Singer-guitarist James Hetfield paused midway through Metallica’s concert at SoFi Stadium on Friday to share a memory stirred as he walked past a giant Metallica logo backstage before the first of two shows there this weekend.
“It’s a logo I scratched out on a napkin in Norwalk, I don’t know, about 15 miles from here,” Hetfield told the crowd, many of whom were wearing that iconic design on T-shirts new and old. “It went from a napkin to here.”
Hours before the show, drummer Lars Ulrich, who with Hetfield formed Metallica 42 years ago, talked backstage on KLOS-FM/95.5 with DJ Matt Pinfield about his own memories of those early days, Ulrich driving from Newport Beach to meet Hetfield in Norwalk to jam and dream and plan for a future that against all odds eventually came true.
Later, bassist Robert Trujillo would introduce “Rose Avenue,” an instrumental he and guitarist Kirk Hammett performed, as a riff and a jam they created on that street a few miles to the west in Venice.
So make no mistake: Metallica has been based in the Bay Area for most of the past four decades, but to the guys in the band and the fans in the stands, these are homecoming shows, a return to streets and freeways, the rehearsal spaces and tiny clubs, where Metallica began.
All of which made a night that would have thrilled in any city feel just a bit more special as Metallica roared through 16 songs in two hours on stage.
“Creeping Death,” the single from 1984’s “Ride The Lightning,” kicked off the set, the song racing through its tale of biblical plagues before hitting a slower, heavy midsection during which the stadium echoed with fans singing “Die! Die! Die!” It’s a powerful show-opening, immediately pulling the crowd out of their seats to fist punch the air to the visceral wallop of the beat.
The M72 World Tour, named after “72 Seasons,” Metallica’s 11th studio album released in April, has a few twists to make it different than any of the…
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