BOB ROCK
Ambitious, driven, uncompromising and supremely self-confident, in the first decade of their career, Metallica weren’t used to hearing the word ‘no’. So when Bob Rock turned down an offer to mix the band’s fifth album, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich were initially affronted, then intrigued. Passing on that opportunity would turn out to be one of the smartest decisions of the Canadian sound engineer/producer’s career, for it opened up a dialogue with Metallica that would ultimately result in Rock producing the quartet’s next four albums: Metallica (known globally as The Black Album), Load, Reload and St. Anger. It’s fair to say that the relationship between the Winnipeg-born studio technician and the San Francisco band wasn’t always entirely harmonious...
Having graduated from engineering and mixing hugely successful albums (Bon Jovi’s Aerosmith’s to producing Motley Crue’s your career was on a roll before Metallica entered your life: did that make it fairly easy to reject their offer to have you mix their fifth album?
