…And Justice for All by Metallica (1988) — what a copy is worth and which pressing to own, in a full Lead-In dossier: Their bassist was dead — thrown from a tour bus in Sweden — and the new one arrived to find his playing mixed almost to silence on Metallica's most ambitious record.
Their bassist was dead — thrown from a tour bus in Sweden — and the new one arrived to find his playing mixed almost to silence on Metallica's most ambitious record. …And Justice for All is nine tracks of clanging, dry, near-progressive thrash about corruption and control, crowned by 'One', the band's first video. It reached US #6, lost the first-ever metal Grammy to Jethro Tull, and remains the album fans argue over hardest — because of what you can, and can't, hear.
Metallica's fourth studio album, released in September 1988 — the first made without Cliff Burton, who had died in a tour-bus crash two years earlier, and the first with his replacement Jason Newsted, whose bass was mixed so low it is barely there. Nine long, intricate, deliberately dry songs about war, corruption and control, recorded in Los Angeles with Flemming Rasmussen. It went to US #6, produced the band's first video in 'One', and lost the first metal Grammy to Jethro Tull. It is the most contested record in the Metallica canon.
On 27 September 1986, near Ljungby in southern Sweden, Metallica's tour bus skidded off the E4 and overturned in the small hours. Cliff Burton — the band's classically curious, wildly influential bassist, and by many accounts its musical conscience — was thrown from his bunk and crushed beneath the vehicle. He was twenty-four. Metallica were in the middle of touring Master of Puppets, the album that had made them the most important band in thrash, and in an instant the group that would make their next record was a group in mourning. They chose, painfully and quickly, to carry on: Jason Newsted, of the Bay Area band Flotsam and Jetsam, auditioned that autumn and joined within weeks. The album he walked into would define his first years in Metallica, and not in the way anyone would have wanted.
…And Justice for All was recorded at One on One Recording Studios in Los Angeles across the first half of 1988, produced by the band with Flemming Rasmussen, who had helmed Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets. What they built was Metallica's most ambitious and least comfortable album: nine tracks, several past the seven- and nine-minute mark, stitched from riff upon riff into long, shifting, near-progressive structures. The drums are dry and clicking, the guitars scooped and metallic, the arrangements interlocking like machinery — a cold, precise, exhausting sound that matched lyrics about war, censorship, environmental ruin and institutional rot. It is thrash pushed to the edge of prog, made by a band deliberately refusing to repeat itself and grieving while they did it.
And then there is the bass — or the absence of it. Newsted played the whole record, but in the final mix, handled by Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero, his bass is pushed so far down it is nearly inaudible, felt more than heard. It is one of the most notorious production decisions in rock, and its motive has never been settled. Thompson has said the band, chiefly Hetfield and Ulrich, kept ordering the bass turned down; Rasmussen has recalled the instruction as 'take the bass down… and then take it down another three dB.' The explanations offered since compete rather than agree: that Hetfield's scooped guitar tone occupied the same low frequencies, so Newsted's lines merely doubled the rhythm guitar and muddied it; that years of touring had damaged the band's hearing and they misjudged the low end; and, the version fans love most, that the new man was being quietly hazed. Newsted himself has at times waved off the hazing story. The honest position is that all of these have been floated, some by the band, and no single tidy reason has ever been confirmed.
Whatever buried the bass, it did not bury the album. 'One' — a slow-building anti-war epic drawn from Dalton Trumbo's novel and 1971 film Johnny Got His Gun, about a soldier left blind, deaf and limbless — became the vehicle for Metallica's first-ever music video, directed by Bill Pope and Michael Salomon and intercut with footage from the film, which the band licensed. For a group that had cultivated an anti-MTV, anti-commercial image, a video was close to heresy; it was also a triumph, breaking the band to a far wider audience and later winning the 1990 Grammy for Best Metal Performance. The song's clean, mournful open giving way to that machine-gun double-kick finale is the album in miniature: control and detonation, held in exact balance.
The other Grammy story is the one everyone tells. At the 1989 ceremony, the Recording Academy introduced its first Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance award, and Metallica — nominated, present, expected to win — lost to Jethro Tull's Crest of a Knave, a British folk-rock band whose label had reportedly run ads suggesting a flute was a kind of heavy-metal instrument. The room's disbelief became legend; Metallica turned it into merchandise, stickering later copies of the album 'Grammy Award LOSERS'. It remains the definitive example of an institution catching up to a genre years too late, and it did the band's outsider myth nothing but good.
…And Justice for All is not in our hundred, because the hundred is closed. But it may be the most argued-over record Metallica ever made — revered for its ambition and its riffs, second-guessed forever for its sound. It sold in the millions, sent the band toward the stadium-filling behemoth they became on the black album three years later, and left one permanent scar in the mix that no one has ever fully explained. Hetfield has refused to remix it, calling these records snapshots of a moment in the band's life. That is exactly why it endures: a grieving, overreaching, half-buried masterpiece that sounds like no other Metallica album, on purpose or by accident, and possibly both.
Because Justice sold in the millions as a double LP, the game is condition and edition, not scarcity. Clean 1988 US originals (Elektra, gatefold) and the early European Vertigo pressings are common and affordable — the thing to hunt is a genuinely sharp, unfaded copy, ideally sealed, since the gatefold is what dates and grades a copy. Collectors debate US versus European cuts on sound, but no vintage pressing escapes the album's defining feature: the bass is buried on every one of them, because that is how the record was mixed. The modern prize is the out-of-print 2018 remastered deluxe box set, which gathers the remaster, live shows, demos, rough mixes and video — and pointedly does not 'fix' the bass, because Hetfield declined to remix. Two things to be wary of: fan-made 'bass restored' remixes and needle-drops circulating as though they were official editions (they are not), and the abundance of ordinary later repressings sold at a premium as if they were firsts.
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