James Hetfield
Metallica frontman James Hetfield on guitars, tone, riffs, tuning - and the journey from Lars Ulrich’s bedroom to Theblackalbum
“FOR ME IT’S GOT TO BE PERCUSSIVE. IT’S GOT TO PUSH AIR. IT’S GOT TO BARK!”
THE DREAM
The first concert I saw was in 1978, Aerosmith with AC/DC opening. I was a big Aerosmith fan, but I had no idea that AC/DC was that cool. I dug AC/DC, but when you go to see your favourite band you don’t really want to see anybody else. Some Metallica fans are like that. I went with my older brother, and I remember him saying (about AC/DC lead guitarist Angus Young), ‘That little guy running around was annoying!’ You look at Angus and you’d think that guy would’ve just fallen apart or something – his head would fall off, it’s swivelled so hard! Going to a big arena rock concert was a pretty eye-opening experience, just the whole feel: the lights going out, the anticipation, the crowd, the smells. Every sense was just soaking it in. And I wanted to be the guy up there on the stage.
RIFFS
Making an album, you start with 800 riffs and you whittle it down to 50 with the help of others in the band. Then you pick ones you want to jam on. Once you open that Pandora’s box of riffs, you don’t want to stop. You start picking out stuff. It’s all springboarding. You narrow it down and start making some songs. My take usually is shorter, more muscly songs and Lars (Ulrich, drummer) has a more organic approach where there’s no limit and you just keep writing. So between the two we get a little of both.
THE ODD COUPLE
Lars is very important if I’ve got 800 riffs and they’re all great so I need some kind of filter. And he’ll come in and he’ll pick out the stuff. He’s a good finder of riffs and he hears things different than I do. When we go to do certain songs he’ll be playing on the offbeat in my mind and he’s on the offbeat in his. So it’s a great problem to have that we hear things differently. There’s a very creative grind that happens with that and it can go off the rails but most of the time it’s extremely worth it because you’re coming up with some really cool stuff. And we’ll go out and jam on it. What happens next? We just let it happen and then usually a feel happens. He plays it on drums or I do it with a riff and I’ll tell you, we help each other a lot. He wants to be the singer and guitar player, I want to be the drummer, so it’s really kind of odd but cool where we make little suggestions that the other wouldn’t even think of.
METAL UP YOUR ASS!
The original band name Lars wanted was Thunderf*ck. ‘OK, pretty cool!’ The story might have been a little different with a name like Thunderf*ck... But Ron Quintana, an early metalhead up in the Bay Area, had a list of names for a fanzine he was getting together, he ended up choosing ‘Metal Mania’, and Lars saw that list, and ‘Metallica’ was on there, so Lars ‘borrowed’ it. Forever. And then he did a pencil drawing of a toilet with a sword sticking up and the words: Metal Up Your Ass. Like, that’s it, that’s gonna be the logo!
WORLD DOMINATION
In our minds, we were gonna surpass everything! We were gonna be huge. We really were! Lars had a poster in his bedroom: ‘DIAMOND HEAD’, in these huge, huge letters, and then below it ‘Silverwing’ (NWOBHM glam rock act). And then Lars put under Silverwing, ‘AND Metallica’, in a very small logo! It’s weird, I can’t really describe our thoughts back then. But every time we moved forward a little bit, it was a feeling of, ‘My God, we’ve made it!’ We did our first gig –yes, we’ve made it! Ooh, we got our first cheque, $14 – we’ve made it! We’ve got our following, we’ve got five fans
“ONCE YOU OPEN THAT PANDORA’S BOX OF RIFFS, YOU DON’T WANT TO STOP”
and they’ve drawn Metallica on the back of their jackets – check it out! And on it goes, making a demo, making the album. We knew we were out for world domination. We didn’t know what that meant, but we were gonna do it!
CLIFF BURTON
I remember when Cliff was in Trauma [his pre-metallica band], Lars and I seeing him headbanging at the Whiskey A Go Go and saying, ‘My God, we gotta get this guitar player... Oh sh*t, he’s playing bass! Wow!’ His f*cking hair flying, this skinny dude, with big bell-bottoms, and he’s playing a wah solo on bass. Holy sh*t! This is very unique. He can’t be in Trauma, he’s gotta be with us! Cliff was a pretty strong personality. He wouldn’t let Lars get away with sh*t, and the other guys (Kirk Hammett and Burton’s successor Jason Newsted) always let him get away with a lot of sh*t. Cliff was my ally in the battle. The end of Cliff Burton’s time with Metallica, his time on Earth... Things changed for sure after that.
TWIN HARMONY
I love harmonies. Cliff Burton planted a seed in me that continues to grow. And I love it. I always loved Thin Lizzy and bands that pull off these really cool harmonies. There’s so many cool voicings that you can do and it just interests me a lot.
PLAYING FAST
The white Electra V [used on Metallica’s debut album Kill ’Em All] is really good for the faster songs. Saying ‘this guitar is really fast’ sounds stupid, but it is.
RIDE THE LIGHTNING
There’s a lot of great songs on Master Of Puppets, but I prefer Ride The Lightning [the group’s second album, released in 1984]. That felt to me like the giant that Metallica has produced.
AMPS
The guitar sound is a work in progress still from Kill ’Em All on, and the Crunch Berries amp that we’ve used, I think, since Ride The Lightning or at least Master Of Puppets for sure, that Mesa/boogie C++ Simul-class is a very integral part of the sound.
TONE
The never-ending quest for the Holy Grail of guitar sounds! For me it’s got to be percussive. It’s got to push air, what we call bark. It’s got to bark. But I don’t want it really abrasive, so any fake fuzz to me really just takes away from the sound. And it’s tough because when you turn guitar sounds down, you really hear what they sound like and when you push them up it sounds a different way. So trying to find that balance of enough mid push while still sounding big, what I’ve found is the wider and bigger you make it sound the thinner it becomes in a way, at least depth-wise. You’ve got to find your space. Elbow your way in there and sonically make some room. And it varies throughout certain songs, the guitar is really important in this song but this one, maybe it’s all about groove.
WRITING
If I play a riff and hey, we’ve got this complicated little thing, then I think, ‘Oh sh*t, I’ve got to sing over it!’ I’ll want to make it really easy and I don’t like that. I’ll challenge myself to slow the whole thing down and sing over whatever I’ve played. And make it as close as possible to it. Over time when we rehearse these songs, yes the vocal changes a little bit because you want to impact a certain hit on your guitar or vice versa so it’s like a stew, you throw all these things in and you think it’s going to taste like this and then it ends up like something else so the singing and the playing is its own thing.
DOWNPICKING
Once you start digging in harder your strings are taking abuse, your pick takes abuse. I would say digging in is a positive thing. It gives it a little bit more dynamic, and it’s not so compressed and saturated that there’s