5 Wild Metallica Hardwired to Self-Destruct Stories That Still Blow My Mind (Beyond the 12 Video Drop)

Hey everyone, PJ Pat here. I dropped a quick Short on Metallica's Hardwired to Self-Destruct, the 2016 monster that ended their longest studio album drought, brought Hetfield and Ulrich back to the songwriting partnership that built Master of Puppets, debuted at number one in 57 countries, and came with 12 music videos for 12 songs. Spit Out the Bone is still my favorite. Pure thrash, no apologies. But that record has so many backstories tucked inside it that I had to give it the full deep dive treatment. Here are five more wild Hardwired stories that go way beyond the 12 video drop.

1. Kirk Hammett Lost a Phone With Roughly 250 Riffs and It Cost Him the Album

Picture this. It is 2015, the band is gearing up to start writing the follow up to Death Magnetic, and Kirk Hammett is rolling through Copenhagen Airport when he loses his iPhone. Gone. The catch is the phone had somewhere around 250 riff ideas voice memoed on it. By Kirk's own count there were about 450 memo entries, which boils down to roughly 250 to 300 unique riffs once you factor in different takes of the same one. He had not backed up the phone. He has said he could only remember about four of them after the fact. Devastating word, his own. Here is the wild part. Hardwired to Self-Destruct ended up being the first Metallica studio album since their 1983 debut Kill 'Em All without a single Kirk Hammett songwriting credit. James Hetfield later said in interviews that he did not totally buy the phone story as a full explanation. Either way, the lesson is the same. Back up your phone. Especially if you are the lead guitar player in the biggest metal band on earth.

2. Murder One Is a Stealth Tribute to Lemmy Kilmister

Lemmy died on December 28, 2015, right while Metallica was deep into making this record. Hetfield has called Lemmy a father figure to the band more than once. Lars has said following Motörhead around in the summer of 1981 was the whole reason he wanted to be in a band in the first place. So when Hetfield and Ulrich sat down to write Murder One, track 11 on disc 2, they did the most Metallica thing possible. They hid an entire eulogy in plain sight. The title Murder One was Lemmy's nickname for his signature Marshall amp head, a stack he carried with him forever. The lyrics are stitched together from Motörhead song titles. The video Metallica released for it was an animated short by Robert Valley, the animator behind Tron Uprising and a bunch of Gorillaz work, telling the story of a black silhouette warrior modeled after Lemmy. The whole song is a love letter from one band of road dog metal lifers to the guy who basically taught them how to live the life. Pay attention to that one next listen. It hits different.

3. The ManUNkind Intro Is Robert Trujillo Talking to Cliff Burton

If you have ever played the album front to back and gotten to the opening of ManUNkind on disc 2, you have heard a Cliff Burton tribute. Robert Trujillo wrote that intro, a melodic finger picked bass line over Hetfield's clean guitar, with Cliff in mind on purpose. In interviews Trujillo has called it a tip of the hat to Cliff and to the spirit of Cliff. The melodic, lyrical bass approach with that almost classical sounding picking style is straight out of the Burton playbook. Think Anesthesia Pulling Teeth or the Orion intro. Cliff died in a tour bus accident in Sweden in September 1986, nearly 30 years before this record dropped. Trujillo had already been the bass player for 13 years by 2016 and he still felt the weight of taking that chair. So he tucked a little salute right at the front of a song to remind anybody paying attention that Cliff's fingerprint is still on this band. That is the kind of detail that separates a record you listen to from a record you live with.

4. Moth Into Flame Was Written About the Amy Winehouse Documentary

The Amy documentary, the one that won the Oscar in 2016, hit James Hetfield hard. He talked about it in interviews around the time Hardwired came out. He saw the scenes of Amy Winehouse trying to leave her own flat in London while the paparazzi swarmed her on the street, and he watched a lively, joyous singer get hollowed out by fame and addiction. That movie became the seed of Moth Into Flame. Hetfield has been careful to say the pop queen in the lyric is not literally Amy or any one specific person. It is bigger than that. It is about anyone, including musicians in his own band's history, who chases fame thinking it will fill the hole and instead gets eaten by it. The flame is the spotlight. The moth is anybody who flies straight at it. Coming from a frontman who has been very publicly sober for years and has talked openly about his own struggles, that song is way heavier than the riff makes it sound. Some of the most personal Metallica lyrics in a decade are hiding in that chorus.

5. Hardwired Made Metallica Only the Second Band Ever to Debut Six Straight at Number One

You already know the album hit number one in 57 countries. Here is the deeper chart story. Hardwired to Self-Destruct was Metallica's sixth consecutive studio album to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 in America, going all the way back to the Black Album in 1991. The only other artist in the history of the Billboard 200 to pull off six consecutive number one debuts at that point was Dave Matthews Band. That is the list. Metallica and Dave Matthews Band. Think about that for a second. A thrash band from the Bay Area, who took eight years between studio albums and detoured through the Lou Reed collaboration Lulu in between, somehow shares this very specific chart record with a jam band famous for live tapes. Hardwired sold 291,000 album equivalent units in its first week in America and it did this in 2016, the streaming era, with a 77 minute long double record that opens with a song built around the word obsolete. Metal does not chart like that anymore. Metallica just keeps doing it anyway.

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Anyway

Anyway, that is five wild Hardwired to Self-Destruct stories that prove this record has way more going on under the hood than the 12 video drop and the eight year wait. Murder One for Lemmy. The ManUNkind intro for Cliff. Moth Into Flame for Amy and anyone who ever flew at the flame. Kirk's lost phone. And a chart record only one other artist on earth shared. Stuff like this is why I keep digging into the records I have already worn out. For more rock deep cuts, subscribe to It's 1 Louder on YouTube, follow us on Facebook, and hit me up at hello@its1louder.com if you want me to dig into another classic album.

Crank it up 1 louder.

PJ Pat