John Marshall: The musician James Hetfield called Metallica’s “saviour”
The right hand of James Hetfield is pretty much superhuman. We, mere mortals, may try to play Metallica songs to the best of our ability, but the fact that Hetfield can sing all of them and play rhythm guitar using almost exclusively downstrokes is the kind of endurance that no other player can touch. However, there was a time when Hetfield was out of commission, and he considered John Marshall the true unsung hero of the band.
For a brief moment in time, Hetfield almost wasn’t the rhythm guitarist at all. If you look at the early press photos, you can see the original lineup of the group with Dave Mustaine on guitar and Hetfield holding the microphone without a guitar, which makes him look like an incredibly awkward kid who doesn’t really know what to do with his hands.
Once Hetfield actually mastered his picking technique, he supplied the fuel they needed. As much as Hetfield’s voice was still in the beginning stages on the group’s first albums, he more than made up for it for the sheer intensity of songs like ‘Disposable Heroes’, with a rhythm part that sounds like machine gun fire on a battlefield.
As the band started to get bigger during The Black Album, though, their touring regiment started to get a lot bigger and a lot more dangerous if you didn’t know what you were doing. Such was the case when Hetfield got confused about where he should be in Montreal in 1992, which ended with him being engulfed in some of the band’s pyro.
Despite what must have felt like getting a warm hug from the sun, Hetfield’s first priority was ensuring he could get a replacement to play guitar. He wasn’t going to let something like a burn get in his way, so Marshall stepped up to the plate to play the rest of the guitar parts.
Then again, they didn’t hire any old nobody to play guitar. Marshall had already turned in time in the thrash metal band Metal Church and had been travelling with Metallica as a guitar tech before stepping up to the plate.
Looking back on that incident, Hetfield considered Marshall one of the biggest resources the band had at the time, telling Behind the Music, “This [was] not gonna bring us down. It was going to take a lot more than that to stop Metallica. We had [John] come in. I can still sing. So John Marshall has been our saviour quite a few times. So it pays if you’re a roadie: learn the band’s songs. You could end up on stage with them”.
While Hetfield only needed to stay in the hospital for a day, he had to undergo massive therapy to even hope to play again. After a few months of recuperation, he finally got back into decent shape to hit the circuit again, which brought back the musical engine that we all recognise.
If anything, the fact that Hetfield managed to soldier just made their tourmates, Guns N’ Roses, look worse. Here’s one of the biggest metal bands in the world refusing to be defeated, and then there’s Axl Rose almost cancelling a show because he had the slightest sinus infection.
