‘The Unforgiven’: The Metallica solo Kirk Hammett said “everyone hated”
There’s a certain art that comes with creating the perfect guitar solo. Most of the greatest six-stringers of all time tend to approach their craft the same way a singer approaches a melody, so it’s no use throwing in 50 notes for a solo that might only need two or three to get the job done. Although Kirk Hammett had a hand in many tasteful solos throughout his career in Metallica, he remembered the first draft of this song left the entire room underwhelmed when he played.
But looking at the riff library that Metallica have at their disposal, Hammett isn’t typically the first person who needs to focus on writing the meat of the song. James Hetfield is probably one of the most prolific riff writers since Tony Iommi and half the time, Hammett was supposed to fly off the handle and put all of those skills that he learned from people like Joe Satriani to use on albums like Master of Puppets.
Underneath all of those chops was a bluesy soul, though, and half of Hammett’s best works involve him taking cues from everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Robert Johnson when he plays. While every novice metal guitarist has dreamed of mastering the guitar break in ‘One’, the greatest part of the soul is when he taps into blues licks, eventually playing off the drums before going back into the main riff.
However, that kind of showmanship wasn’t welcome when making The Black Album. The whole process of making hits didn’t involve having mile-long solos, so in theory, Hammett’s job should have been a lot easier. He had even said that the album contained songs screaming for a specific type of solo, but ‘The Unforgiven’ proved to be a tricky beast.
The song is already unconventional by flipping around the soft-verse/loud-chorus dynamic that happens in most ballads, but when crafting the solo everything was all wrong. Compared to the tasty solo that Hetfield played on ‘Nothing Else Matters’, it was clear that Hammett needed to be put through his paces when making the final take.
When talking about the solo later, Hammett said that no one really liked it in the mix, saying, “I came into the studio with a solo that I worked really hard on, and everybody hated it.” For everyone who has heard the song before and seen what Hammett eventually put on the final track, the version that they worked on in the documentary A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica feels all wrong from the moment it starts.
There’s still a healthy amount of finesse on this version, but all of the phrasing feels completely off for the track. The whole point of the song is about a man being left with nothing but raw pain after everyone has turned their back on him, but rather than channelling that anger and sadness, this feels like someone who took the pentatonic scale and tried their best to channel their inner Angus Young.
While the band didn’t necessarily have to haze Hammett as much as they did to get the right solo out of him, it’s nice to see that they found out what the track was missing. Because if they had gone with the first draft, ‘The Unforgiven’ wouldn’t nearly be as good enough to warrant multiple sequels in the years that followed.
