#4 - Metallica - One
By all rights, I should hate Metallica. Metallica, along with Meat Loaf and Dr. Hook, were my freshman-year roommate Bob's three favorite bands/acts.* I could write up hundreds of Bob stories and most of them would be funny even to folks who never met him, evidenced by the fact that my teenage son still asks me to tell them on road trips, and he typically only laughs at me and not with me. Just to set the scene, Bob was maybe 5'6 and 130 pounds soaking wet.** He had perfect SAT scores but got booted from the mechanical engineering program for bad grades (he never went to class). He didn't shower much, his side of the dorm room was a total wreck, and he loved to watch imported Anime laser discs. On the other hand, he was great guy and super generous and gloriously weird and the best spades partner ever, and I'm still sorry I hurt his feelings so badly when I told him I just couldn't live with him again sophomore year because the mess (and the anime) was driving me crazy.
Bob could play along with every song on every Metallica album note for note, which he did for several hours a day with his Les Paul guitar plugged in and distortion pedal activated. Luckily, Bob usually slept till noon and was kind enough not to play after 9 pm, but any time in-between was fair game. I would be sitting down eating my microwaved Oscar Meyer cheese-filled hot dogs for lunch while trying to watch
The Young and the Restless and Bob would pop up, plug in, and start shredding away. He was so damn good at it that I didn't even mind. Still, you would think hearing
...And Justice for All accompanied by shrieking guitar hundreds of times would make me hate it, but nope.
1986's
Master of Puppets was critically acclaimed and huge in the thrash metal underground, but it still only sold around 500,000 copies in its first year and peaked at #29 on the Billboard album chart. 1991's black album, meanwhile, launched Metallica to global mega-stardom.
...And Justice for All was the bridge between those two worlds - proof that Metallica could get even bigger and more dynamic after the tragic death of bassist Cliff Burton. It was released in early September of 1988 and sold almost 2 million copies in the US before the end of the year - peaking at #6 on the charts - all without much commercial airplay, at least until the release of the video for
One in early January the following year.
Maybe Metallica's most hard-core fans would roll their collective eyes at me saying
One was the best song on the album, but I was never that hard-core anyway. It also takes some pretty twisted logic to view an 8-minute song about a blind, deaf, speechless, armless, and legless WWI veteran as a "sellout." The video is a flat-out masterpiece.
One
* Bob's nickname was The Dragon. We didn't give it to him. When his mom called, she would actually say, "Hi Scorchy, is The Dragon there?"
** Our decided size differential never stopped Bob from yelling "PINHEAD" at me whenever I annoyed him.