On the latest episode of "James Hetfield's Riff Life", his show on SiriusXM's Maximum Metallica, the METALLICA frontman named the guitarist he owes most to, and did not hedge about it.
"Tony Iommi is the riff lord, in my mind, and he is the one that has inspired me the most out of any guitar player for my rhythm guitar playing and songwriting," Hetfield said.
He then did what the show exists to do, which is take a riff apart. His case study was BLACK SABBATH's "Children Of The Grave". "Obviously, Tony is the riff lord and everyone starts the song together on the one riff," he said. "Basically, Tony plays off that riff, goes in to hit the big giant chords, which opens the song up. I really love the drum overdub that they did to help with that percussion of the riff and the real cool ghostly guitar sounds at the very, very end."
The debt is old and well-documented. Hetfield told Guitar World in 1992 that he "discovered BLACK SABBATH by digging through" his older brother's record collection. "Their album covers really drew me in. I immediately thought, 'I gotta put this on.' And when I did, I couldn't believe it. It was, like, 'Whoa! Heavy as shit.' SABBATH was everything that the '60s weren't. Their music was so cool because it was completely anti-hippie."
Twenty years ago he had to say it out loud, in a tuxedoed room, and nearly could not. Inducting BLACK SABBATH into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in March 2006 at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, Hetfield — in black jeans and a black shirt — fought back tears recalling a nine-year-old stealing his brother's SABBATH records. "Those monstrous riffs lived inside of him and spoke the feelings he could never put into words, sending chills of inspiration through him," he said. "They helped crack the shell he was stuck in." And then the line everyone remembers: "I realize that without their defining sound, there would be no METALLICA, especially with one James Hetfield. Never have I known a more timeless and influential band."
He was caught off guard by his own reaction. "It was like, 'Oh, no, I'm going to start crying,'" he told Rolling Stone afterwards. "I'd never known it until I had to access all those emotions in front of that crowd, but it just goes to show how much SABBATH mean." Lars Ulrich, inducting alongside him, put it in blunter terms — that without BLACK SABBATH there would be no METALLICA, and that heavy metal as a genre "might as well be subtitled 'music derivative of BLACK SABBATH'."
METALLICA repaid it once more in person at SABBATH's "Back To The Beginning" charity show on July 5, 2025, opening with "Hole In The Sky" and later covering "Johnny Blade" alongside "Creeping Death", "For Whom The Bell Tolls", "Battery" and "Master Of Puppets".