During a recent appearance on Let There Be Talk, Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett talked about the band’s 1988 album …And Justice for All.
Discussing if Justice is a “prog album,” Kirk said: “We just wanted to as weird as we could. And at that particular point in time, a lot of what was popular then was music that really showed-off musicianship. That was probably the heyday of guitar albums like Joe Satriani‘s albums.
“You had a lot of these really commercial hair-metal bands with these guitar players who just play incredibly, but the songs were f*cking crappy,” he continued.
“That was kind of, like, the thinking, you know, ‘Let’s show how much of our musicianship is actually there.’
“And it became a vehicle to just show our musicianship, basically, and I was happy to do it because I come from a place where that was kind of centered,” Kirk added. And what I mean by that is: Joe Satriani‘s album [likely referring to Joe‘s 1987 sophomore album Surfing With the Alien] was, like, the f*cking biggest thing around that time.
“And I think at one point Lars was taking drum lessons from Joe Satriani‘s drummer [Jeff Campitelli] and so he had just a whole new perspective and approach on his drums, and so we wanted to implement that musicianship into the sound, and that’s what became …And Justice for All, basically.”
Writer and extreme metal devotee, Ialdagorth has spent over a decade covering the darkest corners of heavy music. A black metal lifer, he spends his free time wandering the Carpathian Mountains, likely humming blast beats to the trees.
