There aren’t too many metal guitarists that could hope to emulate what James Hetfield has brought to the instrument. Throughout Metallica’s career, Hetfield’s fusion of punk ethos mixed with heavy metal grandeur has built the blueprint for what every metal guitarist is supposed to sound like, with a ripping tone and a knowledge of when to bring it down to delicate fingerpicked sections. Although Hetfield might flex his chops whenever he can, he still bows at the altar of this unholy guitar hero.
Then again, Hetfield’s taste goes beyond just the sounds of metal. When talking about his biggest influences, his original inspiration as a rhythm guitarist came from Ramones, thinking that the relentless downstrokes of Johnny Ramone made the band sound tighter than any other band in the punk scene.
When working out different melodic passages, Hetfield also listened to what bassist Cliff Burton was listening to around that time. Despite being a champion of all things metal, Hetfield would admit to being a fan of certain country musicians like Waylon Jennings and covering the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic ‘Tuesday’s Gone’.
Like all metal badasses, though, Hetfield learned his craft from Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath. Originally formed as a blues band, it was Iommi’s riffs that turned the group into something beyond traditional hard rock, bending the strings and creating riffs that signified the sound of doom whenever they came on like ‘Children of the Grave’ and ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’.
When talking about his inspirations, Hetfield still thinks that he’s trying to lift more material from Iommi all the time, telling SiriusXM, “All of it stems from Tony Iommi. I mean, I’m still trying to outdo him. I know I never will, but I will continue to try, man. So a lot of it is about him and his inspiration with me”.
While Metallica has carved out their path as one of thrash metal’s finest, there are also more than a few times where they have borrowed passages from Sabbath’s work. Despite the massive doom that comes from the song ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, the trademark lick that connects the different verses together has more than a few shared elements with the final guitar solos in the song ‘Fairies Wear Boots’ from Sabbath’s Paranoid.
Even though the band could get nowhere close to Sabbath’s intensity, Hetfield made up for it with the relentless fury of their songs, turning tracks like ‘Master of Puppets’ into massive exercises that take the strength of Hercules to pull off effectively. To their credit, the band also seemed to learn from Sabbath’s techniques on their later albums, learning to tune the guitar down a few steps to get a heavier sound on tracks like ‘The Thing That Should Not Be.’
Then again, the band did get their chance to say their “thank-you” to the band that shaped them when they went out on tour with Ozzy Osbourne when promoting Ride the Lightning. Though Osbourne would claim that the thrash legends blew him off the stage whenever they performed, Metallica was more than happy to be working with the frontman behind some of the heaviest riffs the metal world has ever known.
