Album Title
The band initially intended to title the album Metal Up Your Ass with the cover featuring a toilet bowl with a hand clutching a dagger emerging from it. However, Megaforce urged them to change this, and they agreed, switching to Kill 'Em All. This time the cover featured the shadow of a hand letting go of a bloodied hammer. Burton is credited with coming up with the name Kill 'Em All (referring to timid record distributors, saying "why don't we just kill 'em all?") as a response to the whole situation. Even though the original title was unused, the band did later release a "Metal Up Your Ass" t-shirt with the proposed artwork. A live bootleg recording of a 1982 performance is in existence, titled Metal Up Your Ass (Live), and includes the originally intended cover artwork.
Original pressings of the album came with an inner sleeve that included pictures and lyrics as well as a silver label on the vinyl. Subsequent pressings had a blank white sleeve and standard album label. The 1988 re-release re-introduced the lyrics and photos. The original release can be distinguished by the words "Bang That Head That Doesn't Bang" at the top of the back cover. This was dropped from the re-release.
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Famous quotes containing the words album and/or title:
“What a long strange trip it’s been.”
—Robert Hunter, U.S. rock lyricist. “Truckin’,” on the Grateful Dead album American Beauty (1971)
“Et in Arcadia ego.
[I too am in Arcadia.]”
—Anonymous, Anonymous.
Tomb inscription, appearing in classical paintings by Guercino and Poussin, among others. The words probably mean that even the most ideal earthly lives are mortal. Arcadia, a mountainous region in the central Peloponnese, Greece, was the rustic abode of Pan, depicted in literature and art as a land of innocence and ease, and was the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance (1590)