Early Metallica producer Flemming Rasmussen – who produced 1984’s “Ride the Lightning,” 1986’s “Master of Puppets,” and 1988’s “…And Justice for All” – discussed the infamous lack of bass on “Justice,” saying on the Alphabetallica Podcast:
“What happened was [mixing engineers Steve Thompson and Mike Barbiero] did a mix that they thought sounded really, really good, which had lots of bass in it.
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“And the bass – let me just point out – the bass tracks on ‘…And Justice for All’ are actually fantastic. Jason plays really well. He probably tried to prove that he was worth, that he was up there with Cliff, which in my opinion he is.
“It’s a different style, but he is as good of bass player as Cliff, just in a different way.
“And I’ve heard the bass tracks and they were actually amazing. They sound good, he plays well.
“But, they heard the mix and they went, ‘Alright, take the bass down, change this this this and this, and then take the bass down.’ So you can barely hear it.
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“And then once they’ve done that they said, ‘Take it another 3dB down.’
“Why they did that – I have no idea! It could be that they were still grieving about Cliff. I have no idea. But imagine my surprise when I heard the album. I was like, ‘What the… What?!’ [Laughs]
“It got really criticized when it came out, and people got more or less blown away because of the dryness of the sound. It just goes BANG, right in your face.
“‘…And Justice for All’ was probably the single album in the last 30 years which has been the most influential in terms of sound for the whole generation of the hardcore metal bands.
“They all wanted to sound like ‘…And Justice for All.’ That really clicky, high-endy bass drum, all that stuff…
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“Every time I hear the bass drum like that, I go ‘I’m really sorry about that. That’s my mistake.’ [Laughs] Well, I didn’t mix it! [Laughs]”
Asked on how Cliff Burton’s death affected the recording sessions, Flemming replied:
“It was just work, work, work – we worked like 14 hours a day.
“They like started at 10:00, ended up at midnight. Some days would go to slightly past midnight, and then we’d go further past midnight. Then we said, ‘OK, let’s start at 11:00 tomorrow.’
“And as that kept progressing we kind of pushed the start time an hour all the time because we went so late. There was actually one point when we started at 5 in the morning because we went all the way around the clock. [Laughs]
“That was one of three days I had off in those four months. That was the day that we kind of caught on by pushing the hours. We were kind of on a 25-26-hour day. Everything got kinda pushed.”