|
Name - Kirk Hammett
Instrument - Lead
Guitars
Place of Birth - San Francisco, California
Date of
Birth - November 18, 1962
Fav. Bands - Jimi Hendrix, UFO, Black
Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Kiss, John
Coltrane, Goul Mule,
Chet Baker, Prez Prado, AIC, David Bowie, U2, King Crimson, Robert
Johnson
April 1, 1983, San Francisco, California. A
phone rings; "Hi, Kirk? This is Metallica, we
just fired our lead
guitar player, and we need a new one. Interested?"
Things didn't
exactly happen quite that way, but Kirk did play his first show with
Metallica
fifteen days later in New Jersey. Metallica's then road
manager, Mark Whittaker, once
managed
Kirk's band Exodus. When it
became time to switch lead players, Mark was quick to
suggest
Kirk.
Hammett's playing brought Metallica into an era of
more melodic and controlled guitar
work.
He's been in the band ever
since that day in 1983, which surprisingly was less then a
month
after
he and his former band, Exodus opened for Metallica.
Kirk
grew up in the Bay area town of El Sobrante and began playing guitar at
age 15. His
first guitar
was a Montgomery Ward catalog special and
his first amp a shoe box with a 4 inch speaker.
A few
years later
Kirk "graduated" to a 1978 Fender Stratocaster. Always searching for his
sound, Kirk
managed to "Frankenstein" the guitar with different
pick up and amp combinations.
Eventually he
traded up to a 1974
Gibson Flying V (just like Michael Schenker's!) That Flying V is
still
part of
Kirk's collection, and still pops up on Metallica's
albums.
With his new Flying V, Kirk started playing with other
people. This led to a whole other
problem:
money. A short stint
working at Burger King fixed that as it earned him enough cash to
buy
his first
Marshall amp. Around that time, Kirk co-founded Exodus with
Paul Baloff. They were the
support
act for Metallica twice: on
November 29, 1982 and March 5, 1983.
After the call from Metallica,
Kirk scraped up enough money for a flight to the east
coast. He
found
himself outside his native California for the first time, on the
other side of the
country and in a new
band. Oddly enough, the band
never really asked Kirk to join, it wasn't until the
recording of
Kill
'Em All that he felt confident he was in. After Kill 'Em All and
the tour that followed,
he took lessons
from Joe Satriani and
learned the virtues of jazz, blues, classical and
Hendrix.
Currently, Kirk can be found in the Bay area, with his
wife Lani and dog Darla.
|
