James Hetfield’s 1996 Ken Lawrence Explorer

This guitar was custom-made for James by Ken Lawrence in 1996. It served as one of his main live guitars from that year, and it was used to record most of the stuff from Garage Inc. in 1998.

Specs

The guitar had a mahogany neck and body. and a custom-shaped headstock. It was equipped with Sperzel Locking tuners, Tonepros Tune-O-Matic Bridge, and a set of EMG 81/60 pickups. Just recently James switched pickups to EMG-JHs, which is his own signature set from EMG.

Both the body and the headstock have had Chechen wood glued on the top, which gave the guitar its unique look since this is a very unusual type of wood that one does not often see used on guitars.

The guitar also had a “Grenadillo” rosewood fretboard with unique inlays showing hunters throwing spears at a beast.

James had two of these guitars. This first one was made in 1996, and the second one was made in 2003 and features a quilted bubinga top and flame sun inlays. The rest of the specs are identical.