No. 713 – One

Performer: Metallica

Songwriters: James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich

Original Release: … And Justice for All

Year: 1988

Definitive Version: S&M, 1999

At the Daily Herald, none of the copy editors had individual desks, except maybe the news editor. I had a drawer where I kept my editor’s pens, pica pull and AP style manual. After having had my own office for nearly a year in Michigan City, this was something of a come-down, as you can imagine.

The copy desk was set up this way to maximize very limited floor space in a downtown Arlington Heights building that long since has been replaced by a gigantic office out by the Kennedy. Two shifts used the same desks.

During the day shift, which I worked a few times to cover for vacations, the Lifestyle and Neighbor sections had the workstations. Neighbor was the department that put out all the different local stories that were zoned for different regions that the Herald covered. At the time, the Daily Herald had 18 zones and stretched from as far north as Grayslake to as south as Carol Stream and west almost to Elgin. That was the land mass the copy desk dubbed Herald City.

When Metro was done for the day around 4, the news desk would assemble and move into the now-empty (or soon-to-be-empty if things were running a tad late) desks.

The desks were arranged to create a pod or central group of four desks where the news editor, assistant news editor, wire editor and assistant wire editor sat to divide up the news pages and assign the stories. Another pod was on the far side of where the news editor sat, and other desks formed the rim that ringed the whole area. That’s where the run-of-the-mill copy editors, like me, sat.

In the middle of the honcho pod sat a little color TV that we had on a lot, like during the whole Tiananmen Square protest and massacre, which, of course, took place on my 25th birthday. We also had it on in February 1989 when I was introduced to Metallica during the Grammys broadcast.

I knew about Metallica, but at that point, I wasn’t sure that I had ever heard a Metallica song. All I knew about them was that they were thrash metal—serious metal that made the hair crap that MTV peddled on a constant basis during that time sound like wuss rock—and extremely loud. When they were about to perform, I watched to see what the fuss was all about. (The copy queue was temporarily empty.)

They did this song, which was nominated, and other than the fact that it sounded pretty good and wasn’t nearly as thrashy as I had expected, nothing was overly shocking—or loud—about the performance.

The big shock, of course, came after they played when Jethro Tull won the first Grammy for hard rock/heavy metal. Jethro Tull? What, Seals and Crofts didn’t release an album? Having long been aware of the lameness of the Grammys, I figured that the 80-year-old voters picked Jethro Tull, because it was the only band any of them had ever heard of.

Well, I had heard of Metallica, and now that I’d seen them and didn’t hate what I heard, I was more open to checking them out, although it would be almost another decade before I actually would buy any of their stuff.