Most metal outfits tend to have a different way of looking at their sales than the traditional pop model. Even though any band will want to sell their music in droves to anyone who will hear them, it’s hard to think of groups like Iron Maiden or Black Sabbath trying to widdle down their track listing for radio or writing songs with the best single potential. Metallica may have been one of the few metal acts that didn’t even need hit singles throughout their glory days, but Lars Ulrich admitted that he had to fight to get them to even consider ‘Enter Sandman’ for single release.
It’s not like Metallica knew how to pick the singles before. During their thrash years, a song like ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ may have been the closest to a mainstream track they had ever released. When they finally decided to loosen up and give a video to MTV, the fact that they chose ‘One’, a seven-minute thrash-about written around a man torn up by war, was proof that they weren’t looking to compete with bands like Poison and Europe on the charts.
Their tides were already shifting around the 1990s when they hooked up with Bob Rock. Considering their last few albums saw them punching bar by bar, trying to find the hardest sound possible, Rock was the guy you went to if you wanted a record to sound huge, and that meant loosening up when it came to long songs.
Although tracks like ‘Sad But True’ and ‘The Unforgiven’ were hits then, the pieces were still much longer than the traditional single, each hovering around the five-minute mark. There was something magical about ‘Enter Sandman’, though, and it seemed that Ulrich was its only cheerleader once the record was mixed.
Recalling the band’s time working on it, Rock said that Ulrich continued to pester him about ‘Enter Sandman’ in the studio, telling Classic Albums, “Lars knew just from the demos that ‘Sandman’ was the song. I didn’t hear it.”
Ulrich also discussed the band’s push for ‘Holier Than Thou’ to be the frontrunner, explaining, “They were like ‘Holier Than Thou’ the first song on the record and the first single, and I was sitting there like, ‘Guys, you don’t get it.’” For all of Ulrich’s pushing, let’s play devil’s advocate for a second.
If ‘Holier Than Thou’ had been the first single released, fans would probably have been much more forgiving of the band’s change in direction… but many mainstream fans would still have no idea who Metallica was. Since ‘Sandman’ was based around just one riff, it’s a lot easier for someone to sink their teeth into, especially when chanting the chorus in the middle of a stadium.
They should be thankful that ‘Enter Sandman’ was the first song to indoctrinate new fans. Because if fans got their first taste of the new Metallica and it was something like ‘Nothing Else Matters’, chances are some heads might have exploded. We would have been cleaning up vomit on streets across the world from metal purists who thought their beloved metal act had sold out. ‘Enter Sandman’ was the best of both worlds: a track that had a pop structure but never forgot about what the band had to begin with.
