Usually when we talk about a massively successful
record going platinum, you know, there's this
expectation of total control. Right. Yeah. Like
you picture these state of the art studios, a
team of producers, meticulously tweaking every
single knob, endless months of writing. Oh, absolutely.
The whole corporate machine. Exactly. And a band
that just has everything perfectly mapped out.
But in 1987, Metallica completely shattered that
illusion. They recorded a masterpiece that was
born entirely out of chaos, a tragic death, and
a skateboarding accident of all things. Yeah,
it's wild. So we are taking a deep dive today
into a record that just bucked every industry
rule. We're looking at Metallica's 1987 release,
the $5 .98 EP, Garage Days, re -revisited. It
is such a compelling case study, honestly. We
aren't just looking at, you know, a simple collection
of cover songs here. No, not at all. We're looking
at a real -time snapshot of a band in absolute
crisis. They're fighting against intense label
pressure, they're battling the retail industry,
and honestly, just trying to figure out how to
simply function as a band again. Right. And to
really understand this, we need to set the scene
for you. If you were a fan following the band
back then, what did 1987 actually look like for
them? Because, I mean, they weren't just taking
a casual break between albums. Oh, no, not even
close. It was incredibly heavy, both musically
and emotionally. Let's just put ourselves in
their shoes for a second. They had just suffered
a profound tragedy. Their bassist, Cliff Burton,
died in a horrific tour bus accident in Sweden.
Which is just... Dressed clean imaginable, and
that alone is enough to end most bands' rights.
But they made the really difficult decision to
carry on, and they recruited his successor, Jason
Neustad. So you have a band that is deeply grieving,
trying to integrate a brand new member, and on
top of that, the music industry machine, it just
does not stop. Right, the calendar doesn't care
if you're grieving. Exactly. But I've got to
ask, why was Burton's loss so specifically paralyzing
to their creative process? Obviously losing a
friend is awful, but musically, couldn't the
other members just, you know, write the guitar
and drum parts like they always did? Well, that
overlooks how crucial Cliff Burton was to their
actual songwriting architecture. Oh, really?
Yeah, he wasn't just standing in the back playing
root notes on the bass. Burton was the member
with the absolute deepest understanding of musical
theory. I didn't know that. Yeah, he was the
guy introducing classical harmonies into thrash
metal. He taught the other guys about counterpoint
and melody. So when he died, they didn't just
lose a bass player. They lost their musical compass.
Wow. Trying to replace Cliff Burton, it wasn't
just replacing an employee. It was literally
like trying to replace the engine of a car while
it's bombing down the highway at 90 miles an
hour. OK, let's unpack this. They have lost their
musical engine. They have a brand new bassist.
And yet. The calendar is just forcing them forward.
Relentlessly. The source material notes they
were facing mounting pressure to perform at the
1987 Monsters of Rock Festival at Castle Donington.
A huge deal. Massive. And to make matters even
more stressful, their UK label, Vertigo Records,
was aggressively demanding news material to coincide
with that festival appearance. Imagine starting
a high -stakes new job, like News Dead did, right?
Oh, man. And the boss just says, hey, we need
a massive presentation immediately, while half
the team is in mourning. Yeah, the clock was
aggressively ticking. And, you know, they genuinely
tried. They tried to write new original music
with Jason Newstead to meet that demand. Right.
But the creative, well... Given the emotional
toll and obviously the loss of Burton's compositional
skills, it was just completely dry. Just nothing
there. Yeah, all they managed to produce from
those initial songwriting attempts was a single
rough demo for a song called Blackened. Which
is a great song, but it's just one demo. Exactly.
And just when you think they might be able to
build some momentum off that one track, disaster
strikes again. James Hedfield, the frontman and
rhythm guitarist, he gets on a skateboard, falls
and literally breaks his arm. Yeah, you can't
make it up. But wait, I have to ask, if he's
the singer, couldn't he just, you know, sing
and let the lead guitarist Kirk Hammett handle
all the guitar work in the studio while his arm
healed? What's fascinating here is that to assume
that is to misunderstand how Metallica's specific
sound is actually engineered. OK, oh, so. Well.
James Hetfield's right hand, his picking hand,
is the literal driving force of the band. He
uses this technique called rapid downpicking.
Right. So instead of strumming up and down like
a normal guitar player, he strikes the strings
in a continuous, aggressive downward motion.
That sounds exhausting. It is incredibly physically
demanding, and it creates this highly percussive
machine gun -like rhythm that basically defines
thrash metal. Oh, I see. So Hammett is a brilliant
lead player. obviously, but he couldn't replicate
Hetfield's specific rhythm attack. With a broken
arm, Hetfield couldn't downpick. The band was
physically paralyzed. So they're completely boxed
in at this point. They can't write because they're
grieving and missing their primary arranger,
and they can't even play the one new song they
did write because the rhythm guitarist is in
a cast. How on earth did this physical limitation
force them to change their entire creative strategy?
Well, it shifted their strategy by forcing them
to basically abandon the idea of a new album
entirely. They just scrapped it. Yeah, they had
to. But they still needed to gel as a unit with
Newstead, and they still had the label breathing
down their necks for a release. So instead of
trying to force new material, they returned to
their roots. Sweet sense. They decided to record
covers of some of their absolute favorite bands
from the late 70s and early 80s, specifically
punk rock and bands from the new wave of British
heavy. heavy metal. Wait, before we move on,
for those of you who aren't deeply entrenched
in metal history, what exactly is the new wave
of British heavy metal? Or NWOBHM as it's spelled
out. Why did that specific sub -genre matter
so much to them? Right, so the new wave of British
heavy metal, it was this movement in the late
70s featuring bands like Iron Maiden, Diamondhead,
and Def Leppard. Okay, the legends. Exactly.
They essentially took the dark, sludgy heaviness
of early Black Sabbath, right, but they stripped
away the blues influences and they injected it
with the speed and the totally DIY energy of
punk rock. For Metallica, these British bands
were the absolute blueprint. They're going back
to the source. Yeah. Doing covers of these specific
bands was a brilliant pressure release valve.
You don't have to worry about composing the perfect
riff or writing profound lyrics. The song already
exists. It already works. Exactly. Right. Your
only job is to play it and inject your own energy
into it. It totally removes the stress of creation
and just leaves the joy of playing together.
So they have the songs picked out. They're going
to run backward to the stuff that made them love
playing music in the first place. But there's
a logistical problem. To rebuild their chemistry,
they needed the right environment. Right. And
they didn't go to some plush studio in the Hollywood
Hills. They went to a literal garage. A literal
garage. Specifically, drummer Lars Ulrich's garage
in El Cerrito, California. Yeah, but remember,
this is a heavy metal band playing at absolute
breakneck speeds. You can't just plug in a double
kick drum kit and massive amplifiers in a quiet
residential neighborhood without the police shutting
you down in about five minutes. Wait, clarify
that for me. What exactly does a double kick
drum setup do to the sound? Why does that guarantee
noise complaints? So a standard drum kit has
one bass drum operated by a single foot pedal,
right? Right. A double kick setup uses either
two bass drums or a double pedal on a single
drum. It allows the drummer to play rapid fire,
machine gun, 16th notes with both feet. Oh, wow.
Yeah, it literally shakes the foundations of
a building. It produces this massive, booming,
low end frequency that just travels straight
through standard residential walls. Which brings
us to the new guy, Jason Neustead, and how they
solve this noise issue. Because before joining
the band, Newstead actually had experience working
as a construction worker. He did, yeah. So the
band hands the new guy some tools and tells him
to hang drywall. and soundproof the drummer's
garage so they can rehearse, hold on, making
the new guy hang drywall while the rest of the
band watches. That sounds less like, you know,
grounding sweat equity and more like straight
up toxic workplace hazing. I mean, it absolutely
looks like hazing on the surface, especially
when you consider that on the liner notes of
the actual EP, Newstid is officially credited
as Master J New Kid. Oh, man. Master J, new kid.
Yeah. But you really have to view this through
the psychological lens of four guys in their
early 20s who just endured massive, massive trauma.
That's a good point. They didn't have therapists.
They had each other. Having Neistat physically
build the room they were going to play in wasn't
just about cheap labor. It was a profoundly grounding
exercise. It creates literal and figurative sweat
equity. He wasn't just stepping into a preexisting
machine. He was physically building the foundation
of their new era with his own hands. That actually
makes a lot of sense when you frame it as trauma
bonding. So once that room was built, they rehearsed
the material there before taking it to Los Angeles.
And they recorded and mixed the entire thing
over just six days. Six days. Six days at A &M
and Conway Studios. And they intentionally kept
it raw. The liner notes proudly declared that
the EP was not very produced by Metallica. Yeah.
Doing all of this, the manual labor, the rapid
-fire six -day recording schedule, the totally
raw self -production, it stripped away all the
corporate polish that was starting to surround
them at that point in their career. It was a
reset. It was exactly the reset they needed.
And that raw DIY ethos... didn't just stay in
the garage, it completely dictated their track
list. The way they selected the songs they were
gonna record is just a perfect reflection of
that loose mentality. For example, the source
material notes, they were in the middle of rehearsing
a song called White Lightning by the British
metal band Parallax. But while they were playing
it, the lead guitarist, Kirk Hammett, just randomly
starts playing a completely different riff. He
plays the riff for a song called The Wait by
the post -punk group Killing Joke. And instead
of stopping him and demanding they stick to the
schedule, the band just pivots. They decide right
then and there, you know what? Let's record the
weight instead. That's incredible. That kind
of organic left turn is only possible when you've
completely removed the pressure of making a perfect
album. Right. If studio time is costing you thousands
of dollars an hour, you don't casually abandon
a song you've been rehearsing for weeks. But
when you're self producing in six days, you just
follow the energy in the room. Yeah. They also
consider tracks like Signal Fire by the Japanese
band Bow Wow. And I'm no fool by Gaskin, but
ultimately drop them. But the most chaotic, creative
decision has to be what they did with the Misfits
covers. Oh, yeah. They took two completely separate
Misfits songs, Last Caress and Green Hell, and
just mashed them together into a single track.
Musically, how do you even take two songs that
were originally recorded five years apart featuring
entirely different vibes and smash them into
one cohesive track? It requires finding the connective
rhythmic tissue. Like, Last Caress is almost
a twisted pop song. It has this catchy, upbeat,
almost 1950s -style chord progression. Yeah,
it's weirdly catchy. Exactly. And Green Hell,
on the other hand, is a blistering, aggressive,
hardcore punk track. Total opposite. So what
Metallica did was match the tempo. They played
last caress much heavier and way faster than
the original. They ramped up the energy so that
when they transitioned directly into the chaotic
speed of green hell, it feels like a natural
escalation. Instead of train wreck. Right, rather
than a jarring car crash. It's an exercise in
pure musical instinct. And that instinct carried
over to the business side, too. Here's where
it gets really interesting. They didn't just
take this punk rock anti -establishment attitude
into the recording booth, they took it directly
into the retail stores. They sure did. This is
where we have to talk about the pricing gimmick.
They officially named the release the $5 .98
EP, with the specific goal of stopping retailers
from overcharging their fans. They even slapped
a giant sticker right on the front of the original
cassette release that read, if they try to charge
more, steal it. If we connect this to the bigger
picture of the 1980s music industry, you really
have to appreciate the absolute logistical nightmare
this caused. I can't even imagine. You have a
major label, Electra Records, distributing a
release that explicitly encourages consumers
to commit retail theft if the store manager decides
to mark up the price. But why did they feel the
need to dictate the price in the actual title
of the album? Couldn't they just ask the label
to suggest a retail price? Well, in the 80s,
independent record stores and major chains had
a lot of leeway to mark up highly anticipated
releases. Because this was a short EP, it was
only about 25 minutes of music. Metallica felt
it was fundamentally unfair for fans to pay the
price of a full hour -long album. By embedding
the price into the title, they literally weaponized
their own album art against the retailers. But
that title created massive headaches across different
formats because physical media wasn't universally
priced in 1987. Precisely. Compact discs were
still a relatively new technology back then.
Right. The raw materials and the manufacturing
plants required to press CDs were far more expensive
than those used for, you know, duplicating cheap
plastic cassette tapes. Sure. The wholesale cost
of a CD to the retailer was often higher than
$5 .98. So when the official American CD version
was released, they literally had to amend the
title of the ET. It legally became. the $9 .98
CD just to reflect the economic reality of that
specific format. Imagine having to legally change
the name of your art just to match the physical
plastic it's printed on. Yeah, it's absurd. And
what happened when this hit the international
market? The currency differences alone must have
been a nightmare. Oh, it got incredibly complicated.
In Australia, the label decided to keep the original
title $5 .98 EP. But obviously, Australian currency
values were completely different. So the label
had to add a separate, highly contradictory sticker
to the Australian... release, clarifying that
$5 .98 was just the name of the record and not
the actual price you're supposed to pay at the
register. Please pay 15 Australian dollars for
the album titled $5 .98. Exactly. That completely
defeats the anti -establishment purpose of the
title. Totally. But the UK pressings had an entirely
different set of problems that actually altered
the track last write. Yes they did. To understand
this, we have to look at the strict legal definitions
of music releases in the UK at the time. Wait,
before we get into the UK dropping a track...
What exactly define an EP back then? Why did
the length matter to the lawyers? Right. So an
EP stands for Extended Play. It's basically a
middle ground between a standard two -song single
and a full -length album, which is called an
LP or a long play. Got it. In the UK, the official
charts company had very mathematically rigid
rules about runtimes. If a release went over
a specific minute mark, it was legally classified
as an album. Oh, I see. And that changed how
it charted, how it was taxed, and how it was
priced. The UK industry instituted these rules
to prevent bands from packing singles with filler
audio just to manipulate the album charts. So
because of the runtime of these five covers,
what did they have to do? They actually had to
completely omit the track, the weight from the
UK pressings. Wow. Yeah. They dropped an entire
song just to ensure the total runtime squeezed
in under the legal definition of an EP. It is
amazing how much chaos a handful of cover songs
recorded in six days can cause in corporate boardroom
across the globe. It really is. But the band
wasn't just trolling the retail industry with
their pricing and their stickers. They were also
trolling their musical rivals right on the record
itself. Oh, absolutely. The Deep Dive source
material points out this incredibly bizarre outro
tacked onto the very end of the EP. It is a wildly
off -key, intentionally awful, chaotic segment
of Iron Maiden's massive hit, Run to the Hills.
Why target Iron Maiden? It really highlights
the simmering feud and a major cultural shift
that was happening in heavy metal in the mid
1980s. Okay, tell me more. Iron Maiden represented
the established vanguard -like, the polished,
highly theatrical old guard of British metal.
They had massive stage setups, a giant zombie
mascot, and these soaring operatic vocals. Right,
very grandiose. Exactly. Metallica, on the other
hand, represented the aggressive, rising American
underground. They played much faster, way more
abrasive thrash metal, and they performed in
dainty jeans and t -shirts. So by intentionally
butchering one of Iron Maiden's most famous polished
songs on tape, they were essentially planting
a flag. It was a very deliberate, petty jab at
the old guard saying, we don't care about your
rules or your polish. Exactly. It's the ultimate
garage band inside joke that they accidentally
broadcast to the entire world. So what does this
all mean? Which brings us to the aftermath. We
have a paralyzed songwriting process, a broken
arm, a soundproof residential garage, an EP stitched
together from spontaneous jams, international
retail pricing chaos, and a petty jab at a rival
band. A lot of moving parts. Yeah. How did this
project actually perform with the public? Incredibly
well, which is kind of the ultimate irony of
this whole story. Despite the rough production,
the fact that it was entirely covers and all
those industry headaches, it actually peaked
at number 28 on the Billboard 200 chart. Number
28. For a raw Unpolished 25 -minute throwaway
EP. And we didn't stop there. The EP eventually
achieved platinum certification in the United
States from the RIAA, meaning it shipped over
a million units. Insane. And it went gold in
Canada. Over a million people bought a record
that the band themselves admitted was just thrown
together. But then, after all that success, the
EP basically vanished from the face of the earth.
From 1989 all the way until 2018, the original,
the $5 .98 EP went entirely out of print. Entirely.
For nearly 30 years, you could not buy a new
copy of it anywhere, which in the pre -streaming
music world is the exact recipe for creating
a holy grail. Totally. Because it was physically
unavailable for three decades, original cassettes
and CDs became massive, highly coveted collector's
items among fans. Now the music itself didn't
entirely disappear. In 1998, Metallica released
a double album called Garage Ink, which compiled
a bunch of different cover songs from throughout
their career. And they included all five tracks
from the 1987 EP on it. And in true Metallica
fashion, they couldn't just cleanly re -release
the songs. They had to mess with the artwork
too. The source mentions that for the back cover
of Garage Ink, they took the original 1987 Garage
Days photo, and they literally just take pictures
of their older 1998 faces. over their younger
1987 faces. Yeah, it maintains that exact same
DIY cut and paste punk aesthetic that birthed
the EP in the first place. It's brilliant. But
fans wanting the original standalone EP format
had to wait until 2018. That's when the band
finally reissued the 598 EP, Garage Days, revisited
on their own blackened recordings label. So they
finally made it available again across all formats,
including vinyl, taking to all their own catalogs
so they never have to fight a label over a price
tag again. Exactly. This raises an important
question, though, when we look back at this entire
sequence of events. What's that? Well, we look
at this EP as a throwaway project, right? A stopgap
measure just to appease a label and kill time
while a broken arm healed. Yet it became completely
foundational to their legacy. It solidified their
lineup and reminded them of who they were at
their core. From Cliff Burton's tragic passing,
the intense pressure from Vertigo Records, James
Hetfield shattering his arm, making Jason Newstead
hang drywall, to legally fighting record stores
over the price of a cassette tape. It's astonishing
that this 25 -minute release became a million
-selling piece of history. It really leaves you
wondering about the modern music landscape, doesn't
it? It absolutely does. Today, bands have access
to infinite digital tracks. They have Pro Tools
software that can automatically snap a drum beat
perfectly to a grid, and autotune that can correct
any flat vocal. Everything is perfectly pristine.
Right, you can record an entire album in a digital
vacuum without ever having to face a single limitation.
But looking at the $5 .98 EP, you have to ask
yourself, by removing all the physical and logistical
friction from the recording process, have we
engineered the happy accident out of music completely?
That's a great point. If a band today doesn't
have a literal garage, a strict budget, and a
broken arm to force them into a creative corner,
can they ever truly capture that kind of raw
lightning in a bottle? That is a fascinating
angle. We spend so much time building the perfect
digital tools to remove every obstacle from our
path, but maybe it's the obstacles themselves
that actually shape the art. Thank you so much
for joining us today for this deep dive. We hope
this look into the muddy, chaotic, unproduced
waters of 1987 gave you something new to think
about. Until next time, keep digging into the
stories behind the noise.