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By Root 505 0

young heads from the tripped-out West Coast? Somewhere far off in the shadows, perhaps, certainly nowhere near the centre. But that was okay. Metallica needed the down-time to sit and write their future. Their next album – their first recorded directly for a major American label – would be their most important yet and they all felt the pressure of that even as they kidded around and acted like it was all just a game. It would also be the first Metallica album for which there were no hold-overs from the past to fall back on; no old Mustaine or Exodus riffs to repurpose and remould into their own, more interesting new image (although Dave would later claim, erroneously, that he’d had a hand in at least one of the new tracks). Just at that moment when they needed to demonstrate they had what it took to climb out of the musical ghetto thrash metal was already beginning to resemble, they would need to start again from scratch.

As would become their habit from here on in, Lars and James initially retreated to the garage at El Cerrito alone, roughing out early demos before inviting Cliff and Kirk down to jam along with some ideas of their own. As a result, while the Hetfield and Ulrich monikers would adorn all eight of the tracks that would make up the next album, already titled Master of Puppets after the best of the new numbers James and Lars had begun bashing into shape, only two would bear the names of all four members (the title track and album closer, ‘Damage, Inc.’); three with the addition of Hammett (‘The Thing That Should Not Be’, ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’ and ‘Disposable Heroes’), just one the additional Burton imprimatur (the by-now-obligatory Cliff instrumental, ‘Orion’), and two simply bearing the Hetfield-Ulrich stamp (‘Battery’ and ‘Leper Messiah’). Nevertheless, insists Hammett, ‘Ninety-nine per cent of it was conceived by the four of us. There wasn’t anything left over from the Ride the Lightning stuff, the Kill ’Em All stuff was already written [when I joined]. It was pretty much the definitive musical statement from that line-up, and it felt like it. We had really gotten to know each other’s musical capabilities and temperaments over that three-year period. And I could tell that it was really blossoming into something that was to be reckoned with. It was very consistent. Every song we came up with was just like the greatest thing. Every time we’d write another it was like, “Oh my god! It’s just another great conception,” you know?’

All but two of the new songs – ‘Orion’ and ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’ – were fully completed at El Cerrito that summer. Speaking with me more than twenty years later, Hammett laughed off Mustaine’s suggestion that he should have received a co-credit for ‘Leper Messiah’: ‘Even though Dave might claim that he wrote “Leper Messiah”, he didn’t. There’s maybe a chord progression that was in that song, like maybe ten seconds that came from him – that, ironically, is just before the guitar solo. But he did not write “Leper Messiah” at all. In fact, I remember being in the room when Lars came up with the main musical motif.’ Kirk still has tapes ‘recorded on a boom box in the middle of the room’ of the El Cerrito sessions, including works-in-progress such as ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’, ‘Disposable Heroes’, ‘Master of Puppets’, ‘Battery’ and the middle section of ‘Orion’: ‘Cliff wrote that whole middle part complete, with bass lines, two- and three-part harmonies, all completely arranged. It was pretty amazing. We were all really, really blown away.’

Although Burton only received co-writing credits on three of the eight tracks, Hammett felt strongly that ‘people don’t talk enough about Cliff’s contribution to that album’. Not just things like the evocative ‘volume swells’ on the bass intro to ‘Damage, Inc.’, which had evolved from the improvised bass solo he performed each night on tour, but to the overall sound and direction the band now took: ‘I remember him playing the intro to “Damage, Inc.” on the Ride the Lightning tour. It has all those bass swells and harmonies on it. What