Credit: Far Out
All metal music seemed to be defined as music for the outsiders of the world.
When the genre was first started, most people weren’t flocking to listen to bands like Black Sabbath when they put the needle on the vinyl and heard someone like Ozzy Osbourne screaming about the horrors of the world while Tony Iommi’s riffs thundered behind him. That was too much for most people to take, but while many gravitated towards The Rolling Stones and The Animals around that time, there was bound to be someone who hit on the winning formula that made the world headbang along.
But we have to qualify what we mean by heavy metal this time around. There are plenty of bands that would have been considered heavy metal in their prime, but a lot of them would have preferred being placed in the hard rock category. Sabbath never considered themselves innovators of a whole new genre, and even if every metal band would consider Led Zeppelin one of the biggest bands in the world, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page wanted their group to be a bit more eclectic than that.
Then again, no one could ever get more associated with the genre than Metallica. Anyone with metal in their name wasn’t going to be embarrassed by wearing their influences on their sleeves, but it’s not like they were going to get Kill Em All into the charts when they started. Their influences were all from bands that didn’t necessarily have the highest chart placement, and while Master of Puppets made them legends of the underground, it was going to take the right person for them to see what could happen once they made catchier tunes.
And that person’s name was Bob Rock. The producer was no stranger to producing hard rock bands after turning in time with Aerosmith and Bon Jovi, but when he heard Metallica live, he understood that they needed a bit of work. They needed a bit more power behind the scenes, and Lars Ulrich remembered him not being afraid to say that to their faces the minute that he heard them.
Rock was originally supposed to come in to mix the album, but Ulrich recalled him sitting the band down and telling them the potential that they had, saying, “He basically sat us down and was so brutally honest with us. He said, ‘I’ve seen you guys play a bunch of times live and I’ve listened to your records, and you guys haven’t captured what you are capable of on a record yet’. And we were like, ‘Excuse me? Who the fuck are you?’” But working with Rock meant a lot more than pressing record in Rock’s mind.
He was looking to work within the song and suggest different ideas, and while any other Metallica record wouldn’t have been caught dead with a song like ‘Nothing Else Matters’, Rock was willing to make something new. They were known as one of the fastest bands on the planet, and yet when they slowed things down, it was virtually impossible for anyone to ignore the massive riff in ‘Enter Sandman’ or the primal stomp that James Hetfield captured on ‘Sad But True’.
Further reading: From The Vault
The band might have expected this record to be their high watermark, but no one could have expected one of the biggest albums of all time. After years of having borderline metal acts like Van Halen and Guns N’ Roses to sell millions of copies, The Black Album became the first massive metal release to sell over ten million copies worldwide.
Other members of the thrash scene would have called them sellouts at the time, but that was a small price to pay for making the metal equivalent of The Dark Side of the Moon. They were now the promoters of all things metal, and if their more mainstream record meant one more person becoming a metalhead, that was bound to be better for the community at large.
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