“I thought to myself, ‘This guy’s not gonna be here very long’”: When Dave Mustaine first saw James Hetfield play guitar, it was bad news for Metallica’s fifth member Brad Parker

While famously a quartet – back in 1982, Metallica played a show as a five-piece at the Whisky a Go Go on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. The lineup saw James Hetfield assuming vocal duties only, while Brad Parker – under the alias Damian Phillips – handled rhythm guitar.

In a new interview on SiriusXM show Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk, Dave Mustaine – who was then Metallica’s lead guitarist – recalls being unimpressed by Parker’s stage getup the night of the show, and after witnessing Hetfield play guitar for the first time at rehearsal the following day, he knew Parker’s days in the band were numbered.

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“[James is] an exceptional guitar player,” Mustaine tells Eddie Trunk [via Blabbermouth]. “I remember the day I saw him play guitar for the first time. We were playing at the Whisky [a Go Go in West Hollywood]. And we had a guitar player with us, his name was Brad Parker. And the night of the show he changed it to Damian Phillips.” Mustaine says Parker showed up to play the gig in “mid-1980s Rudy Sarzo garb”.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s not gonna go down.’ And I looked at him and he had a giant feather earring. And I thought to myself, ‘This guy’s not gonna be here very long.’

When Mustaine headed to the band’s next rehearsal, Parker was absent, but he saw Hetfield playing guitar for the first time, and in that moment Metallica’s future as a four-piece was all but set in stone.

“The next rehearsal I go and there’s no Brad, there’s no Damian, nobody. It was just James playing guitar – like a motherfucker. And I thought, ‘How did this happen? How did this guy go from singer to a great guitar player like this?’ And I was excited for me. I was excited for the band.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Mustaine touches on Megadeth’s upcoming version of Ride the Lightning, which will appear on the band’s final outing next year.

“We were talking with management, and we were just kind of yacking about what the cover song was gonna be on the record, ’cause we always did cover songs on our records,” he says.

“But this wasn’t a cover song, because I wrote it with James. And it just became clear that I should do this, because if I’m going to ride off into the sunset, I wanna pay tribute to the band that I started in, and I wanted to make mention about what I think about James.”

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He later adds: “Something off of Kill ‘Em All [Metallica’s debut album] would’ve been obvious, and we already did that [with Mechanix] And so I was thinking about Ride the Lightning, and there’s only a couple songs on there that I wrote. I didn’t think that The Call of Ktulu would be the right move, ’cause that’s not even how the song was when I was in the band; they changed it so much, so it’s not the way that I remember it.

“So we started doing Ride, and it just felt so great, listening to the tracks, listening to James’s singing, listening to how the song structure was. It was just great… I’ve always believed when you do a song from somebody, you’ve gotta do it as good or better. So we sped it up a little bit and we beefed up a couple parts, just to make them a little bit more modern. And there you have it.”

Editor’s note: This article originally mistakenly implied that James Hetfield was the guitarist with the feather earring that Dave Mustaine was referring to in the interview – it has since been updated to clarify that the person being spoken about was Brad Parker aka Damian Phillips.

Megadeth’s self-titled final album will be released on 23 January. You can find out more or pre-order the record via their official website.