The bass guitar did not drift out of heavy metal by accident. It was walked out at the mixing desk, a notch at a time, by people who could say afterwards exactly who had asked for it. The New York engineer who has told the story for three decades, that the drummer arrived on the first day with his own equaliser settings written out on paper and that every move of the bass fader after that was an order, is Steve Thompson, and the album he mixed with Michael Barbiero in June 1988 was ...And Justice for All.
Released by Elektra on 25 August 1988 and carried to number six on the Billboard 200, the fourth Metallica album is the most argued over bass guitar metal mix ever pressed, a record on which a new bassist can be seen on the sleeve, read in the credits and heard, by most listeners on most systems, almost nowhere. Everything else on it is enormous. The kick drum clicks, the snare cracks, and the rhythm guitars fill both speakers from edge to edge.
A kitchen that makes proper stock takes a cleaver to the marrow bones, splits them down the shaft, roasts them until the edges char and then boils them for twelve hours, and not one splinter of any of it can be seen in the bowl. Lift the bones out after the first hour and the liquid comes out the same colour and steams just as hard. It tastes of hot water. The bass guitar is the bones.
Take the bass out of a heavy record and the record still looks finished. It just stops tasting of anything.
The bass guitar metal mix that went missing
What is attested fits in a few sentences, and it flatters nobody. Recorded at One on One in Los Angeles between January and May 1988 with the Danish producer Flemming Rasmussen, the album went to Bearsville Studios in upstate New York for the mix, and Thompson has said that the drummer listened to his first balance for a matter of seconds and told him to take the bass down. The man who gave that order, by every account on the record, was Lars Ulrich.
Rasmussen, who has said he was angry the first time he heard the finished mix, has added that Ulrich and James Hetfield then had the bass cut lower still, an amount Rasmussen gives as three decibels and Thompson elsewhere as five. Nobody stopped them.
The bassist who had joined in October 1986, weeks after Cliff Burton was killed when the band's tour bus crashed in Sweden on 27 September, and who has said since that he was furious when he first heard the record, was Jason Newsted. He had played his parts well. The mix simply did not want them.
There was a musical reason the fader could come down so far without the songs collapsing, and it is the part of the story that gets told least. Newsted doubled most of the riffs note for note with Hetfield's rhythm guitar, a unison Thompson has praised, and that guitar had been dialled with its low end pushed and its middle dug out, so it was already sitting in the bass player's chair. Two instruments playing the same notes in the same register do not stack. Turn one of them down three decibels at a time and the ear hands the whole seat to the other, a seat Hetfield has refused to give back: the band remasters its tapes but does not remix them, since doing so would rewrite the record's history, and the 2018 reissue kept the old balance.
Birmingham, and the unison that worked
The same arrangement, bass and guitar on one riff, had been the heaviest thing in the genre eighteen years earlier, and it is worth hearing why it worked there. The Aston bassist who went into the sessions for the first Black Sabbath album playing through a seventy watt Laney amplifier built for guitar and a Park four by twelve cabinet with a speaker missing and two of the remaining three torn, because nobody in the band could afford new cones, was Geezer Butler.
The ripped cones pushed his bass into the midrange as a snarl. Tony Iommi's guitar, set with its own bass control at nothing, left the bottom octave empty for him. So the unison divided the work instead of fighting over it: the guitar carried the edge of the riff and the bass carried its tonnage, and neither could be taken away without the riff losing half its body. Justice did the same arithmetic backwards. There the guitar had moved into the bottom and the bass had nowhere left to stand.
Released by the London independent Chiswick in August 1977, Motörhead shows the other way a bass survives a loud band. The trio's bassist who ran a Rickenbacker into a Marshall valve head with the low and treble controls rolled off and the middle pushed hard, and who came out of the speakers sounding less like the floor of the band than like a second guitar, was Lemmy Kilmister. On any honest reading it was the least bass-like bass tone in British rock, and it was never once buried.
Heard through the harmonics
It works because of what a small speaker cannot do. The open E of a four string bass vibrates at a little over 41 hertz, a note that a car door speaker, a portable radio or a pair of cheap headphones reproduces only faintly, and yet listeners hear it, because the ear rebuilds a low pitch from the harmonics stacked above it even when the fundamental is missing. Lemmy threw the fundamental away and kept the harmonics. The harmonics were all a jukebox could play anyway.
"Stay Clean", from Overkill in March 1979, is the proof you can hear. Midway through, the band stops behind him and the bass carries the song alone for a few bars, and what comes out is gravel shovelled through the middle of the spectrum, gritty, dense and perfectly audible on the tinniest system in the house. There is no low end worth mentioning. Nobody misses it.
The bassist who owned the band
The East London bassist who founded his band, wrote most of its songs and sat in on its mixes, and who therefore never once had to ask an engineer to turn him up, is Steve Harris. He plucks with two fingers on a Fender Precision strung with roundwound strings, and he has described his Marshall cabinets, loaded with EV speakers, giving him full range from the top right through to the bottom rather than a rumble, which is why his attack clanks where other basses thud.
That attack is the whole trick. A woodpecker working a telegraph pole is heard across a valley over every other bird in the wood, not because it is loud but because every blow starts with a hard crack that nothing else out there is making, and the ear locks onto the crack and follows it from pole to pole. Harris's bass arrives the same way, a hammer blow on the front of every note, and the twin guitars can go as wide as they like around it.
"Wrathchild", filmed at the Rainbow in London on 21 December 1980 and released on Killers the following February, opens on the bass and the drums alone, and the riff that the song is built on belongs to Harris before a guitar has touched it. Iron Maiden never needed a remix campaign. Harris took the producer's chair himself for the first time, sharing it with Martin Birch on Fear of the Dark, released in May 1992.
Co-produced by Harris and Kevin Shirley and released by EMI in May 2000, Brave New World brought three guitarists into the band's records for the first time, a salvo of six strings on every chorus, and the bass still sits level with all of them, clanking through the gaps between the guitars rather than hiding underneath. Three guitars did not bury him. One order buried Newsted.
How a dense mix carries it now
The lesson of all three bands has become the bastion of modern practice. An engineer building a bass guitar metal mix today, facing four rhythm guitars and a triggered kick drum now splits the bass in two, one clean signal kept below roughly 100 hertz for the weight and one distorted copy for the snarl, and cuts the lowest octave out of the guitars with a filter so that they stop sitting in the bass player's chair. The clean half is felt. The dirty half is what gets heard.
None of that machinery existed when the bass first went missing, and none of it would have saved Justice, because the problem on that record was an instruction and not a frequency. The rooms, the tape machines and the men at the console belong to that part of the history, and the lesson they teach runs the same way every time. Whoever holds the fader holds the band.
The same few hundred hertz start a new fight the moment a singer walks in, since a heavy voice wants the midrange Lemmy's bass lived in and the guitars already claim, and settling that dispute is most of the work of recording heavy metal vocals. The bass rarely wins it. Sometimes it is never invited.
