Metallica have reissued Load with a 2025 remastering, which really makes an audible improvement on songs “Ain’t My Bitch”, “Until It Sleeps”, “King Nothing”, “Hero of the Day”, “House That Jack Built”, and the biggest sonic upgrades on “Bleeding Me” and “Mama Said”. Check it out here while James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett discuss Metallica’s Load thirtieth anniversary with me In the Studio.
“He nicknamed me ‘Dr. No’ ,” chuckles Metallica lead singer/songwriter James Hetfield, regarding their early recording collaboration with producer Bob Rock. “Every suggestion he made I’d say ‘No’. Over time we learned to think about his suggestions…”.
“And then say ‘No’,” deadpans Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett with a comedic rimshot. After the superstar-making 1991 “Black Album”, it took five long years for the members of Metallica to catch their collective breath sufficiently to venture a follow-up, Load, in June 1996. Even pre-internet widespread use, the response in popularity and the attendant responsibilities to be available to a voracious worldwide fanbase left precious little time for writing and recording new Metallica music.
After almost a decade of struggle, capturing Metallica’s heavy metal sonic fury in the studio had eluded them. The tragic death of original bass player Cliff Burton, and being rock’s maladjusted poster children had made Metallica insular, and for good reason. Of course, selling an unbelievable 16 million U.S. copies of their first attempt working with hard rock veteran producer Bob Rock on 1991’s phenomenal “Black Album” raised even the notoriously obstinate band’s confidence level to Def Con 4 for the follow up, Load in June 1996. Hear all about it here in a refreshingly honest interview with Hetfield and Hammett while you jam at lease-breaking levels. –Redbeard
When the Super Bowl was played in San Francisco in February 2016, hometown Bay Area hard rock heroes Metallica were the obvious choice for the event’s high-profile midpoint entertainment slot…except the Load they were bringing was deemed “too heavy for halftime” by the NFL. So Metallica staged their own free concert the night before in Golden Gate Park in front of a quarter million fans while performing this version of “King Nothing”. No admission price, no abbreviated setlist, and thank God no dancers!
Don’t mis James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett delivering a full Load next week here In the Studio to mark the thirtieth anniversary of that Metallica multi-million seller. –Redbeard
In 1980, the Canadian rockers Loverboy went from the throwaway pile outside my office door to the #13-selling album on Billboard Album Chart, no thanks to one of the all-time worst album covers ever. Reportedly a self-portrait Polaroid of the graphic artist hired to lay out the album cover, it could be the least representative of the straight ahead rock music inside since John Hiatt‘s debut, where he looked like a cadaver.
Simply titled Loverboy, their American debut in October 1980 suffered from an almost fatal album cover and virtually no promotion, but working late one night in my ROCK 103 Memphis office, I found that first Loverboy album in a throwaway pile and stumbled onto “Turn Me Loose” and “The Kid is Hot Tonight”, easy one-listen obvious hits. So when their sophomore effort Get Lucky came out in Fall 1981, these Canadian rockers were the right band at the right time.
The first time we saw them around Thanksgiving ’81 live at the Memphis Orpheum Theater opening for Point Blank, Loverboy started their tightly rehearsed set with a great song about “…everybody’s workin’ for the weekend…”. But this great song which they had just performed had not appeared on that first release. Bewildered, I rushed backstage immediately after their set to inquire,”What was that great song you opened with?” And who then could have possibly imagined that, over thirty years and 4,000,000 copies later, “Working for the Weekend” would be the soundtrack to the popular Radio Shack Super Bowl tv ads a few years back, seen and heard by over 100 million? North American rock radio was waiting in anticipation for it, along with “When It’s Over”, “Jump” co-written by fellow countryman Bryan Adams, “Gangs in the Street”, and “Take Me to the Top”. Get Lucky by Loverboy also was highly significant for its produced sound, which had a huge presence that really cut through on the radio, and it wasn’t long before the bands who would define Eighties rock including Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, and Metallica were all making the pilgrimmage to Vancouver’s Little Mountain Studio to work with Loverboy’s studio brain trust, producer the late Bruce Fairbairn and engineer Bob Rock, who themselves had been musicians in Prism and The Payolas, respectively. Lead singer Mike Reno and guitarist Paul Dean recall how nice guys don’t necessarily finish last in this In The Studio classic rock interview. –Redbeard
My rare Malcolm Young interview from the In the Studio archive will be certain to give you even more insight into the gut-wrenching circumstances which precipitated the making of “Hell’s Bells”, “Shoot to Thrill”, “You Shook Me All Night Long”, “…Money Honey”, “Have a Drink on Me”, and “Back in Black” as Angus Young and Brian Johnson host AC/DC’s forty-fifth anniversary of the world-wide phenomenon Back in Black with me here In the Studio. Just how phenomenal is it? 27,000,000 copies in America. And that’s not a typo.
The Back in Black AC/DC secret has now been revealed, but until the In the Studio series of exclusive classic rock interviews, you didn’t find it in the myriad of magazine articles, online biographies, books, and fan sites dedicated to the band. Sure, you’d see tons of photos and references to lead guitarist Angus Young’s frenetic stage energy while performing in his schoolboy short pants. But understand this: AC/DC was always his big brother Malcolm Young ‘s band. My initial hunch that this was true came during my first classic rock interview with the band, as Angus, singer Brian Johnson, and I were discussing the breakthrough albumHighway to Hell (the last with colorful ruffian singer Bon Scott, who died of alcohol poisoning shortly after) and the follow-up with Brian singing,Back in Black. Numerous times during the conversation, both Angus and Brian alluded to what Angus’s older brother, rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young, thought, said, or did. It became increasingly apparent as the stories unfolded that, musically and inspirationally, Malcolm Young was to whom the others in AC/DC looked. Angus Young may have been chosen early on to be the focal point of AC/DC, but big brother Malcolm was always the heart and soul of this band, becoming even more so after the death of Bon Scott in 1980. (That’s a young Young: Malcolm left, then Atlantic Records promo veteran Michael Prince center, and even younger brother Angus Young, right)
So a few years later when another AC/DC interview opportunity arose, I insisted that Malcolm be included, and my hunch was quickly confirmed. Malcolm was plain-spoken, unpretentious, wise, and doggedly determined. And while the excellent biographers at AllMusic.com correctly note that AC/DC’s popularity and sales waned from the mid-1980s through the end of the decade, they fail to grasp why: Malcolm’s drinking had increased to a debilitating point whereby it was affecting not only his health but his creative leadership of the band, and Mal wisely took a leave of absence for over two years. So it was then no coincidence, when a clean and sober Malcolm Young rejoined AC/DC for 1990’s The Razor’s Edge, that it became the quintet’s biggest seller and best-reviewed album since Back in Black a decade earlier.
Notably, like AC/DC Back in Black released in late July 1980, several of the best-selling hard rock albums in history also have been made under the most dire of circumstances amidst tremendous tragedy and loss:
Deep Purple Machine Head – lost their reserved recording studio to a massive fire the night before they were to begin. Result: one of the quintessential hard rock albums of all time.
Def Leppard Hysteria – lost their key man producer; lost their way in the studio; drummer lost his arm in a car crash. Result: 25 million copies sold worldwide.
Whitesnake (’87) – bandleader David Coverdale lost his voice; lost his band; lost $3 million making it. Result: estimated 9.5 million copies sold.
Metallica Metallica (Black Album) – band lost their bass player in a Swedish tour bus rollover crash. Result: 16.5 million copies sold in the US.
We are saddened that AC/DC co-founder Malcolm Young has passed after a long bout with dementia. Nevertheless, it always was Malcolm’s band. The most popular selling rock album ever, AC/DC Back in Black marked its forty-fifth anniversary with a massive North American tour and a stop here In the Studio for Angus Young and Brian Johnson. –Redbeard
Like so many bands, Metallica wisely emerged from the pandemic lockdown on live concert performances with a much scaled-down pop up appearance in the 400-capacity San Francisco club. The combination of the mutual thrill of being back after eighteen months playing in front of rabid fans, coupled with the superior acoustics of a purpose-built small hall, resulted in quite a historic show. Here is “Fade to Black” from that Metallica show. –Redbeard
To put this musical monster into historical context, since its August 1991 release Metallica (affectionately known as “The Black Album” in the same way The Beatles had been dubbed “The White Album”) has sold an estimated twenty-two million copies worldwide. That is several million copies more than either Sgt. Pepper’s… or Abbey Road by the Beatles, or any Led Zeppelin album. In this classic rock interview with Metallica’s lead singer/songwriter James Hetfield and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, we show how the band sits atop the family tree of hard rock/heavy metal evolution, which you can trace all the way back over fifty years to Deep Purple In Rock and the first Black Sabbath album. Like AC/DC’s Back in Black a decade before, Metallica’s “Black Album” is the hard rock collection for people who thought they didn’t like hard rock.
With writers at Rolling Stone magazine ranking it #252 on their Top 500 Albums of All Time, you would assume that Metallica (containing “Enter Sandman”,”The Unforgiven”,”Nothing Else Matters”,”Sad But True”) coasted unimpeded to this pinnacle, but quite the opposite is true.The traditional gatekeepers and kingmakers of rock respectability, including U.S. radio, the rock press, the Grammy Awards, and to a lesser extent MTV, all thought that by ignoring heavy metal that it would just go away. That conspiracy lasted a full twenty years. “Conspiracy, I like that,” chuckles Metallica frontman James Hetfield. “That’s pretty spot on,” agrees lead guitarist Kirk Hammett. “It resonates within a lot of people, heavy metal and aggressive music. People hear it and can relate instantly because it strikes an (emotional) chord within them that they can relate to . ..It takes them away in a way that they want to be taken.” –Redbeard
For the Super Bowl 50 halftime entertainment hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area, the NFL really fumbled the ball when they passed on homies Metallica as “too heavy for halftime”. So the band threw their own party the night before in Golden Gate Park, from where this terrific performance of “Wherever I May Roam” comes, shared just ahead of the “Black Album” thirtieth anniversary here In the Studio ! –Redbeard
More heavy metal history? Absolutely. The godfathers of hard rock Ozzy Osbourne, James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett of Metallica, Klaus Meine from Scorpions, David Coverdale from Deep Purple and Whitesnake, and Queensryche co-founders Geoff Tate and Chris Degarmo rip through some seminal hard rock including the late Ronnie James Dio fronting Black Sabbath on “Neon Knights”, “Queen of the Ryche”,”Rock You Like a Hurricane”, and Metallica’s defining “One”. Part two of two. –Redbeard
Metallica reminds us that the last time that San Francisco was involved in a Super Bowl was not as a team but as host to the landmark Super Bowl 50 in February 2016. As it was the fiftieth anniversary of that most American of worldwide exports, the Super Bowl, the site was carefully chosen by the NFL to be one of America’s finest regions, the San Francisco Bay area, a US metro with a long rich heritage of musical contributions and home to one of the world’s most popular bands, Metallica. And so who did the NFL secure to perform at halftime during this historic All-American sporting event, broadcast to over a billion viewers worldwide ? Coldplay, the finest innocuous British band money could buy. Granted, at the time the NFL was embroiled in a concussion conspiracy scandal, so booking the ultimate head-banging band might have been deemed not PC at the time. Actually, being branded too heavy for halftime at the Super Bowl that year played brilliantly into Metallica’s outlaw image: they decided to play the night before the Super Bowl in AT & T Park for a crowd even larger than that for the football game, and Metallica got to play for two hours in a thrash metal throwdown, neither of which would be possible in a Super Bowl halftime performance. Here is “Fuel” for your fire from that show.- Redbeard
Flashback to February 2016 and the fiftieth anniversary of that most American of worldwide exports, the Super Bowl, & the site was one of America’s finest regions, the San Francisco Bay area. And so who did the the NFL secure to perform at halftime during this historic All-American sporting event, broadcast to over a billion viewers worldwide from a US city with a long rich heritage of musical contributions? Coldplay, the finest innocuous British band money can buy. In the true spirit of rock marching to the beat of its own drummer (in this case the Olympian Lars Ulrich), San Francisco homies Metallica decided to play the night before the Super Bowl in AT & T Park for a crowd even larger than that for the football game, and they got to play for two hours in a thrash metal throwdown, neither of which would be possible in a Super Bowl halftime performance. Here is heavy rock absolution with “The Unforgiven“.- Redbeard
