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Metallica’s ‘…And Justice for All': 10 Facts Only Superfans Would Know

By the second half of the 1980s, Metallica were in a strange boat. They had released three albums — the most popular of which being  Master of Puppets —  lost bassist Cliff Burton in a horrific accident, recruited Jason Newsted and released an EP with him.

They had several different routes they could take. Either they could recreate  Master of Puppets  and continue onward with that familiar format, or they could change it up and prove they weren't the type of band that would keep putting out the same album. Lars Ulrich , in particular, wanted  Master' s follow-up to be as raw and in-your-face as possible.

The result was titled  ...And Justice for All,  a mockery of the social and political climate of the country, and was released on Aug. 25, 1988. The sound was aggressive and brash, the structure was progressive, featuring unusual, alternating tempos.

"One" was the gem of this new collection of songs, and it put Metallica in a light that they hadn't previously been seen in before. The video became one of the most highly-requested on MTV, and the song was nominated for the Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance at the Grammys in 1989 — which they infamously lost to Jethro Tull .

Justice  is recognized by many Metallica fans as their last true thrash record. They would go on to work with producer Bob Rock on The   Black Album   in the following years, which expanded their audience beyond the purely metal horizon. Here are 10 facts only superfans would know about  ...And Justice for All. 

1. An affair with Guns N' Roses.

After hearing Guns N' Roses groundbreaking debut  Appetite for Destruction,  Ulrich became fixated with Metallica's next album having as hard of a sound. "It was so venomous. It was so fucking real and so fucking angry," the drummer gushed to  Classic Rock .

Thus, when producer Flemming Rasmussen told Metallica he would not be available to work with them, Ulrich sought out Mike Clink — who had produced  Appetite.  On the other hand, writer Mick Wall noted that Axl Rose  gave Metallica's  Ride the Lightning  as an example to Clink prior to recording it.

2. They recorded two covers to get comfortable working with Clink.

Metallica recorded covers of Budgie's "Breadpan" and Diamond Head 's "The Prince" with Clink as an introduction to working together. The two songs were released as B-sides, and they were later included in their 1988 covers album  Garage Inc. 

 3. It ultimately didn't go so well.

Ulrich and James Hetfield had slightly different visions at the start of the recording process. Where the drummer was hoping for this next album to take Metallica to a larger-than-level status, Hetfield wasn't a fan of the Guns N' Roses debut, and he wasn't a fan of how they were going about his guitar parts.

“I just flipped out,” the singer admitted to Wall. “Couldn’t hang with it anymore.”

Clink was fired shortly after. “As much as I believe they wanted me to put my magic on  the tracks... I think that they were used to doing things on their own and doing it their own way," he chimed in.

The band called Rasmussen and he ended up being able to work with them again. They chose to keep the drum tracks they had recorded with Clink for "Harvester of Sorrow" and "The Shortest Straw."

4. Cliff Burton's final songwriting credits.

...And Justice for All  was the last Metallica album to list Burton in the songwriting credits, particularly on "To Live Is to Die." Burton had recorded fragments of bass lines on tape, but Newsted ended up actually playing them on the final version. The song is considered instrumental, though there is a spoken word portion that consists of two lines written by different poets and the final two lines written by Burton.

5. Jason Newsted's bass... or lack thereof.

As  St. Anger  is known as the album in Metallica's discography for having too much snare,  Justice  is known for having nearly-inaudible bass. "I was so disappointed when I heard the final mix," Newsted told  To Live Is to Die: The Life and Death of Metallica's Cliff Burton  author Joel McIver.

“I know for a fact, since I recorded it, that there’s brilliant bass playing on that album," Rasmussen affirmed to Classic Rock.

"The bass frequencies in Jason's tone kinda interfered with the tone that James was trying to shoot for with his rhythm guitar sound, and every time the two blended together, it just wasn't happening," Kirk Hammett explained to Decibel Magazine. "So the only thing left to do was turn the bass down in the mix."

6. James Hetfield's first introspective set of lyrics.

Prior to  The Black Album,  the subject matter of the lyrics on Metallica's first four albums tended to focus on the world around Hetfield, rather than his own. However, "Dyer's Eve" features some introspective lyrics that reflect the frontman's confusing Christian Scientist upbringing, which he would delve into on later songs such as "The God That Failed."

“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 described to Classic Rock. “It’s basically a letter from the kid to his parents, asking them why they didn’t expose him to the real world.”

"Dear Mother / Dear Father / What is this hell you have put me through?"

7. "One" and  Johnny Got His Gun.

Dalton Trumbo's 1938 novel  Johnny Got His Gun  tells the story of an American World War I soldier named Joe Bonham, who was severely injured by a German shell. When he woke up in the hospital, he realized he lost everything — legs, arms and face — except for his brain. Eventually, he communicated with the officials in Morse Code by hitting his head, and wrote out the message, "Please kill me."

Hetfield had a similar idea for a song before reading the novel, about being just a mind. Thus, "One," one of Metallica's most epic songs, was born.

The band even purchased the rights to the film adaptation of the movie, which was also directed by Trumbo, in order to use parts of it in their music video for the song. Some sound effects from the film were used in the final recording of it as well.

8. It was the beginning of their road to excess.

As Wall mentioned in Classic Rock, the tour Metallica embarked on while the album was being mixed was when they began experiencing a true breakthrough. They were out with Van Halen , the Scorpions and Dokken , and though they were the smallest of those acts at the time, that was all about to change.

Women, cocaine and alcohol became more accessible than they could have imagined. Hetfield, especially, was starting to drink a lot.

"I would get pretty violent," the frontman revealed in an interview with Ben Mitchell . "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. With who? Sometimes with Lars. That’s how resentments would get released, pushing and shoving, throwing things at him."

9. Platinum, and more platinum.

Just a few months before  ...And Justice for All  was released, its predecessor  Master of Puppets  was certified platinum. Then, just nine weeks after its release,  Justice  was certified platinum as well. This would begin a streak of immense success for the band for years to come.

10. The statue of... Doris.

The album cover features an illustration of a tied-up, blind-folded Lady Justice — an obvious reflection of how the band felt about social and political injustices in the U.S. at the time, which went hand-in-hand with the title and general theme of the songs.

During their  Damaged Justice  tour, they erected a large replica of the "mascot" on the stage. They gave her the name Doris, and she represented Metallica's early foray into stage production. Toward the end of the set on each night of the tour, Doris would collapse and become decapitated.

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Metallica Kicks Off M72 World Tour: Set List and Videos

Metallica kicked off their M72 World Tour  at Amsterdam's Johan Cruyff Arena on Thursday, beginning a sprawling road trip that will run through late 2024.

You can see the set list and videos from the performance below.

The metal giants kicked off their 16-song set with "Orion" — their first time using the  Master of Puppets instrumental as a show opener since 2011, according to setlist.fm . Other mainstays such as "Master of Puppets," "Battery," "Fade to Black," "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "Sad but True" also appeared.

Several classic songs were notably omitted on opening night, including "Enter Sandman" and "One" (the band played no tracks off  ... And Justice for All ). Metallica is playing two shows in each city on this tour, changing set lists and opening acts each night to create a "No Repeat Weekend," so those songs could still appear at their next show.

Watch Metallica Play 'Lux Æterna' at M72 World Tour Kickoff

Watch Metallica Play 'Fuel' at M72 World Tour Kickoff

The band also played three songs off its new album  72 Seasons : "Lux Æterna" and the live debuts of "Screaming Suicide" and "Sleepwalk My Life Away." Metallica released their 11th album two weeks ago, marking their first full-length since 2016's  Hardwired ... to Self-Destruct . The LP debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, ending a chart-topping streak that dated back to their 1991 self-titled album .

James Hetfield described the album's concept in an official statement: "Seventy-two seasons. The first 18 years of our lives that form our true or false selves. The concept that we were told 'who we are' by our parents. A possible pigeonholing around what kind of personality we are. I think the most interesting part of this is the continued study of those core beliefs and how it affects our perception of the world today. Much of our adult experience is reenactment or reaction to these childhood experiences. Prisoners of childhood or breaking free of those bondages we carry."

Watch Metallica Play 'Seek & Destroy' at M72 World Tour Kickoff

Watch Metallica Play 'Screaming Suicide' at M72 World Tour Kickoff

Metallica will return to the Johan Cruyff Arena on Saturday with Floor Jansen and Ice Nine Kills in place of Architects and Mammoth WVH . Other support acts on different legs of the tour include Pantera , Greta Van Fleet and Five Finger Death Punch.

Watch Metallica Play 'Sleepwalk My Life Away' at M72 World Tour Kickoff

Metallica, 4/27/23, Johan Cruyff Arena, Amsterdam 1. "Orion" 2. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" 3. "Holier Than Thou" 4. "King Nothing" 5. "Lux Æterna" 6. "Screaming Suicide" 7. "Fade to Black" 8. "Sleepwalk My Life Away" 9. "Nothing Else Matters" 10. "Sad but True" 11. "The Day That Never Comes" 12. "Ride the Lightning" 13. "Battery" 14. "Fuel" 15. "Seek & Destroy" 16. "Master of Puppets"

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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.'”

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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!'”

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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.

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How ...And Justice For All changed Metallica forever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he did.

Published in Classic Rock #252

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

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

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

Listen to … And Justice For All .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• 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…”

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...And Justice for All

Best New Reissue

By Sean T. Collins

November 3, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• Top 20 outdoor concerts of summer 2024 in WA

Despite a few early outliers, Memorial Day weekend typically marks the unofficial start of summer concert season. This year’s holiday weekend slate is especially heavy with piano man Billy Joel taking T-Mobile Park, the opening of Seattle Theatre Group’s new Remlinger Farms venue in Carnation, two-nighters with Sarah McLachlan at Chateau Ste. Michelle and dance music titan Illenium at the Gorge Amphitheatre and the 53rd annual Northwest Folklife Festival.

Of course, as rain clouds grow scarcer, the open-air party is just getting started. Here are 20 of the top outdoor concerts and festivals coming to the Seattle area through Labor Day weekend, with an honorable mention to Bumbershoot, which had yet to reveal its lineup at the time of this writing.

Red Hot Chili Peppers

The funky pop rockers were feeling California casual when they last pulled into their grunge buddies’ hometown for a midsummer night at T-Mobile Park back in 2022, two months before dropping their second lengthy album of that year. RHCP are still sailing on those sprawling/kinda bloated 2022 LPs — “Unlimited Love” and “Return of the Dream Canteen” — their first since reuniting with heyday guitarist John Frusciante.

May 31; Gorge Amphitheatre, 754 Silica Road N.W., Quincy; tickets start at $175 ; livenation.com

Jon Batiste

New Orleans’ genre-dabbling jazzman has been on a tear since winning album of the year at the 2022 Grammys and leaving his post as Stephen Colbert’s late-night bandleader. The affable piano man steps up to Chateau Ste. Michelle this summer following a February Paramount Theatre engagement, still touring on last year’s sonically ambitious “World Music Radio.” Batiste is an early-season standout amid a strong Woodinville slate that also features country/pop star Maren Morris; Americana heavyweights Charley Crockett and Jason Isbell; alt-rock shape-shifter Beck performing with a symphony orchestra; and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. 

June 5; Chateau Ste. Michelle, 14111 N.E. 145th St., Woodinville; standard tickets sold out, packages available starting at $270; ste-michelle.com

Beyond Wonderland

Washington’s premiere EDM festival returns to the Gorge one year after a campground shooting left two people dead and three injured. As a lawsuit against Live Nation and festival organizers unfolds in the background, the beat goes on at Beyond Wonderland with electronic stars Mellodeath — a team up between crossover producer Marshmello and dubstep destroyer SVDDEN DEATH — Alison Wonderland, Rezz, Kayzo, Dillon Francis, Zedd and more.

June 22-23; Gorge Amphitheatre, 754 Silica Road N.W., Quincy ; single-day tickets start at $158, two-day passes $229; camping starts at $202 ; pnw.beyondwonderland.com

This folk-pop sensation’s massive online following boiled over to a chart-conquering Lumineerian buzz last year, coming on the heels of his late 2022 “Stick Season” LP. The Vermont singer-songwriter, who was up for a best new artist Grammy this year, will play his biggest (by a longshot) local show yet, taking on the Gorge.

June 29; Gorge Amphitheatre , 754 Silica Road N.W., Quincy; sold out ; livenation.com

The Seattle electronic heavyweights are concluding “The Last Goodbye” album cycle the same way they started it two summers ago: with a three-night blowout at the largest home state venue they’ve ever played, this time stepping up to the Gorge Amphitheatre after a mesmerizing Climate Pledge Arena run in 2022. On May 31, ODESZA will release an appetite-whetting live album, “The Last Goodbye Tour Live,” recorded over the last two years.

July 4-6; Gorge Amphitheatre , 754 Silica Road N.W., Quincy; remaining single-day tickets start at $80 ; livenation.com

Canada’s new leading pop export looks to bring a younger crowd to Chateau Ste. Michelle than the usual wine-and-cheese set that flocks to one of Greater Seattle’s most popular outdoor venues each summer. The freshly minted 20-year-old pop star is riding the success of “Greedy,” her first Top 10 hit and infectious lead single off sophomore album “Think Later,” replete with very Canadian cover art of Tate McRae wearing hockey goalie pads.

July 7; Chateau Ste. Michelle, 14111 N.E. 145th St., Woodinville ; remaining demand-priced tickets $444 ; ste-michelle.com

Day In Day Out

The chiller sibling to Capitol Hill Block Party slides up a month in the calendar this year, due to scheduling reasons at Seattle Center, while expanding to a third day after its first sellout in 2023. DIDO continues to shoulder some of the buzzy indie-rock acts that have subtly waned from Block Party’s main stage over the years while offering a less frenetic experience on the Fisher Pavilion lawn. Alt-pop fan favorite Carly Rae Jepsen, Jack Antonoff’s Bleachers and hometown heroes The Head and the Heart headline.

July 12-14; Fisher Green Pavilion at Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle ; single-day tickets start at $130, two-day $225, three-day $275, kids 8 and under free ; dayindayoutfest.com

Kenny Chesney

Country’s rum-endorsing king of summer circles back to Seattle this year, bringing his island vibes and No Shoes Nation fan base to Lumen Field. Armed with decades of country radio hits, the perpetually sleeveless honky-tonker remains one of the genre’s biggest draws and his Sun Goes Down tour features some serious firepower among its supporting cast. For this run, Chesney is joined by the country rockin’ stalwarts Zac Brown Band and red-hot newcomer Megan Moroney, who turned Nashville heads last year with her breakout single “Tennessee Orange.” Also performing: Uncle Kracker, Chesney’s back-in-the-day duet partner on the tour’s 2004 namesake, “When the Sun Goes Down.”

July 13; Lumen Field, 800 Occidental Ave. S., Seattle ; tickets starting at $30 ; lumenfield.com

Capitol Hill Block Party

Seattle’s unmatched party of the summer will continue its Pike-Pine reign with firepower aplenty across its ready-to-dance lineup headlined by electronic maestro Kaytranada, psych-pop vibesmith Still Woozy and funky alt-pop star Remi Wolf — a standout from Block Party ’22 — stepping in for Kim Petras, who scrapped her summer festival slate due to health issues. Deal-chasing festival hoppers take heed of the combination DIDO/CHBP passes starting at $349.

July 19-21; Capitol Hill; 1122 E. Pike St., Seattle ; single-day tickets $105-$149, two-day passes $179-$225, three-day passes $235-$365 ; capitolhillblockparty.com

Chris Stapleton

This soulful country star is starting to get familiar with Sodo. Following a Lumen Field supporting slot with country legend  George Strait last year , Chris Stapleton returns to Seattle’s stadium district for his own headlining date across Royal Brougham Way. This time, Stapleton’s bringing a country legend with him, as a 91-years-young Willie Nelson will link up with Stapleton’s seemingly endless All-American Road Show Tour just for the Seattle date. Upping the ante for a loaded triple bill, recent Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Sheryl Crow hops aboard too.

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July 27; T-Mobile Park; 1250 First Ave. S., Seattle ; sold out ; ticketmaster.com

The fledgling Afrobeats fest became the most exciting new addition to Seattle’s festival landscape during its inaugural event in 2023. For a follow-up act, organizers tapped one of the genre’s brightest lights, Davido, who earned three Grammy nods stemming from last year’s “Timeless” LP, to headline Year 2. The Afrobeats titan is joined by Nigerian model-turned-singer Ayra Starr — a late scratch from last year’s lineup — rising singer/rapper Shallipopi, South African producer Musa Keys, Sarz and more.

July 27; Fisher Green Pavilion at Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle ; tickets start at $90 ; blastmusicfest.com

After canceling last year’s appearance at Washington’s preeminent country bash due to illness, Luke Bryan was reslotted as the denim-wrapped centerpiece of Watershed’s 2024 lineup. The country superstar’s fellow headliners are spitshined Nashville vets Old Dominion and Hardy, one of Music Row’s latest behind-the-scene’s songwriters to make it big on their own, while drawing influences from contemporary hip-hop and rock. Hardy’s star-solidifying murder ballad “Wait in the Truck” with Lainey Wilson, who headlines White River Amphitheatre on Sept. 27, remains the most chilling mainstream country hit of the last two years.

Aug. 2-4; Gorge Amphitheatre, 754 Silica Road N.W., Quincy; three-day passes start at $295, camping $225-$1,035; watershedfest.com

Remlinger Farms’ inaugural summer lineup is a trusty mix of time-tested greats (Elvis Costello, Parliament Funkadelic, Blondie) and new-guard splash-makers stepping into larger venues (Hiatus Kaiyote, Goose, Goth Babe). But the centerpiece is THING, the indie-centric festival sliding over to the Snoqualmie Valley after three years in Port Townsend. This year’s leading acts include art-rock auteur St. Vincent, synth rockers Toro y Moi, Grammy darling soul rockers Black Pumas and revered rappers Earl Sweatshirt and Killer Mike. While on-site parking is free, Seattle Theatre Group is working on a ticketed shuttle service with pickup points around the Seattle area for all shows. Details to come.

Aug. 9-11; Remlinger Farms; 32610 N.E. 32nd St., Carnation ; single-day passes start at $129-$300, three-day passes $349-$825 ; thingnw.org

Willie Nelson + Bob Dylan

That Seattle date with Stapleton isn’t the only time ol’ Willie’s passing through this summer. The country icon’s always-stacked Outlaw Music Festival blows into the Gorge with arguably the heaviest of heavy hitter lineups this summer. The 91-year-old Nelson is accompanied by another one of America’s greatest living songwriters, Bob Dylan, a third Rock & Roll Hall of Famer in John Mellencamp and new-school star Billy Strings — a progressive bluegrass ripper who could probably headline the Gorge on his own. Washington lucked out landing the only tour stop on which Strings joins the trio of greats.

Aug. 10; Gorge Amphitheatre , 754 Silica Road N.W., Quincy; tickets start at $78 ; livenation.com

Sierra Ferrell

The Nashville-based Americana breakout has been bubbling in roots circles for the past few years, earning an emerging artist of the year award from the Americana Music Association in 2022. With her new album “Trail of Flowers,” Sierra Ferrell is deservedly getting hers, making her headlining debut at the Ryman Auditorium and playing some of the biggest venues of her career supporting Zach Bryan and The Avett Brothers this spring. Punk rocker-turned-alt-country singer-songwriter Nick Shoulders opens.

Aug. 11; Woodland Park Zoo; 5500 Phinney Ave. N., Seattle ; sold out ; zoo.org

Country-pop star Kane Brown looks to fill his biggest Seattle boots yet, bumping up to the stadium district after his 2022 headliner at Climate Pledge Arena. This month the crossover-savvy Brown released the fist-pumping single “Miles on It” with Marshmello, marking the second time he’s connected with the EDM-pop hitmaker. Ticket sales for Brown’s T-Mobile Park date have been sluggish out of the gate, with a “buy one get one” special offering two upper-level tickets for $44.50 (a stadium country steal) at the time of this writing.

Aug. 16; T-Mobile Park; 1250 First Ave. S., Seattle ; tickets start at $29 ; ticketmaster.com

Waxahatchee

2020’s critically acclaimed “Saint Cloud” was a marked shift for Waxahatchee, the musical vehicle of singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield, leaning into a gentle-breeze alt-country sound in step with her Alabama roots. The mood continued with her Plains duo album with twangy contemporary Jess Williamson in 2022 and the latest Waxahatchee LP, “Tigers Blood,” one of the most well-received indie-rock records of the year. Waxahatchee’s ZooTunes date is perhaps the buzziest of the zoo’s stellar (and nearly sold-out) season, also featuring Seattle indie rockers Car Seat Headrest and hip-hop’s live-band standard-bearers The Roots.

Aug. 18; Woodland Park Zoo; 5500 Phinney Ave. N., Seattle ; sold out ; zoo.org

Foo Fighters

Another legacy rock band forging on after the death of their drummer, Dave Grohl and the Foos channeled their vintage fuzzed-bombed, big-hooking ways on last year’s “But Here We Are” — the band’s first album without the late Taylor Hawkins since 1997’s “The Colour and the Shape.” Riding the album’s emotional outpouring, the Foo Fighters embark on their Everything or Nothing at All Tour, which hits T-Mobile Park this summer. It’ll be the band’s first trip back to their birth city since  christening Climate Pledge Arena  shortly before being  inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame . Support from the Pretenders and Alex G makes this one of the best stadium rock bills of the summer.

Aug. 18; T-Mobile Park; 1250 First Ave. S., Seattle ; s old out; ticketmaster.com

Seven years after they  last pulverized Lumen Field , the Bay Area metal gods are doubling down on their stadium-crushing ways. With their M72 World Tour (the name evoking their thrashtastic new double album “72 Seasons”), Metallica are bringing “no-repeat weekends” to select cities around the world, playing two shows per town with different openers and set lists each night. It’s a fresh approach for a band which, if there’s any knock against their colossal live shows, it’s the relative predictability of their song selections. Joined by openers Pantera and Mammoth WVH the first night and Five Finger Death Punch and Ice Nine Kills the second, Metallica’s Seattle stand is their last on U.S. soil before closing the tour with a four-night, two-weekend blitz in Mexico City.

Aug. 30 and Sept. 1; Lumen Field; 800 Occidental Ave. S., Seattle ; single-night tickets start at $55 ; lumenfield.com

Dave Matthews Band

This spring brought word that the jammy, folk-rocking behemoths and their Seattleite frontman will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this fall. But before receiving their Rock Hall flowers, DMB and their legion of rabid fans will convene for their annual “Labor Dave weekend” at the Gorge — three nights of intricate, freewheeling musicianship and Matthews’ gently darting vocals.

Aug. 30-Sept. 1; Gorge Amphitheatre , 754 Silica Road N.W., Quincy; single-day tickets start at $67, three-night lawn pass $162 ; livenation.com

The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.