“A lot of artists, when they’re 62 years old, they’re winding things down,” Metallica‘s Kirk Hammett says in the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. “I feel like I’m still fucking climbing the summit, bro.”
Hammett has a new coffee-table book out, The Collection: Kirk Hammett, with highlights from his massive assemblage of vintage instruments. He took the occasion to look back at his entire career with Metallica, and what’s coming next — including his first-ever full-length solo album. Here’s the entire conversation — to hear an audio version, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.
What a beautiful book. It reminded me how much I enjoy looking at pictures of guitars.
[Laughs] Me too. And the primary audience is people who just have a passion for great vintage, rare, unique guitars. For me, I’ve always been a collector. I’ve been collecting things ever since I was like five or six years old, starting with comic books and monster magazines, and so I developed a strategy for collecting early in life when I was still a kid: Always go after the rarest, most unique, difficult-to-obtain things. ’Cause those are the things that will always retain value and hopefully go up in value.
That was the same attitude when it came to guitars. And a lot of times going after the rarest, most unique stuff sends you down rabbit holes of research and investigating. And then the next thing you know, you find more rare and unique stuff that you didn’t even know existed. And then the quest grows.
How many guitars do you own?
I made it a point a long time ago not to count ’cause the number bums me out, ’cause I can’t play ’em all. Over the years, I’ve been trying to bring that number down, ’cause it drives me crazy knowing that there’s guitars sitting in cases that never get played. That’s a result of going out on tour and needing certain guitars for that particular tour. And then after that tour is over, those guitars go into cases and we don’t use them again. Both James and I have countless numbers of guitars like that.
When I’m going after rare stuff, I want to trade, because when you trade, everyone’s happy, man. When cash is involved, there’s something empty-feeling about it. I have a core collection of about 40 to 50 guitars I try to play all the time. Those are my most favorite guitars. And most of them are in the book.
Of course, your most legendary guitar is Greeny, which once belonged to original Fleetwood Mac guitarist Peter Green. You’ve mentioned that it actually changes the way you play. How does that work?
Well, I want to hear the tone. So fewer 16th notes, fewer eighth notes, and fewer 32nd notes — a lot of, like, whole notes and quarter notes just to let that thing sing. ’Cause she sings, man. And Greeny is a unique guitar because you plug that guitar into any amp, it makes the amp sound better. There are very few guitars that actually do that. It has frequencies that just come through every single time.
It’s an amazing guitar. It was iconic before I even got it. The sound of it is so unique. It doesn’t sound like any Les Paul out there that I’ve seen, and I constantly A/B it to all sorts of guitars, vintage and modern, and, bro, Greeny kicks all their asses.
Other high-profile players had the opportunity to buy Greeny but passed. Two of those guys would be Joe Bonamassa and James Hetfield. So it feels like Greeny was just waiting for me, bro. I came along, and when I put that guitar in my hands and started messing with it, in a second, I knew I wasn’t giving it back. I can’t get enough of it, bro. I play that thing all the freaking time. I bring her everywhere with me, everywhere, bro. Everywhere. Where I sleep, Greeny’s not that far away.
Do you and someone like Joe Bonamassa compete for the same guitars, given that he’s also such a serious collector?
Oh, he’s a mega-collector. But we’re both at points in our collection. We have so much good stuff, we kinda stay in our own lanes. He alerted me to the fact that a certain black 1959 Les Paul Standard was finally coming up for sale in Nashville, and that was a guitar that I had been chasing for the last 10 years, and it finally became available. I have to thank Joe for that opportunity — for not buying it ’cause he already has one, and just for being really cool and calling me first. Once he found out it was at that store, he literally just called me first. I was so stoked. I sent him a Greeny [replica] because I was just so happy about that.
Honor among collectors.
It’s rare, bro. It’s rare because in the horror-movie poster world, cutthroat. I see people taking second, third mortgages out on their house to buy movie posters. I know people who seem like they’ll sell out their own family members just to get a certain movie poster. And maybe it’s like that in the guitar world. I don’t know. I haven’t seen it, but there does seem to be a certain honor among collector musicians, because we’re all kind of occupying the same space.
Now, there are some dealers out there who are just unscrupulous, and there are some dealers out there who just wanna maximize the worth of their guitars. And I get it, they’re businessmen. But man, it just goes back to my other thing. When you can get a good barter deal going where everyone’s happy, everyone has the guitars that they want in their hands, and everyone walks away with a big smile on their face. That’s the type of deal that I love, man — and I look for.
That photo of you in the book playing guitar on the Great Wall of China is wild. How did you manage to get your guitar all the way up there?
Well, I have to give credit to my security guy, Rob Fernandez. ’Cause he was the guy who had to haul that stuff up there. And it’s a walk, man. Before you even get to the Great Wall, there’s like a quarter-mile walk uphill just to get to the entrance. Right. And then you start walking and there’s countless steps and inclines, declines. God bless my security guy. He had to carry a guitar and an amp [laughs].
The pollution was particularly bad that day. So I had to wear a mask that whole time ’cause I’m very susceptible to environmental sickness and lung infections. But, man, there’s some pretty annoyed people around because not only did Rob Fernandez have to lug my guitar up there, but the photographer, Ross Halfin, and his assistant had to lug a bunch of gear as well— camera cases, lights, the whole deal. So I had a very annoyed crew with me at the Great Wall, and I was like, “OK.” Then we had to find the location. And that took like 15 minutes, and I was like, “Nope, this is not gonna do it. How’s this? Nope, this is not gonna do it. Ah, this part? Yes.” And by the end of it, bro, they’re just cursing my name.
Well, what did you play up there on the Great Wall of China?
I was probably freaking playing some crazy, like, new wave of British heavy-metal licks. Of course, from my youth. It’s what we always do when we get together and jam. Fucking jam on Seventies hard rock and new wave of British heavy-metal stuff. It just never fails. People walk in going, “What is this stuff? What do you play? How come you guys all know this song I’ve never heard of?”
I recently interviewed Dan Nigro, who produces for Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan — these pop acts with strong rock influences. He’s part of a wave of producers who are genuine rock fans at heart.
Like that guy in Sweden.
Max Martin.
I met him, I was just, he looks like a Swedish metal guy.
Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” has a full guitar-solo section. Dan actually mentioned your argument for guitar solos in the Some Kind of Monster documentary, where you said that omitting solos would actually date the music to that moment. How do you view that whole period now, when solos weren’t just uncool in Metallica but across the wider music world?
You know, as a guitar player, I just always shook my head and looked the other way because guitar ebbs and flows. Guitar is popular and then guitar is not popular. It’s weird, because over the course of my life, it seems like people get sick of hearing it and want to hear something else, but then when they hear too much of something else, they crave hearing guitar again.
In 1979, 1980, everyone was saying heavy metal is dead. And heavy metal hadn’t even fully blossomed yet! [Laughs.] Me and all my friends were listening to this incredible freaking heavy metal coming out of the U.K. and Europe, and shaking our heads going, “Heavy metal’s dead? They’re not listening to the same stuff we are.” Because it was a really exciting time. The energy that heavy metal had, it was a new hybrid of just like punk energy, punk aggression, heavy-metal riffs. Oh, man. Anyone who said to me, “Heavy metal is dead,” I’d say, “No. It just is not being played on the radio for people like you who don’t have the wherewithal to look beyond what they’re hearing on the radio.”
But people were just kind of sick of all the guitar stuff. And so all these synths came in, right? All these synth bands, New Romantic movement, Duran Duran, and fucking hell, I can see why people would say heavy metal’s dead, because they’re hearing nothing but synths these days. But under the surface, bro, it was just waiting to strike and come back, and it came back with a vengeance.
Now, it’s the same cycle, I believe. But instead of just synths you have samples. You have whole songs that are created digitally. You also have like five or six writers on one song, which is mind-boggling to me. ’Cause when you hear the song, you’re like, it took five or six people to put together that song? I mean, to answer your question, bro, I think I fucking strayed so far. But I think it just follows trends. It truly follows trends, and to say that something is dead, will never come back. I think that’s just a dangerous statement to say overall when you’re talking about art of any kind.
I find it fascinating that you were listening to early Soundgarden when you wrote the “Enter Sandman” riff. That helps explain why the Black Album somehow fit alongside the grunge explosion when it came out in 1991. You guys were already tapped into those sounds.
Oh, yeah. I remember getting the first Sub Pop singles in, like, 1987, bro. I still have all those single-of-the-month singles, Nirvana, Mudhoney, Tad, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Green River. I mean, it’s tons of stuff. I was listening to a lot of it and James was listening to a lot of it. And all of a sudden I knew things were happening. ’Cause a couple years later, I started seeing guys with hairdos that reminded me of the Sub Pop guys’ look on all these singles. Then all those albums started coming out, and then we were full on in the grunge era.
I had no problem with the grunge. I freaking loved it, to be honest. I fucking thought it was the greatest fucking thing. And there’s a lot of stuff that came out of that whole period that I still listen to a lot today, like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Mudhoney.
People don’t realize the extent to which Kurt Cobain was specifically a Metallica fan. You tell that story of him coming to a show and being like, “You guys gonna play ‘Whiplash’ tonight?”
Oh, man. He loved “Ride the Lightning,” too. There’s a song on Bleach that kind of reminds me of the “Ride the Lightning” riff, has the same sort of phrasing. Kurt was a great guy. You can tell that he was shy. He was more the observer than the participator. Every time I saw him, he would always be just kind of mellow, sitting back in the seat, either drinking a beer or smoking a joint or whatever. I smoked and drank with him quite a bit back in the day.
I remember getting an early copy of Nevermind. And then seeing them at the Palladium in L.A. I came backstage and I said, “Kurt. Nevermind, it’s gonna be huge.” He goes, “No, it’s not.” I go, “Yes, it is.” And then I told Krist Novoselic. I said, “Bro, this album’s gonna be huge.” He goes, “Think so?” I go, “I know so. It’s gonna be huge, man.” They’re like, “Man, nah.”
But I mean, Nirvana at the time, prefame, they were a great band and with very pure intentions. They came out there and just fucking played their asses off. Once fame set in, Kurt kind of had a little bit of an attitude that worked into the live performance. Some people loved that. I just saw the difference, don’t have much opinion over it, but I saw the change. And it was evident ’cause they used to go out there and just play, and you could tell they were so into it, man. And really just loving the support. But when all the accolades came on, and all the freaking celebrity came, it just rubbed Kurt the wrong way. ’Cause he wasn’t that kind of person.
While everyone celebrates your Eighties material — which is rightfully legendary — I feel like we shouldn’t overlook the Black Album, and even Load, and Reload. I was listening to the Black Album this week, and sonically, it has to be one of the best-sounding rock records ever made.
Agreed man. The drum sound is amazing. Every time I hear that drum sound, it sounds so big, man, and so easy to listen to. You’re like, “Yeah, turn it up even more,” because it’s so easy to listen to. So easy on the ears listening to that fantastic drum, big drum sound, that big snare sound, those sizzly, reverb-drenched symbols.
It’s probably our best-sounding album, hands down. And we put so much work into it to make sure it sounded good, bro. [Laughs.] We hit the mark. Sometimes you hit the mark, sometimes you miss the mark. And missing the mark is important. It brings you back down to planet Earth and it grounds you, and you say, “OK, let’s be honest about our next approach.”
So try another approach and just be totally honest about it, and hopefully it works. That’s really the attitude, because we can’t just go in there going, “OK, we’ve written these songs that are custom-made for every sort of Metallica fan alike.” If you do that, bro, it just, you end up with substandard results, ’cause you’re watering it down, you’re softening the edges. You’re not playing what’s in your heart or what’s in your gut or what’s in your ka, and that’s so important, bro. ’Cause listening to your instinct, listening to your gut leads you to other places that you wouldn’t have otherwise been trying to steer it.
Metallica is a lot of spontaneity at first, to try to figure out what the music is shaping like. And then once we get enough of the music and cobble together a more clearer picture of how the album is collectively sounding, then that influences the way the rest of the album is written and recorded.
Your approach to soloing on the Black Album marked a real evolution in your playing. What do you remember about creating the “Enter Sandman” solo specifically?
You know, bro, it’s so crazy because all the solos came together really, really quickly. It felt like the solos were writing themselves. All I needed to do was find the notes, finger them, and just put it down on tape. It was a remarkable sort of thing. I remember sitting down with Lars in my hotel room before we ever even went into the studio to start doing solos, and played him all this stuff. It was just like, “Wow, there isn’t that much really to do other than just record what you already had.”
But then there were songs I had no idea what to do for, and I did kind of have to stretch out. Like, I didn’t know what to do for “Unforgiven.” We never really had a song like “Unforgiven” at that point, which was, like, light choruses and heavy verses. All our ballads were the opposite, light verses and heavy chorus — it was totally inverted. And it took being spontaneous to put down the solo that works.
That was one of my very first tastes of what it feels like to just show up with nothing and then wait until something spontaneously shows up. And I’ve found over the years that usually that’s the best stuff. The stuff I don’t think about is usually the best stuff because it just comes to me. That’s how I come up with everything these days, bro. I just sit there with my guitar and see what happens. I refuse to work hard on anything. And when I mean by working hard, just like analyzing it and trying to say, “Oh, if I change this note and this has to work with this” — it feels like I’m doing algebra afterwards. I don’t want it. I failed algebra two years in a row. I’m not gonna fucking wanna do algebra when it comes to music.
I wanna sit there and see what the universe and the muse sends me, and in the last 10 years I’ve gotten great results. All I really have to do, and I do this practically every day, I go, “OK, sit here, clear my mind and start just moving my fingers.” And inevitably something comes, and it’s a beautiful thing. And I feel so blessed and lucky that this is happening. ’Cause I’m 62 fucking years old. And I haven’t reached the top of the mountain yet. Haven’t reached the top, the capstone of the pyramid. Still going up, man. Still feel like I’m improving. And I still have a lot of freaking creative momentum and energy in me, to the point where I’m creating more work for myself, and I have to be careful.
Word is you had something like 700 riffs stockpiled for the last album.
Oh, it’s ridiculous, bro. Let me see how many riffs I have at this point. Going over to my phone. All recordings. 767.
And this is 767 new ones for the next album?
New ones, bro! Oh, God. It is such a nightmare going through this stuff, too. It is such a fuck. I can’t do it. And I’m the one responsible for all of it and I can’t do it.
Sometimes the band asks you to pare those down, right? Like, “Can you narrow it to your best 300?”
Well, Rob Trujillo is an extremely patient individual. And he doesn’t mind taking on a task like that. And I just shake my head and I say, “God bless you, man. You’re my bro. There’s a reason why you’re so much my bro.” Because it’s just a lot of material to go through. So right now, I’m just actively getting ideas together for my [first] solo album.
Oh, wow.
It’s gonna be a fusion of all sorts of styles, but not necessarily a fusion album. You know what I mean?
So not, like, jazz fusion.
I started out like, “I’m gonna write a jazz-fusion album,” but all of a sudden I’m writing fucking classical progressions, and I’m fucking writing, like, more heavy stuff, and all of a sudden I’m writing like a funk thing. I’m, like, going, “OK, I guess this is what it is.” It’s a fusion of different styles and it’s gonna be a full-length album. My [EP] Portals was a half-hour worth of music, but this is gonna be a full album’s worth of music.
And all instrumental again?
No, there will be vocals, because the songs that I wrote scream for vocals this time around. So I’m like, “OK, who’s gonna be doing the vocals?” I don’t know. I hope I am not, I already have too much to do onstage.
It’s interesting because I started to learn how to read ancient Greek. I’ve been obsessed with a lot of ancient-Greek texts, Pythagoras — he’s the father of fucking musical theory. And I’m discovering that the guitar, the lyre, and the cithara are ancient, so ancient that they can’t figure out the origins of these instruments, and the Greeks just say that the gods, they just showed up with them. And Dionysus and Apollo, they just showed up playing these things.
There’s so much reference to music in the ancient text in regards to ritual and magic. And it’s so interesting to me because I see parallels. The Greeks used to use music to augment their rituals, their secret rites. And music was so highly regarded back then. And I’m reading all this and I’m going, I’m shaking my head going, “Yes, I can see how they would use all this.” ’Cause I firmly believe that if there’s any true, real true example of what magic is in this world, it’s music, bro. Music is magic.
Music is magic because all you need to do is sit in front of someone and play an instrument and they’re moved by it. You have the ability to change the situation in the room by playing music. When people hear certain types of music, they’re transformed. If you don’t think that’s magic, what is it? Science? Come on, gimme a break. It’s more than that. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like this.
So what’s the timeline on the solo album?
I’m hoping to bring it out at a time where it doesn’t conflict with Metallica’s schedule, so it’s probably gonna be sometime next year. I’m gonna try and finish it by the end of this year. And because I’ve been reading all these ancient-Greek texts, they’ve influenced the music. I have an instrumental piece that, to me, sounds like it’s 2,000 years old, called “The Mysterion.” It’s based on all this stuff that I’ve been reading, the ancient-Greek texts, and it’s amazing to me, bro, because I wouldn’t have had this instrumental if I didn’t start reading these ancient texts.
So something’s happening. Something unseen and invisible is happening, bro, to me, because I’m being sent all this music and I feel like an antenna or a vessel. The muse whispers music into my ear every single fucking day. I need to act on it or else it’ll stop. And that’s kind of where I’m at these days. I’m having my own weird musical experience, in the close confines of my house when I’m writing and doing demos for this music. And it feels almost paranormal, bro, because like I said, I refuse to work hard on anything, and the music’s still coming and it’s taking shape into songs, tracks, musical ideas.
All I can really do is say “thank you” to whoever. ’Cause I refuse to take my ego and put it into this and take responsibility for this saying “I created all this.” ’Cause it doesn’t even feel like that, honestly does not feel like it. I’m just fucking passing something along that always existed. It’s craziness. I’m having problems wrapping my head around it because I need to understand things. I’m a seeker of knowledge, so I need to understand things, and this I can’t fully understand. So I’m looking to other ways to explain it, and it’s living somewhere in the unseen. And people are gonna think I’m crazy, but you know what? I’ll just play you the fucking music and you guys figure it out, because I can’t.
Well, “The Unseen” is sitting right there as a song title.
Yeah! Actually, you know how I see that. I see music as an invisible temple. When you listen to the music, four walls come up: harmony, tone, rhythm, and melody. And you’re in this temple listening and experiencing it. And then when the song ends, the temple, the walls come down and you’re left with an experience.
That’s cool.
Yeah. I hope I don’t sound crazy, bro, but I’ve been struggling with all this stuff the last two or three years, and I really don’t know. I don’t have any answers that sound logical. And any answer that I can give you that’s steeped in some sort of sensibility just sounds like bullshit to me. And I’m not a bullshitter.
So with all these 767 new riffs you’ve accumulated, do you have any sense of when the next Metallica album might happen?
When we have a band meeting, and it’s usually Lars who says the line, “OK, boys, time to create the riff bank.” That’s when we all step up. I don’t foresee that happening for at least another year. ’Cause we’re still finishing the 72 Seasons tour, and once we fully finish this and go to all the outlying places like Asia and Australia and New Zealand, whatnot, I think we’re gonna take a little bit of a break — not too much of one — and then we’re gonna get right back into it.
Hopefully, that’s what I see. But in Metallica, any fucking thing can happen. I mean, Covid really just frigging surprised the hell out of us and threw our whole cycle off. But we managed to get our heads together and figure out a way to work during Covid. And the result of that is 72 Seasons, and 72 Seasons turned out better than any of us expected given the circumstance of fucking Covid and writing via Zoom, writing songs via Zoom. It’s not ideal, man. I wanna feel that kick drum in my gut. But you can’t get that through Zoom. But still, we managed to fucking focus and be as precise as we could on the circumstances. And we made what I think is a pretty decent album.
I’d actually love to hear you guys revisit some of those Nineties sounds on a future album.
Who knows? We might just say, “OK, let’s go back to the Nineties again.” It’s not a bad idea. We haven’t said that to each other yet. It’s interesting, because when Load and Reload came out, there was a lot of derision, there was a lot of backlash. It was, like, too much change. We changed our appearance, we changed our sound, we changed the way we recorded. I was even playing different guitars and fucking tuned into E-flat and listened to a lot of blues and jazz. Load and Reload are so different from anything that came before it.
It’s interesting, ’cause nowadays I run into fans and they love that era. They love Load and Reload. But when those albums first came out, it was like, “Fuck Load.“
I remember!
“Fuck Reload, fuck Metallica.” But nowadays we play “Fuel” and people go nuts. We play “Until It Sleeps” and people fucking know every fucking word. And I’m thinking, it’s like when I was a teenager, I listened to all the Zeppelin albums except Zeppelin III, because it was more acoustic and I just wanted the high-energy aggressive stuff. ’Cause that’s what I liked when I was a kid. But over time I really came to embrace Zeppelin III and how wonderful it is. And now I fucking fully understand it and its place in Zeppelin’s catalog. And I think a similar thing kind of happened with Load and Reload, after people got over the initial shock and the challenge, people kind of sat down and gave an honest listen and said, “Oh, it’s not really that bad at the end of the day.”
I’ve always thought people were reacting more to the image changes — the haircuts and nail polish — than to the actual music.
So one of the reasons why I cut my hair, bro, is ’cause I didn’t think I looked good with long hair when I wore a suit jacket [laughs]. So I cut my hair so I looked better when I wore a suit jacket. I swear to God. That was one of the only reasons. There wasn’t like any freaking huge thing. And I showed up, I cut my hair, and then, like, literally the next day, Lars cut his hair because he was already thinking about it. So James saw that Lars and I cut our hair and he fucking went for it. It just seemed like a kind of nice change. And Jason Newsted already had short hair by that point.
“The Memory Remains,” from Reload, is a great song that featured Marianne Faithfull, who recently left us. Any memories stand out?
Lars and I, we loved Marianne and we would hang out with her. And one time Lars and I went out to dinner with her and Anita Pallenberg. And, boy, what a dinner that was. And the stories we heard! Anita and Marianne really liked hanging with Lars and I, because we kept up with them. Every fucking drink, every line, everything. We did a lot of drugs that night. And then Marianne, man, amazing. She never slowed down.
I’ve always been curious — do you think the chorus in “The Memory Remains” was influenced by the riff in Bowie’s “Station to Station”? There’s a definite resemblance in the hook.
Wow! You’re absolutely right. You know, I don’t know. ’Cause James wrote that melody. But you have a point there. I love that song, man. “Station to Station.”
Speaking of unfairly maligned Metallica works, I’ve always felt that Lulu got a completely undeserved bad rap. If that album had never been released but was discovered today — “Hey, Metallica made an album with Lou Reed!” — I think people would be raving about it.
You know, I think you’re correct in making that statement. You know, what happened was we always said, “This is not a Metallica album.” We always said that from the very beginning. This is a new thing with Lou Reed. We’re a new entity. It’s not Metallica, it’s not Lou Reed. It’s Lou Reed with Metallica, and this is Lulu. And bro, that album means so much to me for a number of reasons. The lyrics are amazing. It’s poetry. I’m a huge Lou Reed fan. To be able to hang out with him and work with him musically meant so much.
And the track “Junior Dad.” Ugh. I can’t listen to it, man. Brings me to tears. And remember when Lou said, “I have a song for you and I want this to be on the album.” And he played it for James and I. And by the end of the song, I looked at James, and James looked at me and we both had tears in our eyes. And then Lou Reed came in and saw us both crying in the kitchen, and he was smiling and said, “I got you, didn’t I?” I was like, “Fuck Lou. Yeah, you got me. And you got him too.”
Reed banned wah-wah on that album and wasn’t big on solos either, right?
I remember I started doing some wah-wah stuff and he just went up to the mic and said, “No.” I was like, “What?” And he goes, “No guitar solos.” I’m like, “OK.” And then I remember at one point I was like, you know, we were looking for a part, and I went to a Phrygian dominant, you know, it’s kind of an Eastern-sounding scale. And he went up to the mic and said, “No belly-dancing music.” Oh, my God. I’m still laughing.
I guess it wouldn’t have helped to point out that you personally helped popularize the Phrygian-dominant sound in metal.
Exactly. And then we came up with a song, and I said to everyone, “I’m putting a fucking guitar solo on this song.” ’Cause I hear one, I put it on. Everyone’s like, “What are you gonna tell Lou?” And then I had to sit down and write a fucking long-ass email that I thought this song deserved a guitar solo. And I was so nervous about sending it. And so I sent it and then I see Lou later on that day. Nothing. I see Lou the next day, nothing. I see Lou third day, and he goes, “Oh, by the way, I got your email.” And he said it’s OK. And that was it. And the solo was on the album.
Well, it’s funny, ’cause he had a band with Mick Ronson and let him solo for hours. So I don’t know what the deal was.
I think he had a guitar player in the Eighties that just turned him off. I think that’s what happened, man, because the way he talked about the guitar and guitar players sounded like there was some sort of personal thing that went down. So, hey, he’s Lou Reed, he can fucking think whatever the fuck he wants to think. I’m not gonna push him or challenge him on any of that. If he didn’t like guitar solos, fine. It’s my duty to find a guitar solo that he liked, and I managed to sneak one on there.
Fans have been trying to catalog which riffs in Metallica songs you’ve written. These lists are floating around online.…
Always wrong, too! It’s literally a crowd of riffs and people trying to fucking randomly pick out which ones I wrote. Fucking good luck.
Are there any particular riffs that you’re especially proud of writing that people should know came from you?
Well, for Death Magnetic, I wrote so much of that stuff. That album is chock-full of riffs. And a lot of those riffs just came out of my stockpiles of, like, 400 riffs. But that was a time when Rob took those riff tapes and went through ’em all. And a lot of times when it was, like, we need a riff, everyone looked to Rob because he had a whole glossary of riffs he set aside, and he said, “OK, we had this one, will this one work out.” And when he was always playing stuff to me, I would say, “That’s my riff?” He’d say, “Yeah.”
I’ll tell you, I think one of the heaviest riffs I think I’ve ever written was a bridge riff in “The Thing That Should Not Be.” To this day, I just love that riff, and we haven’t really come up with a riff since then that’s like that. I think that’s one of the freaking heaviest things ever. And I’m still trying to write a riff that even touches the glory of that riff. That’s why I find myself trying to grab the fire of certain riffs that we’ve written in the past, and write something like it that’s similar, but different. Or just steal that feel! Steal the fire, man.
I’m a big, big advocate of ripping ourselves off. And I’ve seen in the past other bands just rip themselves off. So when someone says, “Oh, we freaking did that,” I say, “Hey, we have every right to repeat ourselves when we want to, because it’s part of our glossary, it’s part of our vocabulary, it’s part of our bag of tricks.” So I think we’ve earned the right to reuse one or two of these techniques. We never blatantly ever repeat ourselves note for note, but we’ll do something like something else. Absolutely.
The Rolling Stones just became first band to make a hard-hitting rock album in their eighties. Similarly, you guys are pioneering something new — a metal band as heavy as Metallica still going strong in your sixties, still touring and making new music. How long do you think you can keep this up while maintaining the intensity?
Well, you know, a lot of it has to do with just personal health. I think we’re all pretty healthy and pretty fit. And sometimes I freaking forget how old I am. ’Cause I don’t feel like I’m 62 years old. I feel like I’m still somewhere in my thirties and I go out and surf, I bike, I run, I walk and I do all sorts of fucking crazy stuff physically. I’m still able to freaking do everything. I do yoga every day, I meditate every day, and I don’t feel like I am winding down. If anything, things are ramping up around me. And I know that I’m not the only band member that feels this way. Lars is in really great shape too. As long as we have our health and our mind, I think we can just keep on going.
And Rob Trujillo’s in excellent health too. And Rob doesn’t even have gray hair, you know? How amazing is that? And so, I don’t know what it is, maybe playing this music or maybe just being in this band is somewhat of a fountain of youth for us and keeping us youthful. ’Cause it’s how you feel, which is a good gauge of how old you really are, physically and mentally, emotionally, spiritually, bro. I feel like I’m still in my late-thirties, and I just have no plans to give up anything. ’Cause this is my life. I work, I play guitar every single fucking day. I have a guitar on right now. I’m OCD and I can’t help it, but I still love what I’m doing. I just love music.
I can remember as a toddler hearing bossa nova music. Jazz music, Broadway, classical music. I can remember songs that I would hear when I was five or six years old. I know the Beatles songs, I know the Hendrix songs I heard back then. And I don’t know if this is true with all musicians, but, man, there’s always music in my head. There’s a frigging jukebox in my head. You mention a song from one of my favorite bands, and I can listen to it in my head.
I can write and compose without a guitar, just by visualizing and hearing things in my head. I feel blessed. It almost feels like it feels paranormal, and it all feels so familiar. It feels like I’ve been doing this for longer than my lifetime, which means, ’cause I believe in reincarnation, I’m starting to believe that I’ve always been a musician, bro. Chew on that.
Why is that?
Everything seems so familiar. The act of playing music seems so natural and so familiar. And the effects of music on other people. I’m familiar with the outcomes of that, and I strive to be an inspiring force to people because musicians have inspired me. And man, that gift of inspiration is hard and heavy. And when I’m inspired, nothing can stop me until I’ve played out that inspiration. And I want to be able to feel like I can inspire musicians out there to write the music of the future.
I don’t like my celebrity. I have a real hard time balancing it all. ’Cause I want to be inspiring, but then I don’t want a lot of the attention. I wanna just be able to do what I do, put the art out there, and just move on to the next thing. ’Cause that’s what I feel like is what I’m here to do. And everything that comes in the wake of that is just gravy.
But I have no expectations. I have no financial expectations. I’m not looking for status. I just want to put the best art out there with no ego, because ego and things like financial gain and greed stain the whole process. For me, in the last 10 years, it’s all about being as pure as possible and really playing for the music. It’s a great place for me to be because then I don’t have to stress about all the shit that I thought I had to stress about.
The guitarist Tim Henson from the band Polyphia, who has this crazy futuristic style, referred to bluesy bending as “boomer bends.” What’s your take on that?
I love that. But you know, is he gonna call Eddie Van Halen a boomer guitar player? You know, I really like his style. It’s really unique, and in terms of technique, it’s amazing. But then, it’s the age-old question: How relatable is it? It’s good to listen to, like, three or four times. Can you really relate? Sometimes people just wanna listen to music and not feel challenged. Sometimes people just want to feel raw emotion. Is he hitting on raw emotion? No. It’s so complicated. It’s a very kind of distinct emotion that he’s shooting for, and therefore, how accessible is it on a larger scale? Well, it’s only accessible to people who like that, or can understand that. It is a very small category of people, and that’s absolutely fine if he wants to reach that category of people.
Yeah, it’s amazing playing. But at the end of the day, people want something that they consider like bread and butter, something that’s comforting and satisfying and fills all their needs and is not that hard. And Polyphia, they’re great at what they’re doing. But only a certain amount of people have patience for that or even the musical ability to actually understand the breadth of it. And once you understand the breadth of it, it’s huge. It’s great. It’s wonderful. I love watching him play, but, man, after a while, I’m probably gonna go and put on a fucking Jeff Beck album. Or fucking Stevie Ray Vaughan. Or maybe put on the Misfits or something. And I tell ya, I’ll get more out of a fucking Misfits album singing along and screaming and yelling than I’ll do out of something really technically challenging.
Right. At the same time, you and I both like Rush, so there’s always room for complexity.
I’m totally into jazz fusion. I love Return to Forever. Weather Report. Tony Williams is one of my favorite drummers. I love Allan Holdsworth. I love all that really fucking complicated shit. But you’re demanding a certain amount of effort from the listener. And a lot of people commit to that, but a lot of people just can’t be bothered. And a person whose life is already complicated, they’re just gonna go, “Ah, I just want to hear Green Day.” [Laughs.]
In your book, there’s a guitar featuring the Joker from the Batman TV show — from the episode where he goes surfing. What’s the story there?
Bro, I love that episode. And it just is so hilarious because it’s shot in Malibu, right? And Caesar Romero and Adam West, they did all the beach shots, but then they got some pro surfers and dressed them up like Batman and Joker to do all the surfing, and it’s vintage, like, mid-Sixties surfing. It was such a hilarious episode, and I just loved the fact that the Joker had his own surfboard, you know, he had a Joker-brand surfboard.
So just had to put that scene of him with a surfboard on a guitar. And a lot of people want me to put that out as a mass-produced guitar. But it’s difficult because I had to deal with the [copyrights], and it makes it just a lot more complicated than it should be. But, man, I get a lot of freaking requests for that guitar to be mass-produced ’cause it’s such a great image.
From Rolling Stone US
