MetALiCCa

I saw Metallica’s second orchestral collaboration, S&M 2, on Wednesday night at the movie theater, and enjoyed about half of it:  the half corresponding to their material from 1983 to 1991, which was the beginning and the end of the show.  It occurred to me that Metallica has indulged in a few affectations over the years.   These are represented by the A, L, C and C uppercase.

Acoustic.   I got their Helping Hands album recorded earlier this year.  Of 12 songs, a full third, 4, were covers:  “When A Blind Man Cries” (Deep Purple), “Please Don’t Judas Me” (Nazareth), “Turn the Page” (Bob Seger), and “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” (Blue Oyster Cult).  The remaining songs were “Disposable Heroes”, “The Unforgiven III”, “Bleeding Me”, “Nothing Else Matters”, “All Within My Hands”, “Enter Sandman”, “The Four Horsemen”, and “Hardwired”.

I’m getting really fed up with acoustic albums, and I think we can blame Tesla, a band I’d otherwise be praising, for this thanks to their Five Man Acoustical Jam. 

My assessment is that if a song was originally electric it will not sound any better as an acoustic song. 

I suppose I should distinguish songs which were acoustic from the beginning, and metal bands are surprisingly competent at doing so.   That being the case, their electric songs still work better in their original format than pretentiously reduced to acoustic parameters.   When it comes to bands’ ability to write original material in the acoustic format, I give Alice in Chains & Jerry Cantrell the top honors, with SAP and Jar of Flies being superlative.  Everyone else should stick to electric.

Here’s an idea: instead of this acoustic crap, how about taking songs which were originally acoustic and make electric, heavy versions of those?   Go for it! 

Live.  Actually, I can’t really call live albums an affectation.   For that reason I’ll give them a pass on that.  In fact, I’ll give them credit:  they’re releasing all of their shows from the most recent tour as live albums, not just a single live album per tour.  They haven’t matched their San Francisco comrades the Grateful Dead policy of playing a different set each night; their sets are about 80% identical night by night with 2-3 slots as wildcards.  [Dead & Company, the current incarnation of Jerry Garcia’s classic band, are also releasing all shows on MP3 and CD, as Metallica are.]  I picked up the May 2017 show at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, which is the show my brother and I saw for the Hardwired tour.  Of course I already had Live Shit: Binge & Purge, recorded on the Black Album tour. 

More recently, they have Live at Grimey’s, which is setlist heavy on older tunes – “Fuel” being the only one from later than Metallica.  In fact, it’s excellent enough to warrant sharing:  “No Remorse”, “Fuel”, “Harvester of Sorrow”, “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, “Master of Puppets”, “Sad But True”, “Motorbreath”, and “Seek and Destroy”.  THREE songs from Kill ‘Em All!  This show was the night before their Bonnaroo show in 2008, which itself was a remarkable set:  

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/metallica/2008/great-stage-park-manchester-tn-53d6dfc9.html.  Sadly, only one track from that show (“Sad But True”) made it to recording.  We’ll have to enjoy the Grimey’s set instead…

Covers.  Yet again, comrades Tesla did this with Real To Reel, but they did this clever thing of releasing the first disc normally with the second disc picked up on the tour, which of course I attended (fall 2007).  I actually got Frank Hannon, who had been running the concession stand at the Ram’s Head Live at that show (aside from actually performing) to sign my CD insert – after he gave me disc 2.

Anyhow.   Metallica has been doing covers for awhile, and its Garage Inc did a remarkable job of a full new disc (#1) and compiling previous covers on Disc 2.  That’s in addition to the Garage Days Re-Revisited EP, the first endeavor with bassist Jason Newsted.   

Classical.  It’s now been twenty years since Metallica’s first classical collaboration, S&M, which gave us “No Leaf Clover”.  I have it on CD and have listened to it a few times.  At that time ReLoad was the most recent album, so of 21 songs, 7 were from Load and ReLoad, or one third. 

Now there’s S&M 2, twenty years after the first S&M show, a live show with an orchestra backing them up.  They’ll be adding another night, 10/30, on which you can see them in a local movie theater.  I would imagine when the run is over, the soundtrack (DVD/CD/MP3) will be available.  

Here’s what prompted me to do this blog, because I came to two conclusions based on this, one specific to Metallica and the other more general.

Metallica.   I liked Hardwired when it came out, considering it a change from the prior albums, which is to say Load, ReLoad, St Anger, and Death Magnetic, a series I’ll refer to as the Loadwired albums.  However, when it came to the middle of this set of S&M 2, I realized something.  After “For Whom The Bell Tolls”, the band plays nine Loadwired songs, including three (“Confusion”, “Moth into Flame”, and “Halo on Fire”) from Hardwired, before returning to “Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth)” in set 2.  All nine sounded equally “meh” to me.  Now, “meh” for Metallica isn’t crap, manure, commercial, or unendurable, but with so many other awesome songs on Kill ‘Em All through Metallica, I could do without any of the Loadwired songs taking up place in the set. 

And I could not aesthetically distinguish the three from Hardwired from the other six of that era.  That being the case, Metallica (aka the Black Album), is the cutoff point for the material I’m going to listen to on a regular basis and enjoy.  The Loadwired stuff is to be endured periodically and far less often, and I do have all of it on CD. 

On the other hand, some people arbitrarily stick with the Cliff Burton material, meaning you have only three albums to choose from – Kill ‘Em All, Ride the Lightning, and Master of Puppets.  It also means you’re going to miss the 9 excellent songs from …And Justice For All and twelve of Metallica.  This includes “One”.  Because you’re too pissy about “The Unforgiven” and “Nothing Else Matters”, you’ll also miss out on “Harvester of Sorrow” and “Sad But True”. 

Hey, it’s your loss.

General.  The more I hear these live albums where a band performs its material with an orchestra, the more I consider these to be an affectation. 

For songs I already liked, the orchestra really doesn’t add much more.  And for songs – like those Loadwired songs – which I never cared for to begin with, the orchestra doesn’t turn it into a song I now like. 

Let’s go a step further and briefly address bands releasing original classical music of their own (which disqualifies ELP’s Pictures at an Exhibition, by Modest Mussorgsky).

Atom Heart Mother.  I love this Pink Floyd album, although the band itself doesn’t.  Gilmour has been playing “Fat Old Sun” in his solo sets these days, and Waters has been playing “If”, but that’s side two, isn’t it?  And we all love Wright’s contribution, “Summer ‘68”.   I suppose we should say it’s the “Atom Heart Mother Suite” which takes up all of side A that the band really detests as overindulgent and pretentious, but I listen to the album in its entirety on a regular basis.  Hell, the album cover alone, with the cow, is distinctive and noteworthy. 

Deep Purple can claim the distinction of Concerto for Group and Orchestra, from September 1969, not only the first musical operation of Deep Purple Mark II which had finally formed that summer – Rod Evans and Nick Simper shown the door, and Ian Gillan and Roger Glover finally abandoning Episode Six and joining up – but also one of the first rock & orchestra collaborations.  Mind you, this wasn’t Deep Purple’s regular material – which at that point would have been exclusively Mark I material anyway – but original classical music written by keyboardist Jon Lord expressly for this project.  I have it on DVD and watched it once.  Blackmore plays his red ES335.  It’s done at the Royal Albert Hall.  It was interesting but hardly had me compelled to watch it again.

Days of Future Passed.  The Moody Blues album deserves credit as well, and predates Concerto by two years (1967).  In this case the orchestra was real – the London Festival Orchestra – but the material was expressly written and recorded with the orchestra ab initio.  And this is an album I’ll listen to far more often than Concerto.  The Blues themselves have played the album live in its entirety fairly recently (2017) with the full orchestra.  I can venture to say that Concerto didn’t get a repeat performance, and with Jon Lord resting in peace and the rest of the band close to packing it in, isn’t likely to in the near future.

How did we get to Atom Heart Mother and Days of Future Passed from Metallica???  Classical music, two S&M performances.  Given that we know Metallica has no objection to playing covers, perhaps S&M 3 should add in Floyd and the Moody Blues.  Think about it, guys….

*****

People seem to love hating on Metallica, and I find about 50% of the crap to be justified.  But for all my dozing off during the Loadwired material, I certainly came back when “Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth)” resumed a set section I knew would be exclusively older material.  Now let me sit back and enjoy the Grimey’s show….