Take a Look at "Carl," the Guitar Made Out of Wood from Metallica's Eighties Home
Today, Metallica TV posted a rather fascinating interview with James Hetfield. In it, the Metallica frontman discusses "Carl," a guitar he commissioned from luthier Ken Lawrence, crafted from wood left over from the remains of the garage at 3132 Carlson Boulevard in El Cerrito, California, where the band lived from 1983 to 1986.
Though the garage—where the band wrote Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets—was later demolished, a friend of the band's (Andy Anderson, of the Bay Area thrash group Attitude Adjustment) kept eight pieces of wood from it, and gave them to Hetfield.
Hetfield then passed them on to Lawrence, saying in the interview that "I knew he could work with that wood."
"I was worried about him making it too clean, and that he did not [do]," Hetfield says. "There's no splinters, but you feel the wood, you feel the grain. It's almost like grooves in vinyl."
You can see Hetfield discuss the guitar at length in the video above.
To learn more about Ken Lawrence and some of his other creations, stop by his Facebook page.
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