Man of The World
Kirk Hammett knew that paying visit to Peter Green was the right thing to do, and yet the Metallica guitarist couldn’t shake the feeling that it could all go wrong. As “the caretaker” of Peter Green’s stage-weathered 1959 Gibson Les Paul, aka Greeny, the famous ’Burst with a magical tone secret that Green sold to the late Gary Moore in 1970 for $300, Hammett felt it in his bones. He would visit the former Bluesbreaker and Fleetwood Mac guitarist at Green’s home in the Isle of Dogs, London. He would take Greeny, pay his dues, and talk shop with the player whose preternaturally gifted feel and tone gave BB King “the cold sweats” and set the benchmark for British blues. And yet the whole idea was giving him the heebie geebies.
“To be honest I was a little bit nervous and... Scared!” Hammett laughs. “It’s hard to gauge how someone with a reputation like that was going to react to meeting someone like me. On my way over there, the unpredictability of the situation was driving me crazy the whole time.” The psychic weight of this encounter is written all over the excitable cadence in Hammett’s voice some six months
