In May 1983 four men arrived at MusicAmerica Studios in Rochester, New York, to make a debut album. The assistant engineer on those sessions has waited forty three years to write about it.
Andrew Wroblewski's memoir is called Bass Solo: Take One, The Kill 'Em All Tell 'Em All, and the title tells you which take it is about. He was young, he was the assistant, and he was in the room while Metallica recorded the record that started a genre in the United States.
What a book like this is good for is not the verdict, which has been delivered a thousand times, but the detail: the studio techniques, the experiments, the problems nobody solved elegantly, and the sound of four people who were not famous yet talking to each other. Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton and Hammett before any of it.
The photographs are the part that cannot be reconstructed. There is not much from that spring that has not been printed, and an assistant engineer with a camera and a reason to be there is as close to the room as anybody now gets.