Metallica: Two Shows That Showed Their Range + Their Greatness
I’ve been a Metallica fan for a long time. I was first turned on to them when I heard the song “For Whom The Bell Tolls” on a syndicated radio show, Metalshop, back in 1984. (My memory might not be on point here, but I remember they had a contest of some kind where the winner would get to join Metallica on stage to play air guitar.) The song was so heavy, so powerful, and so scary that I was immediately interested. I was already a fan of Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, and this seemed to be the next level of heaviness.
I picked up their then-new album, Ride The Lightning, and became a huge fan. I didn’t see them in concert until their next tour, which was promoting their follow-up album, Master Of Puppets. They were opening for Ozzy Osbourne at New Jersey’s Brendan Byrne Arena on April 21, 1986. It’s the only time I ever saw them with Cliff Burton on bass. (Ticket price: $14.50!) I became a fan for life, never wavering as they got bigger and bigger. I watched them as they became a theater headliner and, soon, an arena headliner. In the summer of 1992, I saw them co-headline with Guns N Roses at New Jersey’s Giants Stadium.
Metallica have emptied the tank, so to speak, at every concert that I had ever seen them play. The shows were all different: a band headlining their first big theater tour is a different band than when they headline their seventh arena tour. But the shows were similar in some respects:, it was always James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and (execept for the first time I saw them), Jason Newstead on bass. They mainly played Metallica classics and new songs, with a few covers thrown in. That’s what most successful arena bands do. Even before the days of the internet and Setlist.fm, you pretty much knew what you were in for at a show, and if the artist is popular enough, they can play the hits with some new songs added, over and over for years, or even decades.
All of this is to say that when Metallica announced in late 1998 that they would do a club tour where they would only play covers and none of their own songs, I was really excited. They were coming to New York City to play at the Roseland Ballroom on November 24, 1998, a general admission venue with a capacity of about 3,500. I’d seen bands like Faith No More, Primus, and Helmet headline there. It was unbelievable that Metallica would play at that venue. I was fortunate enough to get my ticket through a friend of mine who was a member of the Metallica fan club. The show was mindblowing: in a move that only Metallica would make, they booked a tribute band, Battery, to open for them. They were great and earned their spot: it must have been intimidating playing Metallica songs while James and Lars were in the building. And they were in the building: James came out and unsuccessfully tried to cut the lead singer’s hair during their set.
Metallica was promoting their new release, Garage Inc. It was a 2 CD set: the first CD was all new covers, and the second one collected covers from their 1984 Garage Days Revisited single (featuring “Am I Evil?” and “Blitzkrieg”), their 1987 EP Garage Days Re-Revisited, and other assorted covers, including their Grammy-winning version of Queen’s “Stone Cold Crazy.”
The show was similarly split between new covers and the classics. In their early days, Metallica covered mostly obscure metal and punk bands. Surely, many early Metallica fans weren’t aware of, say, Diamond Head or the Misfits. And on Garage Inc., they showed that they could still credibly cover underground punk and thrash via their covers of Discharge (“The More I See” and “Free Speech For The Dumb”).
At Roseland, Metallica showed that they still could play as furiously as they had in the early days (and indeed, they played Roseland in the summer of 1984 with Anthrax and Raven). They opened the show with a new cover, the Misfits’ “Die, Die My Darling,” before going back to the ‘80s with Blitzkrieg’s “Blitzkrieg,” Holocaust’s “The Small Hours” and Diamond Head’s “The Prince.” It was incredible.
The show had its share of classic rock and metal from more well-known sources: “Stone Cold Crazy,” Black Sabbath’s “Sabbra Cadabra,” and their huge hit covers of Bob Seger’s “Turn The Page” and the traditional (via Thin Lizzy) “Whiskey In The Jar.” I remember thinking during the latter that it was cool that Metallica finally had a legit party jam that you could play alongside songs by AC/DC, Van Halen, KISS, and Aerosmith. But for the most part, the show was a thrashfest, including furious versions of Sweet Savage’s “Killing Time,” Killing Joke’s “The Wait,” the Misfits’ “Last Caress” and “Green Hell,” Budgie’s “Breadfan” and wrapping with Motorhead’s “Overkill.” Metallica reminded us that no matter how successful they were, they could thrash as hard as any younger metal band.
Which made their next New York City show 364 days later, on November 23, 1999, all the more surprising. This time, they were playing a one-night-only show at Madison Square Garden, and James, Lars, Kirk, and Jason were joined by conductor Michael Kamen and the St. Luke’s Orchestra to reproduce the concert captured on their new, live S&M album (it stood for “Symphony and Metallica”). If the previous year’s concert showed them reconnecting with their roots, this one showed how far they had come. Beyond that, it demonstrated how well most of their music had aged and how powerful they could be in a setting that would have been unimaginable when they wrote songs like “Master Of Puppets,” “The Thing That Should Not Be,” and “For Whom The Bell Tolls.” All three of those classics took on a new life with the orchestra. Newer songs like “The Memory Remains” and “Bleeding Me” revealed new depths in this context. And the songs written for the occasion, “No Leaf Clover” and “-Human,” were instant classics in my mind. While the sound in Madison Square Garden, a venue built for basketball and hockey games, probably wasn’t quite as pristine as the Berkeley Community Theater in California where S&M was recorded, it did sound amazing and the show was unbelievably fantastic.
Of course, I’ve seen plenty of “regular” Metallica concerts as well (I wrote about some of them here), but I’ve yet to see them do an acoustic show. I do have their live album, Helping Hands… Live & Acoustic at the Masonic from 2018, and some other acoustic recordings (including their performances at Neil Young’s legendary Bridge School Benefit concerts). I hope they’ll do an “unplugged” type show in my area. But if I never see another Metallica show of any kind, I’m happy with the ones that I’ve been lucky enough to witness.
