Kirk Names Riff That Started Metallica’s ‘Ride the Lightning,’ Recalls How Happy James & Lars Were After Dismissing ‘Their Old Guitar Player’

The guitarist also discusses his first reaction to jamming with the guys, talks teasing Cliff Burton.

During an appearance on Let There Be Talk, Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett looked back on the band’s 1984 sophomore album “Ride the Lightning,” as well as his early days in the fold.Kirk joined Metallica in 1983 as a replacement for Dave Mustaine, about two years after the band was launched and just in time to record guitar parts for their full-length debut “Kill ‘Em All.” He now said about the “Lightning” sessions (transcribed by UG):

“The songs just kind of just happened. The songs just happened, we just started playing, and they just fucking happened. I remember walking into the room, and there’s Cliff [Burton] playing over and over again the intro for ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’

“And I remember Lars [Ulrich] saying, ‘That’s pretty cool’ – and the next thing you know, it’s the intro for the song. Things like that happen.

“I remember we were in a basement in New Jersey, and James [Hetfield] starts playing this arpeggiated thing, and then he has this heavy part, then I was going, ‘That’s great, that’s a good cycle to that, but it feels like it needs to have another melodic part for the end. How about this?’

“And he said, ‘Yeah, that will work.’ So we put it all together and that became ‘Fade to Black.’ ‘Trapped Under Ice’ – again, the same basement.

“Three songs were written in Jersey because the initial song that kind of pushed off the beginning of that album was ‘Creeping Death.’ And that riff, the main riff, was played slow.

“It was kind of like a slow, bouncy thing, but the more we played it, the faster it got. We didn’t even notice it was getting faster and faster and faster until we went back to the original and we thought, ‘Well… if it’s sounding better faster, let’s speed it up way more.’

“And that became what it was. The part that I lifted from the Exodus song was a riff that I’ve written when I was, like, 15-16 years old; that, ‘Die, by my hand’ part. And I’ll never forget it because there’s a turning part in my own playing.

“I remember just sitting down my bedroom and that riff just fell off my guitar. I remember scratching my head, going, ‘Wow, that’s like nothing else that I’m hearing on the radio, and that’s a lot like what I hear coming over from England and Europe.’

“It was a turning point, it showed that I was able to kind of cop that feel that I was so into, and I could start writing songs in that kind of direction rather than what was played on the radio and what everyone else was listening to, which was, like, Van Halen, Journey, Led Zeppelin.

“All that stuff was cool, but this other stuff to me was just way cooler. To be able to start writing that kind of flavor, it was a huge thing to me.

“‘Ride the Lightning’ was another song that kind of pushed off the initial direction of ‘Ride the Lightning’ [album]. That riff was something that James had. They had, like, four riffs put together.

“And I remember James and Lars just putting that whole cycle together, and then I came in and put the whole middle section together with them, and then it wasn’t finished.

“We had to finish it in Copenhagen at Mercyful Fate’s rehearsal place. They lent us their rehearsal place and we finished writing the song ‘Ride the Lightning’ there in their rehearsal space.

“And the fact that we were there was freaking me out because I was so into Mercyful Fate. I loved all the demos, I love King Diamond, I loved the EP…”

When you first joined, were you, like, ‘These fucking guys are weird’ or were you just weird with them?

“I was weird with them. We all got along right off the bat; we hit it off so amazingly right off the fucking bat. The very first night that I played with them, this ‘audition,’ Lars kept on looking at James, and James kept looking at Lars, they kept on smiling.

“I was, like, ‘What’s up with these guys, are they in love with each other or something? What’s going on?’ I later found out that they were so happy that the other person playing guitar was not their old guitar player [Mustaine].

“And they were so happy that he is out of the picture and I was in the picture with a lot of potential and a lot of possibilities. They saw all of that stuff even before I saw it.

“They never really told me that I was in the band; I mean, I figured it out when Lars said, ‘Okay, in about three weeks we’re gonna go to Upstate New York and we’re gonna record our first album.’

“I was, like, ‘Okay’, and then I realized, ‘I must be in the band because we’re doing the album.’

“So, I fly out to New York, play a bunch of shows in New Jersey, New York, that whole area – and we had to play shows because we were fucking broke, and we needed to play shows to fucking eat because we were on Megaforce Records, we were the first artists on Megaforce Records.

“There’s no, like, capital or fucking financial resources, and I remember this, whether it was $10,000 or $15,000 raised, and with that money, we had to record our album and also live.

“We went up to Upstate New York and we were all living in one house, and then we recorded ‘Kill ‘Em All,’ and then Cliff and I took a Greyhound bus from New York back to San Francisco – took us three fucking days – and then Lars and James came back like a week later with a cassette of the album.

“And we all made copies, and then we were home for maybe a couple, two-three weeks, and then we went back to East Coast again and started playing lot more shows because we had to.

“We had to exist, and then it looked like we were going to be able to go to Europe for our first European tour.

“It was the Venom tour, that was our first tour of Europe, and it worked out. We barely did it, but we did it, and it was fucking eye-opening and great – it gave us a kind of a plot, it gave us an idea of how we wanted to move forward.

“We weren’t worldly like Lars. He’s European, he had that kind of experience ahead of us. We were wearing stretched jeans, no one had stretched jeans back then.”

Did you guys ever look at Cliff and go, ‘Hey dude, you got to do this look’?

“We tried to change his look all the time, absolutely. We would call him ‘Pencil legs’ or we would call him ‘U-boat’ because he had big feet; thin legs and big feet, and we were always laughing at his bell-bottoms and at his Peddeleton’s and Denim jackets.

“He didn’t care. Turns out he was ahead of his time, but the funny thing is, I remember on tour he was, like, ‘Oh man, I need to get some more bell-bottoms.'”