Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [62]
An ex-New Yorker who was so shocked by news of Hendrix’s death he took up the guitar himself – ‘the day I heard he died, I was playing football and I went to the coach and told him I was leaving to play guitar to be like my hero,’ he says now – by 1981 Joe Satriani was working out of a guitar shop in Berkeley, giving lessons, while trying to get his own club band, The Squares, off the ground. Kirk had heard of him ‘from just being in the San Francisco underground metal scene and seeing a few guitar players in the scene who had a massive amount of technique, and me coming up to them and introducing myself to them and asking, “How did you learn to play like this?” And they all said the same thing, “Oh, I’m taking lessons from this guy named Joe, in this music store in Berkeley.”’ Kirk, who ‘had to just find this guy’ got on his bike and rode it to Satriani’s store. ‘I walked in, like “Hi, I’m here for guitar lessons. Is there a guy named Joe in the house?”, and some guy in the back said, “Yeah, I’m over here.”’
‘The first few times Kirk came to me for lessons I remember his mother brought him,’ says Satriani now. ‘It was the beginning of thrash metal in San Francisco. But Kirk was really quite different, really wanting to know the secrets behind Uli Jon Roth and Michael Schenker as well as Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. He was a connoisseur, a really good head on his shoulders. He knew what he liked and had really good taste. One day he comes in and says, “Hey man, I got this audition for this band Metallica.” Then I didn’t see him for a bit, then he comes back and he’s like, “I’m in this band and it’s great! We’re recording an album!” Things were just taking off for them and it was really great to see it. Then later on as they were working on other records, sometimes he would bring in songs that they were working on and he’d say, “What do you play over this?” Because James [Hetfield] would be writing some chord progressions that people hadn’t written before. Whether he knew what he was doing or not, it didn’t matter; he was writing some very intense music. But Kirk, who was the soloist in the band, it put him in a new stop. If he went back and looked at Schenker’s solos or Hendrix solos he’d say, well, those guys didn’t get into this territory either so where’s my guide, you know? And so I started to introduce him to some unusual scales. And the way I did it was quite organic. I would show him a scale, explain to him that the scale comes from the notes of the chord progression and then I’d say, “But there are no rules and you have to decide what scale you’re going to play and which notes from the scale you’re going to emphasise. And whatever you decide, that becomes your style.” Kirk was a great example of somebody who could look at what I was doing and say, “I understand where Joe is coming from but I know he wants me to take it in my own direction.” And that’s what he did and that’s the sound that we know and love, the sound of Metallica with Kirk riding on top.’
At the time he left to join Metallica in New Jersey, Kirk had recorded one three-track demo with Exodus and held high hopes for their future. ‘I started Exodus in high school. It was me and [drummer] Tom Hunting. We basically got together to just play. One day I said, “Hey, let’s find a name for ourselves,” so we went to the county library [in Richmond]. I went down one aisle and I saw a book and on the spine it said: Exodus by Leon Uris. I pointed to that and said, “That’s our name right there – Exodus!” and it stuck. From the get-go we were playing original material. Although it wasn’t very good, we were still playing original material, and we played a bunch of cover