In a quietly revealing conversation with Pete Pardo of Sea Of Tranquility, Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson shared an experience that reads more like a rock fan’s fever dream than real life: an impromptu jam session with Metallica‘s Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo at his house in Toronto.
“The guys from Metallica were in Toronto last week. And I got together with Kirk and Rob. We went out for dinner and then we got together and jammed afterwards — actually, right here at my house. They came over after dinner, and we played for a few hours, and it was great,” Lifeson shared.
That’s already a staggering sentence, but Lifeson didn’t stop there. “Often in the past, if you jam with a bunch of people, we’d play a 12-bar bluesy thing; everybody can play that: ‘Let’s do that.’ But when you play with great musicians like those guys are, places you go is, it’s just unbelievable,” Alex explained. “It’s so remarkable. And God, I loved every second that we did that. The three of us just were oozing with enthusiasm, that whole thing. And that’s pretty cool.”
It’s not the first time this connection between the Rush and Metallica camps has bubbled to the surface. Less than two years ago, Trujillo appeared on Geddy Lee‘s Paramount+ documentary series Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bass Players Human Too?, an experience Trujillo clearly didn’t take for granted.
“I played in backyard party bands at age 16 and we played ‘La Villa Strangiato’, we played ‘YYZ’, we played all those classic songs,” Robert said in a previous interview with Meltdown of Detroit’s WRIF. “The harder, the better back then. And we probably butchered them, but we would play these backyard parties and play Rush songs in the same way that we also played Ozzy songs, and we played Black Sabbath songs and Van Halen and all these different bands. So you can imagine hanging out with one of your heroes and just trying to stay grounded.”
He continued, “At the end of the day, everybody’s a human being and you always wanna treat people with respect and, again, stay grounded. But at the same time, you’re going, ‘Damn, that’s Geddy Lee.'”
That admiration made its way onto the stage recently when Trujillo and Hammett performed a rendition of “La Villa Strangiato” during Metallica‘s April 26 concert at Rogers Centre in Toronto — a fitting homage to the band that helped shape their musical DNA.
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