scott wrote:H-GM wrote:You guys aren't listening clear enough if you can't hear Cliff's playing on Ride the Lightning, or, Master of Puppets. For your consideration: Orion. It could be that my ears are not as finely tuned as the lot of yours, but I hear much bass goodness in this song, as most Metallica songs from this period. Cliff was badass. Metallica died when he died, and I'm sure that James, Kirk, Lars, and to some extent Dave Mustaine would say the same thing.
It's easy to miss the fact that the guitars have no low end on them and it's all actually the bass, because for the most part, Cliff is playing more or less the same thing as the guitars. But it's so easy to hear that much of the apparent crunch of the guitars is actually the attack of his picking. The rhythmns actually jump out quite a bit at some times when he gets more 16th-notey with it when the guitars don't.
Cliff was awesome. We used to make fun of him for looking like a stupid hippie, when we were stupid metalheads, and that's a great thing, looking back. He was totally the heart of the band. I remember reading in a metal mag back in the day, James saying that everything he understood about melody and countermelody and harmony was because of Cliff. That Cliff was a musical genius kinda guy. And yeah, much of Anesthesia is mechanical, to me, in the same way that most all that I've heard of Mozart's stuff is. Point being?
Losing Cliff is what killed this band. It's when Lars' and James' egos were unleashed into a pissing match for control of what *used to be* a band.
Man, I never realized there's so much Metallica on YouTube!!! I woulda thought they would've had people killed for this by now.
Blackened, live in '89
I'm going to have to vote crap on these guys overall, but I totally agree about Cliff Burton. He was a major hero of mine when I started out playing bass. To this day when I feel nostalgic I'll throw on Anesthesia, Orion, The Call of Ktulu or even Damage, Inc., (that intro with the bass swells still sounds so cool to me).
If I'm feeling nostalgic and hanging out with my friends from when I was 14, and I've had 10 or so Samuel Adams, I will even sometimes play a few of the other songs off of those albums. However, this is increasingly rare these days.
A few months ago I came across a torrent that was nothing but live Metallica boots from 82-86. The bass solos are my favorite part of them. Even in regard to that some of the later ones weren't that good. He started putting a pitch shifter effect on his bass that just totally killed what I dug about his playing and his sound. I really like his distorted sound on those songs I mentioned before.
Why is it that every bass player that they've had since him hasn't duplicated that sort of distorted sound? Especially Trujillo. Like him or not he is a really good bass player in that whole technique over substance kind of way. When I looked at that live version of Orion that somebody linked to earlier in the thread I couldn't believe how shitty his sound was. Is agreeing to have a totally thin, tinny, no balls sound a prerequisite to joining Metallica as their bass player? In my mind that runs counter to the thought of "heaviness".