Pepper Keenan has revealed that his first approach from Metallica came more than a decade earlier than the audition he is known for, in the days after James Hetfield was burned onstage in 1992.
The Corrosion Of Conformity frontman told the story on the “Garza Podcast“, hosted by Suicide Silence guitarist Chris Garza, in the same appearance where he disclosed that Dave Grohl had paid for Reed Mullin‘s rehab.
“We were on tour with the Rollins Band, CoC was,” Keenan said (via Loudwire). “My phone rang in my hotel at three in the morning and it was f**king Q Prime [Metallica‘s management]… They were putting the feelers out and trying to find guitar players who could come in and play guitar.”
Keenan continued: “I was like, ‘Bro. For one thing, it’s a f**king stadium tour. Metallica‘s never been tighter in their entire f**king lives and you want some yahoos to come jump in and try and be Hetfield? Is that what you’re saying?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah’.”
Q Prime faxed the music to his hotel so he could learn it. He told his bandmates and Henry Rollins what had happened, and flew to Colorado the following day.
“My suggestion was that we split it in half with one of the Sepultura boys, split the set in half. This was crazy talking — they’re losing a million bucks a f**king day each day they ain’t playing. This was real s**t and I’m a f**king 20-year-old dude, sitting in the place in Denver, Colo., top secret bunker and they got the gear in there and s**t,” Keenan recalled.
By his account, only he, Sepultura‘s Andreas Kisser and a small number of other guitarists were contacted.
The accident took place on August 8, 1992 at Olympic Stadium in Montreal, on the co-headlining stadium tour with Guns N’ Roses.
During “Fade To Black“, Hetfield stepped into a pyrotechnic charge after a miscommunication with the pyro director, who had not told the band that additional flame units had been placed beyond the ones they were expecting. Hetfield suffered second- and third-degree burns to his arms, along with deep second-degree burns to the back of his left hand. His double-neck guitar took much of the blast and shielded his right side.
Metallica cut the set short. Axl Rose later walked off after a handful of songs, and the crowd rioted.
The tour resumed 17 days later, on August 25 at Phoenix International Raceway in Avondale, Arizona. Hetfield performed vocals only, his arm in a bandage running from elbow to fingers.
The rhythm guitar parts went to John Marshall, a former Metallica guitar tech and Metal Church guitarist. He covered the rest of the tour.
It was not his first time doing it, Marshall had also filled in during 1986 when Hetfield broke his wrist.
Keenan tried out again roughly a decade later, this time on bass, after Jason Newsted left the band in 2001. He has said he knew during the session that it was not going to happen, and the moment came when they handed him something unfamiliar.
“I guess they were trying to stump me with something I’d never heard before… St. Anger or some s**t like that. It was a drop-tuned song and I hit the blower knob on my bass and just blasted through,” he told Guitar World.
“They were like ‘What the f**k are you doing?’ It sounded as heavy as lead to me, totally ripping from all the overdrive on my short-scale SG bass set to the front pickup.”
During a recent appearance on the “Talk Louder” podcast, hosted by veteran music journalist “Metal Dave” Glessner and vocalist Jason McMaster, Keenan was asked if he would have been truly satisfied playing bass in Metallica and potentially stifling his own creative output.
He said at the time: “Yeah, that’s been asked a bunch of times. I would’ve been the bass player for Metallica. And even James [Hetfield said], like, ‘Man, I don’t think you’d have made it.’ The exciting part of that would’ve been the tag-team writing s**t. I would’ve loved to bang heads with Hetfield f**king writing s**t. And that was a weird thing as well.”
Knowing the stiff competition, the guitarist playfully tried to leverage his vocal abilities against the eventual winner.
“It was between me and Trujillo. And once Trujillo stepped in there, I was, like, ‘Well, you know how this is gonna go.’ I kept telling them, ‘Well, he can’t sing worth of s**t,’ hoping that would gimme some legs, but no,” he added.
Back in 2003, James Hetfield publicly discussed the audition process, which was famously captured on film for the band’s “Some Kind Of Monster” documentary. Speaking to the U.K.’s Kerrang! magazine, the frontman explained his final decision:
“[Pepper]’s a good player and a solid guy. I had such high hopes for him. But when it came to jamming with the band, I knew that it wasn’t going to work. It just didn’t feel right.”
Despite the missed opportunity, Pepper Keenan assured fans in a 2005 interview with Straight.com that trying out for the biggest metal band in the world caused no friction with his Corrosion of Conformity bandmates.
“No, no, no, no — nope,” he said at the time. “What are you gonna say to somebody about that, man? Would you tell him, ‘No, don’t do it.’ Hey, come on!”
Corrosion Of Conformity released Good God / Baad Man, their eleventh studio album, on April 3 through Nuclear Blast, their first in eight years and the first written without Mullin, who died in 2020. Stanton Moore played drums and Bobby Landgraf handled bass, with Warren Riker producing.
