ROBERT TRUJILLO: 'With METALLICA, There's No Shortage Of Creative Energy Or Ideas'

Keith Spera of The Times-Picayune recently conducted an interview with METALLICA bassist Robert Trujillo. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

The Times-Picayune: One of my favorite scenes in "Some Kind of Monster" is when you're offered the METALLICA job and drummer Lars Ulrich casually mentions a $1 million signing bonus. You look like a guy who's trying to a, make sure he heard that correctly, and b, stay cool. Is that accurate?

Trujillo: Pretty much. It was a bit surreal, to say the least. I refer to it as being caught up in a tornado or the wash cycle of a washing machine, where your head is spinning and frazzled. You've just been asked to join METALLICA, and they've thrown an interesting amount of money at you as well. People always ask me, "So where's that money?" Well, after taxes and mortgage payments and insurance... At the time, I wasn't married and didn't have children. Since then, I'm married and have kids. A lot has happened in the last five years since that million-dollar moment.

The Times-Picayune: You didn't just join a band. You joined one of the five biggest bands on the planet.

Trujillo: Basically, METALLICA is one huge family. The work ethic is strong. Not just writing the songs — that's a given. There's a lot of dynamics that go into each song, lyrically and musically. The crew, the management, people that work at the fan club — there's a lot of pride in the whole process and the whole machine that is METALLICA. Everybody gives 120 percent. But at the end of the day it all comes down to when we put on our instruments. Especially Lars, (guitarist/vocalist) James Hetfield and (guitarist) Kirk Hammett — they're like kids again. The jokes start flying and they're jamming on UFO or IRON MAIDEN and the stories start coming out. You can be in this multi-million-dollar complex, but it boils down to having fun.

The Times-Picayune: That's one of the beautiful things about being in a band or on a professional sports team — prolonged adolescence.

Trujillo: That's true, but with the money and the business, sometimes things take a turn. There are bands that have been around a long time and it gets to a point where the new music isn't as relevant any more; the touring is based on what happened in the past. With METALLICA, there's no shortage of creative energy or ideas. If anything, it's the other way around — there's too many ideas, which is a great problem to have. People do care about what the new album sounds like; it's still viable. And no one's gotten burned out on our end. This new album feels like a launch pad — we're excited about writing more stuff for the next round.

The Times-Picayune: On your first tour with METALLICA, the band didn't play anything from "St. Anger", the then-current album. On this tour, you're playing a lot of "Death Magnetic", which implies that the band is much happier with this album than "St. Anger".

Trujillo: Basically, the material in "Death Magnetic" was designed with the intention that we would play it live. One of the things Rick Rubin stressed to us was, "Create that hunger again. Try and put together songs that you imagine performing in front of an audience. Have that attitude and mindset that you're trying to get a (record) deal again." These songs are fairly lengthy and there's definitely moments where things get pretty technical. But the bottom line is they have a live feel. We recorded them standing up, like we were performing. We didn't use a click track on the drums; we just went for it. So you've got these elaborate arrangements, but basically we performed them. And the songs have to groove. You've got to have that groove element when you try to perform these numbers. The songs on "St. Anger", on the other hand, weren't recorded that way. They were edited and formatted on the computer. That's a big difference. That's why we only worked up four songs and ended up playing one or two of them on a consistent basis. We've worked up eight songs from "Death Magnetic" and we're playing four or five.

The Times-Picayune: What was your contribution to the writing process?

Trujillo: I was there every day when we were writing and arranging the songs. It wasn't a closed shop the way it has been in previous years, where it was, "OK, give us your cassette with ideas, and we'll see you in six months." All these ideas that you hear on "Death Magnetic" were riffs and grooves that we physically jammed out, then fused and mixed and matched. A song like "Cyanide", for instance. There's a moment where Lars and I are linked, speaking as one. That was inspired ...we had gone to see THE CULT the night before and we were getting into their old jams. James started playing that "Cyanide" riff and we immediately locked in on this pattern together. To me it's important that Lars and I keep establishing ourselves more as a team, for the bass and drums to connect. That's going to be really important for what we do in the future. That's one of the elements that makes it exciting for me, as a bass player, to be in METALLICA. METALLICA is very inspiring. At one point I was taking flamenco guitar lessons. I showed the guys some of the stuff I had learned. Some of those scales and runs actually appear in these songs. They get excited about musical ideas that come from different places. Whether it comes from a semi-classic band like THE CULT or a flamenco guitar scale — it's all music at the end of the day.

The entire interview is available in text and audio format at The Times-Picayune.