Shadowing Practice: Metallica: The Flemming Rasmussen Trilogy (Documentary) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Metallica are one of the biggest and most influential bands in history, which is kind of amazing when you consider how extreme,
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progressive and defiantly uncommercial their early music was.
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Over the course of just four years in the mid-80s, the band released a trilogy of increasingly ambitious albums with Danish producer Fleming Rasmussen.
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Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets and And Justice For All, each of them a refinement of a shared blueprint.
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Together they expanded heavy metal's sonic palette, blending aggression with progressive structures, classical influences and weighty social themes.
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While their peers chased radio play, polished videos and glossy images, Metallica forged a grassroots movement, spreading largely by word of mouth.
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We're doing it our way and a lot of the major magazines are picking it up
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and not putting a bunch of hype.
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It is actually possible to do this without airplay, without videos and although they later embraced radio and MTV,
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it was the Fleming trilogy that laid the foundation of their legacy.
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Music still revered for its authenticity, ambition and power.
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What's your favourite Metallica album?
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Ride the Lightning.
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Master of Puppets.
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And Justice for All.
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Ride the Lightning.
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Master of Puppets.
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And Justice for All.
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Ride the Lightning.
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Master of Puppets.
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Justice for All.
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I think they're three of the greatest albums ever recorded, and I'm going to spend the next 50 minutes going deep into how they were made and how they've endured.
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We're heading towards Copenhagen, Denmark.
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We're recording Ride the Lightning, which is the second album,
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at Sweet Silent Studio, where some early Merciful Fate demos have been recorded.
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The two latest Rainbow albums have been recorded there.
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It's a real good sound, real good house engineer.
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And it's gonna sound more ballsy than Kill Em All.
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It's gonna have more rougher, you know, because Kill Em All was a bit too polished.
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Released just seven months earlier, Metallica's debut album, Kill Em All,
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was recorded in Rochester, New York and released on the fledgling New York-based independent label, Megaforce Records.
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The band's founders, guitarist and vocalist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, were both just 19 years old.
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Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett was 20, while bassist Cliff Burton was the granddaddy of the group at age 21.
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The album, a tight thrashy blend of new wave of British heavy metal and punk influences,
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became an underground success as the band hit the road in the US with Raven on the Kill'em All For One Tour.
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Copies of Kill'em All were selling faster than Megaforce could press them, and with Metallica eyeing the European market,
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a deal was struck between Megaforce and UK independent label Music For Nations.
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This saw album sales of their debut climb to 60,000 worldwide by February 1984,
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and landed Metallica a support slot on Venom's Seven Dates of Hell European Tour during which Metallica showcased newly written material.
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This is a new one right here, from the forthcoming album, the title Ride the Lightning!
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With Music for Nations advancing the band's recording budget, Metallica decided to record Ride the Lightning while they were in Europe.
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A favourable exchange rate enabled them to buy three weeks at Sweet Silent Studios, where Rainbow's Difficult to Cure was recorded, and sweetening the deal even further,
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the studio came with its founder, Fleming Rasmussen, as in-house engineer.
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I had no idea that there was a band that existed that was called Metallica.
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I obviously heard it when they called me and asked if I was interested.
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And I immediately said yes, because it was my kind of alley, the heart rock thing.
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But I didn't know Lars, I didn't know the band, I didn't know anything about it at all.
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It was like these four kids that had known each other for a long time that kind of, it's us against the world, and they were all, you know,
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fighting the Metallica fight, you know, we need to make Metallica the best thing ever.
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Easing the financial burden even further, Fleming allowed the band to sleep in the studio during the day, while other commercial clients paid for recording time.
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We slept up in the tape room upstairs.
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I remember sleeping on the floor, looking through all these tapes, you know, there was like, you know, Rainbow had recorded there.
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Oh really?
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Yeah.
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We got him to pull up some old Rainbow 2 inches, and he put them on there and we soloed Richie's tracks.
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Wow.
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That was awesome.
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Very cool.
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Cliff struggled the most with the European lifestyle.
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According to his friend and former bandmate Jim Martin, he'd talk about being someplace in Europe and missing, say, breakfast.
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You miss breakfast in Europe?
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That's it.
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Places don't stay open like they do in the States.
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They have Denny's in the States.
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It's open 24 hours.
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You can go and get food anytime.
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You fk up in Europe, and all of a sudden you have to eat cucumber fking mayonnaise sandwiches.
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What kind of bullst is that?
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But Lars' local connections kept them on track.
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He introduced them to the best beer, best food, and even to merciful fate, whose rehearsal studio, located nearby Sweet Silence,
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was used by Metallica to finish writing the songs ahead of recording.
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Meanwhile, Rasmussen was getting to know his new live-in clients.
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He was impressed by their raw passion and attitude, but also came to the realisation that he had work to do, particularly with the drummer.
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And I think he never gave it much thought that, you know, what happens between the fills, you have to be f*ing steady
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and there have to be an equal length between the kick and the snare and all this stuff.
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So yeah, me and Jake, his drum roadie at the time we kind of you know
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told him then you go boom boom you know took his leg
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and when you do this and then you do this with a snare
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and i don't think he ever thought about
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that he just thought about putting energy into the songs i didn't want to sit for five years
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and get lessons and learn all that i was
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so interested in just playing songs and and playing with guitar players
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and so forth
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that as soon as i could count to four you know
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i started looking for other people to get a band together with
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and I don't necessarily recommend that to other people
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but you know it was um I was just
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so interested in playing in a band
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that I just sort of jumped over all the uh sort of beginning learning things
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and just went straight into playing with other people.
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Yeah he was not the world's best drummer but for Metallica he is.
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Lars gets way too little credit for his creative inputs on Metallica.
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There would be absolutely no Metallica without Lars and his creativity.
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Cliff Burton brought a heavily individualistic bass style and approach to Metallica and was an equal contributor of musical ideas, even bringing some of his older ones.
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He was a crazy bass player actually because he didn't like headphones.
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I actually hooked up a pair of speakers
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and stuck his bass amp in another room
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and he could like run around
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and play his bass to the sound on the speakers
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so it's just like playing live and that's the way we got the best performances
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and he did some pretty crazy stuff he was innovative in a way
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that no other bass players was at that time it takes a bit to lean over and out of manipulate
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especially on a bass you know
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because a lot of people think of bass being right back there with All the drums just going thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.
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Like really adventuring off into the...
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...wobbly under, right?
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F*ing everybody up.
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Cliff also introduced the band to harmonies and would obsessively harmonize over any melody.
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He was genius at harmonies and layering and phrasings.
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You know, very classical sounding, not your typical rock stuff at all.
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According to Kirk Hammett, he was just a living, breathing harmoniser.
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There was no way you could avoid that rubbing off on you.
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Cliff's harmonies even rubbed off on Lars, and he's a f*ing drummer.
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Cliff Burton shows up and starts talking about, you know, the Eagles or Simon Garfunkel or Jethro Tull or the Misfits or all this,
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lots of different stuff and so Ride the Lightning sort of, we went broader and broader in our scope.
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One aspect of the band that particularly excited Fleming was the rhythm guitar work of James Hetfield.
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He would go on to describe James playing as extremely exact, the best rhythm guitar player in the world.
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He'll do eight tracks and it sounds like one.
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On all the albums I've done with Metallica, the only one playing rhythm guitar is James Hetfield.
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Why is that so?
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Doesn't Kirk play a good rhythm guitar?
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Yes he does, but he's not nearly as good as James Hetfield, so when you have a James Hetfield in the band you obviously use him to record.
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Having lost his cherished Marshall head and cabinets when the band's equipment truck was stolen shortly before leaving for Europe, James tried practically every Marshall in Denmark,
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including Merciful Fates gear, before settling on a Marshall JMP2203 found at a hole-in-the-wall music shop in Copenhagen.
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He used his white flying V throughout the album, not actually a Gibson, but an Epiphone with a Gibson plate screwed on the headstock.
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James had found the guitar tone he was looking for, but he was less confident as a vocalist.
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I listen back to those vocals and go who is that?
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Who is that?
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Who is she?
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Some of his high screaming stuff.
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Wow!
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He was pretty shy.
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He didn't really consider himself a singer who was more like shouting.
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So you know just just getting him to do the vocals was in the beginning pretty hard
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but he obviously got more better and better at it.
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The band were even considering bringing in a new singer to allow James to focus solely on his guitar playing.
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You really looking for a vocalist?
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Let's put it this way, we're open to offers.
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An offer was actually made to Armoured Saint vocalist John Bush, but he declined.
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He's since been magnanimous about his decision in interviews.
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It was just never meant to be my destiny.
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There's no other singer that should have been the singer for Metallica other than James Hetfield.
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Meanwhile, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett was bringing his own set of influences and musical ideas to the table, something he didn't have the opportunity to do on Kill Em All.
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Having only joined the band weeks before recording their debut, he also contributed songwriting ideas including riffs from his former band, Exodus.
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Die, die, die.
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I wrote it when I was 16 years old and is still with us to this day.
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Kirk was taking guitar lessons at the time from Joe Satriani, who had this to say about his student.
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Kirk would come in and say, Check out this new song I have to do a solo over.
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What key is this in?
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Often the song wasn't just in one key.
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I had to teach him to decipher the song's tonality, to understand the musical possibilities, and how to make his own decisions on what to play.
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But traces of Metallica's former guitarist, Dave Mustaine, still ran through the new material.
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Before his departure, Mustaine had co-written several songs that would resurface on Ride the Lightning.
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Ride the Lightning I wrote, Call the Cthulhu I wrote.
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Mustaine's riffs and ideas remained part of the band's DNA, even as Hammett added his own distinct style and solos.
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The band, along with Fleming, worked tirelessly for three weeks,
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putting together an album that would become the archetype of a trilogy of albums that would define Metallica and redefine metal.
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Side One opens with a Baroque-inspired piece written by Cliff.
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According to Kirk, Cliff would play this piece constantly.
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Layered with multiple 12-string acoustic overdubs, it opens the album before morphing into possibly the thrashiest,
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most brutal song they had produced up to that point, if not ever.
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Fight Fire With Fire set the bar for opening tracks on Metallica albums and amidst the intensity,
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the clear influence of Cliff's obsession with harmony.
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This is followed by an epic title track, a mid-tempo banger, and a ballad.
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Fade to Black was a first, a song that introduced melancholy, introspection and vulnerability to Metallica's arsenal.
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Closing side one, it became the emotional counterweight to their aggression.
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It also established a formula that they'd carry on through the next two albums albums, closing the first side of each with a sensitive ballad building into an epic climax.
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According to Lars, that kind of song was always in the background for us.
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We knew in our hearts that was part of the Metallica sound, but we just didn't have the skill or finesse to tackle it on Kill Em All.
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By the time Cliff and Kirk came on board, we felt we had the ability to go down that path.
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Side two opens with another riff of Kirk's, borrowed from his old band.
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I don't know, I'm moving through this hell Walking up, I'm still locked in the shell Followed by,
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well, a straight-up attempt to write a catchy single I'm on my own, I'm still being free
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That was kind of their giveaway to get a major label deal
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So that eventually they could have a single It's never been released as a single, I think But that was kind of what they thought We'll do this shorter song
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which has like a singable riff to it, which was more like what everybody else was doing in the 80s.
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Escape, I hate that song.
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So let it be written.
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So let it be done.
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And rounding things off, one of Metallica's greatest anthems and an epic nine-minute instrumental.
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And with that, the blueprint was set.
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Eight tracks, packaged together as Ride the Lightning, A title Kirk lifted from a line in a novel he was reading,
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Stephen King's The Stand, with a blue cover depicting an empty electric chair suspended in bolts of lightning.
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The dark imagery reflected the record's central obsession, mortality.
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The spectre of death loomed over every track.
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Ride the Lightning was released on July 27, 1984.
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Kerrang! called it nothing short of breathtaking in its 5K review.
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Sounds wrote that Metallica simply strived forward with undeniable strength and skill.
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For a lot of people, this is their favourite Metallica album and there's good reason for that.
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I mean, look at the track listing.
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For Whom the Bell Tolls, Fade to Black, Creeping Death, all-time classics, probably played at every Metallica show.
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Then you've got great epics like Ride the Lightning and The Call of Cthulhu.
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Yeah, there's a couple of slightly subpar tracks, but overall this is amazing.
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I can't believe they made this in three weeks while sleeping on the studio floor.
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An absolute metal classic.
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It also marked a giant leap forward professionally, with Metallica signing to major label Electra Records,
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part of the WEA conglomerate that also included Atlantic and Warner Brothers, and securing new management under Q Prime,
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whose roster already featured Def Leppard.
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With Ride the Lightning, Metallica had bridged the gap between the underground and the mainstream.
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They were poised for success, and would insist on doing so on their own terms.
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Cliff Bernstein is one of the most respected managers in America because of Def Leppard, you know, biggest band and all this st.
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And also he has Dawkin on Elektra, which is the same label.
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So he has very good insight into the company and they know,
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the record company, that when he says don't get involved with the songs or the recording or the production,
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then they know him enough to sort of say, oh, we won't.
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They know, they're business people and they can see that what we're doing is happening, right?
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I mean, the records are selling and the people like it.
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By spring 1985, Metallica were finally back in San Francisco after relentless touring across Europe and North America.
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Returning like conquering heroes, they settled back into their house on Carlson Boulevard El Cerrito, the infamous Metallica mansion.
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When I think back to that summer when we were riding, the one thing that stands out is the couch and the TV.
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You know, the guitars were laying around.
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The Carlson Metallica mansion had an open door policy for if you liked metal, come on in.
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The door was always open.
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Always open.
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Day and night.
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Mansion is a generous word for a two-bed, one-bath rental on a main road next to a gas station.
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But the property did have a garage, which they converted into the band's rehearsal space.
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This was Metallica's original HQ, where much of Ride the Lightning was written, and where work on songs for the highly anticipated follow-up was now kicking off in earnest.
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The house is actually still there and was being rented a few years ago by this guy, Drew, who not only kept the spirit of the Metalli Mansion alive,
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but enthusiastically welcomed visitors.
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Check it out, here he is giving a guided tour for a fan who just showed up on his doorstep.
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We put our couch in the same spot where they did the Master of Puppets or something like that.
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We put our couch in the same spot.
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Wow dude, that's f*ing awesome.
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By the way, from what I can tell, Drew is no longer at this address, so do not turn up to this house expecting to be invited in.
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While sitting around their living room, writing their next album, the TV was always on,
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providing a source of inspiration for riffs and lyrics based on whatever was flickering across the screen.
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World War II films, sleazy televangelists, Satan will you.. even Channel 4's end of transmission music.
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Meanwhile, Cliff kept feeding in his own obsessions, classical pieces and a steady diet of H.P.
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Lovecraft.
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As the songs took shape, the band began lining up studios and producers.
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One name seriously floated was Geddy Lee of Rush.
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We were actually very keen on getting him
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and he was very keen on working with a very good friend of our management
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and he came to our show in Toronto and we got on with him really well and so forth.
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And basically what happened was there was a sort of conflict schedule as they say in the business, which meant that he basically couldn't do it because of his commitments with Rush.
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And we slowly started thinking about that it would be better maybe just to approach ourselves anyway like we did last time.
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And we came to the conclusion that we were very keen on working with Fleming.
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Remembering this time, Lars recalls, that was the summer Back to the Future came out, and the main theme was that Huey Lewis song, The Power of Love.
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That was the biggest hit of the summer.
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I remember driving around LA with Fleming and James, and every channel you'd turn to, that f*ing thing was on.
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We're actually looking at studios in LA to record Master of Puppets, me and Lars.
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I took like a two week trip to find a good studio to record it
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because they wanted to do it with me but they wanted to stay in the States.
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Specifically, they wanted a studio with a massive live room that could recreate the natural drum ambience they'd captured at Sweet Silence.
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And we didn't really find anything that matched that so the band decided that, you know, alright, we'll do it in Copenhagen again.
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After five months of writing and rehearsing, Metallica criss-crossed the Atlantic the Atlantic for a run of career-defining shows.
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First up, Monsters of Rock at Donington in the UK, where they were sandwiched on the bill between Rat and Bon Jovi.
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Well, we're Metallica and I have to tell you something from the start.
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If you came here to see spandex and f,
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and the words rock and roll, baby and every fing band!
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and back to the States for Day on the Green in Oakland.
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And once again to Europe for the Metal Hammer Festival in Germany, where they began teasing the new material.
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Alright, this is a new one from the album Master of Puppets to be out around Christmas time.
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This one's entitled Disposable Heroes!
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With momentum building, the band returned to Copenhagen to begin the next chapter.
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Back at Sweet Silence, they knew the room and the value of Fleming Rasmussen, now on board officially as co-producer.
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With Elektra now holding the purse strings, things were different.
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The band stayed in hotels and had home-cooked meals prepared for them every single night, courtesy of Fleming's wife, Pernille, and paid for by Elektra.
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Danish meatballs were a favourite.
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We started at 6 at my house and they came and ate.
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My wife made dinner for them.
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And then we discussed what we needed to do during the night
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and we'd walk to the studio from my house which was like three minutes.
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And once we'd finished recording it would be four or five something like that.
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And they would always make sure they got to the hotel and the morning buffet opened at 6.
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They were there at 6 so they could eat breakfast buffet
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and then go to bed and sleep until they got up and got to my house to eat dinner.
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In 2017, Metallica reunited with their former producer to share some memories.
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Master of puppets, co-producer, engineer.
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I actually remember all of that session.
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I think we all had the same perspective of where we wanted to end.
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What's it like for you, 30 years later, seeing the boys play these songs?
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I get really proud.
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I think we did a really good job back then.
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Metallica now had four months of studio time booked, a luxury which enabled them to refine their recording process.
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Both James and Kirk now added Messer Boogie amps and Jackson Flying Vs to their arsenals.
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James' rhythm sound was painstakingly dialled in to a new level of crunch.
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Takes were now meticulously perfected.
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Clif's already precision right hand was given further finesse by employing VeriSpeed.
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Some of the songs on Master of Puppets, we actually recorded them lower and VeriSpeed them up so that it got even tighter.
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But this machine-like precision was countered by the wild blue yonder approach of Clif.
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I can remember you complaining about him though because at the top of the session he'd have One hand of beer,
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another hand of pipe, drink a beer or smoke.
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And you go, I'm ready.
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Yeah, I'm loose now.
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We want it tight, goddammit.
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Working off the blueprint established by Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets opens with a classical music-inspired piece written by James,
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something he put together late at night on the couch at the Metalli Mansion, whilst hearing that end of transmission music on Bay Area Channel 4, Foray's Pavane.
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James recalled, It was such a great melody.
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I'd grab an acoustic, play along, and eventually wound up with a chord progression that got me thinking.
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What would be the ultimate intro?
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I wanted something with a lot of build, that would raise your hair up and give you goosebumps.
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Like an approaching storm.
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Something's coming.
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You can feel it.
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It starts off soft and quiet, then boom.
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This is followed by an epic title track.
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Spanning eight and a half minutes, Master of Puppets draws as much, if not more, from progressive and classic rock as it does from Thrash.
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Speaking about Cliff, Lars said he was really into a lot of kind of progressive stuff like Yes and Peter Gabriel, and a lot of prog rock,
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and he was a hardcore Rush fanatic.
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Amid all the movements and odd time signature changes, there's even a nod to David Bowie.
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Lyrically, Master of Puppets represents another step up for the band, with themes of addiction and manipulation.
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Side one continues with a mid-tempo banger.
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and rounds off with a ballad.
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Whilst embracing the job of being the band's singer, James was still unsure of his abilities as a vocalist.
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It was like a really high part.
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Santa, damn it.
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Really high.
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It's like, I can't sing that.
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And you're like, well James, you knew this was coming.
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What are you gonna do about it?
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Side 2 opens with another epic, dealing with the topic of soldiers used as cannon fodder in war,
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a continuation of a theme established with For Whom the Bell Tolls on the previous album, and that would continue on the following album with One.
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Metallica shied away from making political statements during this period, but their return to this subject always from the point of view of a soldier, wondering what it is he's fighting and dying for,
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fits squarely into the tradition of anti-war songs like War Pigs and Fortunate Son.
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The subject then changes to Televangelism.
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And I wrote a bunch of Leopard Messiah too.
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They didn't give me credit on that.
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Then perhaps the emotional centerpiece of the album, the eight minute instrumental Orion, built around a midsection composed by Cliff Burton.
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He played me a rough version of it one time in the hotel room, but it was just the progression.
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And then I remember hearing it like X months later and it had all these harmonies, all these melodies on it.
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It had grown from this little chord progression to this huge opus.
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The album finishes with Damage Incorporated, which starts with another composition of Cliffs, inspired by Bach's Come Sweet Death.
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The track then explodes into an ode to senseless destruction, leaving no hope or optimism.
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Master of Puppets was released on March 3rd, 1986.
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The album was mixed by Michael Wagner with a cover design painted by Don Broughtigam.
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Their first album recorded for and released on a major label.
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They hit the Billboard Top 30 alongside Whitney Houston, Dire Straits and Van Halen.
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Yeah, being in the Top 30 is pretty surprising.
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It's great though.
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Good place to be.
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With a record of extreme progressive music written in the garage of their rented two-bedroom house in El Cerrito.
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The band hit the road with Ozzy Osbourne, playing to sold out arenas across the US, before embarking on a headline European tour with Anthrax.
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Metallica were now an unstoppable force, achieving success in the mainstream industry without compromising their music,
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without a single music video and with virtually no radio play.
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Four guys from different walks of life, united by a love of new wave of British heavy metal, rock, punk, prog and ambition.
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Honestly for me this was like the Sgt. Pepper of my generation.
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An absolute masterpiece, it completely changed the game.
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One of the best albums made by any band in any genre, ever.
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I think Master of Puppets signifies for a lot of people and it does for me as well.
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The pinnacle of the Cliff Burton era with Metallica, obviously.
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but also it was still rebellious.
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Back then it was just still the four of us in a van, about to conquer the world.
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We knew we were onto something, you know, and we knew it was provocative,
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and we knew that it might not be accepted by anyone, but we were fully, a thousand percent committed to it,
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you know, every single note.
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And we had to be, really.
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We had to be.
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It's hard for me to separate the record itself from the experience of writing the record
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and recording the record and everything that ensued, the life experiences and the tours and so on.
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And I understand, you know, to other people it's like eight songs
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that starts with the first note of Battery and ends with the end of Damage Incorporated.
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And I just have a different relationship to this record
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but obviously we were broadening our horizons and I understand
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that for a lot of people it's it's it's one of the primary and set seminal moments of Metallica's career.
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We don't expect anything we just go out and do what we do
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and hope people like it and try and please ourselves artistically
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and these are our goals and we don't sit back and say oh I hope we're
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big next year or i hope this i hope
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that we just go and do it and don't put a lot of thought into
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what might happen or what could happen we just think about what's happening
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we try not to think too much about the future
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i wrt
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and i nourish yellow home of midnight metal of course tonight
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uh dedicating the entire show to uh cliff burton of metallica
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who uh died uh early this saturday morning in a tragic
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auto accident the tour bus of Metallica of course going off the road during their tour in Sweden
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and just a lot of people calling up who did not know
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that and a lot there are on the other hand a lot of people saying
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when I look back to that time in 86 um not continuing never felt like it wasn't was an option.
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We, you know, when you're, I guess I was 22 at the time,
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I don't think you're capable of processing grief and loss at that level.
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The only option for us was to continue and we were pretty sure, and I still am to this day, that obviously Cliff would have encouraged us.
375
We were back up on our feet literally in two
376
or three weeks and we auditioned bass players and were back on stage touring in Japan six weeks later.
377
Just 49 days after that tragic accident on a freezing cold highway in Sweden, Metallica were back on stage in Japan with their new bassist,
378
Jason Newstead, formerly of Phoenix thrash band Flotsam and Jetsam.
379
Jason, at age 23, had suddenly found himself thrust into a role he could not have dreamt possible just weeks before.
380
You know, they asked me and I just freaked and it was like a dream come true.
381
I looked up for these guys for a long time and so it was really kind of unbelievable.
382
I was like going, what, what?
383
Here's the new f*er right over here, Mr. Jason, ah!
384
With Cliff's death, Metallica had lost a bandmate who they viewed as a musical equal and a mentor.
385
With Jason, they suddenly had a Metallica fan in the band.
386
In the throes of working off their grief, Jason's bandmates and crew were determined to knock that fan out of him.
387
I think it had to be extremely bittersweet for him.
388
like a dream come true
389
but I'm stepping into someone's shoes who can never be filled it must have been very difficult for him
390
and for us it was difficult it just truly was
391
I had only recorded the garage days thing with them and
392
that was other people songs and
393
so we hadn't really done a thing where this is how Metallica does it in the studio.
394
James and Lars get tapes, you know, you put your riffs on your ideas on tape and then those guys pull out and they take an idea, take an idea, take an idea
395
and try to build it into a blossom of some kind with our help once they've got the seed going.
396
Every song was a riff tape in itself and we had so many riffs that we wanted to get them all in.
397
There was this kind of of underlying thing about ability and about chops and about, you know, what's Slayer doing and what's Megadass doing.
398
You know, wanting to show people that, yeah, we're a metal band, but we can actually play intricate stuff.
399
This was extremely detailed, very precise.
400
We wanted to be as tight as f*ing.
401
As Metallica were sharpening their chops, preparing to dazzle the world with their musical athleticism and dexterity, along came a record from a new band,
402
with a sound and style built on old school swagger and attitude.
403
I see your sister in a Sunday dress Produced by Mike Klink,
404
Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction would become one of the biggest selling debut albums of all time, turning the rock world on its head.
405
The Guns N' Roses record had come out, it sounded like a band, it was like there was this sound thing happening, this attitude.
406
And with Fleming Rasmussen booked up in Denmark and expecting a newborn with his wife Pernille, Metallica were looking closer to home for a producer.
407
Then my Klink came in and God bless him and his patience
408
and so on and what that last maybe like a couple weeks, three, four weeks, something like that.
409
In the few weeks they spent together in the studio, Metallica and Klink did get some drum tracks recorded and also managed to lay down two more quick and dirty covers.
410
Both would appear on the B-side of the Harvester of Sorrow single.
411
Klink received an engineering credit but both tracks were marked as not produced.
412
It didn't gel because I think primarily we just weren't ready to let somebody in yet.
413
Reflecting on this period, Klink said, In the back of my mind I couldn't help feeling
414
that maybe I had only been there as a placeholder until Fleming became available
415
and they could get back to something more familiar and comfortable.
416
Fleming came over and we were right back to what we knew.
417
What Metallica knew was a Danish producer with the tried
418
and trusted expertise to record them the way they wanted to be heard, and who had the sense to stay out of their way when it came to songwriting and arrangements.
419
In the Fleming era, all the songs were 100%, 99.9% done by the time we started recording them.
420
But this time, the band wouldn't be recording in Copenhagen.
421
Instead, Fleming would relocate to LA with his family, taking over where Klink left off at one-on-one studios.
422
We worked for four or five months, like 14 hours a day.
423
We would work hard to get the level of perfection we wanted.
424
And that would also mean that we would like recording bits, we'd get one good bit and then we'd punch in and continue from there.
425
And that was tedious work because we wanted...
426
Metallica in those days always wanted the level.
427
I mean, if they were this good, they wanted the level up here.
428
They would always kind of challenge themselves, and that's why they improved all the time.
429
As the musical arrangements reached new levels of complexity, the lyrical themes became grounded in real-world observations.
430
Inquisition singing you with prying my hands.
431
On Ride the Lightning there was a general theme about a lot of different stages and thoughts about death.
432
On Puppets it dealt a lot with manipulation, thought control, you know, and things like that.
433
And this album, the theme seems to be, you know, honesty, justice, truth, you know, stuff like that.
434
Very topical.
435
But also there started to be a little more internal stuff showing up, you know.
436
Not so much opinions, but my experience with it.
437
You're not telling people what to think or believe in, as you know, same as the other albums.
438
Just a statement opinion of ours, and people take it the way they want.
439
I think that we're careful because we don't want to be seen as a political band or anything like that.
440
I mean, I don't want to be involved in any of that kind of stuff.
441
We write about things that interest us.
442
We have our own ideas and standpoints, but I don't think that we walk around and force them down other people's throats.
443
In tracking these complex pieces and aiming for as yet undiscovered levels of tightness, Fleming worked a lot in sessions with individual band members,
444
focusing on getting the most precise takes.
445
And sometimes it would just be me and Lars doing the drums and, you know, people would be more like, you know, just in the studio with me.
446
Everybody except me got time off.
447
After tracking the drums to a meticulously prepared click track, Fleming would edit the tape by hand, using a micrometer to mark the position of the tape where beats should land,
448
and manually adding or removing tiny segments.
449
For each song and each tempo, I had made markers on the tape deck, so I knew that this was an eighth in the tempo, so if the snare was here,
450
I knew I'd have to take out this much this much.
451
Every time Lars was a little late, I would chuck out a piece of the tape.
452
And every time he was a little early, I would take any odd piece from my envelope and just stick in.
453
For Jason though, it was a far less hands-on experience.
454
I remember him just for all being chaotic, being confused.
455
I recorded my stuff with Toby Wright, who was at that time the assistant engineer.
456
But there wasn't the producer in the room or Fleming in the room with me or any of that.
457
You know, that was kind of on the fringes for me.
458
But working through the night, Jason recorded tight, aggressive and precise performances.
459
James's vocals, now strictly confined to within his limited range, were delivered with a brutal raspiness and placed high in the mix to give prominence to the lyrical themes.
460
While Kirk's His solos, still composed under the influence and guidance of his teacher, Joe Satriani, were recorded, as always, under the close scrutiny of Fleming and Lars.
461
Both Kirk and James had by now signed endorsement deals with the ESP Guitar Company, adding to both players' growing guitar collections.
462
The first four tracks of An Justice For All would once again follow the formula established on Ride The Lightning
463
and continued with Master of Puppets.
464
But this time, there'd be no acoustic intro.
465
Instead, a multi-layered guitar piece played backwards.
466
Here's how it originally sounded.
467
This becomes yet another classic album opener, Blackened, the only track on the album co-written by Jason.
468
The intense precision of the main riff sets the musical tone for the entire record.
469
The song's lyrics, describing environmental decay and the extinction of the human race, establish a bleak vision that doesn't waver for the entirety of the album.
470
Death of mother, never a rebirth!
471
And this is followed by...
472
An epic title track, this one clocking in at close to ten minutes.
473
Then, a mid-tempo banger. And a ballad.
474
I can't remember anything To me, One is like the ultimate darkness.
475
It's the ultimate loneliness.
476
The most lonely you could ever feel, really.
477
Based on Dalton Trumbo's 1939 anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun, One tells the story of a young soldier gravely injured in battle,
478
isolated from the world and trapped within his own mind.
479
It's gone on to become one of Metallica's most enduring and emotionally powerful classics.
480
The shorter straw picks up the pace and deals with modern-day witch hunts.
481
Harvester of Sorrow delves into some of the darkest corners of the human psyche.
482
and the frayed ends of sanity pushes further into the realm of progressive metal.
483
On Lightning, the epic instrumental was the closing track.
484
On Puppets, it would be the penultimate track, and that would also be the case on Justice.
485
Clocking in at close to ten minutes, To Live Is To Die was based on a riff of Cliffs.
486
and features a melancholic midsection.
487
The album closes with the breakneck precision and confronting themes of Die as Eve.
488
And with that, justice was done.
489
With recording completed, Metallica joined the Monsters of Rock US tour, headlined by Van Halen.
490
Earlier this year we were in the studio for about three months working on the new album.
491
It's entitled And Justice For All.
492
It should be out in about three weeks or so.
493
But with the new album still needing to be mixed, Lars and James would travel to the studio in between gigs to be present for the sessions.
494
Every day off me and James have had to go up to Bearsville, which is about three hours north of New York, and mix.
495
And, um, so basically, you know, it's been a lot of traveling and very little rest and so forth.
496
For decades, fans have speculated about the reasoning behind the unusual sound of the album.
497
In particular, the conspicuous, almost absence, of Jason Newstead's bass parts.
498
Nearly 30 years after the album's release, the album's co-mixer, Steve Thompson, finally revealed exactly what happened.
499
So Lars comes in and he walks in, he listens to it by a couple seconds, he goes...
500
He shakes his head.
501
He says, stop tape.
502
I said, what's the problem?
503
What happened to my drum sound?
504
Long story show, we had to get the drum sound the way he wanted.
505
I'm like, oh God, here we go.
506
And he goes, okay, now the bass.
507
I said, great part.
508
All right, I want you to drop the bass level down in the mix where you barely audibly can hear it.
509
I thought it was a joke.
510
So I did that.
511
And then they said, all right, drop it down another 6 to 8 dB.
512
I looked at Hetfield like this.
513
I said, is this guy serious?
514
I understand, it's their record, it's not my record.
515
But I was so pissed off the way this was sounding, I called up my managers and I said, I love this band, but their direction,
516
I'm not gonna be happy with.
517
Find somebody else to do this record.
518
And at the time, Cliff Bernstein and Peter Mench were managing the band, they talked us into staying with it and everything like that.
519
And I'm saying to myself, why are you doing this?
520
Once they had mixed and Justice For All, Lars always comes and plays the album to me before it's released.
521
And when he gets a nod, he's really happy.
522
But when he came and played in Justice World, I was like, what the is that?
523
Because they've taken the bass totally out.
524
And I don't know why they did that, but it was Lars and James that did it.
525
It was always that sound.
526
That was the sound of the band.
527
Look at the original, original, original photographs, where it's just Lars with his drum kit and James, and they're both hanging on the Flying V.
528
it was them.
529
That's always been the sound of the band.
530
My take on it now as a fan first, then in the band, now out again and trying to get the fans perspective, step out of myself.
531
Best garage duo ever.
532
Best garage duo album ever.
533
And Justice For All was released on September 7, 1988.
534
It reached number six on the Billboard chart, going on to become one of the biggest selling albums of the year.
535
I ran to the store and bought this the day it came out.
536
I took it to my friend's place.
537
We stood there in front of the stereo.
538
We were just in awe.
539
Bass or no bass, this was the album of the moment in 1988.
540
Metallica would spend the next 12 months touring the world with hundreds of dates across North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and South America.
541
In 1989, they produced their first ever music video for the song One and performed at the Grammys, the first metal band ever to do so.
542
So here to perform the song one from the Grammy-nominated album And Justice For All, Metallica!
543
The trilogy of albums produced by Fleming Rasmussen laid the foundation for everything that followed.
544
Decades on, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets and And Justice For All are the albums being returned to by older fans
545
and being discovered by younger ones.
546
And a fortuitous twist of fate has led me to exactly the place I need to be to underscore this point.
547
It's funny how life works out.
548
I'm in the middle of editing this Metallica documentary
549
and then I get called out to shoot a video job out here in Olympic Park in Sydney.
550
And you'll never guess who's playing a gig tonight.
551
Metallica.
552
All right, let's do this.
553
Let's talk to the Metallica fans.
554
What's your favourite Metallica album?
555
Ride the Lightning.
556
Ride the Lightning.
557
Ride the Lightning.
558
Give him aster of a bit.
559
Ride the Lightning.
560
Ride the Lightning.
561
And Justice For Off.
562
I love one.
563
It's my favourite.
564
Very emotional...
565
And Justice For All...
566
Why that one?
567
One Yeah, One Justice For All Probably Ride The Lightning What's your favourite Metallica album?
568
Justice For All Probably Puppets Hey dudes What's your favourite Metallica album?
569
Oh A Justice For All What's your favourite Metallica album?
570
It's gotta be...
571
Ad Justice Ride The Lightning Master I'll Ride The Lightning Yeah, why that one?
572
Cause Ride The Lightning's on it Ride The Lightning What's your favourite Metallica album?
573
Puppets Puppets...
574
All the way All the way Master of Puppets, of course Yeah, of course Of course There's not actually any other answer.
575
Justice.
576
Injustice.
577
I was about to say the same thing.
578
Master of puppets, bro. Of course.
579
Come on.
580
I think...
581
Ride lightning.
582
Justice.
583
Justice.
584
Justice.
585
The story of how a band of uncompromising metalheads rose from San Francisco's underground thrash scene, sleeping on studio floors, living on the road,
586
persevering through tragedy and making their mark without music videos or airplay, and going on to become one of the biggest cultural forces
587
of their era is one of the greatest tales in the history of popular music.
588
Thank you.
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Who Is This Video For?
This video is perfect for intermediate English learners who want to boost their listening and speaking skills while diving into music history. If you love rock, metal, or stories about creative processes, you’ll stay engaged as you practice. It’s great for those aiming to understand conversational English with a mix of formal and casual tones—think interviews, anecdotes, and behind-the-scenes chat. Plus, the focus on a specific era and producer makes it easy to follow, even if you’re new to "shadowing technique" (repeating speech aloud to mimic rhythm and pronunciation).
Words & Idioms Worth Stealing
- Grassroots movement: A campaign started by ordinary people, not big organizations. Example: "The band built their fanbase through a grassroots movement, not ads."
- Ballsy (informal): Bold or confident. Example: "Their new sound was more ballsy than their first album."
- Eyeing: Looking at something with interest. Example: "Metallica was eyeing the European market after their debut."
- Sweetening the deal: Making an offer more attractive. Example: "The studio came with an engineer, sweetening the deal for the band."
How to Get the Accent Right
The video features a mix of American (Metallica members) and Danish (Fleming Rasmussen) accents, so focus on rhythm and stress to nail both. For American English, emphasize the "r" sounds in words like "forged" and "endured," and keep sentences flowing with a casual pace. For the Danish accent, notice how some vowels are shorter—like in "Fleming" or "Copenhagen"—and practice softening "th" sounds (e.g., "the" might sound closer to "duh" in fast speech). Use a "shadowing site" to replay short clips: pause, repeat, and match the speaker’s tone. This "shadow speak" practice will help you sound more natural, whether you’re talking about music or everyday life.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | they've endured · have been recorded · I've done |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | were made · have been recorded · was recorded |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | history, which is · Lightning, which is · Elektra, which is |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.