While promoting the forthcoming 30th anniversary box set release for landmark album ...And Justice for All, Metallica were joined in Pittsburgh by longtime rock journalist and Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke, who was responsible for writing Metallica's first feature in Rolling Stone in 1989, making him uniquely qualified to revisit those days with the band.
"It's the beginning and ending of a lot of different things," says James Hetfield starting off the nearly 90-minute talk that covers the circumstances surrounding the creation of the record, where the songs came from, and how each member was coping with their own grief during recording following the death of their friend and bassist Cliff Burton.
Also present for the conversation is "One" video director Michael Salomon, the first video for the band and one that stitches together performance footage of the band and a 1971 anti-war movie titled Johnny Got His Gun.
He recalls of the shoot, "There was a concept — and I talked to Lars on the phone quite a bit before the video became what it was—he had kind of explained that there was this movie they wanted to intercut with the band, and they weren't quite sure how it would work together; I wasn't either. I think the first I actually met all of you," he says to the four bandmates, "was on the set... I was brought in mainly as an editor to try and figure out how to interweave the movie with the song."
