In the autumn of 1998, after a three-album run of The Black Album, Load and Reload had seen Metallica evolve from thrash metal's greatest band to an arena rock behemoth. The band set about doing what they do best: blindsiding everyone with something completely unexpected.
"Metallica still needs to have fun," Lars Ulrich told Billboard that November. "We made three pretty serious albums in a row. It was time to do something different."
Released on November 23 of that year, that "something" turned out to be Garage Inc – a monstrous double-disc collection of covers of seminal rock and metal songs that had inspired the Four Horsemen over the years.
While the second disc was a smorgasbord of B-sides from various Metallica releases across their career, the first was a brand new collection of fresh takes on timeless classics.
We dissect that colossal first half – with a little help from some of the bands who inspired it.
- Free Speech For The Dumb (Discharge cover)
It still seems a bold move for the world’s biggest metal band to open a new record with a grinding dirge by Discharge, the 80s most brutal punk terrorists. Once hated by the press for their relentlessly basic, bleak noise assaults – hammered out to a frantic stuttering rhythm (the ‘d-beat’, itself inspiring a global subgenre) – the Stoke-on-Trent band laid the template for metallic hardcore, and were keenly adopted by the metal underground.
There was a 90s mini-industry in Discharge covers among discerning metal bands such as Anthrax, Machine Head and Soulfly, but with this face-ripping opener, Metallica stayed faithful to the original (from Discharge’s seminal 1982 debut Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing), while slowing it down to a metallic grind.
- It’s Electric (Diamond Head cover)
Joining Iron Maiden, Saxon and Def Leppard in the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, Diamond Head were tipped for megastardom in 1980. They’d been formed in Stourbridge in the West Midlands in 1976 by guitarist Brian Tatler, drummer Duncan Scott, vocalist Sean Harris and bassist Colin Kimberley. It’s Electric was inspired by an AC/DC concert in Birmingham in 1977.
I was impressed they’d gone to the trouble to work out one of our songs – even the solo was much spot on.
- Sabbra Cadabra (Black Sabbath cover)
This was the Garage Inc track closest to then-Metallica bassist Jason Newsted’s heart. "Geezer Butler is my favourite bassist of all time," he told fan club magazine So What! "So needless to say, that was the shit, and the one that I tried the hardest to pay the most attention to be ultra-respectful on."
From the Brummie metal inventors’ fifth LP, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, it was an unusually chirpy, loved-up rock’n’roll tune.
- Turn The Page (Bob Seger cover)
Beardy 70s Detroit rocker Bob Seger may have seemed an off-the-wall choice for Metallica in 1998, but this emotive ode to the road suited them perfectly; James Hetfield said that the first time he heard Turn The Page, he swore Metallica could have written it. Yet whenever any Metallica talks about this road-weary ballad, they seem to distance themselves from its creator.
- Die, Die My Darling (Misfits cover)
It was the ever-discerning Cliff Burton who got Lars, James and Kirk into New Jersey horror punks Misfits, commandeering every tour van stereo and endlessly flipping their tapes. By 1986, barely a Metallica photoshoot went by without a bit of visible Misfits merch, and Last Caress (from Misfits’ 1980 Beware EP) remains one of Metallica’s best-loved covers.
- Loverman (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds cover)
Amid these love letters to 70s rock and 80s metal is this brooding alternative epic of obsessive lust, written in 1994 by an Australian gothic art-rock maestro Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Loverman was always the odd man out on Garage Inc, but Papa Het made sure he felt right at home.
- Mercyful Fate (Medley - Satan’s Fall/Curse Of The Pharaohs/A Corpse Without Soul Into The Coven/Evil) (Mercyful Fate cover)
Near-contemporaries of Metallica on the nascent 80s extreme metal underground, Mercyful Fate emerged from Copenhagen, Denmark with a devotedly occult but sophisticated and progressive brand of heavy metal, their first, brief phase of activity brimming with some of the mightiest metal tunes ever written.
- Astronomy (Blue Öyster Cult cover)
New York eccentrics Blue Öyster Cult were promoted as the American Sabbath, but their more sensitive charms were evident on monster smash (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. Esoteric mini-epic Astronomy closed their 1974 album Secret Treaties. By the mid-90s, BÖC bassist Joe Bouchard – one of the song’s co-writers – had quit playing music to take a job in publishing. When he heard Metallica were covering one of his old songs, it prompted him to go back to music.
- Whiskey In The Jar (Thin Lizzy cover)
The oldest tune covered on Garage Inc – by several centuries. A traditional Irish folk ballad, Whiskey In The Jar’s roots have been traced back to the 17th century, though Metallica were drawing on Thin Lizzy’s 1972 version of this tale of a doomed highwayman betrayed by his lover.
- Tuesday’s Gone (Lynyrd Skynyrd cover)
Lynyrd Skynyrd were one of the founding fathers of Southern rock in the 70s, before their career was cut short by a tragic plane crash in 1977 that took the life of frontman Ronnie Van Zant and five other people.
- The More I See (Discharge cover)
Garage Inc. was bookended by two Discharge songs. The track that closed the album, The More I See, was a 1984 single featuring a riff that presaged their subsequent shift from proto-hardcore punk to more metal territory.
