Edition: U.S. / Global


Published: July 10, 1988
(Page 4 of 4)

With the release of ''Kill 'Em All,'' Metallica started to move rapidly up the heavy metal touring circuit; the album sold 300,000 copies, a huge number for an independent release, and an additional 240,000 when reissued this year by Elektra. Its songs included fairly typical heavy metal manifestos alongside darker scenarios of warfare and unbridled aggression, like ''Seek and Destroy.''

Metallica's second album, ''Ride the Lightning,'' was released independently in 1984 but soon picked up by Elektra, and spent 50 weeks in Billboard's Top 200. On that album, Hetfield's lyrics revolved entirely around death - by nuclear war (''Fight Fire With Fire''), conventional war (''For Whom the Bell Tolls''), Biblical plague (''Creeping Death'') and slow freezing (''Trapped Under Ice''). The title song was a monologue from the last moments of a man in the electric chair; ''Fade to Black'' recounted the thoughts of a suicide. Like most of Hetfield's songs, it was a first-person monologue that drew no conclusions.

K.J. Doughton, a psychology major at Southern Oregon State College who has run Metallica's fan club since 1982, says that ''Fade to Black'' brought the first wave of letters from female Metallica fans. ''When that came out, girls wrote about friends who attemped suicide, and how the song made them understand what they were going through,'' he says. ''A lot of letters came in, not saying, 'You've inspired me to do damage to myself,' but the opposite: 'You've shown there's someone else relating to the situation I was in, or a friend was in.' '' Currently, he says, the club gets 80 to 100 letters a day, many of them responding to the band's lyrics.

''Master of Puppets,'' an album released in 1986, stayed in the charts for 72 weeks and rose to No. 29, with barely any radio play. The title song is one of the bleakest visions of drug addiction in all of rock. The syntax is typically blunt and unpoetic, but the lyrics are neither simplistic nor sensational: Taste me you will see More is all you need You're dedicated to How I'm killing you.*

In September of 1986, while Metallica was on its first tour as a headliner through Britain and Europe, its bus overturned, killing the band's bassist, Cliff Burton. After auditioning three dozen bass players, Metallica chose Jason Newsted, and was back playing concerts in November. But since February of 1987, the band has been off the road. It recorded a mini-album of British heavy metal songs, ''The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited'' (which sold 600,000 copies), assembled the home video, ''Cliff 'Em All,'' so that newer fans could see the late Burton with the band, and started writing ''. . . And Justice for All.''

As Hetfield and Ulrich describe the process, writing a Metallica album begins with guitar riffs, assembled and reassembled until they start to sound like a song. Then the band will come up with a title and a topic, and Hetfield will work to turn the title into a song. For the new album, the phrase ''The Shortest Straw'' evoked thoughts about being blacklisted and ostracized; Cliff Burnstein, the group's manager, suggested they read Victor Navasky's book about the McCarthy era, ''Naming Names.'' Another song, ''One,'' is about the feelings of a soldier who loses his limbs and senses to a land mine; Burnstein suggested consulting Dalton Trumbo's novel ''Johnny Got His Gun.'' Other songs on the album address censorship, pollution, paranoia, suicide and how justice can be bought -not topics calculated for a million-seller.

''We're real serious about the words,'' Hetfield says. ''But we're not trying to push any subject across or do any dictating how people should live. We're just stating an opinion.''

''It's inevitable that kids are going to learn that there is violence and mutilation and the risk of nuclear catastrophe within the real world,'' says Doughton, the fan club president. ''These songs say, 'Open your eyes, look at what goes on.' Ultimately, kids have a yearning to know the truth.''

WE'RE THE UNDERDOGS on this tour,'' guitarist Kirk Hammett says, as Metallica members prepare to step onstage for the opening date of the Monsters of Rock Tour at the Alpine Valley Music Theater in East Troy, Wis. ''We haven't had a Top 10 hit, and we look like a bunch of bums out there. Amidst all this glam and this huge production, we're going to stick out like sore thumbs. But that's what we're here for - and that's what put us here in the first place.''

Later, Metallica performs amid the equipment of the other bands, using a fraction of the stage area that Van Halen will romp across hours later. In the 40,000-strong audience, mostly truant from school, black Metallica T-shirts are all over the place. A mass of them crowd in front of the stage.

The music is like a cyclone, surging and subsiding, then surging from a new angle. Fists pump the air in the audience; shoulders shake. ''I see we have a lot of friends here,'' says James Hetfield, grinning, as he cues the band for ''Whiplash'': Another town another gig Again we will explode Hotel rooms and motorways Life out here is raw But we will never stop We will never quit 'Cause we are Metallica. *

Without hesitation, thousands of voices sing along. * Copyright (c) Creeping Death Music: ''WHiplash,'' 1983; ''Master of Puppets'' and ''Disposable Heroes,'' 1986. All lyrics reprinted with permission.

Photos of Metallica's Jason Newsted and Kirk Hammett performing (Dana Fineman/Sygma) (pgs. 26 & 27)