"We were walking from the place we were staying to the photographer's studio to shoot the portrait on the back cover and thinking about names for the album, and Cliff said, 'You know what? Fuck those fuckers, man, those fucking record outlet people. "We were pissed off, but we knew we had to think up a new name," he continued. Metallica's then-manager Jonny Zazula, who was preparing to release the album on his own Megaforce label, broke the bad news to the band as the owner of a record store, he understood that an independently-released album called Metal Up Your Ass wouldn't stand a chance in the retail environment of the time. Unfortunately, it also repelled their prospective distributors, most of whom thought that the album's title and cover art would be a tough sell to retailers. That would've gotten everyone squirming uncomfortably."Īs the band saw it, the title Metal Up Your Ass - especially when paired with Stephen Gorman's irreverently graphic artwork (which wasn't quite as gnarly as Ulrich's description) - would serve as both a come-on and a warning, attracting real metal fans everywhere while repelling the posers.
"And the toilet had barbed wire around it. "We were gonna have a hand coming through a toilet bowl, holding a machete, dripping with blood," Lars Ulrich explained in a 1984 interview. And just in case you didn't get the point, so to speak, the artwork offered the most literal depiction of the phrase that they could imagine. Knowing that their debut album needed a title that would succinctly sum up their music and attitude, the band had decided to call it Metal Up Your Ass, a title they'd originally used for a 1982 demo of live material.
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