Metallica Up Your Ass
NRG Park, June 14th, 2025
As I’ve written in this post, seeing the Van Halen: Fair Warning tour in 1981 was a demarcation line, sharply dividing my life between the before and after. It hit like a seismic shift; igniting a bright beacon in what otherwise seemed a dull and listless future.
For me, suburban life was, in large part, a slow painful slog, dotted with hidden dangers I was too naïve to see coming, and too sensitive to handle when they did. There was just a special sort of something about the sound of an electric guitar at high volume that cut through the monotony, injecting life between the cracks forming in my already fragile world. It was that tone, the sound, the weight and the power and the allure of a guitar’s signal pushed until it began to come apart, and then pushing it some more, which spoke to me in a language more powerful than anything I’d ever learned in school.
From my early teens forward, I took up the guitar with increasing passion, reaching a point during which I played for several hours daily over the course of a number of years. It was enough to develop my own style, my own sound, something I’d always wanted. By the advent of the ‘90s, I was playing in bands, writing songs, playing shows, and loving the freedom and opportunity to have a creative voice and an outlet to express it.
I flirted with heavy metal throughout my musical upbringing, but I never quite embraced it completely. I never played in a metal band, either. There were some metal bands and records I loved, but I didn’t give everything up for moccasin boots, a battle jacket, bangs and wings. I was much more enamored with punk and hardcore and the growing independent underground of weirdos and outsiders than I was with metal. My tastes have grown towards metal dramatically over the years, to the point at which I listen to it now more than any other genre. I love all the stuff I loved before, but I listen to metal the most.
In 1988, the band Metallica was in a challenging spot. Since their start in the Bay Area in 1981, the band quickly rose through the ranks of the tape trading underground into a spot among the most exciting bands in metal. By the time their third full length album, “Master of Puppets,” had come out, they were getting big, big enough to warrant full scale touring, both domestic and abroad. Touring Europe in 1986 (the year I graduated from high school), Metallica was tucked away in their tour bus, passing through the Swedish countryside, when the driver lost control, causing the bus to veer off the road and flip over. Cliff Burton, the band’s bassist and most popular member, was thrown through a window onto the road, tragically getting crushed to death beneath the bus.
For a while it wasn’t clear if the band was going to survive the tragic loss. Burton was loved and respected, a driving force behind their sound and style. It was hard to imagine Metallica without him.
The band ended up going with a relatively unknown player named Jason Newsted. With the renewed lineup, Metallica returned to the studio. The resulting album, their fourth, “And Justice For All,” notoriously had all of the bass tracks removed from the final mix, a move broadly seen as a massive slight to Newsted, as well as a clear sign that they in no way were handling the loss of Burton in a healthy way. Some fans hated the way it sounded because of the missing bass. I fucking loved it.
1988’s And “Justice For All” was a ferocious collection of intense and intricate compositions, arriving as a statement that Metallica was back and they were not fucking around. The album’s centerpiece is One, an antiwar anthem that propelled Metallica to the top of the metal world, even stretching across the void to a larger audience, thanks to heavy MTV rotation. One opens with the sounds of war, gunfire and artillery and the blades of a chopper rhythmically setting the stage, before settling into a lilting and downbeat, undistorted guitar-driven opening section. The chorus comes on strong, heavy and pulsing with energy, repeating this cycle and then taking a massive turn into a rapid fire rumble of double bass drums, matched after a couple measures by a militaristic barrage of precise, machine-gun-like bursts of guitar.
The speed and crispness of this staccato section is infectiously heavy. The song and album began to really pick up momentum. The band began to tour behind “Justice,” reaching huge audiences finally ready to embrace a grand total of one metal band. The tour was so successful that before long, they underwent a second go-round in 1989, calling the tour: “Damaged Justice.” This time I made a point of going.
British pysch-rock revivalists The Cult opened the show. The Cult’s 1985 album: Love was a favorite of mine in 12th grade. When the band took the stage at Houston, Texas’s The Summit, my excitement was palpable. Before long, I realized that there was something wrong with the sound. It was muddled and inarticulate. I couldn’t make out many of the details, hearing instead a muffled, bass-heavy mess. It was so bad I questioned how I could have liked the band in the first place. Even when they whipped out Steve Jones, the guitarist from The Sex Pistols, for a guest spot, I couldn’t enjoy it because I couldn’t hear him either. The whole set was a wash.
It was a mercy when they finished their set. I was bummed, and worse, I was afraid that Metallica was going to sound shit as well, which would have ruined the night.
When they hit the stage, all fears were wiped away, as the band ripped through their set, sounding heavy, and clear. It was a great show, remaining high up among my live show highlights.
In 1991, Metallica followed “Justice” with a self-titled record everyone called the black album, because of its Spinal-Tap-esque none more black appearance. “Metallica” was released the same year as Nirvana’s “Nervermind,” the album widely credited as having murdered hair metal and ushering in the grunge era. The thing was, “Metallica” took the world by storm as well. The song Enter Sandman became a massive radio hit, placing Metallica among the biggest bands on the planet. The record was heavily produced, and the lighter, catchier sound of tracks like Enter Sandman, and The Unforgiven helped make the band more appealing to a pop music crowd.
I played the album quite a bit at the time, though I was not thrilled about their seeming to pull away from the very scene that had birthed them and supported them from the start. It seems silly to take it personally, because it’s their band. It bothered me at the time to see them pull back stylistically right when they were hitting their stride.
And then the band completely changed course and released the album “Load.” “Load” was like a nail in the metal coffin for Metallica. They came out with stylist-designed, shorter haircuts, and fancy, fashionable clothes. Metal fans, in large measure, lost their fucking minds. The album was a huge hit on the rock charts, however, and their mainstream success was cemented. Personally, I hated “Load.” Old school fans started calling the record: “load of shit.” A joke one had to think the band had to have seen coming a mile away. “Our” band had finally sold out, and it was downhill from there.
Each successive album was met with wide derision in the metal scene. I stopped listening to them, disgusted with their new image and sound. When they tried to return to their heavy roots with “St. Anger” in 2003, and “Death Magnetic” in 2008, it all seemed too little too late. The songs were forgettable, and worse, they sounded terrible. The mixes were strange, favoring weird inorganic studio production over the thicker, warmer sound of their first several records. The band seemed to be going through the motions, cashing in on legacy, and losing what made them special.
It got to the point that I stopped paying attention to them altogether, seeing them as a money-making stalwart of pop oblivion, washed-up has-beens.
Over the years, Metallica soldiered on comfortably, consistently drawing massive audiences worldwide.
When the band released the album “72 Seasons” in in 2023, I gave it a spin, as I did with all their records, and was surprised to find that I liked much of it. It was their best record since “Metallica,” in my opinion, and it was nice to hear them returning to their roots in style and substance. It wasn’t as good as “Kill ‘em All” through “Ride the Lightning” to me, but it was a solid return to form.
Their live shows had become a massive production, consistently selling out multiple nights in sporting stadiums all over the globe. They even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, playing at least one show on every continent, the only band to do so to date. I’ve always respected their longevity, and even began to see some live footage than managed to claw back some of the excitement I’d felt for them in the past.
My interest in huge rock shows had waned dramatically over the years, thanks in part to a growing disinterest in massive crowds. Also, a general rule, the bigger the show, the worse it sounded. The science of making a band sound good on that scale had been relatively elusive. Spectacle had overtaken the place of the personal connection felt at smaller shows. It’s hard to feel connected to a band when you’re listening to them with tens of thousands of other folks. I will always prefer small to mid-sized venues, for both the intimacy and the superior sound.
My wife grew up in Brazil, and was also a huge live music fan. She had the chance to attend several massive festivals and stadium shows while growing up. Rock and metal is huge in Brazil, with enormous, ravenous crowds attending the shows, absolutely losing their minds from start to finish. They know every note and every word, and they pack into venues sometimes over a hundred thousand strong. It’s a unique and special phenomenon.
When Metallica released the tour dates for “72 Seasons,” Houston had a spot to be hosted at NRG Stadium, which is the home of the Houston Texans NFL football team, and the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, the largest rodeo on the planet, by a large margin. Opening the show would be Suicidal Tendencies, the punk/metal hybrid from Los Angeles, followed by the revitalized reincarnation of Pantera, the ‘90s groove metal sensation. After the tragic and untimely deaths of brothers Darrell “Dimebag” and Vinnie Paul Abbott, Pantera reformed in 2022 with original vocalist Phil Anselmo and bassist Rex, plus the addition of guitarist Zakk Wylde (Ozzy Osbourne, Black Label Society, Zakk Sabbath), and drummer Charlie Benante (Anthrax, S.O.D.).
Many rabid, diehard Pantera fans weren’t impressed, because to them, there was no Pantera without the Abbotts. Nonetheless, Pantera has been touring solidly since, drawing huge crowds, many of those in attendance happy to get a chance to see the band for the first time.
My wife bought us tickets to the show. I was overly-under-moderately-enthused. Since COVID, the idea of being enmeshed in large groups of people had lost any remaining shred of luster for me. Lugging through the heat and mass of stinky humanity to sit in the nosebleed seats and possibly deal with shit sound for this show didn’t fill me with much excitement. I was, I guess, tentatively curious. I knew Metallica was notorious for a great show. But they were also notorious for playing over two hours, which sounded like torture to me. Sitting down was going to help, but I was definitely apprehensive.
As the day approached, I grew less enthusiastic about having to weather the whole experience. But then, I tend to do this about all sorts of things. I don’t like going out too much, almost exclusively preferring to be alone and/or at home. I even had my standard freakout during which I acted like an ass, before resigning myself to the show, and apologizing for being a tool.
We Ubered to NRG early last night, taking the long walk from the Yellow Lot, rideshare drop-off point to the stadium (just over a mile’s walk). The weather was muggy, but not too terribly hot. We reached our seats way up in the nosiest of bleeds right in the middle of Pantera’s set. We’d missed Suicidal altogether, which sucked, because we’d both hoped to see them. And it sucked even more that we missed about half the Pantera set. The set times posted online were bullshit, and we left the house way too late. They were in the middle of This Love as we took our seats. They sounded solid, which was a surprise, and with the giant Metallica stage and lighting setup, it was a great show, even from our distant viewpoint.
The band blazed through a selection of songs from “Vulgar Display of Power,” plus the title track from “Cowboys From Hell,” plus a couple of other tunes, and then they were done. I was impressed with how well their set worked live as opposed to many of the videos I’d seen from previous reformed shows. Wylde’s propensity for the widdily-widdily shredder shenanigans that tend to drag him into heavy wankery territory always sounded a bit too loose and runny for the precise and massive demand of filling Dimebag’s shoes. But live, it worked just fine. The sound was a bit muddled, but I was prepared for that.
After a short intermission, Metallica took the stage with Creeping Death. It was immediately apparent that this was their show. They sounded massive. Everything was just a bit better, clearer, and heavier. It wasn’t pristine, but for a stadium, it was very good. The stage sat in the middle of the playing field, in a full circle, with outposts housing effects pedals and microphone stands placed around the perimeter where the band would take position. The inner part of the ring (the Snakepit, as it’s dorkily called) was filled with people, as was the remaining floorspace around the outer stage. The stadium seating was almost entirely packed all the way up to our dizzying level.
Surrounding the stage were 8 massive tower structures topped with canister-shaped light, sound, and video rigs. Each tower was covered in 360 degree high-definition digital screens which showed footage from the show, as well as orchestrated film clips and little artistic videos styled and produced for each song. Curving out from these like beer mug handles were huge rows of massive speakers, through which the sound was projected (also in 360 degrees), in a way that filled the building with surprisingly crisp sound. There was definitely some echo from the music bouncing around the stadium, but it was nowhere near as tortuous as other large shows I’ve seen.
I found out this morning that the show broke the attendance record for concerts at NRG. Over 75,000 people attended, which is insane. The band was fantastic, playing a mix of songs from most of their albums, while kindly leaving out their worst material. Only one song, a track from from “72 Seasons,” brought the energy down, and even then it was negligible. Guitarist and vocalist James Hetfield even made a crack after the song, thanking the crowd for sitting through it.
The production was spot on. There were pyrotechnics that shot forth from spots along the circumference of the giant, round stage. They were used strategically, never going into numbing overkill. I was acutely aware of the pacing, noting how well the set flowed. Two hours is a long time for a single band to play, but it never dragged. I was actually surprised when they closed the set, thinking there were more songs coming. They closed with “Enter Sandman” their biggest hit, which got even the youngest kids around us to their feet, pumping their fists.
The only part of the show that sucked was after it was over. We joined the mass of folks working their way down the huge ramps on the side of the stadium. It went smoothly until we got closer to the ground level. As the lower levels joined the crowd, it began to back up. Suddenly it was stifling. Hot and extremely muggy, after days of heavy rain, we were now stuck ass-to-balls with a suffocating mass of sweaty, and horrendously stinky, humanity. I told my wife that it smelled like someone had a paint can of concentrated ball sweat, and was regularly dipping a brush into the syrupy muck and swiping it repeatedly under my nose. It was fucking terrible. I had a strong urge, which I miraculously resisted, to shout out, “Wash your fucking balls next time!” Had I been drunk, it might have gone another way.
The relief at reaching the bottom of the ramp was palpable, but temporary. Form there it was a full-on Bataan Death March back to the rideshare waiting area over a mile away. We arrived at the spot, drenched, and joined a throng of probably over a thousand people. The wait times for a ride were long, and the prices were outrageous. The ride to the venue was something like $36. The ride home, once it finally arrived after almost an hour, was around $100.
As we waited, I tried to lean against a barricade placed to keep folks from walking into the road. The damn thing kept swaying back and forth, however, because a loud, obnoxious, drunk lady was leaning all her weight against it. By this point we were both soaked, sticky, sore, and pretty over it.
Enjoying some permanent nerve damage following a couple of delightful hernia repairs years ago, the top of my left thigh is perpetually numb. I can run the tip of a pencil down that area and not feel it. And then, if I stand on it for too long, it begins to tingle and then burn. And it fucking sucks. The only relief is to sit down, or stretch it out.
I stood alongside my wife and stretched my leg as best as I could. Suddenly there was a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to see a middle-aged woman with a concerned look on her face looking up at me.
“Excuse me, sir,” she said, a note of care in her voice, “would you like to sit?”
The woman gestured to the base of a streetlight she had been sitting on. Man, I wanted that spot.
“Oh no, thank you so much, though,” I said, hating myself for being so polite all the damn time.
I hated the woman even more. How dare she see me as some sort of invalid old man, unable to stand for any stretch of time? Was she trying to be a good Samaritan by saving the faltering flame of a pathetic old soul, one foot in the grave, the other attached to a dead leg? I wouldn’t have taken that seat if it was going to save my life. I wanted to. Badly. But I would have preferred to chew off my bad leg then cave in to the implication of my physical downfall.
Tired of the trickling flow of rideshare cars making it through the traffic jam at the entrance to our lot, we hoofed it out onto Main Street and hunted down our ride.
The blast of cold air that met us as we took our seats in the Uber was orgasmic. Our driver appeared to us as an angel, an angel who’s accent was so heavy, neither of us understood a word he said. But it didn’t matter, because he’d clearly dropped down from heaven to rescue us from the steaming miasma of ballsweat-soaked humanity, to deliver us safely to our bullet-riddled refuge in the ghetto.
I told myself that I wouldn’t act like an asshole if I ended up really enjoying the show. I really enjoyed the show. And I acted like an asshole after it was over. I was giddy, even waking up my poor son just to tell him how great it was, as if this newsflash couldn’t wait.
I slept like the dead, waking up obscenely late, feeling like I’d been broadsided by a train. My eyes were gummy from expelling all the sweat they’d soaked up. I was sore. My throat was parched from screaming like an idiot, and then chain smoking after it was over. I felt every bit like I was 56, because I am.
I sat on the couch, still exhausted, and I remarked to my wife, “How the fuck do those men, who are all older than I am, do this every fucking night for over two hours?”
“I know,” she said, “I thought the same thing.”
And that’s when it all came out.
I’ve been seeing concerts since the early ‘80s. Combined, I’ve both seen and played hundreds of shows in my life. I’ve always loved live music. And yet, over the years, the luster for live music has waned considerably. I’m tired, for one. And I’ve suffered hearing damage, for another. I have constant tinnitus. Sometimes it’s roaring. It also literally hurts to stand in one place for longer than 30 minutes, thanks to my bunk leg. The day after a concert finds me utterly drained. It’s a combination of being older, and having all of my senses overwhelmed. As an introvert, the noise and activity and large group of people leaves me depleted. Over the years it’s taken me longer and longer to recover from shows.
Playing shows is even worse, for all of the same reasons. Plus, it takes real work to play a show, because you have to move all the band’s gear yourself (unless you’re, you know, Metallica). If it’s hot, prepare to be soaked for hours. If the show is well-attended, and there is any excitement among those present, all of that takes a toll on me too. I try to put all I can into my shows. Once we’re done playing, I am sometimes close to passing out. I often need to go somewhere away from everyone and just sit in silence (ear roaring silence). The following day is usually a total wash. It’s similar to the last day or two of a bad flu.
I understand that being a millionaire tremendously helps Metallica enjoy their longevity. As does having a full crew to do all the setup and breakdown, as well as an entire system and staff in place to take care of every need. I also understand that there is a ton of pressure to perform every night at a high level, even when you aren’t feeling it at all. Most bands can’t survive that level of pressure for long. And among those that do, there remains only one Metallica. No one else comes close to their scale and scope right now, and that’s impressive. Especially seeing as they are approaching retirement age.
What surprised me was how taken aback I was at how much the show affected me on an emotional level. I didn’t expect that. It was surprisingly moving to revisit the band I’d seen over 30 years prior, and to love their show as much as I did back then, given all the water that had run under all of our bridges. It meant something special to be a part of it, albeit a minuscule part, but still to be able to be present to witness the same band I’d loved so much still going strong, making millions of people’s lives around the world a little bit better. The older I get, the more these things mean to me. Goddamn it, I almost cried a couple of times. I love being alive, and that includes all of the pain and struggle. I’d do it all again if I could. And I’d love every second of it. And I’m glad to know guys like Metallica are still out there doing what they love and doing it as well as anyone, if not better.
But don’t get me wrong. I still hate that fucking “Death Magnetic.” I don’t think there are enough years left to enjoy that damn thing. Jesus.