On Monday night, at a show in Prague, Metallica played all of their self-titled 1991 “Black Album” for the first time ever, starting it with the last song and ending it with album opener “Enter Sandman.” (I saw Jay-Z pull the same trick at his Reasonable Doubt 10th anniversary tour a few years ago. When the first song on the album is also the best-known one, it makes sense.) Before that show, the band had never played “The Struggle Within” or “Don’t Tread On Me” live before. They’ve got a few more Black Album shows coming up, so consider this a preview and watch a few highlights below.
(via Fuse)
Metallica will play both the Black Album and Ride The Lightning in full at their Orion Festival 6/23-24 in Atlantic City.
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If they did Ride The Lightning in reverse and opened with “The Call of Ktulu” — I would want to be at that show.
Seeing and hearing this makes it crystal clear why they never bothered playing Don’t Thread on Me before.
i’ll thread on you! i’ll thread you up!
Ahh man. I like that song – it fits really well on the album. And I was surprised they’d never played it live before.
How do you thread on people?
OK, typo. I must have been thinking of that Stereogum Gap ad from earlier the same day. You know, the one with info about Mayer Hawthorne’s threads.
So I really hope they do this during Outside Lands. Either way, I always wonder how bands feel about playing their older songs. Imagine if your fans could not give a damn about anything you have done since 1991. I remember reading about how much Kurt Cobain hated playing Smells Like Teen Spirit every night, and can only imagine what that is like over a period of 20+ years.
Metallica seems to be cool with playing their old songs. They keep track of what songs are played each night, how many from each album, how long its been since they were played, had they been played on the current tour, etc. at the bottom of their setlists on their official site.
As far as I know it was these Black Album songs and Escape from Ride The Lightning that hadn’t been played. Evidently the whole of the original band HATES Escape, but they’re planning on playing RTL in it’s entirety at the Orion Festival, so we’ll see.
Now if only Metallica’s career can go in reverse chronological order…..
The Black Album was either their last good album, the beginning of the end or both, discuss…
As a lifelong fan I’m totally cool with calling it their last GREAT album AND the point of no return. Load and Re-Load would never have happened if the Black Album didn’t come before them. However, I like a lot of the songs on St. Anger, even if the production is weirdly crap, and I think they actually tried on Death Magnetic. Plus, Metallica ALWAYS did whatever they wanted. So things like S&M and Lulu didn’t surprise me at all (even if I didn’t care for them). Lastly, they have never treated the fans who stuck with them ANY DIFFERENT than they did when they were dirt poor, playing in clubs. They love their fans. But after the success of the Black Album, which I felt was deserved, they were never exactly the same as they were before musically, artistically.
That last sentence is structured for shit, but you get what I’m sayin’ (I hope).
There’s a boring and obvious argument to be made about suing the fans you love.
The band did earn its success, but there was no way but down after the Black Album because they’d overreached so far with …and Justice. They simply weren’t talented enough musically to evolve, so Metallica became a hard rock band, then tried to catch the Metal wave again only to falter after having been surpassed by those who took the early influence and ran with it.
It’s such an interesting case where strong material excuses some wretched playing for a split audience of small part ‘grin-and-bear-it’ and mostly crossover ‘this-is-the-only-metal-band-I-like-and-therefore-don’t-know-the-difference.’
I’ve never agreed with the people who heaped hate upon Metallica for attempting to protect their own intellectual property. Countless cases of a similar nature go to court every day and nobody bats an eyelash. They saw the future and it scared them, so they decided to try to do something about it. In hindsight, it wasn’t there best move. But their inability to do something about it is clearly something they came to terms with a long, long time ago. It’s not like they kept whining about it for any length of time. The world changed – they moved on.
I agree in part with the nowhere to go but down theory. However, they still made questionable artistic choices. They didn’t have to go glossy and clean. Load and Re-load could easily have been dirtied up production wise and released with different album art by a band not wearing makeup and colorful clothing.
They were never the only metal band I knew, so it’s hard for me to wrap my head around all that. I was a fan from just before Ride The Lightning was released. If you were along for that ride, you knew that they were changing all the time anyway. It’s just that the changes on the Black Album, and especially post-Black Album, were much more drastic and confusing.
I know where you’re coming from re the suing of the band’s own fanbase; despite the hugeness of the Metallica “brand”, its vision has always been pretty myopic, with a confused “shoot first, ask questions later” approach. I’m not saying the band was right, but it also wasn’t wrong. The issue, of course, is Lars, music’s all-time goat. That guy could cure cancer and people would still dislike him (although to be fair, he’d probably be pretty annoying about it.)
For the sake of argument, the band probably did have to go glossy and clean. As I’m sure you recall, the mainstream Metal landscape in 1996 was very different than 1991, and because of the limited technical musicianship, Metallica would have been spinning its wheels hard had it dumped another Black album into the market. Skin tight black pants and long hair just wasn’t “cool” in the mid 90’s to the type of audience the band had gained, and if there’s anything Lars wants to be it’s “cool.” If you want people to believe you’re the biggest Metal band in the world, you aren’t gonna convince them by dressing like Pete Sandoval.
I’m not accusing you specifically of falling into the crossover category, but it is a huge percentage of Metallica’s audience. I love Metallica, and I’ll defend Load, but if the pre Black album era material wasn’t so incredibly composed I’d never be able to sit through a current live performance. It sounds elitist, but hearing Lars hit his kick exclusively on the 1 during a song like Battery? It’s like, come on, man.
The ghastly skillset of Lars forced the band to take a different path, which, interestingly, made Metallica the biggest Metal band in the world.
Both. Discussion over.