Kip Winger says he got a call from METALLICA frontman James Hetfield, apologizingh for the infamous “dartboard” scene in the band’s video for “Nothing Else Matters”
Kip made a recent appearance on the “Appetite For Distortion” podcast, and spoke about METALLICA‘s “Nothing Else Matters” video, which prominently features a scene where METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich throws darts at a poster of Kip.
When asked if he ever found out why Lars did that, Kip responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Nah, man, you can see a video on ‘Howard Stern‘ where he’s going, ‘Man, I threw darts at Kip, but it was nothing personal.’ He’s never apologized, but [METALLICA frontman] James Hetfield called me about a year and a half ago and apologized for the incident. James was really cool. James is the kind of guy I can totally be friends with. And he was very sincere; it wasn’t like he just called to apologize and then blow me off. He’s actually texted me a few times; we text every now and then. I don’t think Lars would ever call me to apologize.
“I think everybody was just young kids, and they were thinking it was funny,” Kip continued. “To me, it’s not funny to slag off a fellow musician. But who knows? They were just doing what they were doing. I don’t know. I can’t answer to that.”
Touching on the relentless ridicule WINGER would get on MTV’s “Beavis And Butt-Head” show, Kip said: “‘Beavis And Butt-Head‘ was hysterical; it was really funny. I ended up on the wrong end of it.
“I think that’s just gang mentality,” he added. “Gang mentality — people wanna hide behind… And especially on the Internet, they can hide behind their keyboard and go, ‘That guy sucks.’ But if I was in the room with the guy, he’d be, like, ‘Hey, man, how’s it going?'”
Speaking again on the infmous dartboard scene in METALLICA‘s “Nothing Else Matters” video, Kip said: “I just don’t think it’s a great practice to slag your fellow artists. Everybody has their opinion. There’s bands that I don’t like necessarily. But the point is that the older I get, the more I realize what goes into this stuff.
“So there isn’t any band that I don’t like where I can’t appreciate what work they put into it. Because I don’t care who you are, if you’ve taken the time to get your song on a record and put it out there and made a video, you worked hard on that. I don’t care if it’s good or bad to me — whatever; it doesn’t matter — you put a lot of work into that, and I can respect that on every level.”
Check out the full interview here.
As for that appearance Lars made on “The Howard Stern Show” back in 2020, Lars said at the time: “In the ‘Nothing Else Matters‘ video, which was filmed at the studio while we were recording the Black Album, we had a dartboard… We’d get Creem magazine, Circus magazine, and we’d take posters of people who look particularly obnoxious and put them up on the board and throw darts at them. There’s a shot in that video of me throwing darts at Kip Winger. To this day I apologize when it’s brought up in interviews; it was nothing against Kip Winger personally.”
WINGER‘s seventh studio album, “Seven“, is set to arrive on May 5 via Frontiers Music Srl.
Guitarist John Roth previously said in a talk with Sam Wall about the new album: “[There’s] 12 songs on the album. One song’s a pretty big surprise.
“To me at least, there’s always a song on a WINGER album that comes at you from left field,” he explained. “Like on ‘Karma’, we did a blues song — Kip [Winger, WINGER frontman] and I co-wrote a song called ‘After All This Time‘. On ‘Better Days Comin”, the title track, ‘Better Days Comin”, it’s kind of funky and it’s fun and it’s different for WINGER; WINGER‘s a pretty heavier, darker, metal-ish kind of band. So there’s a song on this album that’s very different for the band, which is cool.
“It’s meticulously produced and recorded, [with] tons of layers of background vocals,” he added. “It’s heavier lyrically, maybe. All of WINGER‘s records have a heavier overtone, because the guitars are tuned low; it’s just more aggressive. And there’s a little bit of a progressive flair on one of the songs. But I think people are gonna really enjoy the album. I hope it’s well received.”