For someone who has just jumped in to drive the bass sounds for the biggest hard rock band on the planet, Robert Trujillo is doing a great job.
Trujillo had a good resume to qualify him for the job. After leaving Suicidal Tendencies, he spent the last number of years as the bass player in Ozzy Osbourne’s band. He was recruited to Metallica following the departure of Jason Newsted, and arrived just after the band finished recording their current album St Anger (with producer Bob Rock handling bass duties).
Trujillo had a baptism of fire with Metallica. He tells the story to Tim Cashmere.
Tim Cashmere: I’ll start with the most obvious question. How did you find yourself in Metallica?
Rob Trujillo: Well I can tell ya, hanging out on Venice Beach playing on a tin can always works. It’s your best audition! You can’t go wrong! No, to make a long story short, I met the guys about ten years ago and had the opportunity to tour with Metallica with Suicidal Tendencies in ’93 and ’94 and I had a great time with them back then. Over the last ten years or so I didn’t see ’em around much. I was busy working with Ozzy Osbourne and also with Jerry Cantrell, so I was quite busy and I wasn’t up on my Metallica info at the time. I actually got a call from a mutual friend of mine and Kirk’s who said Kirk was coming to L.A. and I should take him surfing. So we were hanging out for a few days, not even talking about music, just talking about surfing and getting to know each other as people, not as musicians, and I guess a year after that they started checking bass players out and I was Kirk’s guy. The rest is history. I just came up and was looking forward to jamming on some of the classic songs. It wasn’t like I needed a job or anything, I was fine. I’ve had the good fortune over the years to do what I wanted to do musically. I know Jason [Newstead] probably wanted to do what I’ve always been doing, having the freedom to play different styles of music and work with different people, but for me it was “Oh shit! I get to jam with Metallica!” and it all worked out, here I am.
TC: Like you said, Jason has gone back to Voivod and smaller bands, while you’ve stepped up to the world of Metallica. I imagine you’re living and breathing Metallica now?
RT: Yeah I am and it’s great. For me it’s like being a kid in a candy store. I want to be in a band, I want to be in a band like this. This is a good time to be in Metallica. It’s great. Every night we jam just before we go on stage, we jam for about a half hour sometimes. We jam to warm up, but most of the time we’re working on new song ideas. It’s new grooves and sometimes we get stuck in the jam room. It’s hard for us to get out and play the concert. But we have a little recording set up, so everything is documented, so it’s an exciting time. Then you get out there and play the classic songs, the old stuff, which they haven’t done in a while. A lot of the material that the guys were throwing down live were more from ‘Load’ and ‘Reload’, with a couple of classics mixed in there, but for me to come in… no disrespect to ‘Load’ and ‘Reload’… but there’s nothing like playing tracks from what we call the holy grail, which is ‘Master of Puppets’, ‘Ride the Lightening’, ‘Kill ‘Em All’. That’s awesome. The thing is too, this past year for us hasn’t been about a big ridiculous production, like we went to Europe and every night was a different set, we always mixed it up. The same thing in Japan, tonight’s going to be a different set to the Big Day Out set, we keep things spontaneous. We don’t know what we’re going to play or the order of what we’re going to play until literally a half hour before the show, so it’s a good time, we’re having fun.
TC: What about when you were going back and learning the old Metallica tracks, did they give you a lot of freedom to put your own thing in there?
RT: Yeah, the guys are so casual about all that. The first thing for me was that I wanted to know as much as I could without any assistance. I did as much homework as possible and the last thing, I know from my own experience of auditioning musicians, that it’s really, really great when the guy that comes in knows his shit. The worst thing is for someone to get up there and not be ready. It’s not even worth it half the time. For me I didn’t want that, so I went in there prepared as best as I could be and I just had a blast with them. There were two auditions, the first one was in November [2001] and I basically went up there and had a day where I just hung out with the band and the second day I actually played. After the first day, I went out with Lars drinking, maybe that was his test for me.
TC: …and the Danes can drink!
RT: No shit! Tell me about it. So I actually auditioned with a hangover. That was not fun. Anyway, I think that was Lars’ test. I guess I passed. The good thing about that was that I wasn’t nervous when I played because I was hung over. I got a call back in February and this time I was very prepared, I knew like twenty songs.
TC: How did you feel backstage before your first Metallica show?
RT: My first Metallica show was at San Quentin State Penitentiary. It was very surreal, so how did I feel? I felt very, very strange. I get up on stage for the first time with these guys, I’m looking out over the horizon and I see this beautiful sunset because it was at dusk, and I look a little lower and I see this huge prison wall all around us and these towers with sniper shooters. You see the brothers off in the distance playing basketball, you see another group of guys playing baseball and in front of us is eight hundred inmates wearing the blue uniforms, which are the lifer uniforms; they’re in there for life! They’re lovin’ it and it was just very surreal, that was the strangest thing ever. We also only rehearsed for fifteen minutes, three days before.
TC: Have you ever played a gig like that since?
RT: No, I don’t think that will ever happen again. We had done a video for the song ‘St. Anger’ the day before and our payment to the prison was to perform a show for the inmates.
TC: So the actual video wasn’t that concert?
RT: No. Some of the footage they got was from the concert, but obviously the footage that you see where we’re in the actual cell block was the day before. We were there the whole day before, so I spent the whole day meeting some of these prisoners and seeing a different side of people’s existence and it’s really, really freaky. It was a learning experience, so that was my first live and video performance… my first show. Right after that I had the MTV Icon show to do, so we flew down to L.A. right after the show at San Quentin and they said “Now you get to play in front of millions and millions of viewers all over the world as this band is being recognized as icons”. Now you talk about pressure, because that was pretty much live. So there I was, so I had to be the boy in the bubble, put the blinkers on, prepare myself and not get nervous.
TC: Also I suppose at that time you would’ve still been “the new guy”.
RT: Absolutely.
TC: How did the fans take it?
RT: Well to be the new guy on a tribute, that was my second performance, there was a lot of pressure. But what I did was take myself out of that headspace of feeling the pressure and treating it like I’m going to have fun and roll with it like that. The good thing is it was in L.A. and the other good thing is that a lot of the people there that were playing on the show were people that I had met previously from other tours or from Ozzfests when I played with Ozzy. Some of the musicians were from the local area from Los Angeles, so it was almost like a tribute to Metallica, but it also ended up being like a welcoming for me and a homecoming for me, given that a lot of people there are from where I live. It ended up not being so bad, it was like a celebration of the old, the new and obviously the new record and Metallica re-existing back into it all with myself. It was great; it was a lot of fun!
TC: So tell us about www.metallica.com.
RT: It’s the best, that’s one thing about Metallica is that the whole relationship they have with their fans from what I’ve experienced it’s amazing, it’s the best. It’s day to day, there’s information, and we have a guy called Nicholas who surfs as well. He’s out there with Kirk and I getting footage of us surfing and interviewing people that were pro-surfers and people that we’re touring and traveling with, so it’s just very informative on our day to day. You can just join up and check it out.
TC: Tell us about the ‘Some Kind of Monster’ documentary.
RT: Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger, two award winning documentarians, they made a film called ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Brother Keeper’. They actually met Metallica through using their music on ‘Paradise Lost’. They developed a relationship with Lars and the guys and thought it would be a good idea to film the band, so Metallica was thinking about it and said okay yeah. Then when Jason was going to leave the band and things started getting a little crazy, they felt it was a good time to actually film the band because it was going to be a time of transition and change and it might actually be interesting and different. So it’s not a movie based on any kind of a concert or anything like that, it’s basically seeing a different side of a band like this. It’s very interesting because you’re going to see the side of Metallica that’s more family oriented and you’re going to see sides of their personalities that you wouldn’t even know existed. I saw it, I mean I’m in it, but I didn’t know what it was going to be about until I saw the first screening, and I was just blown away! It was really interesting, so it just premiered at Sundance film festival to rave reviews and things are going good. It was kind of an experiment. We didn’t know what was going to happen or if people were even going to be interested! It’s not a concert… it’s not even the making of St. Anger. There is definitely a chunk of St. Anger in there, but it’s not based on the songs, it’s based on what went down and the energy of the band. Anyway they got through it and here we are and we’re having a blast man!
TC: Will that be available soon?
RT: Well it’s going to be in the theatres first, then it will be on DVD. Right now there’s deals being worked out and it’s all coming together. Hopefully maybe in like two or three months.
TC: Your new single is ‘The Unnamed Feeling’. You’re judging a competition for the cover art of the Australia-only single. Have you picked a winner yet?
RT: We narrowed it down to about three. I don’t know what was decided from the three, but yeah, we had people send in their ideas for the cover art, and there was about thirty different images on the floor. They set ’em up so we’d be in the dressing room getting ready for a show and there’d be thirty pieces of paper with different artistic and beautiful colours actually. A lot of them are great, we narrowed it to three and I don’t even know who won! Also too, with that, the b-sides to the single are going to be three songs from this tour from the Big Day Out shows.
TC: Do you know what they are yet?
RT: I don’t know what they are yet. We record every night, we have a system where every show is documented.
TC: Well thanks for your time.
RT: Cool man!
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