METALLICA Guitarist: Launching 'Orion' Festival Was 'A Lot Of Work, But It Was A Lot Of Fun'

Gibson.com recently conducted an interview with METALLICA guitarist Kirk Hammett. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

Gibson.com: Tell me about the experience of launching Orion Music + More last year. It was quite an undertaking.

Kirk: It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun, and it was extremely satisfying. When we committed to playing the Orion festival last year, we know it was going to be a different sort of obligation for us in that it wasn't just us showing up for festival. It wasn't us showing up for our own show: It was us showing up for our own festival. We felt obligated to be curators and hosts and MCs and announcers and generally decided to just interact as much as we possibly could with as many aspects of the festival as we could, and as I said, it was a lot of work. It was a lot of startup time that needed to begin months and months before the actual date. But it was all very, very satisfying for us to put this much effort into it and see it through, and we had a good staff of people working with us, and we have a good infrastructure, so we were able to pull it off pretty well last year. We worked a lot, so riding on what we had last year, we're going to go into it this year and make it that much better.

Gibson.com: I think it's a cool and novel approach to get artists like the RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS, RISE AGAINST and BASSNECTAR to play what could have solely been a heavy metal festival.

Kirk: Yeah, what we want to do is we want to make this look more like your traditional European summer festival. The European summer festival circuit has been around for decades. A lot of the same festivals that were started there in the late ‘60s are still continuing today. . . . They have a very, very healthy approach in that they try to get a crossbreed of different genres together in one festival. That was the thinking in the ‘60s. You didn't have your blues festival and then your rock festival and your country festival and your jazz festival back then. It was all on one bill, and it was more so to turn people onto different types of music and enlighten people to different cultural music — to show people that there's light outside of just rock or blues or jazz or whatever. As we played the summer festivals, and we noticed that right off the bad how diversified they were and how much we enjoyed that and how interesting the audiences were for us. For us to play in front of a heavy metal audience, we know that most people would like it, but for us to play in front of a more diversified summer festival crowd is little bit more of a challenge. We have to try a little bit harder and look out and see who we're winning and who we're not winning, performance-wise. So, for us, it pushes us to be better players when we're in front of a more diversified audience.

Read the entire interview from Gibson.com.