It all begins with the ominous sounds of chiming church bells. Shortly after a few bars of guitars and drums announce the proper beginning of the song, a distorted riff quickly takes centre stage.
The song is overall a lot more brooding than we were used to from Metallica at that point, with the initial distorted riff largely setting the tone for everything that follows. What a lot of people didn’t realise at first is that the intro riff is played on bass guitar by Cliff Burton.
The bass guitar introduction is played with heavy distortion and a wah-wah pedal. It is one of three bass tracks on the song: lead bass (distorted), rhythm bass (non-distorted), and harmonic bass over the lead.
Burton had kept that riff in his back pocket for quite a few years before he brought it out during writing sessions for Metallica’s second album Ride the Lightning (1984). In fact, he wrote it several years before joining Metallica. He played it for the first time during a 12-minute jam at a battle of the bands with his second band Agents of Misfortune in 1979.
According to lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, Burton regularly played the intro bass riff when the pair of them were hanging out in their hotel room during their early days on tour. He recalled to Rolling Stone in 2014: “He used to carry around an acoustic classical guitar that he detuned so that he could bend the strings. Anyway, when he would play that riff, I would think, ‘That’s such a weird, atonal riff that isn’t really heavy at all.'”
He added, “I remember him playing it for James [Hetfield, guitar], and James adding that accent to it and all of a sudden, it changed. It’s such a crazy riff. To this day, I think, ‘how did he write that?’ Whenever I hear it nowadays, it’s like, ‘OK, Cliff’s in the house’.”
The initial riff set the direction, and the band went to work on making a song for it. In the end, Burton, Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich would be the credited writers on the song.
Once they started working on it, it was clear to everyone that For Whom the Bell Tolls had incredible qualities and would become one of the most important songs on the album. It had a monster riff and they had built a great song around it. Hetfield pushed himself to write something meaningful to go along with the music. Ultimately, he was inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel of the same name.
The book speaks about the process of death in modern warfare and the bloody Spanish Civil War. Specific allusions are made to the scene described in Chapter 27 of the book, in which five soldiers are obliterated during an airstrike after taking a defensive position on a hill.
Make his fight on the hill in the early day
Constant chill deep inside
Shouting gun, on they run through the endless grey
On they fight, for the right, yes, but who’s to say?
For a hill, men would kill, why? They do not know
Stiffened wounds test their pride
Men on fire, still alive through the raging glow
Gone insane from the pain that they surely know
For whom the bell tolls
Time marches on
For whom the bell tolls
It is said that Hemingway named his book For Whom The Bell Tolls after a 1623 poem by the Englishman John Donne, who wrote “Send not to know / For whom the bell tolls / It tolls for thee”.
This song is a commentary on the futility of war. The last few lines of the song diverge from the book to make this point: “Crack of dawn, all is gone except the will to be / Now they see, what will be, blinded eyes to see.”
In many ways, Ride the Lightning was the first true representation of the four people who were known as Metallica. The first album Kill ‘Em All had primarily been written by Hetfield and Ulrich with pre-album member and well-known Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine. Kirk Hammett and Cliff Burton joined later in the process and hadn’t really been able to contribute much to most of that record. Ride the Lightning was their first chance to add their ideas to the mix. This had a huge impact on the end result as they brought different influences with them – especially Burton, who would push the band towards a much more melodic and musical approach.
The band decided to record their second album in Europe. This was primarily for financial reasons. They were short on funds, and discovered that studio time cost much less than in America, further helped by a very favourable exchange rate at the time.
Ulrich was also quite keen for the band to go to his native Denmark, which became a done deal once the band met Flemming Rasmussen who ended up co-producing (alongside Hetfield and Ulrich) and engineering the album. He would also be involved in a similar capacity on the next two albums Master of Puppets (1985) and …And Justice For All (1988) as well.
In the book The Other Side of Rainbow by Greg Prato, Rasmussen said “Metallica wanted to record in Europe because the dollar rate was about twice what it is now, so they could get twice as much studio time in Europe for the same amount of dollars that they could in the States. They sat down and listened to a lot of albums they liked the sound of, and I think one of them was Difficult To Cure [Rainbow’s 1981 album, which Flemming engineered], and especially Kirk really loved the guitar sound on that. So that was actually one of the reasons why they chose Copenhagen. Many people think I knew Lars from beforehand, but I didn’t even know Metallica existed. I hadn’t heard Kill ‘Em All [the first album] when we did Ride the Lightning. I didn’t hear it until we started recording the album.”
The band was really excited to be at Sweet Silence Studios. Difficult To Cure definitely played into it, as Kirk Hammet still remembered that in conversation with Rolling Stone in 2014: “We were excited because we liked the sound of that album,” he said, “and we were looking to get a similar sound for our album, using that studio and the same engineer, Flemming.”
The band had songs written, played some shows to get match fit ahead of travelling, and were rearing to go. Unfortunately, the sessions did not get the best start. All of the band’s equipment got stolen in Boston right before they were due to leave for Europe. The only thing they had were their guitars. The studio obviously could take care of any equipment needs, but playing on your own stuff is often crucial to get the sounds and the feel that you are used to and want to replicate.
Still, with Flemming Rasmussen overseeing the sounds they were making in the studio, the band was extremely happy to have him on board. “Flemming was completely in tune to what we were doing,” Ulrich told Rolling Stone in 2014. “He was recording us with lots of ambiance, and we wanted heavy sounds and big drums.”
In the same Rolling Stone article, Rasmussen was eager to point out how much they all got along: “I had never heard of them, but I really liked them as people. The studio I worked at, Sweet Silence, was renowned in Denmark. My mentor was really into jazz, and he pulled me aside one day and said, ‘What’s going on with these guys? They can’t play.’ And I’m like, ‘Who cares? Listen to the energy.’”
It was a new and interesting experience for at least three of the guys to record in Denmark. It was not necessarily easy. In 2014, Hammett reflected “It was great when we started there, but we were homesick after three or four weeks [laughs]. It was three American guys and a Danish guy. It was easy for the Danish guy to fit in, but it wasn’t so easy for the three American guys. We were experiencing culture shock a little bit. Being homesick gave us the right amount of… I don’t want to say ‘depression,’ but a little bit of longing that I think made its way into the recording process.”
On one certain song, they tried something new. “For Whom the Bell Tolls was the first song we ever did to a click track,” Rasmussen said in a Songfacts interview. “That was kind of tricky. That was also Lars learning how to play to a click.”
Given the song’s title, it was obvious that the sound of an actual bell tolling would be part of the song. In the end, the song ended up not just opening with the tolling of a bell, but it keeps ringing throughout the entire first minute of the song before gradually fading out. They may have had AC/DC in the back of their minds, who famously used a similar effect on Hell’s Bells from their 1980 album Back In Black.
The two bands got their bell sounds in very different ways. AC/DC ordered a custom, one-ton bell from a foundry and recorded it using a mobile unit and 15 microphones. Metallica settled for a mixture of a studio anvil and a sound effects reel.
The album credits bear witness to this, as they contain the curious credit “Lars Ulrich – drums, anvil.”
“We did have an anvil in the studio,” said Rasmussen, “and Lars had to bang that; it could’ve been that or from a record of sound effects. But there was a really heavy, cast-iron anvil and a metal hammer, and we stuck them in an all-concrete room. He’d just go ‘wang!’.”
In the end, the anvil alone was not enough to get a fully satisfying bell sound, so a bell sound effect was also added. “For Whom the Bell Tolls is played to a click track, and we edited in the bell effect so it would fit and be in tempo,” Rasmussen confirmed in a 2018 Songfacts interview. “I copied it and cut it in where it was supposed to come. So, once we got that tape started at the right spot, it simply played itself, and then dumped it into 24-track.”
The recording sessons were effective, lasting from 20 February to 14 March of 1984. Ride the Lightning was released some four months later, on 27 July 1984.
The band was not hugely into singles at the time, and the lone commercial single from the album would in any case be Creeping Death. Some consideration must also have been given to For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as Fade To Black, as they were issued as promotional singles for radio stations in both edited and full-length versions.
For Whom the Bell Tolls is generally regarded as one of Metallica’s most popular songs. By March 2018, it ranked number five on their live performance count. Most of their live albums and video releases include the song. In March 2023, Rolling Stone magazine ranked the track #39 on their 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Songs of All Time list.
More than anything, this is Cliff Burton’s song. He dies in a tragic road accident when their tour bus slid off the road in Sweden in 1986, which has made the tracks that stemmed from him take on a certain level of poignancy.
“Cliff fits in his own category,” Rasmussen told Songfacts in 2018. “He was like a musician’s musician, and he played by ear. You could have something he played that you went, ‘eh,’ and then the next time it would be absolutely fantastic. So, with Cliff, it was waiting for him to get inspired and deliver. Everybody knew he could – especially everybody in the band – because we’d heard it so many times.”
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