Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [158]
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 Rolling 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.’ He went on: ‘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 that 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.
Joey Vera, who’d turned down the chance to do the job Jason eventually got but who was genuinely close to James and Lars – and Cliff – says Jason was ‘more than capable’ but that he’d heard ‘James may have played the bass’ on much of Justice. He also dismisses the idea that it was part of the ongoing hazing process: ‘I’d be surprised if they did anything like that. It would be too malicious and too premeditated.’ Instead, he believes it may have been ‘this psychological way of them sort of hiding the fact that they were still recovering from what they went through [with Cliff’s death] and that they weren’t quite sure how to get out of it.’ Also, ‘They didn’t want any attention going away from the fact that they were ploughing ahead…and the way for them to do that, sonically, is to make the drums and the rhythm guitars the loudest thing you hear.’ He concluded, ‘When Cliff was gone they had to make it evident that, you know, the two of us is what you’re gonna hear…it was a way for them to sort of heal themselves. Like, you know, we need to be heard, this is how we’re gonna be doing it. They didn’t want to be distracted by who the new bass player was or how that role fit in sonically.’
Whatever the truth, by the time mixing had begun in Woodstock, Metallica was already back out on the road, on the US version of the Monsters of Rock festival: twenty-five 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 fellow Q Prime clients Dokken. I travelled with the band for the opening two dates of the tour in Florida, at