Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [60]
Brian Slagel had seen Kirk Hammett play in Exodus and knew he was ‘a great player’. Equally important, ‘he seemed like a really nice guy’. When he heard about Kirk replacing Dave in Metallica, ‘I knew people in Frisco who knew Kirk and I would ask around and everybody said the same thing: the guy’s an incredible guitar player, he’s a super-nice guy and he’s probably the perfect fit for that band.’ From the East Bay town of El Sobrante, Kirk Lee Hammett was born 18 November 1962, to a Filipino mother (Chefela) and an Irish merchant marine father. The middle child, Kirk grew up alongside an older half-brother Richard Likong (from his mother’s first marriage), and a younger sister Jennifer. ‘I was a typical urban child,’ Kirk would tell me. ‘I grew up in the city. I went to Catholic school, a couple blocks down from my house. From the time I was six years old to the time I was about twelve I would just walk to the school alone. You can’t do that these days in San Francisco. You pretty much can’t do that anywhere these days. But, you know, I was a very poor Catholic schoolboy.’ He ‘wasn’t very good at being Catholic’ though, he says, his main memories of his schooldays now revolving around ‘reading monster magazines and horror comic books. Occasionally I’d get caught [and] the teacher would take it away.’ Although he was non-confrontational, he developed a passive-aggressive stance that would later serve him well in Metallica. When the nuns threatened to call in his parents for a serious talk about his comic-reading habits, ‘I remember looking at them straight in the eye and saying, “That’s fine because they know all about it.”’ Even as an adult, Kirk was always the guy firing up a joint and reading a comic book, or watching a horror movie. His favourite: ‘a tie between the original 1931 Frankenstein movie and Bride of Frankenstein’.
When, in fifth grade, he flunked his religious education class, ‘I came to a conclusion that Catholicism was just hypocritical, hypercritical…it wasn’t congruent with my reality.’ More interested these days in Buddhist philosophy, reality for Kirk Hammett as a child was a stepbrother eleven years older plugged into a percolating music scene on his doorstep that was about to change the world: ‘[Richard] was full-on into the whole hippy thing. He was going to the Fillmore and seeing bands like Cream, Hendrix, Santana, the Grateful Dead, Zeppelin…all these monumental bands and gigs.’ There were also the conversations ‘about LSD and acid’ he overheard between Richard and his father. ‘Being a merchant marine, [my father] was exposed to all sorts of things. He was very broad-minded, very open to the whole hippy lifestyle at first.’ Kirk’s long hair was ‘another thing that the nuns really did not like. I would regularly get reminders to cut my hair because it was touching my collar.’ Punishment beatings from the nuns became a regular thing: ‘Generally rulers were the weapon of choice. I got some of it, you know.’
Brother Richard also played guitar and was ‘a pretty big influence’ on Kirk’s playing. When, in 1975, their parents decided to move out of San Francisco to the suburbs, Richard, who was now twenty-three, stayed behind in the city. Kirk, who looked up to Richard and missed having him around, bought a guitar ‘partly because I wanted to play, but partly because I wanted to be like him too, I wanted to emulate him’. Richard, though, was a strummer, the kind of part-time guitarist who liked to play along to Bob Dylan records. Kirk would have ‘different goals, a different plan altogether’. Simply ‘to become the best I could on the instrument. I wanted to be Jimi Hendrix.’ He added laughingly, ‘But, you know, without all the funny clothing.’ As a teenager, most of what Hammett learned on guitar came from playing along to records, beginning with Hendrix