Returning to the same songs onstage throughout an artist’s career tends to get tiring. Even though it might be fun trying to make different changes to a song’s arrangement in the studio, there’s only so far one can go when doing justice to the songs that made them famous in the first place. Although Metallica have kept faithful to most of their songs whenever they play live, Kirk Hammett still gets a kick out of performing this track every night.
When Metallica first got together, though, Hammett was still cutting his teeth in the band Exodus. As Metallica started to kick ass up and down the California metal scene with Dave Mustaine in tow, Hammett was still working on his technique, informed by players as diverse as Michael Schenker and Jimi Hendrix.
Once Metallica got to the other side of the country to cut their first album, the behaviour of Mustaine started to get out of hand, including trashing the houses of the people that they were staying with on the road. Quickly sending Mustaine back to California, Hammett was brought in to lay down his classic lines across Kill Em All, performing solos equally ferocious and thrashy in equal measure.
Then again, it wouldn’t be until the next record that Hammett truly came into his own. Containing the first contributions that he would make in the band’s songwriting, Hammett would put his first riffs into songs like ‘Trapped Under Ice’, based on a scrap of a tune that he had worked on with Exodus. Amid his contributions was the bridge riff to ‘Creeping Death’, which would become a fixture of the band’s live show.
When talking about the riff he contributed, Hammett would say that he wrote it when he was still in his teens, which would become part of the song’s breakdown. As James Hetfield sings lines referring to the different plagues that descend upon Egypt in the Bible, Hammett was responsible for the lick as the rest of the backing vocals chant ‘DIE’.
As opposed to the more commercial music that Metallica would go on to create in the next decade, Hammett would single this song as one of his personal favourites to perform, saying, “There’s a really raw, powerful energy to this one. It’s exciting to listen to, and it’s one that, even to this day, I absolutely love playing live. In my opinion, it’s definitely one of the best solos a Metallica song has ever had”.
While the solo is fantastic, it’s also reasonably unconventional from what Hammett was known for at the time. Compared to the bluesy inflexions that he would put into his usual solos, there’s a bit of punk fury in his delivery, including one section where he slowly ascends the guitar neck without any care for what notes he’s hitting.
Outside of the lead guitar on the song, though, the rest of the track doesn’t let up in terms of intensity. Featuring a central riff from Hetfield, the song is a workout across six minutes, employing downstrokes across the entire song that keep the song rooted to the ground. Even though Hammett might have his chance to show off every time he gets behind the fretboard, ‘Creeping Death’ is also a good benchmark to help keep him in shape whenever he hits the stage.
