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We’re continuing the roll out of Consequence’s Guitar Week with a Crate Digging list of 10 albums that Metallica’s Kirk Hammett thinks every guitarist should own. See where Hammett lands on our 100 Best Guitarists of All Time list, and keep checking back throughout the week for more lists, artist-driven content, games, and more.
As one of the greatest to ever play the instrument, legendary Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett has surely influenced many aspiring musicians over the last 40 years. But there was a time when Hammett was an aspiring musician himself, drawing from various influences as he cut his teeth on the guitar.
In celebration of Consequence‘s Guitar Week, Hammett checked in with us to graciously and exclusively share a list of 11 albums he turned to as an aspiring guitarist. As you’ll soon see, most of the LPs he picked were released between 1975 and 1980, during the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer’s formative teen years.
Among Hammett’s selections are albums from heavy music giants like Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, and Black Sabbath, alongside less obvious influences like Al Di Meola, Journey, and the Tony Williams Lifetime project. Below, find all of Kirk Hammett’s selections (in no particular order), along with his explanations for each choice.
Forty-plus years into an iconic career, Hammett is as busy as ever. He just released a 400-page coffee table book titled The Collection: Kirk Hammett, which features stunning photos of the metal veteran with his prized guitars in Hawaii and Los Angeles, as well as the stories behind the instruments (order here).
Additionally, Hammett will hit the road with Metallica for a new North American leg of their ongoing “M72 World Tour” beginning April 19th in Syracuse, New York (pick up tickets here). Throughout the outing, Hammett will also be partaking in a book tour in select cities.
UFO — Strangers in the Night (1979)
UFO put out the live album Strangers in the Night in 1979, and I picked that live album because it’s kind of a compilation of UFO’s best concert songs. And Michael Schenker’s playing throughout that whole show on that live album is just so brilliant and just so fluid and melodic and aggressive. He’s at the top of his game right on that live album. And I would recommend that album to any guitar player who just wants to learn how to play in a way that really makes a statement. And what I mean by that is Michael Schenker comes up with hooky, melodic, aggressive, bombastic solos, and I love that approach. I’ve been trying to do that pretty much my entire career.
Stream Strangers in the Night on Apple Music or Amazon Music | Buy on Vinyl or CD
Jeff Beck — Wired (1976)
I heard this album when I was 14 years old, and it was before I really learned how to play guitar, and I thought everything that I was hearing was guitar. Of course, nowadays I know that Jan Hammer plays a lot of the stuff that I thought was guitar, but just the mere fact that I had thought that Jan Hammer’s [synthesizer] was guitar, along with Jeff Beck’s stuff, really added to Jeff Beck’s legend for me. When I bought that album, I was trying to learn both Jeff Beck’s stuff and Jan Hammer’s stuff ’cause I just didn’t know better.
The playing on that album is really great, particularly the interplay between Hammer and Beck. And Beck was really going out on a limb on that album. Blow by Blow, the album that preceded Wired, is kind of universally recognized as the Jeff Beck album where he just rewrote the fusion book. But there’s something about the material on Wired that I just love more. It’s more energy. It’s more unique than Blow by Blow, but Blow by Blow is equally as good for sure.
Stream Wired on Apple Music or Amazon Music | Buy on Vinyl/CD
Al Di Meola — Elegant Gypsy (1977)
Again, I heard this album when I was 14 or 15, and I couldn’t comprehend it, because the musicality and the musicianship was just so far ahead of where I was at as a musician. It seems like every five or six months I go back to this album ’cause it’s such an amazingly great fusion album. It has that Latin kind of feel that reminded me of some of the stuff that Carlos Santana was doing.
Being from San Francisco, I came from the Mission District and so did Carlos. And Carlos went to the same high school as my brother and my father. I always looked at Santana like a neighborhood band, and I was so familiar with the music, so at the young age when I heard Al Di Meola, I heard elements of Carlos, but it was friggin’ on steroids. And I took to it immediately ’cause it was really fast, too. And I love fast playing, obviously. And Al Di Meola had a great guitar tone. His lead sound to this day I think is so great.
Stream Elegant Gypsy on Apple Music or Amazon Music | Buy on Vinyl/CD
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