Why did Metallica reject Les Claypool?
Any band that had the momentum Metallica had in the late 1980s had no need to stop for a second. They had gifted the world one of the greatest metal masterpieces of all time in Master of Puppets, but everything around them came tumbling down the minute that Cliff Burton passed away in a bus crash. Although they were able to pick themselves up and keep walking once Jason Newsted joined the group, there was a good chance that their sound could have been a lot more funky had Kirk Hammett had his friend join.
Then again, anyone replacing Burton was going to need to come correct. The whole point behind any great rock and roll bass player might be to serve the song, but Burton was a lead guitarist who happened to play bass in many respects, so something like ‘The Call of Ktulu’ would had to have been played correctly for the rest of the band to give their seal of approval. When first auditioning people, though, the first person on Hammett’s list was his school buddy, Les Claypool.
And it’s not like Claypool was a terrible choice by any metric. His work with Primus may be an acquired taste and more than a little bit weird every time they come on, but given how heavy some of their songs could get when breaking everything down, his sound could have been a breath of fresh air from the relentless downpicking James Hetfield did on every single track.
When they first started playing together, though, Hetfield had the same argument whenever he talked about letting him go: he was too good. It takes a lot for any bassist to be overqualified for the job in metal music, but according to Claypool, he thinks that he may have been a bit too eccentric to come close to capturing what Burton was able to do at the best of times.
So why did Metallica reject Les Claypool?
Despite joking that they should jam on Isley Brothers tunes, Claypool said that there was no way that Metallica would have let him in with how freaky he could be on the four-string, saying, “I just didn’t fit in. I had a blonde Mohawk and baggy skater pants and two different coloured tennis shoes – and this was back when they had long hair and tight pants. I was talking to James a few years ago, and he’d said in this Behind The Music documentary on Metallica that I was too good. I told him he was full of it, and thought I was a freak!”
It also probably didn’t help that Claypool hadn’t done his homework when looking through some of their catalogue, saying, “[I played] ‘Master Of Puppets’ and ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’. I didn’t know that the intro of ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ was the bass! So they’re waiting for me to start it, and I’m just looking at them.” That might have been a cardinal sin for any bass player to screw up, but the audition songs didn’t exactly change as the years went on, either.
When Robert Trujillo was brought into the group, the bass auditions held in Some Kind of Monster show every potential player auditioning with ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, with Trujillo nailing it on the first try. Although Claypool did eventually hit it big once the world was ready for tunes like ‘Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver’, he never forgot about his small role in Metallica history, either.
Newsted was definitely the right call for the time, but Claypool’s slap rendition of ‘Master of Puppets’ that he would play live would have certainly been interesting to hear with the rest of the band thundering away alongside him. If the Primus frontman was going to muscle his way into the band, though, there was pretty much no way that he was going to get turned down in the mix like Newsted was on And Justice For All.
