According to Bill Kelliher, Metallica made a terrible mistake on ‘Black Album.’
“I would look at stuff like, say, ‘Reign in Blood.’ You look at that cover, and you’re like, ‘I know what’s in here. It’s just satanic, fu**ed-up metal,’” the guitarist told The Break Down with Nath & Johnny in a new interview.
He continued, “You look at the Ramones records. You look at King Crimson… I mean, back when albums, you know, were big, not just little thumbnails. So, yeah, we continue that tradition, where I feel like the presentation of your art on the cover must represent the music that’s inside.”
“Like, ‘The Black Album’ — which is a great record to me; I grew up on Metallica — but that record? F*cking awesome record, terrible cover. Like, it’s just black,” Kelliher added about Metallica’s choice of album cover for ‘Black Album.’
Metallica’s ‘Black Album’ arrived on August 12, 1991. The album cover features Metallica’s logo and a coiled snake from the Gadsden flag. “There was no theme to this one,” James Hetfield said of the record. “It was a simple black cover and you had to listen to the music. You wouldn’t be distracted by a drawing on the front.”
The singer also stated, “I decided to go inward and a little more universal, asking questions about life and things that touch everyone. When it’s a little more about your feelings and a little less about the outside world you can’t go wrong.”
The album cover isn’t fully black; it has shades that form the band’s name and a symbol. Though some link it to ‘Spinal Tap,’ Lars Ulrich said in ‘A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica’ that it was inspired by Status Quo’s 1973 black cover for ‘Hello!’ They also chose black to stand out from the colorful metal album covers of the late 1980s, like Poison’s bright green logo.
The album’s coiled snake comes from the Gadsden Flag, which Christopher Gadsden made during the American Revolution. This flag was inspired by a cartoon from Benjamin Franklin. It showed a coiled rattlesnake and the words ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ to symbolize unity among the colonies.