Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [154]
Whatever the real problem was, by the end of the third week of 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 the 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 of 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 sound 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 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. Mostly, the whole thing just sounded 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 – that with Slayer’s Reign in Blood having stolen the thrash crown they had so casually left lying around, and Guns N’ Roses now threatening to beat them to the punch when it came to subverting more mainstream rock tastes, Metallica were no longer leaders doing what came naturally but playing mental catch-up. Looking outside themselves for pointers to the way forward rather than lighting the path for others to follow. That 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 that 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 for ever. 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 sixty-five minutes – the track sequencing still followed the same template as Ride and Master, beginning with a rallying-call