But if you step back further than that, you get to Deep Purple’s Child In Time and Judas Priest’s Beyond The Realms Of Death, even Stairway To Heaven – those big, brooding, epic songs. You can hear that the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal inspired the first record. Lars: Everybody seemed to be caught off-guard by the fact we’d done it.
At the time, thrash purists screamed “sell-out!” The album’s big left-turn – a brooding semi-acoustic ballad. Did anyone ask us to make the intro shorter? No, we were all 100 per cent committed to every single note, every single beat. It’s just highly unconventional even to this day. Again, that intro was a Cliff thing – he’d play it all the time, and the rest of would stiffen up and go, ‘What the heck was that?’ That was completely his own creation - it’s just this weird chromatic thing, the note choice. Which we never seem to be able to do any more (laughs). Lars: We often use For Whom The Bell Tolls as a reference point for chasing simplicity. That immortal intro is actually built around a Cliff Burton bass part… In which Metallica showed they were capable of more than just heads-down thrashing: a sweeping mini-epic that was loosely inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel of the same name.
It stuck in my head, so I wrote it down and told James. I was reading the book The Stand by Stephen King, waiting to do my parts, and I read that phrase. It was when we were recording the first album, when we were staying the house of this guy named Gary Zefting. Kirk: I was the one who spotted the phrase ‘Ride the lightning’. Those sort of things became the lyrical tentpoles over the next couple of records. Big Brother, The Man, fear and manipulation.
Lars: Ride The Lightning is a song about being trapped in a situation you can’t get out of. The first of many Metallica songs to tackle the big topics: death, claustrophobia and the inescapable hand of fate. Kirk’s slicing guitar intro ushers in a stone-cold classic Metalli-riff in this tale of a death row inmate facing the long walk to the electric chair.
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