Universal Records Metallica - Garage Inc

1998

James Hetfield - Kirk Hammett - Jason Newsted / Cliff Burton - Lars Ulrich


Wiki: The day after Metallica finished the North American leg of the Poor Re-Touring Me Tour in San Diego's Coors Amphitheatre, they hit the studio to start recording a new album of cover versions. As Lars Ulrich explained, the band wanted to do something different after "three pretty serious albums in a row, starting with the Black album and then Load and ReLoad", and the process would be easier by working with covers, especially as the band had a tradition of taking other people's songs and "turn them into something very Metallica, different from what the original artist did". Given the band had recorded many covers that were spread across various releases, such as B-sides of their singles and the 1987 EP The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited, the band would "put them all in a nice little packaging for easy listening" along with the newly recorded cover versions, chosen through a group decision. Only one of the eleven songs in the "New Recordings '98" disk was not done in the three-week sessions, a version of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Tuesday's Gone" the band recorded for a radio broadcast along with friends such as Les Claypool, John Popper and Gary Rossington.

UltimateClassicRock: Ten years removed from their prog-thrash opus …And Justice for All, things were quite different for Metallica. A trio of chart-topping albums gained them mainstream popularity, but alienated a large degree of their original fanbase – especially with the blues and country-tinged elements on Load and Reload. Making a conscious decision to get back to their roots, the band hit the studio to record some covers in the vein of 1987’s Garage Days Re-Revisited, with the result being Garage Inc., released Nov. 23, 1998.

“We haven't really fucked with cover songs for a while,” drummer Lars Ulrich told Metal Hammer. “But we just did the two Load albums more or less back to back, so it just seemed like a good time to do some, from both a time point of view and a creative point of view. Just shake that off a little bit and come back to something a little looser and a little kind of sillier. There was just a renewed interest in fucking with some other stuff."

“The most important thing about this, really, is the ‘fun’ factor,” bassist Jason Newsted said. “Not having to get, like, in the Metallica recording mode of everything has to be under such a huge microscope and everything has to be so perfect. This thing gets to be raw and rough and fun…sloppy like it should be – like rock and roll should be. It’s very much rock and roll, that’s the cool thing.”

The idea was to blend an album’s worth of new covers with all those that had been released previously on B-sides, and the Garage Days Re-Revisited EP, making for a double album that effectively spanned Metallica’s career. The songs they’d chosen over the years, in one respect, were a way to pay back the artists whose coattails Metallica had ridden in their club days, when they were filling out their sets with covers of obscure British bands the audience likely didn’t know, passing them off as their own compositions.
“We took their songs and called them ours,” Hetfield said, laughing. “’Metallica Live Tonight at the Troubadour,” – half the set is Diamond Head. But no one knew and they didn’t care and we didn’t tell ‘em. So we do owe [the original artists] somethin’.”