When you’re one of the world’s leading metal bands, with millions of record sales and an expansive catalogue to your name, there’s bound to be a little left-over chaff.
For every ‘Enter Sandman’ and ‘Master Of Puppets’ there’s probably a dozen more not-so-great guitar riffs lurking in the attic.
Keeping those disused song ideas away from the public ear is as much a matter of quality control than anything artistic, but what if those Metallica leftovers were not only available to the public, but up for sale?
That’s the idea that drummer Lars Ulrich briefly hinted at in some recent promotional duties for Metallica: Through The Never, the quartet’s 3D concert/fantasy movie and accompanying soundtrack.
The Danish skin-thumper hinted at the possibility of making the unused riffs from album recording sessions available for auction online in an interview with The National while in Abu Dhabi, as Classic Rock reports.
“We have more riffs than we know what to do with,” admits Ulrich. “We talked about setting up a special riff thing, where maybe we could share some of these riffs with others, like an eBay kind of thing for leftover riffs. Some of them are actually quite decent, but we won’t be able to use all of them.”
The group’s surfeit of potentially sellable guitar hooks is due to them whittling away at work on a new studio album, the follow-up to 2008’s Death Magnetic (if you discount the Lou Reed-teaming monstrosity, Lulu), where the band have built what guitarist Kirk Hammett calls “the Riff Bank.” “Maybe we could share some of these riffs with others, like an eBay kind of thing for leftover riffs…”
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“We do have a lot of musical ideas, we have something called ‘the Riff Bank,’ and the Riff Bank keeps getting bigger and bigger, still, to this day,” Hammett told MTV in June. “I’m writing stuff, [bassist] Rob Trujillo’s writing stuff, James [Hetfield] is writing stuff, Lars is writing stuff, continually expanding the Riff Bank,” adds the axeman.
It’s not actually the first time the idea of ‘making bank’ from leftover riffs has cropped up. The guitar heroes of Black Sabbath and Queen already hit on a similar concept ahead of Metallica, as Classic Rock reported back in February.
Tony Iommi and Brian May had a similar project after the latter British guitarist visited the former’s studio, discovering an enormous wealth of unused material. “I thought it would be great to make a compilation out of them,” says the Queen guitarist. “The idea was to put all these riffs out in some form so people could build their own sings of them. You could make your own music with Tony Iommi on guitar.”
While the idea seems to haven’t gotten far from the conceptual stage for either May or Iommi, Metallica certainly have the funds, connections, and with their new(ish) independent label Blackened Records, the platform to set up and auction off an eBay of second-hand riffs.
Regardless, Ulrich says the band are continuing to chip away on their Death Magnetic follow-up. “We’ll always make another record,” the drummer tells The National. “We’re certainly not avoiding making another record. We’ve been fiddling around a little bit when we have a week here, a week there, but we realized the other day that this (Through The Never) movie will take up realistically the next four or five months. But I hope we will get to another record when this movie is over.”
Remarking on the band’s longevity, Ulrich adds: “Somewhere along the line we learnt to get along and somewhere along the line we learnt we’d rather be in Metallica than not be in Metallica. I think we have tremendous respect for whatever it is Metallica means.” (Even if that means selling off rejected music ideas.)
In related news, Metallica are set to become the second band ever to play Antarctica, with Coke Zero hosting a concert from the metal masters on the isolated concert this December through a competition, as Consequence Of Sound reports.
Never mind Metallica’s ‘Trapped Under Ice’ coming to mind, we can’t help but recall the Spinal Tap proportions of cartoon band Dethklok (of cartoon metal parody show Metalocalypse) performing at the Arctic Circle.
