FROM THE VAULTS: "...And Justice For Newsted"

This is something something I wrote last year (December of '07) in response to the (then) latest downloadable content for Rock Band for the X-Box 360. It ended up being featured on antimusic.com shortly after. I wish I could take credit for the awesome title, but that honor belongs to the site's moderator.

Here's a link to the slightly edited published article: http://www.antimusic.com/news/07/dec/03And_Justice_for_Newsted.shtml

If for no other reason, it's worth checking out the published version for the awesome (and very serious) comment and the bottom of the page.

Anyways, enjoy.




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I haven't written anything in a long time, mainly due to apathy. Apathy is a bummer, which isn't exactly true because apathy is apathy. A bummer is something else entirely.

It's been mostly a quest for inspiration, and tonight I think that thirst was briefly satiated.

So, tonight I was playing Rock Band after having downloaded some extra content for the game on Xbox live. I downloaded a David Bowie pack (which included "Moonage Daydream" and covers of "Heroes" and "Queen Bitch"), a Runaways cover ("Cherry Bomb"), a T. Rex cover ("Bang a Gong"), and a Metallica pack ("Blackened", "And Justice For All", and "Ride the Lightning"). I wanted to try the Metallica songs right away, to see if they'd be hard to play. I'm still living on the 3rd floor of the Rice's home for another couple weeks, so playing the Rock Band drums so late was out of the question.

I switched over to "Blackened" and I noticed that you could play bass on it. A quick note on why this is noticeable: When "...And Justice For All" was released in 1988, it seemed to have been packaged with almost no low end, which mostly means that the bass guitar track was rendered inaudible. This was done for a bunch of reasons, mainly because of the band's lack of confidence due to the then recent loss of their bass player Cliff Burton. The new bassist Jason Newsted had a long bubbling annoyance regarding the erasing of his bass tracks. What happened? Why no bass? You could even almost hear it on two "Justice"-era b-sides, "Breadfan" and especially "The Prince", both of which boasted rough mixes and no real mastering job to speak for.

The resulting album, while being the 2nd greatest album in the Metallica corpus, had the lingering feeling of a joint workshop between Tascam Portastudios and Crate amps (Note to non-music nerds, that means it sounds really tinny and flat and maybe even sounding a bit bad to some with regards to the recording quality). This never ruined my love for the album. I got into it far before I ever noticed that there were good recordings and bad recordings, which might account for (along with my perpetual and unreasonable love for Metallica bootlegs throughout my junior high and high school years) my love for really trashy sounding recordings.

But a mystery remained: whatever happened to those bass tracks? You could hear the bass in live recordings of the "Justice" songs, no doubt at all. But I always wondered what happened to the mysteriously absent low end. Jason Newsted is a good metal bassist, but my curiousity was also tempered by the fact that hearing the bass could change the dynamic of the album.

Yet tonight, the veil was cast aside and I beheld these two "Justice" songs...with bass. I still don't get it. Rock Band evidently has access to the master tapes...otherwise, how else would Harmonix (the company that developed the game) be able to separate the tracks enough so that if you make a mistake on your "instrument" that it plays back as silence with the rest of the track still playing? Futhermore, did they bring the bass track back up or could they have had someone re-record the tracks?

By this point, most readers might have jumped ship and I can't say that I blame them. I can't expect anyone to get as excited about this as me. But still, the whole thing is at least kind of fascinating. For the kind of guy who in high school, though currently having no jean jacket to boast of, would gladly have carefully etched the cover of "Kill 'Em All" on the back of one with a black sharpie (though would have probably gotten in the same amount of trouble for wearing a T-Shirt of the album cover when I was in high school), this is of utmost importance. I now have an idea of what these songs sound like with bass guitar. The result? I kind of like it. I'll always prefer the same copy of the album that I've been listening to for over a decade, but thanks to Rock Band, I can kind of feel like Jason Newsted did when he first heard the playbacks of his performance, not knowing that a legion of subsequent fans with too much time on their hands would someday deconstruct the "...And Justice For All" experience in light of a videogame.