Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [114]
Luck played its part, too. The band had recently received a new Mesa/Boogie amp endorsement, ‘But the new amps sounded really crappy.’ So one of Flemming’s first jobs, in a weird echo of his initial task on the Ride sessions – trying to find a new guitar amp to emulate the sound of James’ stolen amp – was to ‘fiddle around’ until he ‘actually created that guitar sound’ we now hear on the album; something distinct to Metallica that, as he says, ‘has more or less followed them for the rest of their career. We could all feel it.’ Flemming also recalls trying to get Lars to work to a click-track for the first time, in an effort to improve his wayward timing: ‘It was either that or James and Lars playing it till the drum track was cool.’ To boost his confidence, Q Prime flew over Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen’s favourite Ludwig snare drum – a late Seventies replica of the hand-engraved black nickel-plated brass shell-drum originally manufactured by Ludwig in the 1920s called a Black Beauty. ‘We set it up and it was just brilliant,’ Lars glowed.
These were mere details, though. What Rasmussen noticed most was the vast improvement in their overall technique. ‘Musician-wise they were all like a million times better because they’d been on the road for a year and a half. James was brilliant at that time. It was unbelievable. Some of the rhythm guitars, he’d more or less do them in the first take then we’d start doubling up and that would more or less be the first take too.’ Laying down identical rhythm tracks – one on each side of the stereo mix – Hetfield now got into the habit of adding a third layer on top, jokingly nicknamed ‘the thickener’. Because of that: ‘We could get really picky about it,’ says Rasmussen, ‘and make sure they were all right where they were supposed to be because James was so good at it that it was just a matter of taking the time that we needed.’ Cliff and Kirk also exerted more influence this time around: ‘All of them contributed more. If people had an opinion they said it. I definitely know Cliff did that a couple more times.’ Although he was only co-credited with three tracks, it was Cliff’s influence that gave so many of the album’s tracks a neo-classical feel, by turns complex, magnificent, ominous, grandiloquent; turning them into musical pyramids of multiple movements, determinedly in opposition with the verse/chorus formula of most rock bands at that time. Where in earlier days Lars was fond of pushing each new number to such inordinate lengths they often threatened to collapse under their own weight, none of the multiple-part tracks they were recording now sounded anything other than totally spot-on.
Lyrically, the new material was several moves on from what had come before too. James may later have downplayed much of the thrusting new content as simply ‘about playing live’, but that was like his hero Clint Eastwood’s man with no name in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly suggesting there might be a spot of bother further down the road. It would be another five years before Hetfield was ready to completely bare his soul and start writing brutally frank songs about his real-life emotional state, but there were no schoolboy ‘Metal Militia’s on MOP; no more glory-of-rock ‘Phantom Lord’s. In their place were songs about addiction (the title track, all light-and-shade dynamics, the Zeppelin of thrash); American TV evangelists (‘Leper Messiah’, title lifted from David Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’); madness (‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’, about an unjustly incarcerated patient at a mental hospital, hence the misspelled ‘sanitarium’ of the bracketed title, prefaced by the lonely chime of a treated guitar