Metallica - For Whom the Bell Tolls

"Stranger now are his eyes to this mystery. Hear the silence so loud."

Album: Ride the Lightning [2nd album]
Recorded: Copenhagen, Denmark
Genre: Metal, Thrash Metal
Album Release: July 27th 1984
Length: 5:09
Producer: Flemming Rasmussen & Metallica
Vocalist: James Hetfield [age 20]
Label: Megaforce

Official Audio


Live in 1985 from Oakland, California

Charts, Streams & Sales

Australia (single): 2x platinum
UK (single): 1x gold
USA (single): 1x gold
Spotify: 520,000,000 +
YouTube Music: 153,000,000 +

Credits

Bass, drums, guitar [x2]

Details

• 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' refers to soldiers killed in war. A bell would often be tolled to mark the fall of a fighter as a sign of respect to the dead, which gives the sound a double meaning. Respect for the valiant dead is honourable but the sound of the bell is also haunting as hearing it means a life has been lost and the nation is perhaps one soldier closer to defeat.
  
  We are grateful to those who give their lives in our defence but each ringing of the bell represents another family tormented by grief. When those lives are given without good reason it's a travesty and any nation that sends its fathers and sons to die unnecessarily should be ashamed.
  
  The song takes it name from the novel of the same name by Ernest Hemingway, which was published during the second world war in 1940.
  
  
• The song was written by bassist Cliff Burton before he joined Metallica and features him playing on three separate tracks. Some of the bass work is often mistaken for a guitar. The bands guitarist Kirk Hammett told Rolling Stone.
  
  "He used to carry around an acoustic classical guitar that he detuned so that he could bend the strings. Anyway, when he would play that riff, I would think, that's such a weird, atonal riff that isn't really heavy at all."
  
  
• Metallica's first album Kill 'Em All wasn't successful commercially so the band recorded their follow up in Denmark as a way of keeping costs down. The budget for the process was so thin they couldn't afford a hotel room and had to sleep in the studio at night . They worked with producer Flemming Rasmussen and together created a sound that would define a genre. Thrash metal.
  
  While Kill Em All was an exercise in technical proficiency Metallica hadn't yet fully developed their sound. However, during those long hours working in the colds of Denmark they evolved into something more rounded. It was no longer sound and fury signifying nothing, but a complex arrangement of intricate instrumental sections, layered harmonies, melodies and counter melodies. The sound had matured in large part because of Cliff Burton's knowledge of music theory and Rasmussen helped them produce at their best in the studio.
  
  Far from the banging of drums by neanderthals, the album features several literary references which suggest the band to be well-read. 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' is a reference to Hemingway and 'Ride the Lightning' refers to a phrase from Stephen King's novel The Stand, in which an inmate is about to be put in the electric chair.
  
  
• In the 1980's thrash metal was born in the San Francisco Bay Area when bands such as Metallica, Testament and Possessed congregated there in order to escape the glam metal dominated Los Angeles.
  
  It's unusal that a place with so much sun would create a dark, hostile music full of aggression and bravado. It's as if the musicians themselves were rebelling against the unending sunlight by taking up the dark arts of metal. Perhaps the bands only ventured out after dark lest they were turned to cinders by the rays of the sun.
  
  The Bay Area also had some of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in America at the time, so it can be difficult to think of the fans working high paying jobs by day and holding up their devil horns by night but they were. I suppose that while a teenagers parents might be well-paid they themselves might not be and no matter the situation, young people will always want to rebel. How can they utilise their freedom by only doing what their parents allow?
  
  The abundance of sunlight and Californian clean-living invited challenge because too much of a thing can summon its opposite and it was the young, who look for something new, that spearheaded the change in sound away from the The Beach Boys and towards Metallica. The music of the two bands is so vastly different that even putting them in the same sentence feels jarring. That the dominant sound changed from one to the other in a period of only ten years is true but feels so far-fetched it has to be false.
  
  Of course, not everyone in the Bay Area was rich, far from it. There were people who had to clean the streets and work in shops and many of them did so they could afford to attend the metal show on the weekend.
  
  Metal is an innately rebellious genre and it could paradoxically be that the laid back, bohemian attitude of California allowed thrash metal to be born precisely because the place permitted broad deviations from normal behaviour. In other, more conservative places, a burgeoning metal scene might have been killed in the cradle by puritanical parents lecturing something like: "no son of mine will play that filth".
  
  It's astounding how many metal bands are from California. You have Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, Motley Cru, Korn, Deftones and Machine Head to name but a few. Wikipedia has a page that lists well over a hundred bands.
  
  
• That was a key song for us. Again, that intro was a Cliff thing, he'd play it all the time, and the rest of would stiffen up and go, ‘what the heck was that?’ That was completely his own creation, it’s just this weird chromatic thing, the note choice. It’s just highly unconventional, even to this day. Did anyone ask us to make the intro shorter? No, we were all 100 percent committed to every single note, every single beat. [Kirk Hammett talking to Metal Hammer]
  

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