A staple of the band’s live set for the last three decades. Long before Enter Sandman, Metallica’s signature song was this quasi-biblical epic, complete with the immortal ‘Die by my hand!’ refrain. It just goes to show that you’re better off not trying to do things on purpose. I don’t have a particular problem with it, but it never became a live staple like the other songs on the record. Then it got a bad rap, and I don’t know why. We thought of it in the spirit of Iron Maiden’s Run To the Hill or Judas Priest’s Living After Midnight – dare I use the words ‘radio songs’? So instead of turning it into an eight minute Seek And Destroy type of thing, we kept it on the short side. It’s not true! It was the last song that was written for the Ride The Lightning sessions, and it was purposely kept a little shorter than the other songs. Lars: It’s become this folklore that I hate Escape. Nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests. Metallica’s attempt to write a hit single. I felt more comfortable playing in Metallica than I ever did in Exodus, so go figure. But I really felt that Metallica was my calling. We’re all close to this day, but there was a lot of guilt there for a while. I’ve known Tom Hunting since I was 16 years old, I’ve known Gary Holt since I was 17.
I didn’t feel guilty about that, but I did feel guilty about leaving the band I started in high school. Kirk: They came from songs I had written, music I had written. Like the title track, it featured ideas Kirk Hammett brought along from his old band, Exodus – in this case the riff in the verse is based around that band’s then-unreleased song Impaler. The things that people get caught off-guard about are completely normal in my mind, but maybe we don’t do a good enough job of explaining them. There’s the Metallica I live and breathe every day, and then there’s the Metallica I read about. Often I feel like there’s two Metallicas. Lars: Probably because there was a group of people who had a different view of what Metallica was – that we were a lot more of a one-dimensional entity. Why did people react to it the way they did at the time? By the time Cliff and Kirk had come onboard, we felt we had the ability to go down that path. That kind of song was always in the background for us – we knew in our hearts that was part of the Metallica sound, but we just didn’t have the skill or finesse to tackle it on Kill ’Em All. 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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