![]() It’s just highly unconventional even to this day. 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. Which we never seem to be able to do any more (laughs). ![]() Lars: We often use For Whom The Bell Tolls as a reference point for chasing simplicity. That immortal intro is actually built around a Cliff Burton bass part… In which Metallica showed they were capable of more than just heads-down thrashing: a sweeping mini-epic that was loosely inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel of the same name. It stuck in my head, so I wrote it down and told James. I was reading the book The Stand by Stephen King, waiting to do my parts, and I read that phrase. It was when we were recording the first album, when we were staying the house of this guy named Gary Zefting. Kirk: I was the one who spotted the phrase ‘Ride the lightning’. ![]() Those sort of things became the lyrical tentpoles over the next couple of records. Big Brother, The Man, fear and manipulation. Lars: Ride The Lightning is a song about being trapped in a situation you can’t get out of. The first of many Metallica songs to tackle the big topics: death, claustrophobia and the inescapable hand of fate. Kirk’s slicing guitar intro ushers in a stone-cold classic Metalli-riff in this tale of a death row inmate facing the long walk to the electric chair.
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