[…] “Fade to Black” got good and bad response. When the censorship thing started, that was one of the songs they tried to attack. These parents finding their kids dead in the garage with these lyrics, sucking on an exhaust pipe. People tried to sue bands for their mistakes. But we got tons and tons of letters—we still do—that say, “Fade to Black saved my life.” But no one wants to read that. It’s too nice, too boring.

—James Hetfield, Rolling Stone

Everybody seemed to be caught off-guard by the fact we’d done it. We surprised everyone but ourselves. You can hear that the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal inspired the first record. But if you step back further than that, you get to Deep Purple’s “Child in Time” and Judas Priest’s “Beyond the Realms of Death,” even “Stairway to Heaven”—those big, brooding, epic songs. That kind of song was always in the background for us – we knew in our hearts that was part of the Metallica sound, but we just didn’t have the skill or finesse to tackle it on Kill ’Em All. By the time Cliff and Kirk had come on board, we felt we had the ability to go down that path.

Why did people react to it the way they did at the time?

Probably because there was a group of people who had a different view of what Metallica was – that we were a lot more of a one-dimensional entity. Often I feel like there’s two Metallicas. There’s the Metallica I live and breathe every day, and then there’s the Metallica I read about. Those are often two contradictory thing. The things that people get caught off-guard about are completely normal in my mind, but maybe we don’t do a good enough job of explaining them.

—Lars Ulrich, Metal Hammer