This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 7:15 am and is filed under Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
What’s Flea’s favorite Metallica song? That would be the vintage shred-a-thon “Fight Fire With Fire,” a fact revealed near the end of Metallica’s show at the Wiltern last night. That’s when the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist, who organized the concert (which also featured Scars on Broadway) as the annual fundraiser for his Silverlake Conservatory of Music, stepped from the wings and played second bass on an absolutely scorching rendition of the 1984 song.
Flea’s guest spot capped an impressive return to action for the headbanging headliners, who have been all but absent from U.S. stages for some four years.
“We haven’t played here in a long time,” singer James Hetfield said early in the show, Metallica’s first in the Southland since 2004. “It feels good to be playing live again.”
It better. With their first studio album since 2003’s “St Anger” set to come out in September, the hard-rock titans, who also play Saturday at the KROQ Weenie Roast at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, figure to be back full force. Little rust was evident Wednesday as they plowed through a 15-song set of prime fan favorites, and if the sound remains dark and the themes riddled with angst and anger, they played with the exuberant spirit of kids who’d escaped from detention.
– Richard Cromelin
Photo by Jamie Rector / For The Times
I loved the show! But yes, I also noticed a little rust towards the end of “One”, wrong bass at the intro to “Sanitarium”, and someone forgot the distortion for a brief second on the intro to “Sandman”…But it was great to see them again! I’m sure they’ll get back into prime shape in no time…