Kirk Hammett and Rob Trujillo kept themselves busy on Friday night (December 17). After wrapping up the first of Metallica's two 40th anniversary shows at the Chase Center in San Fransisco, the pair darted darted across town to the Fillmore, where they linked up with Hammett's Wedding Band for a set of covers.
Alongside the band's lineup of vocalists Whitfield Crane and Mark Osegueda – of Ugly Kid Joe and Death Angel, respectively – drummer Jon Theodore (The Mars Volta, Queens of the Stone Age) and Doc Coyle (Bad Wolves), the band also brought out Gibson Brand President Cesar Gueikian for a pair of Black Sabbath numbers: Fairies Wear Boots and Symptom of the Universe.
For the performance, Hammett relinquished control of his iconic 1959 “Greeny” Les Paul, allowing Gueikian to take the reins of the legendary beast while he took the latest Greeny Les Paul replica prototype for a test drive. Check out footage of the performance below on Gueikian's Instagram page.
Hammett seemed pleased with the prototype's performance, saying, "Cool prototype tone last night!" in his own Instagram post.
A replica of the iconic guitar once owned by Peter Green and Gary Moore has been on the cards for some time, with Hammett sharing photos of an early prototype back in September 2020, but we've yet to hear any news on an official release date.
Last year, Hammett spoke to Guitar World about the legendary Greeny Les Paul, saying he loves how the guitar has a fanbase that's “completely independent” of him.
“I don’t start [Metallica shows] with that guitar,” he said. “Greeny gets handed to me maybe seven or eight songs in. When I put it on and walk out I can see people pointing and whispering to each other. And signs come out saying, 'Greeny Lives!'”
“When I first got the guitar,” he continued, “my guitar-playing friends would bring over their Les Paul, set it right next to Greeny and take a picture of the two guitars.
“A lot of times I’ll be standing there and all of a sudden someone will say, 'Can I take a picture with Greeny?' I’m like, 'Yeah, sure.' I’ll have to take it off and give it to the person or set it on the stand and take their camera and shoot a photo for them.
“It’s kind of like how it would be if I was married to someone super-famous and was constantly asked to step aside so they could take a picture with her.”
“It's just really fun jamming with these guys,” Hammett recently told Cosmo Music about the Wedding Band. “It's something different. For Rob and I, it's cool, because we get to indulge our love of funk and punk... I was listening to all sorts of crazy music in the '70s – a lot of funk, R&B – so I've always had a real appreciation of the music of that time.”
He continued: “We got together and started jamming out tunes, and it sounded amazingly good, and then we started to improvise, and it sounded amazingly good... It's primarily a way for Rob and I just to jam out. We love to jam; we love playing with people; we love to play funk. It's become a little bit of an outlet for us, but it's nothing really serious or anything like that.”
