• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 328 0

finally, James found an amp and cabinet he liked, Rasmussen says, ‘we fucked around from there’. The result was a much deeper, more powerful sound. ‘We actually more or less made that [new] guitar sound from scratch.’ For Flemming, this was an early source of pride, as, in his opinion, James was the best musician in the band. ‘James is, like, world-class. He’s probably the tightest rhythm guitar player I’ve ever met. I hadn’t heard anybody that played [downstrokes] with that kind of precision before ever in my life. So I was really impressed.’ In terms of pure musical vision, ‘from an artistic point of view it would probably be Cliff’, although it was always ‘Lars and James that were more or less in charge’.

The only real weak spots, technically, as with Kill ’Em All, were in James’ singing and Lars’ drumming. Rasmussen recalls, ‘James wasn’t so keen about singing at all. But we just took it bit by bit and double-tracked him and made him sound [good]. And he got more and more confident as we progressed with the work. I tried to do what I could to boost his confidence because I thought he had a good vibe to his voice and a good character and I thought it fitted the music pretty well. The fact that he was trying, you know, I really liked that.’ Lars’ difficulties on the drums were more problematic. ‘I thought he was absolutely useless,’ Flemming says now. ‘I remember the very first thing I asked when he started playing was: “Does everything start on an upbeat?” and he went, “What’s an upbeat?” Holy shit! The thing is that Lars is an innovative person, so his whole drumming had been based on drum fills. That was his thing. All the ones and twos in-between, he never took notice of that. He didn’t really think about what was going on between the drum fills. I still think he’s a great drummer in his own right ’cos I think he does some things that are absolutely amazing. But me and the guy who was his drum roadie, another guy called Flemming [Larsen] who at that time was [also] playing drums in a Danish metal band called Artillery, we started telling him about [beats]. That they have to be an equal length of time between that hit, that hit and that hit and you have to be able to count to four before you come in again…[Then he could play] a really good fill that nobody else had thought of doing at that time.’ He pauses then adds, ‘I can’t imagine what they must have been like live at that time. He was speeding up and down in tempos a lot [playing] more the way he felt the songs should be.’

Lars remained nonplussed. As he later told me, ‘It’s like, five minutes after I could play drums, Metallica were going, and the shit just roller-coastered. Suddenly we’re making demos, then we’re touring, making our first record after only being together a year and a half…all of a sudden it was like, well, we have a record out but we really can’t play. So I had to take drum lessons and Kirk’s doing his Joe Satriani trip.’ More to the point, ‘We spent a lot of years trying to prove to ourselves and to everyone out there that we can play our instruments – you know, listen to this big drum fill I’m doing, and Kirk’s playing all these wild things that are really difficult…When we were first starting out in 1981 the two big bands in America that year were the Rolling Stones and AC/DC. I clearly remember sitting at James’ house going: “The worst drummers in the world are Charlie Watts and Phil Rudd! Listen to them, they don’t do any drum fills, they’re not doing anything. Listen to that, it’s horrible! Give me Ian Paice and Neil Peart.” So for the next eight years I’m doing Ian Paice and Neil Peart things, proving to the world that I can play…’

After the extra time spent getting the guitar and drums right, it was a relief for Rasmussen to discover that most of the songs were already worked out. ‘They had really rehearsed and arranged the demos. So they were pretty set.’ The only song they hadn’t finished yet was one of the album’s centrepieces, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’. ‘We had one day where they kind of jammed it and finished.’ The bell, in question,