Metallica: The Marines of Metal

The merch preceded them. Forty-eight hours before Metallica performed in Las Vegas, restaurants and bars along the Strip were crammed full of pilgrims dressed in branded gear: T-shirts, jerseys, sweatshirts, sneakers, tank tops, hats, beanies, socks, wristwatches. The most grizzled devotees wore fraying denim vests decorated with several decades’ worth of patches. Metallica’s licensing team estimates that about a hundred and twenty million Metallica T-shirts have been sold since 1995. The motifs are iconic. There’s the one where a hand clutching a dagger emerges from a toilet, alongside the phrase “Metal Up Your Ass.” There’s the one where a skull is wearing scrubs and performing brain surgery with a fork, a knife, and its fangs. There’s the one where the skull has a fistful of stumpy straws and is announcing, “This shortest straw has been pulled for you!” You get the idea.

Metallica is now in its forty-first year. The band was a progenitor, along with Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth, of thrash, a subgenre of heavy metal marked by thick, suffocating riffs, played with astonishing speed. Lyrical themes include death, despair, power, grief, and wrath. Though metal is often dismissed as underground music—frantic, savage, niche—Metallica has sold some hundred and twenty-five million records to date, putting the band on par, commercially, with Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z. It is the only musical group to have performed on all seven continents in a single calendar year. (In 2013, Metallica played a ten-song set in Antarctica for a group of research scientists and contest winners; because of the fragile ice formations, the band’s amplifiers were placed in isolation cabinets, and the concert was broadcast through headphones.) Since 1990, every Metallica album has débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

In 2009, Metallica was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. A speech was given by Flea, the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who described the band’s music as “this beautiful, violent thing that was unlike anything I’d ever heard before in my life,” and called its motivation pure. “This is outsider music, and for it to do what it has done is truly mind-blowing,” he said. Metallica is the only metal group to have had its music added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. Kim Kardashian has been photographed in a Metallica shirt on at least two occasions. Beavis sported one for the entire nine-season run of “Beavis and Butt-Head.” Though the band has made adjustments to its sound through the years—some minor, some seismic, all irritating to certain subsets of its fan base—it’s hard to think of another act that has outlasted the whims of the culture with such vigor. The band recently finished writing and recording its eleventh record, which will be released next year. “Metallica are the Marines of metal,” Scott Ian, a founder of Anthrax, told me recently. “First one in, last one out.”

Metallica’s current lineup includes the singer and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and the drummer Lars Ulrich, both of whom co-founded the band; the lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, who joined in 1983; and the bassist Robert Trujillo, a member since 2003. Hetfield—fifty-nine, tall, graying at the temples—moves with the confident saunter of a well-armed cowboy. Ulrich, fifty-eight, radiates so much kinetic energy that it’s hard to imagine him yawning. Hammett, fifty-nine, and Trujillo, fifty-eight, are the band’s gentle, long-haired surfers, jazz enthusiasts disinclined to dramatics. If Hetfield is Metallica’s heart—its musical center and primary lyricist—Ulrich is its brain, a visionary who instinctively understands cultural terrain.

The night before the Vegas show, the band gathered at Allegiant Stadium for sound check. A scrum of about a dozen people, mostly from Metallica’s touring crew, stood on the floor to watch. (The band’s full road team has at least a hundred members.) Derek Carr, the quarterback for the Las Vegas Raiders, appeared, looking as though he were resisting an intense urge to play air guitar. Some clients of the private-plane company NetJets sat in the stands, enjoying specialty cocktails and cheering. The band periodically gathered around Ulrich’s drum kit. “Is there anything anyone wants to run?” Ulrich asked. But everyone knew what to do. At one point, Trujillo glanced out at the vacant seats and dad-joked, “I thought we were playing a sold-out show.” Even in a mostly empty stadium, the band sounded powerful, lucid, heavy. (...)

That night, Metallica opened its set with “Whiplash,” from “Kill ’Em All,” its début album. On the floor, mosh pits formed; from the stands, they resembled tiny riptides, bodies circling one another, sometimes submitting to a menacing current but mostly just orbiting. If you squinted, it almost looked like an ancient folk dance—something that might happen at a Greek wedding, late, after people had been drinking. “I think the best seat in the arena is the second tier up, where you get to see the band but you also get to see all the fans,” Hetfield told me later. “Forget the band—look at the audience.”

by Amanda Petrusich, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ian Allen for The New Yorker; video YouTube