James Hetfield hasn’t exactly held his tongue when it comes to his bandmate Kirk Hammett, and the infamous incident in which he lost not only his mobile phone, but all of the riffs he’d been working on for last year’s arguable return to form, Hardwired… To Self-Destruct.
In fact, as Hetfield makes quite clear in a new interview with the Meltdown podcast, transcribed by Ultimate Guitar, that he still has some serious doubts over Hammett’s side of the story.
“That’s what he claims,” Hetfield begins, when the phone incident is mentioned. “I’m sure he did [lose the phone], but it doesn’t make sense that he wouldn’t have [the music] on his computer, either. But, whatever…
“Yeah, Kirk had some riffs that he… I guess ‘submitted’,” he continues. “It’s not a very nice word to be used if you’re in a band, but you know, we all submit our tapes, and we sit there and we listen to them and we pick the best stuff.
“There was not much stuff from Kirk. Whether his phone was lost, or whatever…”
The new comments come on the heels of others last year, when Hetfield addressed the division of labour in the band and said that Hammett barely contributed.
“Kirk was not part of the writing,” he said. “Kirk obviously came in and did the solos. Lars and I always have done this, but with contributions from other people on their riffs and things.
“Kirk’s riffs weren’t there. I know he talks about him losing his phone and things like that with the riffs, but – no, he wasn’t involved in the process.
“And Robert was there. The intro to ‘ManUNkind’ is Robert; that is him [his tribute to Cliff Burton], and it’s beautiful. But it is Lars and I doing what we always do – put the songs together.”
As Stereogum notes, it was back in early 2015 that Hammett first revealed that he’d lost his phone and all of his work for the album, but that he could still remember some of his work.
“I was crushed,” Hammet told Jamey Jasta’s podcast. “It didn’t get backed up. When it happened, I was bummed out for about two or three days…
“I’m still looking for it to this day… It still might turn up, I’m hoping that it will … To try to remember those riffs? I can only remember, like, eight of ‘em. So I just chalked it down to maybe it just wasn’t meant to be and I’ll just move forward with it.”
But then, later that year, Hammett expanded on his story to radio DJ Tim Virgin, revealing that he’d almost been able to get the phone back, but not quite.
“Yes, I did go to my computer and hit the button “Find My iPhone”, and it tracked it to the Copenhagen airport, and then the dot disappeared. So what happened was I lost it in a cab. Someone found it in a cab, kept it, and took it to Copenhagen airport and got on a plane, and that was the end of it.”
It seems that even now, the incident is an open wound for his bandmate Hetfield, so hopefully Kirk has got his cloud backup working and his creative juices flowing for the next record.
