Metallica hit the stage for the first time on March 14, 1982, at Radio City in Anaheim, Calif. — with the original lineup of James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, future Megadeth founder Dave Mustaine on guitar and Ron McGovney on bass, playing covers of Diamond Head and Sweet Savage songs, as well as their own “Hit the Lights” and “Jump in the Fire.”
More than four decades later, the San Francisco Bay Area-based thrash metal troupe is still at it — arguably bigger and better than ever. “Playing shows was always the thing,” Hetfield said some years ago. “We wanted to make records, yeah — but when we first got together we just wanted to play, man, just get on stage and play.”
Mission accomplished, it’s safe to say. Metallica has toured the world many times to this point — and thanks to a 2013 performance in Antarctica, it is in fact the only band that’s played on all seven continents. It’s been a constant touring presence, too; 2001, when the group was searching for a new bass player, is the only year Metallica didn’t play any shows, and it’s mixed full-scale, multi-year world tours with lighter-but-still-significant concert runs.
Over the decades, the band has performed more than 1,600 times, moving from dive bars to stadiums and headlining at events such as Woodstock ’94, Monsters of Rock, Lollapalooza, OzzFest and more. As other members entered the lineup — guitarist Kirk Hammett (1983-present) and bassists Cliff Burton (1982-86), Jason Newsted (1986-2001) and, since 2001, Robert Trujillio — Metallica polished its performing craft to the point where it could even play shows alongside the San Francisco Symphony. Its stage productions have also become legendary; Metallica is the band that introduced the idea of the Snakepit, an in-stage fan area, and it’s made use of all manner of pyrotechnics and other visual effects, but never eclipsing what really brings fans to the shows — pulverizing, complex, epic music that makes heads bang, eardrums bleed and venue walls rattle.
“I don’t know if we could ever lose our edge because our music is a quality of our persons, our being,” Hammett explains. “It’s just very natural for us to sound the way we do. It flows like water. There’s never any shortage of really aggressive, edgy, energetic music from us, because that’s part of who we are as people. It’s not an affectation; it’s who we really are.”
Here’s our ranking of the group’s many long and sometimes strange road trips.
