Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz and sad13.
These devices made of magnets, wire coils, and bobbins have their own distinct magic, and choosing the right pickup to create your sound is a big deal to almost every guitarist, but especially to higher-profile working players who need to dependably recreate their ideal tone every night, for the simple reason that it’s the aural representation of their musical soul.
So, we asked five 6-string heavyweights about their favorite pickups. Some talked about their signature models—cultivated to their tastes—and others about classics and their modern variations. We also dipped into acoustic-guitar amplification with a rising star of instrumental folk music. But let’s start with one of the world’s most prominent guitar collectors, who is also the reigning king of blues rock.
Joe Bonamassa
Joe plays his astonishingly clean 1950 Broadcaster.
Joe Bonamassa 1950 Broadcaster Set ($310 street)
Think of legend-in-the-making Joe Bonamassa as a pickup archaeologist. The vintage gear hound is always sifting through the sands of guitar acquisition, looking for good bones. And while nearly every part of a 6-string has an impact on overall sound, think of the pickups as the femur—the main support of great tone.
Like an archaeologist, Bonamassa often makes his finds available to the public, as evidenced by the many classic instruments that have been reproduced as his signature models, and by those sonic femurs—the sets of pickups—that bear his name. His line of Seymour Duncan sets include the Bludgeon ’51 Nocaster, the Blonde Dot 1960 ES-335 humbucker, the Cradle Rock ’63 Strat, the Bonnie 1955 hardtail Strat, and the Amos Flying V humbuckers—all bearing the appellatives he’s given to the special instruments that they hail from—plus a signature pair based on the hummers in one of his 1959 sunburst Les Pauls.
“Some people have signature pickups where they want a certain winding that they want to go into a signature guitar, or some other design they spec out,” Bonamassa says. “I’m not that original. I have a big guitar collection, and each guitar is a little bit different. And it’s like, ‘Why do I play the Nocaster or why do I think the Broadcaster is exceptional?’ It’s because of what’s in it: Not all flat poles and humbucking pickups are created equal.”
It’s natural that the pickup set currently at the front of Bonamassa’s mind is his latest Duncan recreation: his 1950 Broadcaster set from … yeah … his killer 1950 Broadcaster. They have alnico 2 (neck) and alnico 4 magnets, 6.27k resistance at the neck and 8.96k at the bridge, and cloth pushback cable. And while they were resurrected by Bonamassa and Duncan, they were most certainly designed by Leo Fender.
Bonamassa shares his perspective on the pickup development process. “I’m not swapping pickups in my original Broadcaster that’s worth almost a quarter-million dollars, so I always have a ‘donor’ guitar,” he begins. “I have a generic Custom Shop Strat for the Stratocaster stuff, and I’ve got a template Les Paul. In the case of the Broadcaster, Seymour Duncan actually bought a Squier as the test guitar—and that’s the true test. If your Squier sounds as good as that Broadcaster, then we’ve
done our job.”
What does Bonamassa look for in a pickup? “I’m especially interested in the treble side. For humbuckers, I like a higher winding, so it’s a little darker and it barks. Same thing with a flat pole. My favorite flat pole is the one that’s in my Nocaster. It reads at like 9k Leo. And I’m like, wow! It’s just how it was wound in 1951. But overall, if you’re going to really look at pickups, you’ve got to know what they do and don’t do. If you’re talking about a P-90, what P-90 are you talking about? Something that would go into a Les Paul Standard, a Junior? It could sound different in any context. If I need a Junior, I want it all-mahogany and a P-90, right? There’s no putting a set of pickups in a guitar and thinking, ‘Oh, the guitar now sounds magical.’ They have a symbiotic relationship with the wood and with the strings. The great guitars are the ones where you have all the combinations going at once.”
So, what’s the archaeologist’s next “dig?” “I have a Telecaster from ’52 that has an original Paul Bigsby pickup that is pretty exceptional. I really want to see what that’s about.”—Ted Drozdowski
Joe Bonamassa’s signature 1950 Broadcaster pickup set from Seymour Duncan.
Sadie Dupuis - Speedy Ortiz, sad13
Sadie Dupuis plays her Joe Parker Spectre, outfitted with Lollar Mini-Humbuckers.
Lollar Mini-Humbuckers ($190 street)
Sadie Dupuis’ guitar work probably lives in the realm of alternative rock, but her interpretation and distortion of that genre’s sounds makes her playing an absolute thrill. Speedy Ortiz’s latest record, 2023’s Rabbit Rabbit, is a delightful, freakish outgrowth of bubblegum pop-rock and punkish, arty indie rock; the back-to-back punches of “You S02” and “Scabs” capture not only the band’s wonky, razor-sharp arrangement instincts, but Dupuis’ bonkers breadth of tones, most of which sear and needle through the full-band chaos.
To cover this range of needs and maintain articulation, Dupuis relies on the Lollar Mini-Humbuckers loaded into her Joe Parker Spectre. Lollar’s minis are like a smaller PAF, with one bar magnet positioned under each coil with adjustable pole pieces made out of a ferrous alloy and the second coil containing a ferrous metal bar that is not adjustable—for more bass and more output than an alnico core. Typically their DC resistance at the neck is 6.6k and 7.2k at the bridge. They come with seven different cover options, and there’s a pre-wired kit especially for Les Pauls.
“Since I’m playing leads most of the set, and since I play fingerstyle, I need clear output and sustain that will cut well through the rest of the stage levels and not lose presence,” says Dupuis. “But I also play with noisy pedals, and find the mini humbuckers give a good balance of volume, clarity, and character, without the buzzy chaos of some popular alternatives.” P-90s, for example, don’t get along with her board, but Lollar Imperials, which Dupuis has loaded into her Moniker Anastasia, are another option that deliver the precision she needs.
Dupuis grew up playing Strats, which tuned her ear for a personal guitar EQ that skews brighter, so she appreciates a “somewhat darker-leaning pickup to add body and depth to what could otherwise be a treble overload. A lot of what I’m seeking in a recording environment is a novel sound for that specific moment in that specific track, meaning I’ll pick up guitars I wouldn’t or couldn’t bother with onstage,” adds Dupuis. “Onstage, I just want pickups that can communicate the melodies clearly, reflect my effects transparently, and help the guitar hold its own in tandem with my very loud bandmates!”—Luke Ottenhof
Lollar Mini-Humbuckers
James Hetfield - Metallica
James Hetfield snarls for the camera while extracting huge tone from his EMG Het set.
EMG JH Het Set Active Humbuckers ($269 street)
“Pickups are one of the things that helps an artist make a vision come true,” says James Hetfield, the frontman of heavyweight champions Metallica. “Besides all the crunch and the super-heavy stuff, the clean sound is super important to me … developing a clean pickup that has dynamics. I love the passive pickup, but I love the power of the active pickup, and combining those two things.”
So, over a two-year period, starting in early 2009, Hetfield worked with EMG founder Rob Turner to develop his favorite tone kickers, the Het pickup set. “Rob is the mastermind behind EMG pickups. He’s been working directly with us for all these years. We tried many, many things. He’s the kind of guy that will show up at HQ, listen to what you got, what you want to try—and he put together exactly what I was after. I wanted to have something a little more responsive and lively,” compared to traditional passive humbuckers.
The resulting active Het humbuckers have individual ceramic pole pieces with an alnico bar magnet (which is different from EMG’s famed 81s), the customary ground and hot wiring plus a 9V battery, and employ EMG’s solderless connectivity system. And they come in six cover-color options: brushed black chrome, black chrome, gold, chrome, brushed gold, and brushed chrome. The “Het Set” includes a JH-N for the neck that boasts ceramic poles and bobbins with a larger core, and are taller than EMG’s all-around, multi-style pickup, the 60 model, to produce more attack, higher output, and a richer low end. The JH-B has the same core, but with steel pole pieces. This creates a tight attack with less inductance for a cleaner low end. “This has the old-school look of the old [passive] pickups, and the new EMG heaviness sound,” Hetfield adds.—Ted Drozdowski
A black chrome set of Hetfield’s EMG signatures.
Yasmin Williams
Multi-faceted guitarist Yasmin Williams, pictured with her Skyrocket Grand Concert.
Photo by Ebru Yidiz
Acoustic: James May Engineering the Ultra Tonic V3 ($249 street)
Electric: Diliberto Pickups Custom SuperClean YW
Yasmin Williams, known for her distinctively buoyant, hopeful, sparkling, instrumental acoustic guitar compositions, has pickups in both her main acoustic and electric guitars that are as uniquely customized to her playing as her approach to her own songwriting.
Williams’ main acoustic is a Skyrocket Grand Concert. It’s equipped with the Ultra Tonic V3 Pickup by James May Engineering. “I think they just sound the best, period,” she effuses, quick to praise the work of the boutique builder. “They have the highest fidelity as far as any pickups I’ve played with on acoustic. They’re crystal clear.”
The Ultra Tonic V3’s setup is a bit involved. It comes with separate sensors to be glued to the underside of the bridge plate under the saddle, and to the far bass corner of the underside of the bridge plate. A circuit board attached to the inner end of the pickup’s jack comes with a 12-position balance control switch, which “enunciates different frequencies of your guitar.” During the setup, the guitarist selects the switch position they like best.
Williams’ main electric, an Epiphone ES-339 in Pelham blue, has pickups that were handmade and gifted to her by Hernán do Brito, a luthier for the Buenos Aires, Argentina-based company Diliberto Pickups, after the two released a song together (do Brito performs under the moniker “Dobrotto”). The SuperClean YW pickups set are made with alnico 5 magnets, with 7.9k resistance in the bridge and 6.8k in the neck. Do Brito also hand-painted them to match the pattern on a West African-themed shirt of Williams’.
“They’re pickups designed for a very clean tone, since I do a lot of tapping,” Williams explains. “There’s no muddiness; the tone is really bright—kind of high-end, but not screechy. They’re really good for math-rock type things, and they also play really well with pedals. They sound great with reverb; they sound great dirty, especially if you have a good overdrive. It sounds really good with Plumes, for example, by EarthQuaker Devices. I’ve never had pickups that sound as clear as these do. No noise, no nothing.”
—Kate Koenig
There is only one SuperClean YW pickups set, seen here in Williams’ Epiphone ES-339, made by luthier Hernán do Brito specifically for her.
Nels Cline - Wilco, solo, etc.
Few artists straddle the worlds of rock and experimentalism as well as Cline, and his tone is always killer.
Vintage Jazzmaster Single-Coils/Seymour Duncan Antiquity Jazzmasters ($238 street)
Throughout his work with Wilco and his far-reaching solo projects and collaborations, guitarist Nels Cline is often called upon for anything from warm jazz to overdriven rock to twang to explosive noise. And though he can be seen with quite a collection of instruments in his hands, ultimately, he says, the Jazzmaster “is my favorite guitar.”
“The way the Jazzmaster is designed is perfect for me,” he explains. That fondness extends to their pickups: “There’s the tonal variation of the two pickups with the rhythm switch that nobody but me seems to use, which is my instant jazz tone. Then, there’s the pickup-selector toggle-switch tones, and those are excellent.”
Cline most notably calls upon a pair of vintage models: his early 1960 Watt Jazzmaster, which he keeps in Chicago—so named because he purchased it from bassist Mike Watt—and his New York Jazzmaster. “I believe it’s an early ’59,” he says. Both maintain their original pickups. But the guitarist owns other Jazzmasters and some “fake ones,” and he points out: “If I have to put different pickups in one of my Jazzmasters, I put Duncan Antiquity pickups in them because Seymour Duncan understands what Jazzmasters are supposed to sound like, at least to my ear.”
You may already know this, but Jazzmaster pickups are unique among single-coils. They resemble P-90 soapbars, but unlike the P-90, which has magnets under its coils, the pole pieces in Jazzmaster pickups are, themselves, magnets. They also have flat, wide coils—so-called “pancake windings”—that yield a warmer, fatter tone. And they are reverse-wound, so the middle position yields hum-canceling. Duncan’s Jazzmaster pickups use alnico 2 magnets. They have a hearty 8.2k DC resistance in the neck and bridge.
“I wouldn’t put anything different in a Jazzmaster unless I had to mitigate 60-cycle hum,” he adds. And there are a host of options today, ready to tackle the job, that fit Jazzmasters and maintain the look while secretly containing alternative pickups under their covers. “I’ve done that with Duncan PAFs that look like Jazzmaster pickups,” says Cline. If he has a more specific request, Cline calls Bob Palmieri of Chicago’s Duneland Labs for a custom set. Cline says, “He’s a total genius.”
—Nick Millevoi
Up close and personal: a look at the pickups in one of Cline’s prized vintage Fender Jazzmasters.
We cover our favorite tracks on every studio album, with the band’s best riffs and solos along the way. There’s plenty we can all agree on—Master of Puppets sits high on the hard-rock altar—and just us much that’s up to debate—is it time for a critical reevaluation of the Load/Reload double-header? And 13 years on, we’re still talking about Lulu.
This episode brought to you by EMG: http://emgpickups.com
Use code EMG100 for 15% off at checkout!
When they were Monsters: A rare, smiling Metallica band promo photo from the …And Justice for All era. From left to right: Kirk Hammett, Lars Ulrich, Jason Newsted, and James Hetfield.
Which brings us back to Hell. It’s 97 degrees in the Rubber Bowl and there is little refuge within its grim walls, and inadequate food and beverage service. Everyone is hot, thirsty, and covered with sweat and dust. At one point in his band’s set, Rudolf Schenker, songwriter and rhythm guitarist for Scorpions, tries one of his colorful stage moves—twirling a Flying V over his head while holding it by the headstock—and the guitar leaps from his sweat-covered paw, flies across the proscenium, and cracks in half.
I’m there because I’ve been sent on assignment by Musician magazine, where I’m associate editor at the time, and perhaps the only writer there besides the Rev. Charles M. Young who takes metal seriously. A few months before I came on, the publication did its first metal cover, depicting Rob Halford and other hard-rocking heroes as Marvel comics characters.
There is nothing cartoonish about Metallica’s performances on both days in this unforgiving fortress of rock. At this point in their career, they specialize in lurching, locomotive rhythms, head-snapping time changes, and a relentless wall of sound that, while brutal in its own delicious way, takes away the pain of the heat. It’s a sound that cannot be denied. And the crowds show their love by exploding at the end of every song, and bouncing fans onto the stage like human volleyballs, tossed back by security in return. It’s fun to watch, and transporting to hear.
Metallica and Load brought a new sound and look for the band—Lars Ulrich, Jason Newsted, James Hetfield, and Kirk Hammett.
Photo by Anton Corbijn
In fact, when I first heard Metallica, I didn’t comprehend that they were a metal band. I picked up Kill ’Em All on a whim in 1983, intrigued by the hammer with bloodstains on its cover. To my ears, and the reference points of my outlier listening habits, they were mixing hardcore with the avant-garde—creating a sound more akin to Sonic Youth or sped-up Swans than Sabbath, Zeppelin, or Priest, all bands I also loved. But when I caught them on tour, I got it. At that point, I knew nothing of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, since its sound never reached the rust belt of central Connecticut, where I grew up. What arrested me was more than Metallica’s garb, long hair, and the crowd’s headbanging. They pummeled … and artfully soared—a rare balance. James Hetfield drove the songs with his bristling, emotionally fraught howl, and used his profoundly insistent guitar style to command demon groove to do his bidding, with drummer Lars Ulrich and bassist Cliff Burton also keeping their hands on its chains. And Kirk Hammett was entirely unfettered, tossing off ferocious melodies that were so fast and compact they were sometimes hard to absorb intellectually, but nonetheless landed breath-stealing emotional punches. Hell of a rhythm player, too. This was heavy rock wrought extra heavy, then made even heavier by the band’s intersection of energy, virtuosity, power, imagination, and heart. It was evolutionary metal that would lead the genre in multiple directions: powerfully introspective songwriting, a new form of rhythmic expression, explosive nihilism, and edgier, more furious guitar virtuosity. If there was another band as literally impactful at the time, I was unaware of it.
“When I first heard Metallica, I didn’t comprehend that they were a metal band.”
My task at the Rubber Bowl is to interview all the lead guitarists, from Kingdom Come’s Danny Stag to Edward Van Halen. [See this month’s Tuning Up.] When I catch up with Hammett, it is in an especially noxious space in the corridor of the decaying arena, with the smell of truck fuel, forklifts beeping, and the other sensations of gear and worker bees in motion. Not the perfect place for an interview, but somehow the aural barrage that accompanies our conversation seems like a noisy metaphor for Metallica’s own restless, tentacular reach of sounds and emotions.
Kirk Hammett roars with one of his ESP LTD KH-602 signature models.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
We talk about Hammett’s approach, his lessons with Joe Satriani, the band’s core sonic strategy. “What we try to do is form one solid voice,” he offers. “One solid machine locking into a groove and pushing it into everyone’s faces. I mean, I can do the sweep arpeggios and hammer-ons and stuff until I’m blue in the face, but that doesn’t fit what we’re about. I prefer to use certain guitar techniques as effects, rather than an important facet of my playing. When I’m going for a wah pedal, for example, I use a little hammering for the transition.”
Metallica are about to make a transition themselves. Hammett tells me that early in the tour Hetfield and Ulrich had been flying back to L.A.’s One on One Recording between Monsters shows, putting the final touches on a new album. When that recording, …And Justice for All, debuts in August, it will live on Billboard’s albums chart for 83 weeks—sharing that space with releases by Tracy Chapman, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Jackson—and peak at No. 6, transforming the band from outlier to mainstream force, and transforming the musical mainstream in the process. Without Metallica, modern metal titans like Korn, Testament, Avenged Sevenfold, and others would likely not exist, and if they did, they would not have been as successful. Metallica was, and still is, the game-changer.
The Monsters of Rock tour was the first of three times I was on the road with Metallica during a pivotal decade in their career, spanning their albums …And Justice for All, Metallica, and Load—a period that saw them explode in popularity, go through a musical metamorphosis, and begin to reckon with their emotional and psychological haunts as individuals and as a band, and do it in public. The 2004 documentary of their near-dissolution and ultimate rebirth, Some Kind of Monster, was messy and honest and perfectly in keeping with Metallica’s awareness that they have created a true—and gigantic—community for themselves and their fans, built around their music. Among friends, there are no secrets. To anyone who’s attended a stop on their current, two-year-long tour behind 72 Seasons, rumbling through stadiums around the world like an earthquake, it’s obvious that community cuts across all kinds of demographics to create a rare oneness in a divided world.
James Hetfield in 1988, with one of his Gibson Explorers. More beer, anyone?
Photo by Dean Messina/Frank White Photo Agency
When I next catch up with Metallica, it’s in Amsterdam, where they have a day off before playing the final show of the first leg of the …And Justice tour. Somehow—perhaps through persistence and excellence—their album about war, intolerance, suppression, alienation, and mortality (hey, that’s life!) has hit the top 10. My first day is devoted to interviews with Ulrich, Newsted, and Hammett—and a little weed smoking—and on the next morning, I ride with Hetfield to the gig, at the Leiden Groenoordhallen.
It’s a cattle market by day, and before the night’s show the accumulated cow shit is bulldozed out of the 11,000 SRO facility to make way for the fans. On the ride, we talk mostly about his songwriting and how it often draws on his own experiences, and especially his complicated relationship with his Christian Scientist family, whose rules and restrictions made him feel like an outsider. But it’s not like Hetfield watches the world go by while he limns his navel. He talks about plucking song ideas from headlines, like “Eye of the Beholder,” which was triggered by an interview with Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra, talking about the obscenity trial that ensued after the DKs included an H.R. Giger artwork known as “Penis Landscape” in their 1985 album Frankenchrist. And how “To Live Is to Die” was inspired by a eulogy at the funeral of Cliff Burton, who’d been replaced by Jason Newsted on bass by the Monsters of Rock tour.
“The rhythm background is a flatted fifth with a minor pentatonic, so I had to alter every other note in the solo so it would fit.”—Kirk Hammett
With …And Justice for All, the band’s musical ambitions have risen, which demands a lot from its members. Hammett, for example, explains that “‘The Frayed Ends of Sanity’ has some off-tempo key changes that are really difficult. Usually a key change comes in a safe part of a song, like after every eight bars. But here it’s in the middle of the fifth bar. And then, to add more difficulty, the rhythm background is a b5 with a minor pentatonic, so I had to alter every other note in the solo so it would fit. I had worked out a lot of different things to do in the studio, because it’s so tough. But in the end, only about 20 percent of what I’d planned was good enough to use. For one thing, when I got in the studio to record my parts, the tracks were a lot faster than any of the demo tapes I had.”
So he just went for it, which Metallica does that night in Leiden. Despite the crushing sounds and desperate lyrics blasting from the stage—or maybe because of them—the atmosphere is ragingly celebratory. The floor is slicked with beer, and robust men keep queueing up at the concessions to order a half-dozen brews at a time—often for themselves. Backstage, before the show, Metallica are no slouches, either. The green room has its own Jägermeister chiller, and everyone partakes copiously. After all, this is in the days when they are still tagged with the nickname “Alcoholica”—although Ulrich assures me they have all slowed down compared to the “three or four years when we did have every excess known to man.”
At one point during the show—which is absolutely ripping and inspired—a bit of foreshadowing occurs. Hammett stands a little too close to a flash pot when it explodes, and he is visibly shaken. He stops playing for a moment, and looks stunned, but then digs back into his guitar. During a Montreal show four years later, Hetfield would suffer second-degree burns in a similar-but-worse pyro-gone-amuck accident. For the record, during the …And Justice tour, Hammett is playing Fernandes Vs and Strat-styles, while Hetfield is big on Gibson Explorers. They’re also both plugging into the Mesa/Boogie amps that have become, and still are, part of their sonic firmament, and Hetfield also uses a Roland JC-120. Newsted is playing a custom 5-string Wal, with Crown power amps, a Trace-Elliot preamp, and Ampeg cabs.
After the show, Metallica throws an end-of-tour party, renting out a restaurant in a nearby town and putting literally every bottle behind the bar out for self-service. Plus, we’re in the Netherlands, which means joints the size of hoagies are making the rounds. Just before I leave, to catch an hour’s shuteye before grabbing a plane back to the States, I witness something truly touching. At the end of the night, a dark-haired young stranger throws her arms around Ulrich and begins to sob, crying over how much she’ll miss experiencing Metallica live. He freezes and his eyes widen in surprise, then soften, and he spends the next 15 minutes quietly talking her out of her tears.
Later, I’m nearly driven to tears on the flight home. After a day of interviews, a devastatingly superb rock show, and a lot of drinking and smoking, a family with a crying baby takes the seats in front of my row on the plane, and the child howls all the way from Amsterdam to New York. As I shuffle into customs in my leather jacket, black jeans, engineer’s boots, and Metallica t-shirt … my eyes red, my face unshaven, my head louder than Lars’ kick drum … the agent stops me.
Kirk Hammett on the Monsters of Rock Tour at Giants Stadium, two months before the release of Metallica’s game-changing album, …And Justice for All.
Photo by Dean Messina/Frank White Photo Agency
“Where have you been, sir?”
“Amsterdam.”
“Business or pleasure?”
“Business.”
“What kind of business.”
“I’m a journalist.”
“And what were you doing?”
“Interviewing Metallica.”
“Okay, go through.”
That is not how I thought that conversation would end.
The next time I connect with the band, their world has changed. The pivot was 1991’s Metallica, also known as The Black Album. Some of their fans consider it a sacrilegious betrayal of the raw and heavy. I think it’s a logical step. After conquering, hell, redefining what metal is, why not reach back and claim the original grail as well? Why not prove a mastery of classic-rock songwriting, of melodies with air and grace, of hooks that take you to the heights of the charts and insure permanence on radio, of the style that inspired the style—that New Wave of British Heavy Metal—that inspired you? I don’t hear that album as betrayal; I hear it as beautiful.
But it’s six more years, in 1997, before I have the opportunity to check in with Metallica in person again, and this time it’s in Italy, for concerts in Milan and Turin. They’re staying at the Hotel Principe di Savoia near Milan’s Central Station. In Akron, they stayed at a Holiday Inn. Built in 1876, the Principe di Savoia bills itself as the favorite choice of royalty and celebrities. Metallica are now both, and a crowd of fans is stationed outside the hotel 24/7 in hopes of a glimpse or encounter. The lobby glows with stained glass, and in my room I find a fluffy bathrobe draped over a heated chrome pipe in a bathroom that’s the size of my first Boston apartment. In the morning, I can’t decide whether to take a dip in the lovely art-deco-style pool or ride a rooftop stationary bike, overlooking the city. I opt for the bike and the view, as well as a croissant and freshly squeezed orange juice brought by a server. Such are the days of the record-label-paid junket.
Besides better digs, Metallica now have their own jet and a squad of protectors. In addition to a head of security and his assistant, each band member has his own bodyguard. I mention that the last time I was with the band, it was merely a two-man security detail. Now, the head of the force explains each musician is worth such a vast sum of money—not only in his own right, but to their record label and other business interests, that there’s no choice. Plus, there are routinely threats made against them, and security sends photos of people who are known stalkers to upcoming-show venues about a month in advance of the band’s appearances—common practice for superstar artists.
Despite their security cadre, it’s fashion week in Milan, and somehow groups of young models are able to slip by the elite team to get backstage post-show at the Mediolanum Forum, where I’m conducting interviews with the guys after having been elevated by a performance that mixes classics with gritty new Load songs like “Cure.” That’s about trying to let go of the held-in pain from life’s trials—nearly an avocation for Hetfield at the time. Load’s sound is closer to Metallica than Kill ’Em All, for sure, but the band is still clearly holding nothing back. There’s a stunt built into this tour’s show, where a roadie in a flame-resistant suit pretends to catch fire in a stage accident. The first time I see the flaming man running across the stage, I fall for it, as does the record company publicist who’s with me. But the crowd’s in on the joke and cheers, providing me relief. Still, it seems questionable, or at least ironic, after the band’s history with pyro.
“Every town I’m in, I have to get local dirt on my boots for good luck.”—James Hetfield
Good fortune and superstardom aside, most band members seem essentially the same people as a decade before. Lars is still gregarious and opinionated, Kirk is thoughtful and friendly, Jason is reserved and a bit standoffish—maybe because he still seems like a cousin in a band of brothers. Musically, despite the new, post-Metallica flavor of the songs, they’re mostly working the same modus operandi, too—although Hammett and Newsted have been granted more creative freedom in the studio than on earlier Metallica albums, which were essentially the James and Lars show. “The big change for me actually started on the …And Justice for All tour, where the changes with all these different time signatures became an exercise in trying not to fuck up,” Lars offers. “When I listen to tapes from the Black Album tour, even though we were playing in a new, simplified style, the tempos still sound pretty rampant to me in some places.
But things seem different with James. Despite his obvious introspection, he seems less reserved, more open, far more cheerful than one would assume from listening to his lyrics or from, later, watching Some Kind of Monster. Our conversation veers from songwriting to developing character in song lyrics to blues to cars, and even to Tom Waits, whose work he admires and whose aesthetic he’s a little jealous of. “Sometimes, it sounds like he just pushed a button and goes ‘good enough,’” he says, smiling. Trying to break character and be spontaneous himself, Hetfield had completed the lyrics for nearly 30 songs for the Load sessions, and he is feeling good about it. And everyone in Metallica has cut back on alcohol. And they are clearly—with the possible exception of Newsted, due to his station in the band and a neck injury from too much head-banging—having fun.
Lady Justice was a fixture on Metallica’s …And Justice for All tour, where the band’s penchant for complex time signature changes really came to the fore.
Photo by Ebet Roberts
The next night, I’m hanging out in the offices of the PalaStampa arena in Turin, Italy, talking with Hetfield again, and running tape, when I notice what looks like a cat box filled with dirt inside the makeshift dressing room. I’d seen it the night before in Milan, too.
“James, did someone bring their cat on tour?”
“I’m the cat, man.”
“What?”
“I’m the cat. On Lollapalooza, I got into this thing: My stage boots were too clean when I first got them. ‘Fuck,’ I figured, ‘I better dirty them up.’ So every night before I went onstage I kind of kicked them around in the dirt. It became kind of a ritual. Every town I’m in, I have to get local dirt on my boots for good luck. That was fine at Lollapalooza, ’cause you’re outdoors everywhere. But here, I have to have somebody bring me some dirt.”
I haven’t connected with Metallica personally in the decades since, partly because I dropped out of full-time journalism and did very few in-person interviews during the 18 years when I was touring with my own bands. But I still deeply connect with their music, and I will always respect any artist who relishes getting in the dirt.
James Hetfield today, on the 72 Seasons tour at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography