Kirk Hammett on Being In a Jail For St Anger Video

The chillest member of Metallica – Kirk Hammett recalls his trip to San Quentin State Prison back in the year 2003 (The year Greta Thunberg was born and the year Shannon Noll was robbed of winning the first ever Australian Idol!) Where Metallica recorded the music video for their title tack St. Anger.

The clip was nominated for an MTV Video award, It didn’t win though. So that’s another music award robbery for 2003 to put on the record books! The song did win a Grammy for Best Metal Performance, Not sure if that performance includes removing a snare from a snare drum.

It was the first clip to feature their then new bass player Robert Trujillo. It also featured many prison inmates. If you squint you can see the man who killed Jeffrey Epstein.

About the clip Kirk said in a recent interview with Kerrang “Well, there was a lot of tension in the air, for sure, There were some women who came with us and they had to be restricted to a certain area because it was just too dangerous for them to even be seen. At one point, one of the inmates screamed over to me and said, ‘Hey, Kirk, I know your mom!’ and I was like, ‘Excuse me?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, I used to mow her lawn!’ He added that he knew so-and-so from the neighbourhood, too. I was like, ‘I might know more people here than I thought!’”

He said that the experience turned out to be “cool” and “really mellow, All the inmates were really appreciative of the fact that we were there and it was a distraction for them. I got a really cool thing from one of the correctional officers. It was a magazine with us on the cover and the subscription tag said ‘Richard Ramirez’ – the ‘Night Stalker’ killer, who was at San Quentin while we were playing. He was a Metallica fan, but he was on death row and he could only hear us. I still have the magazine. It’s a nice little novelty item.”

Lars talked about what music clip made him most proud he said “I would say the video for ‘I Disappear’ [in 2000], which we filmed at Monument Valley in Utah, on top of one of those pillars or whatever you call them. That was crazy. There was a lot of excitement about that video and it was a different thing for us, because it was tied to a movie, Mission: Impossible 2.”

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