Guitarist Lloyd Grant played an important in METALLICA‘s early days, recording the solo for “Hit the Lights” on the 1982 Metal Massacre compilation. Despite this contribution to their first recorded song, Grant‘s brief time with the band means he’s rarely considered an original member. He shared his story with Reality Check TV.
“I don’t think METALLICA wants to say I am an original member because the band weren’t really formed then,” Grant said in a new interview with Reality Check TV (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
It was, like, I was looking for people to play with and we had a magazine, or a weekly [publication] that comes out on every Thursday, and Lars [Ulrich] put an ad in and I answered the ad. And we started jamming and so forth.”
In 2015, Grant recounted his early days with METALLICA on the “Rockzone Legends” show. He said at the time: “There’s a lot of different versions of what happened. My version is, me and Lars were jamming down there in Orange County, California, and we jammed with a few people, and we were looking for other people to jam with. And we met through… they had a weekly newspaper down here called the Recycler, and we met through that. And that’s how it started.”
“We were playing for a long time, and he came down to my place, my apartment, once, and he kept asking me to come by and jam with the band, but I was really busy doing other stuff,” he continued. “And I went down and played with them… me and him and James [Hetfield]; just the three of us. James was playing bass and I was playing guitar and Lars was playing drums. And we rehearsed that ‘Hit The Lights’ song. But way before that, Lars let me hear that song. We were hanging out watching soccer, and he says, ‘Hey, I met this guy,’ blah blah blah, ‘and he’s exactly what we wanna jam with.’ And he played this one song, and it was great, and that’s how I first was introduced to ‘Hit The Lights’. And after that, I went over and jammed a few times. Then he called me and said they were gonna be on this compilation album [Metal Massacre] and he brought over a tape of ‘Hit The Lights’ recorded on a four-track and asked me to make some solos for that, and they were gonna bring the four-track down and they were just gonna put it out an dump it on the compilation album.”
Grant also described what it was like to perform with METALLICA at the Fillmore in San Francisco in December 2011, as part of their 30th-anniversary festivities.
He said: “Yeah, it was one of the greatest experiences of my lifetime, man. I went up there, and all these rock stars are showing up — Ozzy, Geezer Butler… Everyone was totally well known and rock stars on the same stage that I was gonna play on that night, so that was a pretty wonderful experience. And those guys worked really hard on that stuff. I mean, they’d get there in the morning and they’d play all the songs they were gonna play in the set and they’d go over them several times. They’d start rehearsing in the morning, and they’d stop just before the show start[ed], so they worked really hard. So more power to them. They worked pretty hard. And not only that And not only that — they were really hospitable, and it was a great experience, to be honest. A really good experience.”
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