HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: Garage Inc. – Metallica
It is September 13th, 1998. At the Coors Ampitheater in Chula Vista, California, METALLICA are playing the final date of their Poor Re-Touring Me tour, in support of seventh album Reload that emerged earlier on in the year. As was the band’s style then, the set included a few cover songs, opening with their version of Breadfan from Welsh proto-metal band BUDGIE, an acoustic rendition of the MISFITS’ Last Caress and a small jam session before closing song Creeping Death that included a section of the traditional Irish pub track Whiskey in The Jar. Just over two months later, all of them would be released on arguably the greatest covers album of all time…
To truly talk about Garage Inc., one must go all the way back to November 23rd 1984, exactly fourteen years and one day before the album would commercially appear. It was then that Creeping Death was released as a single from the band’s second album Ride The Lightning (1984) – on the reverse side were cover versions of DIAMOND HEAD’s Am I Evil and Blitzkrieg by the band of the same name and was entitled Garage Days Revisited.
Three years later, the band’s UK label suggested they record some new material to mark the band’s appearance at the Monsters Of Rock festival. However, after only one demo, frontman James Hetfield broke his arm skateboarding; with him unable to play guitar for several weeks, the band decided to record some covers instead. The resulting clutch of songs included tracks originally by KILLING JOKE and the aforementioned trio of DIAMOND HEAD, BUDGIE and MISFITS and was released in August of that year under the title The $5.98 EP – Garage Days Re-Revisited, in tribute to both the Creeping Death single and the band rehearsing the material in drummer Lars Ulrich’s garage.
Fast forward to 1998 and, just one day removed from the Chula Vista show, METALLICA entered the studio to record some brand-new covers for release. Ulrich stated that part of the reason for this was to do “something different after the release of three pretty serious albums in a row (1991’s self-titled, also known as The Black Album, 1995’s Load and that year’s Reload)”; the band’s penchant for covering songs live also contributed. In addition, as Ulrich stated, they wanted to bring all of their previous covers, from B-sides to The $5.98 EP, together in one package for “easy listening”, especially as the latter had, by that point, been out of print for a number of years. As for the new recordings, all but one was recorded during the three-week studio session; the version of LYNYRD SKYNYRD’s Tuesday’s Gone that was done for a radio broadcast and featured a number of guests including PRIMUS bassist Les Claypool, ALICE IN CHAINS axeman Jerry Cantrell, Pepper Keenan of CORROSION OF CONFORMITY and DOWN fame and then-SKYNYRD guitarist Gary Rossington.
Of the other ten, several have gone down in history. Front and centre, of course, is the band’s version of Whiskey In The Jar, which took much of its composition from the THIN LIZZY version released in 1972 and became the most famous of the three singles released – the others were Turn The Page, made famous by BOB SEGER and Die, Die My Darling of MISFITS fame. Other tracks making the cut included BLACK SABBATH’s Sabbra Cadabra (which included a snippet of A National Acrobat), BLUE ÖYSTER CULT’s Astronomy and a five-song medley of MERCYFUL FATE tracks, namely Satan’s Fall, Curse Of The Pharaohs, A Corpse Without Soul, Into The Coven and Evil; there were also renditions of tunes by DISCHARGE, DIAMOND HEAD and NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS.
The second disc comprised The $5.98 EP, the B-Sides from the Creeping Death single and a host of others; this is where Breadfan could be found. Stone Cold Crazy – originally by QUEEN and arguably the very beginnings of thrash metal – also featured, a song Hetfield had performed with its original artists and BLACK SABBATH’s Tony Iommi at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium in 1992. There were also versions of ANTI-NOWHERE LEAGUE’s So What and four MOTÖRHEAD tracks, which had been recorded for a limited edition CD of the single Hero Of The Day and given the title Motörheadache.
Garage Inc. was released on November 24th 1998 and became the fourth of METALLICA’s albums to surpass 400,000 sales in its first week – the official figure was around 426,000. Despite this, it didn’t make the top of the Billboard 200 in the States, having to settle for #2 behind Double Live, the first live album from country artist GARTH BROOKS, although that ended up breaking the record for sales in an inaugural week at 1,085,000. In the lead up to the release, METALLICA undertook the five date ‘Garage Barrage’ tour across the US and Canada, where they fully embraced the concept of the album and did exclusively cover sets. If fans had come to see their original material, they weren’t to be disappointed however – the band chose a tribute act called BATTERY to open for them and play their more recognisable songs before the main event.
When the Garage Barrage tour wrapped up on the album’s release day, METALLICA took the rest of the year off – 1998 became ’99 and the biggest metal band on the planet would embark on one of their most ambitious albums to date. But that’s another story…
Garage Inc. was originally released on November 24 1998 via Elektra Records.
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