James Hetfield

«back to Interviews James Hetfield - Metallica's Main Man Unloads

From day one, Metallica laid out a do-it-yourself approach to building an audience. It wasn't about the music business, it was about the music. Beginning with their debut recording, Kill Em All, they approached the world without radio edit and without significant promotion. There was no coronation from the mainstream press, retail markets, or MTV. There were only fans, who grew in number with each successive show. It was Metallica's uncompromising, thrashing roar that brought the band unparalleled success - completely on their own terms.
All these years later, that still remains true. But now, with Load - their eighth album - Metallica tell their fans to expect the unexpected. They proudly announce that they have more than just one sound or speed. Like Eddie Van Halen, guitarist James Hetfield could not stay exactly the same forever. Metallica is a band that has gone from playing like a football team that marches up the field in lock-step, to being closer to a hockey team where the puck is passed around and anyone can take the open shot.
Recently, Herfield "took a load off" to talk about his early influences and the changing role of the guitar in Metallica's music. Having spent much of his time since Load's release explaining Metallica's new short hair-cuts and why they played last summer's Lollapalooza tour, the guitarist was only too happy to talk about the band's music for a change.
When did you first feel a thrill playing the guitar? It was probally before I even had a guitar, just with a tennis racquet or something. It was me and my buddies jumping around, rocking out to early Aerosmith. There was Kiss, Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent - stuff like that.
So your first link was to air guitar. Yes. I had been taking piano lessons prior to that. But guitar was definitely something I desired because you could move around a lot easier. All of the bands that I liked had them. Negent was the guitar player, and he sang. I just thught playing guitar was something I wanted to do. All the posters in my room were guitar players.
When you first picked it up, were you any good? I had no idea how to play it at first. It's like there are six strings, adn they just make one noise. Then I figuered out you had to put your hands down, hold the strings down, and make different noises (laughs).
Did you have any friends show you things? Absolutely not. Not at all. I looked at the posters on my wall and said, "Hey, he's got his hands right there, maybe I'll try that." My family was pretty musical. There were instruments around the house. My older brother actually had bands in the late 60's and 70's. One brother played drums. So there was a piano, there was a drum kit, and there was an old crappy acoustic sitting around that I made my first noise on. I eventually smashed it becasue it frustrated me.
What was the first success you felt on guitar? Just making a chord sound good was probally the first cool thing.
What chord was it? Probally E. I think another first cool thing was figuring out lines. It was just single note stuff. I would try to play along with "Dream On" or whatever. You get a couple of notes right and get excited. And then do a couple in a row. The turntable come in handy because you could slow it down and figure out where they were going. It was mostly Aerosmith and stuff like that I was trying to figure out. Toys is the Attc adn Rocks were my two favorites. Later on it was UFO and Schenker solos.
So you were trying to play "Walk This Way"? Stuff like that. You'll get a couple of notes right in the song, you'r get excited. A good buddy of mine in junior high got an acoustic guitar, so we'd pretend we were jamming together. We would show each other little things. He had gotten a book and figured out the first few things to "Stairway to Heaven". And, ow, wow, we would sit there and play it over and over and drive our parents crazy. They would yell, "Don't you know the next part?" Of course, it took time. Next was buying the electri guitar. You can't rock out on an acoustic.
Did you save up for it? I saved up. It was a $15 guitar that I got at a garage sale. It had no name. It had no strings, it had no sound. It was so bad. I just remember painting it about once a week, I would go out in the garage and say, "I want it to be this color." "I want it white, I want it black". I'd get the electrical tape out and do it like Eddie Van Halen. It would change colors weekly.
Did yuo buy an amp? I used my mom's stereo. I blew up her stereo a couple times by going right into it. My dad rigged up an amp. He was big into ham radios, so he had some amps. I hooked them up into any speaker I could find. I hooked it up to car speakers, giant stereo speakers. I had no idea about ohmahe or any of that crap. Whatever it was, I just plugged in it. Some of sounds were actually pretty cool. That's actually how I invented my own talk box. Joe Perry had his talk box. I saw it in pictures. I got one of those old car stereo speakers, the little round ones that used to go in the back of the car. It was kink of in its own little encasing. I'd tape the funnel to the top of that and then had a tube coming up. That was my invention of a first talk box.
Did it work? Oh yea, it worked. I also couldn't afford a wah pedal, so what I did was rig the toggle switch on my guitar. I had a rubber band goind onto that and onto the bridge, so it stayed up. And then I tied a string to my toe adn to the toggle switch. I would tap my foot down, and it would switch pickups and give it a wah effect because the rubber band would pull it back up. I was pretty inventive as a kid. My dad was into electronics. I would just go out in the garage, wire stuff up, and plug into it. Most of it exploded or just smoked. I wouldn't start fires in the house, but I got shocked many, many times.
All of that stuff can be just as thrilling as playing music. Absolutely.
Whether you're rehearsing in your basement of getting five notes in a row that sound like Aerosmith, there is an adrenaline rush there. Exactly. Instantly, it's like "I want to join a band now. We'll just play that bit over and over at some party." My sister could sing pretty well, so sometimes I would sit in a room and we would play some songs. I don't remember what songs they were, but we'd sit and fiddle around with some songs.
Somewhere along the line you got into Skynyrd or the Allmans. (Laughs.) There is no doubt about Skynyrd. The first single I ever bought was "Sweet Home Alabama". I thought, "Who is this guy Lynyrd Skynyrd?" I just loved that song. Big time Skynyrd fan. But the Gov't Mule-Warren Haynes, he is absolutely amazing. He plays stuff I would want him to play in a song. You just listen and go, "That's exactly what I'd play, but I don't know how." I love putting on the new wave of British metal, some of the old obscure stuff. I'll put that on when I'm working out. Like some Witch Find or Gaskon or Tygers of Pan Tang, Angel Witch. When I'm working out, it reminds me of old times and gets me all happy.
How has your relationship with the guitar changed over the years? Have you fallen in and out of love with it? Well, there's times when I'm just feeling like something is missing. I start questioning what I'm doing in my life, and then all of a sudden I'll remember that I haven't picked up my guitar for a couple weeks or a month. I go, "Oh yea, I've been on vaction from the band. That doesn't mean I shouldn't play guitar. Thar's part of me," and I pick up the guitar and instantly create a little something and feel 100% better.
It's like missing a vital organ. Right, it's not just playing, but the creation part of it all. You sit down and play and goof around, and come up with something that is pretty cool. The most frustrating part is you don't have a tape recorder in your pocket, so you forget it.
So the guitar is the first step in a Metallica song? Definitely. There might be the odd time where Lars will come up with a beat that inspires something. But mainly it is just sitting down with wharever guitar it is - acoustic, playing the electric acoustically - or plugging into a sound that inspires something. You play a really odd sound, and it makes you play differentlly, and you create something new that way.
Can you point to any Metallica song that started as a sound? "Ronnie." I was goofing around with a Tele through a Fender Tweed. It was so bright, it was cutting everyone's head off. It was like their ears were pierced. I started plinking it really hard and just came up with that kind of Skynyrd vibe. I would also say "Poor Twisted Me." I was just goofing around with the echo settings and started playing this thing over and over, and Lars came in and started playing a beat. The echo kind of dictated the beat, and then this riff kind of came out of that, which is pretty cool. But I have to say pretty much all the early stuff wsa inspired by crunch. You get this crunchy sound, and then you've got to play like some "ggg-ggg" kind of thing or slowere - much slower - heaviers kind of stuff like "Sad But True" or "The Thing That Should Not Be". Being totally out of tune, you'll come up with something different that is pretty cool. A lot of dropped tunings come from being out of tune. You pull your guitar out of the case, and whatever it's on is what you play, and sometimes that is pretty fun.

In the early days of "ggg-ggg," the guitar had the same role as the drums. On Load, there is more diversity of tone and sound, and more of the guitar leading the band as a guitar and not as a drummer. That makes sense. I am very aware of that. A lot of the drum stuff on the earlier music was me not playing but coming up with different percussive things on the guitar. I love percussion, and whenever we are doing percussion in the studio, we get this really stange gut from Vancouver. He is really cool and very inspired by what he does. But he is out there. Most percussionists are. They are banging metal together and doing whatnot in the studio. I love playing the drums all the time. I can play the drums fair. I'm not great by any stretch of the word.
For the first several Metallica records, drums and rhythmic movement made up a large protion of the songs, because the riff and rhythm were the same. And that aspect of the music was not born on the drums, but on the guitar? Yea.
Lars would learn the rhythm from you as you played it on guitar? Yeah, one or the other. It always felt like we were a unit and these things have to go together. There's a lot of parts where Lars would get made because I play along with him. It was like he'd say, "I want to do a roll," and I'd be like, "Me too." (Laughs.)
It seems like with Load, the band is less like a football team, driving downfield in lockstep, and more like a hockey team where you pass the puck around. Yes, passing off the puck to the next guy. I'm done with my part, you run with it for a while. It definitely got everyone on their toes to study the song and say, "What can I use my instrument for on this part?" And there were definitely . "Od, there's a breakdown!" Everyone wanted to fill it. We've got this drum noodling he is doing... then I wanted to put some percussion in there... I've got some swells that I want to do... There is a vocal thing... It's like, man, something has to give. Let's think here what's the best thing for the song.
Would you try all those different ideas and then lesten to come up with the best? Yes.
So everybody had their shot on goal? Oh, absolutely. Then we battled it out later. It was always what's best for the song, and everyone understood that, so there was a lot of cool stuff that didn't show up on there because there was no room for it.
If you and I talked 10 years ago, and I played you "Mama Said' from another band, what do you think your reaction mighthave been? Ten years ago, I would have said that's not us in 10 years. I don't know, and I don't really want to say because what we were doing back then we were 100% into, and what we're doing now we're 100% into. So there's probaly not really any thought to the future. I probally would have said, "That doesn't have any 'ggg-ggg.' It's no good."
Is it a matter of how life changes you? Other things are more important to you. I think lyric content is a lot more important to us now... song flow. I think tonally, an exciting song is not everyone jamming into one spot. The wall that we had was fun, and it sounds like a wall, but it had no depth - it was missing some depth to it. I think we've got that depth with two different guitar players playing rhythm now. It's more counterpoint. Other things become more important. We'e done a lot of that other stuff, and they are still out songs, and we still play them live and absolutely love playing them live.
But you do feel the difference because, during a performance, you plays songs from all parts of your carrer.? You have the lockstep, the "ggg-ggg" and the interplay. And when we do play the older songs now, there's little twists here and there that just come about through playing them again. We're adding little digs here and here and different ad libs, or singing a pattern different, choosing different notes on certain things. Not updating them, but playing them as we want to now. One person I admire who really did that well was Phil Lynott. He would take an old song and revamp it another way. I know there's plenty of others; there's twenty different versions of "Layla". Taking a faster song and making it into a ballady, slow lounge sound - or the opposite, hepping up a slower one - might be fun to try one day. I don't know what songs it would be. It would just have to come out naturally. We used to goof around on "Battery" from Puppets. We would play it really slow and heavy, and call it "Dead Battery."
What music do you like today that might surprise your friends? Right now my CD is the Nick Cave Live Sees. They have a really strange energy that I love. And I can't get the Gov't Mule CD out of my player - that thing is just great.

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