S.F. shows set for Metallica’s ‘big 40’ party
Metallica will celebrate its 40th anniversary with a pair of hometown shows for its fan club members, scheduled to take place Dec. 17 and 19 at San Francisco’s Chase Center.
Each night will feature a different set list, and tickets will be available for sale only to registered members of Metallica’s Fifth Member fan club through a lottery system.
The shows, which mark the first time the band has returned to the home of the Golden State Warriors since performing with the San Francisco Symphony at its grand opening in September 2019, will be part of a fourday weekend honoring Metallica’s 40th year as a band.
The band will also curate a series of live music and comedy events around the concerts, as well as tastings of its signature Blackened Whiskey.
“As hard as it is to believe, the band will be turning the big 40 this October,” Metallica said in a statement. “It’s a wild thing to wrap our heads around. … It feels like just yesterday that we were hitting the stage playing our first show at Radio City in Anaheim, CA, in the spring of 1982!”
The band was formed in Los Angeles by lead singer and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich on Oct. 28, 1981, before moving to the Bay Area to record its 1983 debut album, “Kill ’Em All,” with lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Cliff Burton joining the lineup. Burton died in a bus crash in 1986.
The band has since released 10 studio recordings and sold more than 125 million albums worldwide, becoming one of the most commercially successful bands of all time.
“Many things have happened since Lars and James got together in the fall of ’81 … almost 2,000 live shows across seven continents, mindblowing successes and crazy offroad adventures,” the statement continued. “It’s been a nutty ride and even though most of the time it feels like we’re just getting started, we’re excited to celebrate the past four decades with you.”
Metallica is also celebrating the 30th anniversary of its 1991 selftitled fifth album, known as “The Black Album,” this year with a box set that includes a remastered version of the Bay Area band’s first No. 1 charting release in multiple formats, including a selection of live recordings and DVDs, hardcover book, lyric sheets and various other ephemera from the blockbuster era.
The new offerings are expected to be released through the band’s Blackened Recordings label on Sept. 10, along with a 53track tribute set titled “The Metallica Blacklist” that features covers of songs from “The Black Album” by a wideranging group of artists including indie rockers St. Vincent, Phoebe Bridgers and Mac DeMarco, jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington, reggaeton
singer J. Balvin and many others.
In addition to the Chase Center concerts, Metallica is scheduled to headline two nights of the Aftershock festival in Sacramento, which runs Oct. 710.
The group had planned to headline five hard rock music festivals in 2020, the only live dates the metal icons were scheduled to play last year. Before the pandemic, the Bay Area rock band canceled two of those appearances to allow Hetfield to continue treatment following a stint in rehab.
For more information on tickets to the anniversary shows, go to www.metallica.com.