MASTER OF SET LISTS
Drummer Ulrich hard wires a different song mix the day of each Metallica show as a safeguard ‘against ending up on autopilot’
In Metallica’s frenetic 1983 ode to headbanging, “Whiplash,” the band’s guitarist and lead singer, James Hetfield, barks, “We’ll never stop, we’ll never quit, ’cause we’re Metallica.” Somehow, across four decades marked by success but also death, addiction and at least one very public near-implosion, the band has kept its word.
This year, Metallica released its 11th full-length studio album, “72 Seasons.” Its debut LP, “Kill ’Em All,” also turned 40, just days before the quartet arrived in New Jersey for the first North American date on its M72 World Tour. Metallica isn’t the only band doing stadium tours even as its members pass 60 years old, but not every band also makes its bones slamming through songs that regularly top 190 beats per minute.
That tenacity was evident on an August night at Metlife Stadium as the tour touched down in East Rutherford. Drums pounded. Riffs chugged.
Solos melted the faces off an all-ages crowd of about 80,000, dressed almost exclusively in black.
But how does a band keep it fresh after, by drummer Lars Ulrich’s count, performing “Master of Puppets”
1,697 times onstage? The answer is by constantly “mixing it up,” said Ulrich, who creates the band’s set lists the day of each show — a “safeguard,” he added, “against ending up on autopilot.”
That may sound obvious, but it wasn’t always the case. “Thirty years ago, we took going out and executing a set really seriously,” Ulrich recently explained, when the goal was nailing everything “almost like in a robotic way.”
Metallica — which also features guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo — started fiddling with its encores and covers as its catalog kept growing. About 20 years ago, on the “St. Anger” tour, the group set an ambitious goal:
Never again play the same set list twice.
Dates on the M72 tour, which run through September 2024, are organized around “no repeat weekends,” featuring two shows in each city with two different lists and two different sets of opening acts. The stage is doughnut-shaped, with fans standing inside and out; the setup allows band members to face different parts of the crowd at different times, and it relies on four drum setups, creating multiple front rows.
“Mixing it up” with the set list itself is a surprisingly complex affair. Metallica productions go big, and the band’s elaborate program of pyrotechnics, lighting and interstitial audio-video, among other flourishes — the New Jersey show included a drop of dozens of giant black-and-yellow beach balls — has historically discouraged major changes to the list. Having four drum kits this time didn’t simplify things.
Eventually, the band developed what Ulrich called a “slot” system based on the band’s different “food groups” of songs, a reference to their feel and tempo.
Slot 1 (of 16) on the M72 tour, for example, will always be an uppermid-tempo fan favorite — Day 1 at Metlife, it was “Creeping Death” — that has a quickly recognizable opening riff, not too fast or complicated. But the songs in that slot will rotate. Slot 10 should always be a ballad, like “Nothing Else Matters.” The closer is always “Master of Puppets” or “Enter Sandman.”
Ulrich also keeps careful data about what song the band has played where, and tries to tailor the set list accordingly.
“At times, it turns into a science” he said recently. “We’re in Montreal now, and I’ll have all the info for the last 20 years that we’ve played Montreal in front of me. And I can put a set list together where the deeper cuts will not be repeated.”
Certain songs, like “Sandman,” “Puppets” and “One,” are in constant rotation. Ulrich said the band calls them the “toe-tapping favorites” — an odd, and perhaps
ironic, choice of words for songs better known for headbanging.
A lot of bands begin to mellow as they mature; by most accounts, that happened to Metallica more than three decades ago, enough time for the band to have since come full circle. Like the band’s two most recent albums, “72 Seasons” continues Metallica’s return to the thrash-metal style that defined its early years, and the tour supporting it has thus far followed suit: light on covers and ballads, heavy on the heavy. New shredders like “72 Seasons” and “Lux Aeterna” slot tightly into lists packed with thrash classics like “Seek & Destroy” (1983), “Battery” (1986) and “Blackened” (1988).
“‘Master of Puppets’ is actually the song we’ve played the most live,” said Ulrich. “It’s been a part of every tour since we released it. It got a significant, unexpected boost last year when it became part of the ‘Stranger Things’ finale. And who would’ve thought that a 37-year-old song that’s over 8 minutes long and is pretty heavy throughout would resonate in the way that it does with a new and younger generation of listeners? But how crazy cool is that?”