Joe Rogan and Dave Mustaine discussed Mustaine’s Metallica royalties on JRE, as transcribed by Alternative Nation.
Dave Mustaine: I said don’t use my music, and they did. They used it on the first record, the second record, there’s parts of my songs on the third record. All the solos on the first record are mine, except they’re just performed by Kirk. Close, but not the same. He’s not a bad guitar player.
Joe Rogan: Did you get royalties for that?
Dave: Most of them, yeah. But Kirk got my royalties for ‘Metal Militia’ for many, many years. He asked to see the checks, so I saw somebody saw I wasn’t getting paid.
Joe: So there’s a sadness and bitterness?
Dave: I’m over it. I’s just money.
Kirk Hammett, who has been a Metallica member had an incredible journey of forty years, and he has been the genre’s best-loved guitarist. He has showcased his different creative styles but with the release of “Portals” on April 23, the whole subject is set to change.
Kirk Hammett opens up on his debut solo
Hammett previously described the sound of his debut solo EP as “100%” him, but the EP’s four instrumental tracks mark a distinct departure from the material he’s written for Metallica so far.
Two of the EP’s tracks – “Maiden and the Monster”, and “The Jinn” – Hammett wrote with his wife Lani as background music for his two horror exhibitions, while the remaining two Hammett created alongside the San Francisco Symphony conductor Edwin Outwater, with whom he bonded over their shared love for horror during Metallica’s famous S&M2 concerts.
There is a bit of Hammett that still finds it difficult to believe that “Portals” is really coming to fruition, as having a member of Metallica embark on a solo project would be impossible to even imagine twenty years ago.
Hammett tells Rolling Stone in a new interview:
“I was also pretty shocked that I got the complete band’s blessings on it. It was amazing because our band has not had a lot of great progress with band members going solo, as everyone knows. But all that went down almost 20 years ago, and we’re such different people now. We’re all just older, wiser, and more mature…
“Well, I don’t know if we’re wiser, but we’re definitely older, and a little bit more mature, a little bit more responsible. So something like this takes on a different sort of meaning now than it would have 20 years ago.”
Things were much different for Lars Ulrich & Co. back then. Jason Newsted’s working on his own side-project Echobrain famously created a rift between him and his former bandmates, which eventually led to Newsted leaving the band, and Metallica entering the notoriously difficult period (as captured on the 2004 documentary “Some Kind of Monster”).