For a band who has basically done it all in their 45 years in heavy metal, Metallica was faced with something new: performing at the Sphere, Las Vegas' ultimate music venue.
And even though they are a band that seems to like to take on new challenges, drummer Lars Ulrich was frank this summer when he told NME the quartet weren't walking into their residency with cockiness.
“It’s gonna be challenging,” he admitted, “and obviously, like everybody else I’ve talked to about it, it’s overwhelming and fucking intimidating. But hopefully when we step out on stage that first night, we’ll have it somewhat together."
On Thursday (10/1) Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett, bassist Robert Trujillo, and singer/guitarist James Hetfield looked and sounded like old pros as they took to the stage on the Strip and showed the sold out crowd of 20,000 what all that new fangled tech can do when a metal band straps in.
Before Metallica, the Sphere had only hosted a dozen artists, never anyone close to the thrashing and shredding of the Bay Area rockers who originally signed up for 8 nights but has since increased the Life Burns Faster residency to 24 shows.
Previously the technological wonder has hosted U2 (40 shows), Phish (13), Dead & Company (48), Eagles (58 with 14 more announced), Anyma (12), Kenny Chesney (25), Backstreet Boys (47 with 9 more announced), Zac Brown Band (8), Illenium (11), No Doubt (18), and Carín León (6).
Despite the fact that all of them brought something different musically, Metallica physically changed a portion of the Sphere that now in retrospect seemed a little overlooked: the stage itself.
All of the previous artists used the relatively simple stage at the back of the floor level while utilizing the gigantic wraparound screens for the majority of the eye candy. As fantastic as U2's inaugural 40-night run was, they sometimes appeared to look like a tiny ballerina in the corner of an enormous music box.
Nobody puts Metallica in the corner. Instead they rejiggered their in-the-round style M72 stadium stage to fit in the far smaller Sphere.
And in the middle of that stage: their Snake Pit, designed for some of their most devoted fans to stand in its center while the band rocked around them.
Those lucky ones in the middle of the pit, on the floor and way up in the sky got to witness Metallica blaze through a a 16-song set that spanned their vast catalog. And best of all attendees can brag that they saw the Grammy-winning trailblazers in one of their most intimate venues.
Metallica doesn't play a lot of sub-20k buildings these days unless it's a charity event, an awards show, or something extremely special. Typically if you see them you are in a football or soccer stadium 4x the capacity of the Sphere, if not larger.
In May, the gents played to about 95,000 in Berlin (5/30), more than 90,000 in Athens (5/9) and Chorzów, Poland (5/19). The Berlin show was billed as the largest stadium concert ever in Germany, organizers in Chorzów bragged that theirs was the largest stadium event in Polish history, and in Athens as the largest live concert in Greek history.
The Vegas show began with a tribute to the Italian film legend Sergio Leone and his spaghetti Western -- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly -- which celebrates its 60 anniversary this year.
Metallica routinely takes the stage to “The Ecstasy of Gold,” by Leone's longtime collaborator, composer Ennio Morricone. The musical piece is the soundtrack for the famous sequence of Tuco running through the cemetery searching for the grave containing the buried gold.
Those grave stones and their crosses harken back to Metallica's Master of Puppets album. Finally, thanks to the Sphere show, fans are starting to connect the two.
“Battery” began the onslaught. The first tune Trujillo ever plucked with the band in his audition years ago, opened a Metallica show for the first time since 7/11/2014,
“Now That We’re Dead” returned for its first performance since 9/24/2021, and the title track of …And Justice for All came back for the first time since 8/9/2014.
The truly awesome “The Call of Ktulu” was dedicated to their legendary original bassist, Cliff Burton.
The entire residency is sold out but get on the Metallica email list to be the first to hear about new dates.
