the group was ready to mount the U.S. leg of the Damaged Justice tour in November, they were a well-oiled machine. And they had a big stage to play on, one equipped with a larger-than-life replica of Lady Justice, which would explode and collapse at the end of “… And Justice for All.” All they needed were audiences. “We used Indianapolis as a yardstick or a temperature gauge,” Ulrich says. “We put the first leg on sale and we were playing a few of the bigger cities and then Indianapolis was, like, fifth or something in the schedule. The tickets went on sale in Indianapolis and I can’t remember if we sold it out but we ended up doing 13 or 14,000 people, which for a band of our kind in 1988 was an insane victory. If we were cool in Indianapolis, we were cool almost anywhere.”

A few months later, Metallica released their first-ever music video, for Justice’s “One,” in January 1989, and they found themselves even bigger than before. The song was a brooding quasi-ballad about a soldier who’d been blown into a quadriplegic state after stepping on a landmine and couldn’t communicate; it was all the more terrifying when paired with harrowing footage from Dalton Trumbo’s film adaptation of Johnny Got His Gun , the book that had inspired the song’s lyrics. “MTV was the center of the universe at that time and I remember we were in San Antonio, Texas when the ‘One ‘ video came out,” Ulrich says. “It was, like, the big thing. It hit Dial MTV at Number One, like fucking just completely out of nowhere. It was the most requested video the first day it came out. And we were like, ‘Holy fuck, this is real.'”

“It took us all to a different level of realization of what was possible,” Newsted says. “We would have never thought it would be possible to play heavy-metal music loud as fuck for a career and make money at it until then.”

“I think we did the Grammys that same month, and that was the first time that anyone let, like, a rock band on the Grammys. We were sitting there playing ‘One’ to a set of industry types that looked pretty astonished at was going on in front of them. It heightened our profile and we turned a corner.”

At the same time, Metallica were still learning what they were capable of musically. Their earliest songs were almost like aerobic workouts — breakneck races to the finish line with small flashes of melody — but by Justice , they’d started injecting their songs with melody. They were still demanding though. “You had to remember to eat right and get your sugars because you lose two to three pounds in sweat playing those songs,” Newsted says. They also started allowing their songs to stretch out more, as they layered riff upon riff into byzantine columns of sound. The shortest song on the record was over five minutes, the title track, “… And Justice for All,” has more movements than most classical symphonies and a track like “Blackened,” alternated time signatures which made for difficult headbanging.

“We had a vision for the songs and we felt we wanted to record them that way,” Ulrich says. “There was not much of a process of discovery or emotion. It was like, here’s a bunch of songs we’ve written that start here, end there and we’re gonna walk into the studio and record them faithfully and anybody that’s going to fuck with that, we’re gonna just squash.”

What they learned, however, is that it’s a lot to ask of both themselves and their audiences to process the sheer amount of music they’d written for … And Justice for All . By the time they wrapped the Damaged Justice tour in 1989 with a three-night stand at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre in California and a quick run in Brazil, they had a new perspective on their music. “That’s when we started having a few conversations that maybe we had taken the progressive side of Metallica as far as it could go and we were all yearning for stuff that was little bit simpler and maybe a little more physical,” Ulrich says. “A lot of that stuff was very heady and cerebral, like, ‘Here I am onstage and I’m just constantly thinking about the next part.’ I remember that some of the earlier songs worked a little big better as the places got bigger in terms of the physicality of it. So a few months later, when we started writing again, that’s when ‘Enter Sandman,’ ‘Sad but True’ and ‘Wherever I May Roam’ was born. It was a new direction.”

That newer material became the basis for the self-titled 1991 record known as the Black Album. “Once we got to the Black Album, the appeal was 10 times what Justice was,” Newsted says. “When ‘Nothing Else Matters’ came out as Number One in 50 countries in the first week, it was eye-opening. I would say that the Black Album tour was the biggest, best tour of Metallica, but as far as the real-deal, metal, pull-your-hair-out, bleeding, breaking shit, the Justice tour wins for the visceral aspect.”

Now that 30 years have passed since the Damaged Justice tour, the scene is markedly different both for Metallica and for Newsted, who exited the group in 2001. He’s since gone on to play with a variety of artists and projects, including Voivod, Ozzy Osbourne and his own Newsted band. These days, he’s exploring acoustic country music with his own Chophouse Band. “It’s old-timey music,” he says. “We have mandolins and banjoes and things like that. I’m working on originals, writing songs and collaborating with people and getting hooked up with different players from the folk, American and bluegrass circles.”

Meanwhile, Metallica are enjoying their status as not only the biggest heavy-metal group in the world, but also one of the biggest bands of any genre. The Black Album is the best-selling album to come out since its release, and the quartet has since played on every continent on the globe. They released their 10th album, Hardwired … to Self-Destruct , in 2016, and kicked off their WorldWired Tour with a run of stadium gigs last year. They’ll be touring arenas in the U.S. this winter.

Their success now, though, is a direct extension from the groundwork they laid on the Damaged Justice tour. “Once we started seeing the fruition come from our hard work and the appeal ‘One’ had to so many people, we were going, ‘Holy crap, this is actually something that could be forever,'” Newsted recalls. “This is something we could make a career out of. This is something that can have longevity and go farther than just to the metal kids. It gave us hope that we could do even bigger things and go out and conquer even more of the world than we thought we could before.”

Portions of this article previously ran in Rolling Stone’s 50 Greatest Concerts of the Last 50 Years list last year.

Hear King Princess Cover Steely Dan's 'Dirty Work'

• Classic Nostalgia
• By Emily Zemler

Watch Kate Hudson's Soulful Performance of 'Gonna Find Out' on 'Fallon'

• Late-Night TV

Miranda Lambert Embraces Her Power on Fiery Single 'Wranglers'

• Light It Up

Dua Lipa's Third Album, 'Radical Optimism,' Is Here

• By Tomás Mier

Dua Lipa Finds Her Bliss on 'Radical Optimism'

• ALBUM REVIEW
• By Angie Martoccio

Most Popular

Ethan hawke lost the oscar for 'training day' and denzel washington whispered in his ear that losing was better: 'you don't want an award to improve your status', nicole kidman's daughters make their red carpet debut at afi life achievement award gala, king charles’ latest appearance has body language experts predicting a 'problem' in future events, ed orgeron divorce court finds loophole in ‘binding’ term sheet, you might also like, ‘the buddha of suburbia’: emma rice on working with hanif kureishi to make his iconic 1970s-set novel relevant to modern theater audiences, exclusive: frankies bikinis sweetest swimwear collection yet is coming to nyc, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors, ‘kingdom of the planet of the apes’ will celebrate performance capture in blu-ray release, dodgers’ big-ticket imports find groove in la’s winning culture.

Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.

Verify it's you

Please log in.

Damaged Justice

1988–1989 concert tour by metallica / from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, dear wikiwand ai, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:.

Can you list the top facts and stats about Damaged Justice?

Summarize this article for a 10 year old

Damaged Justice was the fourth concert tour by the American heavy metal band Metallica . It began on September 11, 1988, and ended on October 8, 1989. The name is believed to be inspired either by the cover of its fourth studio album ...And Justice for All , or by the song "Damage, Inc." from the group's previous album, Master of Puppets . The single " One " was released during the tour. [1]

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?

Classic Rock Newsletter

Sign up below to get the latest from Classic Rock, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!

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.

The Brainstorms Project will reveal what your brain looks like when it listens to Pink Floyd

System Of A Down's Serj Tankian slams “absolute maniac” Donald Trump: “He’s only interested in himself, his own ego, his own everything. He doesn’t even care about other Republicans”

"I was terrible to work with, I was unsympathetic, aggressive, mean, selfish, egotistical." The Police were never friends, so Sting discovering coke circa Ghost In The Machine was always going to end badly

Most Popular

• Cover Story

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…”

Read this next:

• The 20 greatest Metallica songs – ranked
• The story behind Metallica's S&M album
• A plea for Metallica's Reload album

Check out more:

Now read these.

Represent reveal new Metallica collab collection

Represent have teamed up with Metallica for a new collaboration celebrating 40 years of Ride The Lightning and more…

Watch Metallica honour Elton John with a badass cover of Funeral For A Friend / Love Lies Bleeding

See Metallica’s absolutely awesome cover of Funeral For A Friend / Love Lies Bleeding at the recent Elton John and Bernie Taupin tribute concert in Washington, D.C.

Metallica announce new vinyl pressings of St. Anger, Garage, Inc. and more

Metallica have revealed phase two of their album reissues, with Garage, Inc., St. Anger, Death Magnetic and Hardwired… To Self-Destruct all getting the coloured vinyl treatment.

Metallica and Paramore win best metal and rock GRAMMYs

Metallica, Paramore and Boygenius win big in the best rock, metal and alternative categories at this year's GRAMMYs

Jay Weinberg confirms first live performance since Slipknot departure

Former Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg will be going down under with funk metal supergroup Infectious Grooves in April, as the band’s usual sticksman Brooks Wackerman is busy with Avenged Sevenfold…

Lucifer’s Johanna Sadonis: The 10 songs that changed my life

Lucifer singer Johanna Sadonis tells all about being turned to the dark side by Danzig, having her mind blown by Metallica, and making mixtapes for her own funeral…

The 50 best albums of 2023

The Kerrang! verdict on the 50 albums that shaped 2023.

Metallica, A7X, Machine Head and more join Foo Fighters at Hellfest 2024

Just over one month on from announcing Foo Fighters as 2024 headliners, Hellfest have added a ton more bands – including Metallica, Avenged Sevenfold, Machine Head, The Prodigy, Enter Shikari, Bruce Dickinson and Corey Taylor…

The best of Kerrang! delivered straight to your inbox three times a week. What are you waiting for?

...And Justice for All (song)/Tour Dates

• View history

Here we will list all times ...And Justice for All has ever been played, complete with links to the full setlist of each show.

• 2 References

References [ ]

• 1 M72 World Tour
• 2 Dave Mustaine
• 3 Monsters of Rock '88

Primary Nav Tour Upcoming Dates Past Dates News News In The Press ...And On Top Of That Band Timeline History Metallica Music Releases Songs & Lyrics Media Videos Photos Podcast Fan Club Sign Up News So What! Contests Videos Photos Forums Local Chapters Shop New & Featured Collaborations Sale Clearance Media Return to Media Reissues Vinyl Digital Downloads Live Metallica CDs CDs DVDs Books Apparel Return to Apparel Shirts Pants & Shorts Outerwear Headwear Footwear Kids & Babies Accessories Return to Accessories Stickers, Patches & Buttons Puzzles, Games & Figures Wall Art Picks, Sticks & Straps Vinyl Care Jewelry Drinkware Collections Return to Collections Month of Giving T-Shirt Club 72 Seasons All Within My Hands Fifth Member™ Blackened Whiskey Probity UK Shop Metallica Black Box

Birmingham, AL, Alabama, US United States

• See all concerts in this city
• See all concerts in this country
• See all concerts at this venue
• See all concerts on this month/day

related merch

• See Lyrics & Stats For This SONG
• See all concerts with this SONG

Battery (Birmingham, AL - January 22, 2019)

Tuning Room (Birmingham, AL - January 22, 2019)

Rob & Kirk's Doodle (Birmingham, AL - January 22, 2019)

Dream No More (Birmingham, AL - January 22, 2019)

Photo Gallery