“Crash Course in Brain Surgery,” which came to Metallica courtesy of the Welsh rockers Budgie, returned to the “hit it and quit” punk ethos – something that kept the thumping piece at just over three minutes. Most of the previous tracks hovered at the five-minute mark or beyond. “We did that EP for the fans, just for fun, and Elektra loved it and released it.” “The fact that the original versions of ‘Helpless’ and ‘The Wait’ don’t even have solos in them was a bit of luck: No one would have anything to compare them to, and it kept any preconceived ideas out of my head,” Hammett told Guitar World. This allowed Metallica to add in their own elements, almost under the radar. Hammett was the one who suggested taking on Killing Joke’s “The Wait” – which, like the Diamond Head track, benefitted by not being particularly well-known by music fans. Following four minutes of lumbering along, the song shifts gears into a frenetic grind punctuated by Kirk Hammett's squealing guitar lead, and then reverts back to its original, threatening meter. Next up was the slow-burner “The Small Hours,” which had originally been done by the little-known Scottish metal outfit Holocaust. They kicked off with Diamond Head, an old favorite whose “Am I Evil?” had previously been covered by Metallica for the B-side to their 1984 single “Creeping Death.” This time around, they updated the rager “Helpless,” creating the opening cut for Garage Days. The kind of songs that Metallica worked on – a mixture of punk and New Wave of British Heavy Metal classics – would lend themselves to that idea. Newsted added, “Play in the room together, jam, that’s how I learned to record.” The time it took us to record the EP … was the time it took us to set up the gear in the studio for the last album!” We usually like to take our time on stuff, but we wanted this to be as spontaneous as possible.

… We did it all in six days down in L.A., which was very quick for us. 'It’s just the way we are that people see, and the EP wasn’t any major planned thing.

“We never had these huge group meetings planning just how we should come across or look, you know?” Ulrich is quoted as saying in Birth School Metallica Death. It was a clear indicator of the spirit of things going in. Rehearsals took place in drummer Lars Ulrich's garage, which had been recently renovated and converted to jam space in a project spearheaded by Newsted. “Flotsam & Jetsam’s first album, Doomsday, was recorded and mastered in six days.” That would be the blueprint for Garage Days, too. “When I came into the band, I’d only ever known one process of recording,” Newsted told Martin Popoff in Metallica: The Complete Illustrated History. And Justice for All by placing the bass controversially low in the mix.) (Of course, skipping ahead a bit, they pretty much punted on that issue with 1988's. It had already been established that Newsted was a solid fit with the group in a live setting, but there were questions about how the writing and recording would go with the former Flotsam & Jetsam bassist. In addition to giving Metallica a relatively low-pressure way to resume the studio portion of their career without Burton – and presumably, more time to heal and deal with their grief – it offered them a chance to further bond as a band with Newsted. The resulting EP, Garage Days Re-Revisited, was released on Aug.

Garage inc release date