METALLICA
METALLICA
With the Black Album, the band that had previously reinvented heavy metal reinvented themselves.
ROSS HALFIN
“I spent six months listening only to AC/DC, and it changed my entire approach to songwriting.”
Lars Ulrich
‘KILL BON JOVI’. That was the blunt message that Metallica frontman James Hetfield scrawled on his white Jackson guitar in 1987. Hetfield had good reason to be pissed off. That year, during Metallica’s performance at the Monsters Of Rock festival at Donington Park, they were momentarily upstaged when a helicopter carrying Bon Jovi, the headline act, flew in over the audience. But for Hetfield, this wasn’t just about that one cheap stunt.The animosity went deeper than that.
When Metallica had started out in Los Angeles in 1981, their uncompromising music, super-fast and super-heavy, made them outcasts in a rock scene dominated by the glammed-up likes of Ratt and Mötley Crüe. This was partly why Metallica relocated to San Francisco in 1982. In the years that followed, as Metallica rose to prominence as the kings of thrash metal, leading a revolution in heavy music, Hetfield, in common with most Metallica fans, had nothing but contempt for all those big-haired pretty boys.