Description
1992 double album
When Lars Ulrich reflects on Metallica‘s massive Damaged Justice tour, he marvels that they were able to pull it off at all. No band as extreme as ours had ever done a full arena tour, he says. So it was definitely a crapshoot, and it paid off. Those were the years that we proved ourselves, Jason Newsted says. We were firing on all cylinders. Once the One video came out, we were ready for it and the world was ready for Metallica. Only five years had passed since Metallica had released their debut LP, 1983’s Kill ‘Em All, and in that time they had clawed their way up from the L.A. club circuit through heavy touring and sheer determination since radio and MTV wouldn’t touch them. But when they put out their fourth album, And Justice for All — with its labyrinthine arrangements, walloping riffs and brutal indictments of the political world — they somehow struck a nerve with the world at large. It was 180-degrees from the spandex-wearing balladeers and Led Zeppelin copycats ruling the rock charts, and it came at the right time. By the time they finished the tour that followed they would be ready to become megastars. The band was already a force to be reckoned with in Europe, thanks to dogged touring on the continent in the early Eighties, but when the group learned it would be playing arenas around the U.S., its members were skeptical. As Ulrich recalls: Our manager, Cliff [Burnstein], was like, We’re gonna be doing an arena tour, and I was like, Seriously, are you sure about that?’ A band like Metallica? OK, fine. We could do L.A., New York, San Francisco, but are we gonna penetrate the American heartland? That’s probably not a great idea. He was like, No, trust me on this. I’m feeling it. Although the Damaged Justice tour officially kicked off in the U.S. in Toledo on November 15th, 1988 (after dates in Europe), Newsted says the true starting point for the tour was earlier in the year when they were second on the bill for the Monsters of Rock tour. They would go on early in the afternoon to warm the stage up for Dokken, the Scorpions and Van Halen. The bassist knew they were on the verge of a breakthrough when they played the Los Angeles Coliseum in July of ’88, and there were already 50 to 60,000 people in the 80,000-capacity stadium when they went on at 2 p.m. When the band’s go-to intro music started playing, The Ecstasy of Gold from Ennio Morricone’s score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, all they could see was a swarm. It was like a giant toilet flushing, Newsted says. All of the people came down out of the bowl and onto the floor and started a most pit. By the time the group was ready to mount the U.S. leg of the Damaged Justice tour in November, they were a well-oiled machine. And they had a big stage to play on, one equipped with a larger-than-life replica of Lady Justice, which would explode and collapse at the end of And Justice for All. All they needed were audiences. We used Indianapolis as a yardstick or a temperature gauge, Ulrich says. We put the first leg on sale and we were playing a few of the bigger cities and then Indianapolis was, like, fifth or something in the schedule. The tickets went on sale in Indianapolis and I can’t remember if we sold it out but we ended up doing 13 or 14,000 people, which for a band of our kind in 1988 was an insane victory. If we were cool in Indianapolis, we were cool almost anywhere. Then the bands first ever video, One, was one of the most requested on MTV and in February of 1989 the band did the Grammys. It was the first time a metal band were able to attend the Grammys. We were sitting there playing One to a set of industry types that looked pretty astonished at was going on in front of them. It heightened our profile and we turned a corner. February (3rd) was also the month the band played the Frank Erwin Center in Austin, Texas, where this album is recorded. It was around this time the band realized that they could make a career of playing metal loud as fuck and make money out of it. Its an interesting piece of history and the band would 25 years later enjoying their status as not only the biggest heavy-metal group in the world, but also one of the biggest bands of any genre.
Track list:
1. Blackened
2. For Whom The Bell Tolls
3. Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
4. Leper Messiah
5. Harvester Of Sorrow
6. Eye Of The Beholder
7. Bass Solo-Jason Newsted
8. Master Of Puppets
9. One
10. Seek And Destroy
11. And Justice For All
12. Creeping Death
13. Fade To Black
14. Battery
15. Helpless
16. Last Caress
17. Am I Evil?
18. Whiplash