“The Call of Ktulu”
Ride the Lightning (1984)
HAMMETT Again, we were using Marshalls; I tracked the whole album with Marshall amps and my Gibson Flying V. For that song, I knew that I wanted to come up with something really melodic at the beginning of the solo. At that point in the song, there’s just a lot of riffing, a lot of heavy dynamics. I was thinking, Wouldn’t it be nice if we had something somewhat melodic to lead into it? Hence that little melody I played. I can remember thinking, Fuckin’ hell, man, these guys want me to play an awful-long fucking guitar solo! It was our first instrumental, and it was an incredibly long guitar solo. It was, like, ‘How can I keep this solo going without making it sound like I’m just playing a bunch of notes?’ So I thought that I would break it up into sections rather than play one long spew of notes. I used a modal approach, and there are also arpeggios that I play in the solo. They’re actually ‘broken arpeggios,’ a term that I got from Yngwie Malmsteen. At that time, 1984, Yngwie was big in the guitar world; he influenced me in that he was using all these different scales and different arpeggios, and really got me thinking about that kind of sound. I was also thinking chromatically: there’s that one part at the top of the next cycle where I play a chromatic lick that goes all the way down the high E string with the wah pedal.
I actually wrote out the entire solo on pieces of paper, using my own notes and my own pet names for the individual licks. I would say that 80 percent of it was composed beforehand and 20 percent of it was improvised. When we revisited that song with the symphony on S&M, it was a lot of fun. It felt like I was visiting my guitar technique from, like, 15 years ago or something. I just don’t play like that now—I’m a lot bluesier—so it was pretty trippy.
“Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”
Master of Puppets (1986)
HETFIELD The idea for that song came from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “Fade to Black” worked well, and we wanted to have another slow, clean, picking type of song, this time with a chorus. I had trouble singing that chorus. It’s really high, and when I went to sing it in the studio, I remember Flemming looking at me like, “You’re kidding.” I said “Shit, I don’t know if I can do this!” So I ended up singing it lower than I intended, but we put a higher harmony on it and it worked pretty well. The riff for that song was lifted from some other band, who shall remain anonymous.
HAMMETT The beginning of the first solo is an arpeggiated ninth chord figure, where I basically mirror what James is playing. The second guitar figure had some harmonies. I used a wah-wah pedal on the third solo, which was pretty straight ahead. The fourth solo comes out of harmonized guitars; the very last lick was based on something really cool I saw Cliff play on guitar in the hotel one night that I knew would work in that spot.
“Master of Puppets”
Master of Puppets (1986)
HETFIELD I think we wanted to write another song like “Creeping Death,” with open chords carried by the vocals and a real catchy chorus. On Master of Puppets we started getting into the longer, more orchestrated songs. It was more of a challenge to write a long song that didn’t seem long. The riff for that song was pretty messy—constantly moving. It works good live. People love to scream “Master!” a couple of times.
HAMMETT I used my Jackson Randy Rhoads V for this solo. When you listen to the solo, there’s this weird sound right after the mellow part where it sounds like I’m hitting a superhigh note in the midst of my phrasing, like I’m fretting the string against the pickup. Well, what happened was, I had accidentally pulled the string off the fretboard! You know how you take an E string, you pull it down toward the floor away from the neck? I accidentally pulled down on the string, and it fretted out on the side of the fretboard. We heard it back, and I was like, ‘That’s brilliant! We’ve gotta keep that!’ Of course, I’ve never been able to reproduce that since; it was like a magic moment that was captured on tape. That was one of my most favorite things about that guitar solo. I thought I had screwed the solo up by accidentally pulling on the string, but once I heard it back, I thought it sounded great. That was definitely a keeper!
For the next solo we used backward guitar parts. To get them I played a bunch of guitar parts that were in the same key as the song and laid them down on quarter-inch tape. Then we flipped the tape over and edited it, so we had two or three minutes of backward guitar. We put it in the last verse of the song.
A lot of people think I actually came into my own sound on that song. That had everything to do with buying Mesa/Boogie Mark II-C heads. Boogie made those heads for a short time in the mid Eighties and only made a limited amount of them. They moved on after that, and they haven’t really been able to recapture that sound since—I don’t know if they ever tried or not. But there’s something about Boogie Mark II-C heads that were really unique and very individual in their gain stages and overall sound. Most of Master of Puppets was tracked with Boogie heads and Marshall heads combined, and I used my Gibson Flying V and my Jackson. By that time, I also had my black Fernandes Stratocaster.
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