Metallica officially formed in October 1981, a little while after James Hetfield answered an ad that Lars Ulrich placed in a classifieds-only newspaper in L.A. That means the band turns 30 this month. For at least half of that time, the band has been an embarrassing grandfather-clause institution at best. Their recent history is essentially a story of one reckless PR blunder after another. There was the decision to release an even-shittier companion-piece album to their least-liked album. There was Ulrich’s grandstanding and generation-alienating (though economically and morally reasonable) demand that Napster-addicted kids pay somebody for the music on their hard drives. There was the overlong disaster-movie documentary that captured, in excruciating detail, the process of recording a total turd of an album, with every awful creative decision (no guitar solos!) immortalized so that the film could turn out to be way better-regarded than the album it chronicled. And now there’s the turd of a new single “The View,” the ill-conceived and worse-executed new duet with Lou Reed, which doesn’t exactly bode well for their collaborative album. For a while now, things have been grisly. And yet.
Metallica is, by some metric, the most important and successful underground rock band of all time. As whiskey-guzzling road dogs, they were headlining arenas long before they came within sniffing distance of MTV. They filled those arenas while making sprawling, antisocial albums that laughed in the face of commonsense notions of pop-song architecture and general approachability — and they did this while rough contemporaries like Black Flag were still struggling in their vans. When they finally did show up on MTV, it was with “One,” an almost comically dark seven-minute black-and-white vision of total powerlessness. And when they became megastars, they did it with the so-called Black Album, which brightened the melodies and slowed the tempos and shortened the track-lengths but still worked as the heaviest slab of post-Sabbath sludge that this writer’s young ears had ever heard. This band became wildly successful and changed the face of music first, and then went off the rails. And whatever dumb shit Lars Ulrich might pop off the next time someone shoves a digital recorder in his face, that legacy won’t ever go away. This was a band that mattered, and they mattered by rocking harder than anyone else.
I’ve seen Metallica live three times, and each time came when the band was, in the collective mind of its fanbase, teetering on the brink of total lameness. First time: July 1992, the first date of a massive co-headlining stadium tour with Guns N’ Roses that marked the band’s final stratospheric ascent into total megastardom. (Thanks to some errant pyrotechnics in Montreal, that tour also nearly marked the end of Hetfield’s life, another story entirely.) Second time: August 1996, as the once-defiantly-uncool band, hair recently cut to office-acceptable length, headlined the cooler-than-thou Lollapalooza tour and prepared to unleash their not-good-at-all album Load upon the world. Third time: March 2009, as the band celebrated the release of its Guitar Hero video game in front of a cool-kid crowd at SXSW. Every one of these shows came as the band moved a bit further from its teenage blood-and-thunder roots, and yet I can’t imagine the most hardcore fan leaving any of those shows in anything other than a state of giddy headbanged-out ecstasy. Live, Metallica, even when they’re playing the new shit, are a conquering beast, a ridiculously tight unit who will always be able to make their demonic din sound like the biggest music ever. I’ve seen Hetfield loom over his crowd like a gargoyle, demanding to know if we’re alive. I’ve seen them execute feats of mind-bending technical virtuosity while hair-whipping at neckbreak speeds. I’ve seen them stand in front of tens and thousands and cover songs by the Misfits or the Anti-Nowhere League, songs that much of their crowd would only ever know because Metallica covered them.
And then there’s those first four albums. (Some people say first three. I say first four.) Every time the group got together during the 1980s to record, whatever its lineup may have been at time time, it turned into an unstoppable force, a unit that translated all its influences into one massive sound that came out bigger than any of its predecessors. When you hear, say, “For Whom The Bells Tolls,” you’re hearing a band that knew exactly what it was doing, that realized exactly the moment that it should snap out of the brain-melt solo and into the battering main riff. In its hellhound fury, the sound that they developed blew way more teenage minds then Sonic Youth, the Replacements, and Eric B. & Rakim combined. For that alone, they deserve an anniversary salute. And if and when this Lou Reed thing turns out to be the disaster that we’re all expecting, at least they’ve earned the chance to make it.
Here’s some videos.
You Might Also Like
 Outside Lands 2012 In Photos |  Metallica Help FBI Search For Virginia Killer |  Watch Metallica Play Black Album Songs Live For The First… |  Metallica Announce Orion Music Festival |
 |
 |
Leave a Reply
Sign in Sign in with FacebookYou must be logged in to post, reply to, or rate a comment.
and lou reed just conspired with them for their tombstone design!
best band of the 80s, worst of the 90s
… And an even worse band in the 00s.
I agree with everything but “a ridiculously tight unit”.
The meter Lars punches out is high school battle-of-the-bands level, and the other guys have just adapted really well.
Gojira is a ridiculously tight unit. Metallica has a lot of ridiculously good songs and a very hard earned, well deserved crew, capable of making the band sound really, really awesome.
So I have wondered this for a while, but…why is James Hetfield always wearing Metallica shirts? It’s pretty cheesy to go to a show and wear the shirt of the band you are going to see, but wearing your own band’s shirt onstage? C’mon! That is way beyond tacky.
This was fantastic. Wonderful. As someone old enough to have purchased “Ride the Lightning” on its release date (well, as close as a pre-order/mail order could come in the Summer of 1984) and saw the band twice while Mr. Burton (with whom I share a birth date) was still alive, I truly appreciate someone who can grasp the importance of this band during their early years. Angry metalheads and anti-metal hipsters have been trying to revise their history for decades now, in light of the lame part of their narrative, but those first three albums will be unmatched for all time. A job very well done!
It’s pretty great seeing this on an indie blog. Early Metallica is some of the most innovative, influential, and just straight up best music of all time. Glad to see them appreciated in a venue like this.
Here’s a raptor jesus sincere truth statement:
Metallica got me into music.
Metallica turns about twenty years too old.
It should read “Metallica Turns 30.” The band is singular, not plural.
People, this guy is 100% right. Why would someone be downvoted for knowing proper grammar? Knowing how to write is a good thing, especially if that is what you do for a living and lots of people read it. Unless, oh no…surely the majority of Stereogum’s readers aren’t just a bunch of eighth-graders who think admitting to knowing something is totally uncool?
Okay, the red pen is out. I actually think this grammar rule, like so many grammar rules, is deeply debatable. Fortuitously, the following website takes “Metallica” as an example: http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/plurals.htm
As expected, though, the example doesn’t really address this question.
If “turn” is an action verb, then the plural form should probably be used: “Here they go / up on the stage / Metallica turn the page.” However, in this case, we’re really talking about “turn” as a linking verb, in which case the aforementioned website, and Spikelee3000, arguably get it right: “Metallica turns 30.”
I’m of two minds on this. Conventionally, music scribes tend to use the plural form: “My Bloody Valentine promise to release a new album before Jesus comes.” In that example, the plural form makes sense, because there is more than one person working on the record. The error is in printing such a story, because we all should know that there’s no way MBV are ever doing a damn thing ever again.
So in this case, whatevs.
While we’re at it, though, “Enter Sandman” should probably have a comma in it.
Correction: If My Bloody Valentine were ever to do anything ever again, we could probably refer to them as singular, because Kevin Shields would be the only person doing anything anyway.
It’s weird that you should bring up mbv. I was looking at the To Here Knows Web board a couple of days ago, and it seems that you are wrong about mbv. Not only have there been big recording things going on for several months, but Colm and then Bilinda were involved.That said, taking into account that Brian Wilson finished Smile, I am totally confident that there will be another mbv album.
The AP rule is that bands take the third person singular conjugation.
Hey guys –
We just have our own standards on stuff like this, that we’ve been following forever. We’re too stuck in our ways to change. I prefer treating band names as plural across the board.
The View? I was sort of hoping that it would be Lou Reed and the band having a heated and poorly mediated discussion about the Amanda Knox trial, with a pause for commercial, and then the daytime divas would have a polite chat with the ever incomparable Kathy Bates, and what to expect from her upcoming season of Harry’s Law.