HAMBURG, GERMANY — The pre-concert VIP tour of Metallica‘s M72 stadium staging is something of a show in itself.
A few hours before the first of two “no repeat” weekend Metallica concerts — where the band plays different songs every night — on May 26, Jon-Michael Marino, a member of the band’s management team is walking the floor of the Volksparkstadion. It is set up for the band’s performance with a giant ring-shaped stage, the center of which will be a fan-filled “Snake Pit,” and eight monolithic towers of monitors and speakers. Each of the towers is anchored by a raised platform that doubles as VIP seating, with eight folding chairs decorated with the black-and-yellow color scheme of the band’s new album, 72 Seasons.
The platforms are needed to anchor the towers — which weigh in at 11 tons without the bases, Marino says — so the band’s team figured they might as well put seats there, too. For a fee of $7,272 — the price a deliberate echo of the album title — fans can reserve the entire platform for both nights, complete with a cooler full of drinks and some other bonuses, as what the band calls an “enhanced experience.” The platforms are about half as high as the stage, so “you’re right in front of them,” Marino says, meaning the band. “You feel like maybe you should put your phone away.”
The tour he’s giving is normally another enhanced experience – there are a half-dozen in all that range from $300 to thousands — and it’s filled with both these kinds of over-the-top statistics (each concert uses more than 500 speakers, 192 audio inputs so the band can roam the ring-shaped stage, and the biggest PA system ever designed for a tour) as well as examples of how the band’s management and touring teams have made logistical challenges work as a business. (Live Nation is promoting the entire tour, which will run until November and then from May to September 2024.) Playing in the round means no dead seats — an advantage in both aesthetic and economic terms – but it can also be ruinously expensive, especially with the kind of scale on which Metallica operates.
“We try to do something a little different every time we go out,” says Cliff Burnstein, co-founder of the management Q Prime, which has managed Metallica for decades. Metallica has already done arena tours in the round, so it wanted to try doing the same thing in stadiums. But the band’s team felt that the normal setup – a circular stage in the center of a football field, would create too much distance between the group and its audience.
“I was that kid who used to sit in the last row, so I thought, how do you make this better,” remembers Dan Braun, the band’s creative director and scenic and production designer. (Braun, who has worked for the band for three decades jokes he “grew up in that hotbed of the entertainment business: Milwaukee, Wisconsin.”) “You move the stage closer to the crowd” — hence the ring, which has fans inside and out – “and you create twice as many front-row seats.”
That requires a production that travels in 87 trucks — 45 for the band and its setup, plus two groups of 21 each for the steel stage and towers. Loading in and building the stage and towers takes several days, so while the band uses one setup, the other leapfrogs it to the next city on the tour. (There are 130 people in the band’s crew along, plus 40 steelworkers, local hires and truck drivers.)
The load-in is so complicated and expensive that it creates an incentive to play two shows in each venue. “Playing a stadium is so expensive production-wise,” Burnstein says. “The value of doing two shows is there’s only one set-up and load-out, so we’re basically partnering with ourselves to lower the cost.”
Doing pairs of concerts in each city with a pledge to not repeat the same songs, an idea Braun says came from frontman James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, encourages fans to see both shows. “We know from past experience that people will travel for a Metallica show,” Burnstein says — and many fans seem just as interested in traveling for two. (The Hamburg show was packed with fans who would be back two days later, and a few planned to see the band in Munich next year.) Since the band will only play 22 cities in 2023 and 2024, many fans will have to come to them.
At first, the band only sold tickets to both shows together, for about 20% less than it would cost to buy both separately, and Burnstein says that between 80% and 90% of fans at each concert will attend both shows. (Fans who want more can buy one of the band’s “I Disappear” passes, different versions of which allow entry to all the shows the band plays on one continent for a year, two continents for a year, or two continents for two years.)
“A Metallica show is half-band and half-audience,” says Braun, who has thought a lot about how the group and the crowd amplifies one another’s energy. “If the band has a better experience, it’s better for the audience. If the audience has a great experience, it’s better for the band. Anything that gets in the way of that is bad.” To him, the key to the production isn’t the scale but the way it can bring fans closer to the action – to give a stadium the immediacy of a smaller room. “I like to challenge the cliches of Metallica,” which he describes as not just a great metal group but a great rock band. “They’re great entertainment,” he says. “The object is to give them the best platform to interact.”
There’s also a desire to make the show memorable — in this case, enough to see twice. “Once you raise the bar to where it is, how do you keep doing better,” says John Zajonc, known as Lug, who has worked for the band on and off for three decades and helps run the tour logistics. “The scale is massive.”
