Posted 6:32 PM by Alfred

Bumpin' Metallica Justice for All, specifically the classic song "One."

I'm pretty sure that this was the first video that Metallica ever made, and the whole thing was just clips from that old movie Johnny Got His Gun, interspersed with shots of the band playing in a shadowy room. This was the only video they made up until Enter Sandman, their kickoff single for the self-titled album, which was good, but I always saw it as their "sellout" album. Don't get me wrong, that album rocks hard, but not like Justice, or Ride the Lightning, or Master of Puppets. Metallica still rocks, they're just older. Nothing wrong with that. I gotta say, I saw them a couple years back at the Blaisdell in Honululu, and they fukn blew the place apart.

Which reminds me, there's a little story associated with that concert. My buddy Jorge and I were having a little session with Jah in the car before heading into the venue. After we're done, in a haze, we get out of the car, lock it up, head towards the show, and I realize I locked my keys in the car, along with my wallet and ticket. So I'm freaking out, try calling AAA to come jimmy the door, time is running out. I tell Jorge, go on without me, I'll be in there. So fuk, I can't get Jorge's phone to work, time is running out, I hear the opening band starting to play, I'm like FUK I'm not missing Metallica, no frikken way. So I start pulling on the window on the passenger side. My car is an Acura and has those doors with no top, the window just closes to the frame of the car. So I'm pulling on the window, hoping I can pull it out a little bit and snake my hand in and unlock the door. So I'm pulling, pulling, then the glass shatters. I broke the fukn window. I'm bleeding like a stuck pig out my arm. I look around for a minute, there's glass all over the ground, in the car, and it starts raining (I'm on the top floor of the parking structure in the far corner.)

Fuck it, I tell myself. Grab the tickets, keys, and wallet, and head downstairs. The ticket checker at the door looks at me like I'm Charles Manson, as my ticket is smeared in blood, and there's blood all over my arm. But I'm in baby. Just grab a paper towel and apply a little pressure, and the bleeding stops. (Luckily it wasn't as bad as it looked.) Grab a beer, find my seat, and commence to rock out. True story. PS it was worth it. They fukn ROCKED.

Anyway, tangent alert, back to what I was talking about, that video for "One" was so badass, and my buddy Von Saucenberg and me even rented the movie that it was based on back in high school. It's this hardcore story about this guy in World War I that gets blown up by a grenade, and his whole face is basically shredded off his head. He can't hear, smell, see, or any of that stuff, he can just feel vibrations. He can't move for shit, either, I think all his arms and legs got blown off too. So he's basically just a torso with no face, so he just lays there and trips out. Real life is shown in black and white, and they switch to color when he's journeying through his mind. Very trippy, cool, movie. He hangs out with his dad's ghost, has all these trippy daydreams, gets confused between life and death, the whole nine yards. He gets to the point where he can't tell when he's asleep and awake, because all his senses have been destroyed. Basically the whole movie is like an acid trip but that came from your face getting blown off rather than popping a tab.

Where am I going with this? I don't really know. I remember that whole idea of living in a dreamlike state like that, with no connection to reality, really fascinated me in a sick way, though. I mean, what would you do, just fukn play mental scrabble all fukn day? Sing 20,000 bottles of Beer to yourself continuously? The fucked up thing is that the doctors all think he's a vegetable, because he has no way to communicate, but he's still fully conscious, just fukn layed out and incapacitated. So in the end, he wants to end it, because his life is fucked, so he bangs his head in morse code and spells out "SOS. Kill me." Over and over. And the shitbag doctors and generals or whatever are like, "oh, it's just a reflex or something, he's just a vegetable," and they let him live, all fucked up in that purgatory between life and death.

Pretty fucked up huh? See that's how core Metallica used to be. No videos, and the one exception they made was the blown up face guy movie. Now they fukn put out a video for every other song, but you can't blame them, that's the name of the game, gotta slang records and MTV is the pimp of the century in that regard. Nothing sells records like play on the almighty MTV. That's when they have time to squeeze videos in between episodes of "Dismissed" and fukn "Undressed" and bullshit like that. Oh and don't even get me started on that fukn sorority sisters show, which is the biggest fukn waste of air-time this side of Mama's Family.

OK mindless rant over. Back to your cubicles.