“Fucking asshole”: The 1980s band Metallica accused of deliberately sabotaging them on tour
Metallica were pretty much the anti-version of everything when they first began playing their metal classics.
There had been metal music well before they hit the scene at the time, but even by the standards of bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, no one knew what to make of the kind of band that played fast, loud and unapologetically to anyone within earshot. This was the dawn of a new age of rock and roll, but that didn’t mean that everyone in the old guard got the approval from the thrash heavyweights.
If anything, the fact that glam metal was making the rounds at the time was enough to fill James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich with anger. The Los Angeles rock and roll scene was already becoming a cesspool of wannabes who figured they didn’t need much more than a bit of lipstick and hairspray to be famous, so Hetfield figured that he was going to be the antithesis of that as a frontman.
Even when listening to some of the audio from their shows at the time, Hetfield would say repeatedly that if someone came to see spandex and people singing ‘baby baby baby’ on every song, they certainly picked the wrong venue to show up at. Metallica were into making songs that were as ferocious as punk and as scary as Black Sabbath, but that didn’t stop them from getting thrown onto the same bills as bands like Bon Jovi when they hit the massive festival circuit.
They were clearly good enough to be headlining by the time they hit And Justice For All, but since they refused to make a video until they finally released ‘One’, there was no way that they were going to be picked over everyone’s favourite New Jersey native. Jon Bon Jovi was the darling of television at the time, but when they were billed on the Monsters of Rock festival with them, Hetfield remembered that their entire set seemed to be hijacked the minute that Bon Jovi turned up.
He wasn’t even on the grounds at that point, but when Metallica hit the stage, Bon Jovi decided to be flown in on a commercial jet right above the festival grounds. Call it a case of extraordinarily bad timing if you want, but given that Bon Jovi was one of the almighty kings of hair metal from the other side of the country, Hetfield was absolutely fuming when he figured out that he was the one behind stealing Metallica’s thunder.
When talking about the stunt after the fact, Hetfield could be heard cursing Bon Jovi’s name backstage, saying, “Fucking asshole! He deliberately tried to fuck up our set.” While Bon Jovi had always emphasised that he would never want to jeopardise someone else’s performance, that didn’t stop Hetfield from adding a certain message to his guitar when he came out the next few nights, saying ‘KILL BON JOVI’.
But even if the New Jersey heartthrobs had the last laugh there, Metallica were about to go far beyond anything that even they could have envisioned. Getting Bon Jovi’s producer for The Black Album already gave them a shot in the arm, but the fact that they became one of the biggest bands in the world and even managed to survive the grunge wave was a lot more respectable than Bon Jovi having discussions with his stylists telling them to make him look as much like Nirvana as possible.
The tides were already turning by getting a band like Metallica on the bill, but even if Hetfield was pissed off that day, he didn’t need to worry about getting outmatched by a band like them. They let their music do the talking half the time, and while they didn’t have the massive choruses yet, it was better for them to give an entire arena the beating of a lifetime when they hit the stage.
