Metallica’s Life Burns Faster Sphere Residency May Be Bigger Than Metallica

By Kory Grow

Kory Grow

Forget Sin City’s “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign. This past weekend, visitors should have been greeted with one that said, “Welcome to Planet Metallica.” Everywhere on the strip you’d see folks wearing black Metallica T-shirts — in casinos, on pool decks, even in the Venetian hotel’s gondolas. Tickets for the band’s Life Burns Faster residency at the city’s ginormous Sphere sold out quickly, so folks who managed to score tickets wanted to show off.

The band themselves called the Vegas residency a “takeover,” sort of a lifestyle-branded convention including special bars for fans, a giant pop-up store, and even a blood drive in addition to the concerts. And while Metallica and their fans have colonized cities with these sorts of events many times, this time felt different.

“I had this dream last night that we were playing the Sphere,” singer-guitarist James Hetfield told the crowd on Thursday. “It was so cool. This is like a dream come true and beyond. … After 45 years, there’s still a lot more fun to be had.”

Metallica have always striven to be the biggest band in the land, and the Sphere gave them their biggest production ever. The photos and video people have posted to Instagram do not do justice to what it actually feels like to have the group’s visuals literally surround you while they play. Sometimes it was disorienting. The virtual-reality–style roller coaster ride they created for “Wherever I May Roam” — which sped through New York, Hollywood, Stonehenge, and the Nashville record store Grimey’s — seemed so real I felt motion sickness. (“How many of you have already thrown up?” Hetfield asked the crowd at one point on Thursday.) And the moon-like orb that crashed down on the band during “Enter Sandman” on Saturday looked like a real Planet Metallica (complete with a spiky “M” on it) as it grew in size.

More than half a century has passed since Pink Floyd invented the larger-than-life concert spectacle, and Metallica may have perfected it at the Sphere. It was a joyous experience for the lucky thousands who got tickets, Jack White and Matthew McConaughey among them. “This is historical,” one fan proclaimed to the venue’s men’s room on Saturday. “It’s worth the price.”

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For the residency’s kickoff gigs, on Thursday and Saturday nights, the band played two unique set lists for what they’ve dubbed a “No Repeat Weekend,” drawing heavily from Master of Puppets, which turned 40 this year, and the Black Album. The 30 songs they played included their biggest hits (“Enter Sandman,” “One,” “Master of Puppets”), as well as a few numbers they rarely play — “Devil’s Dance,” off their recently reissued ReLoad and the 10-minute behemoth “… And Justice for All” — all to their fans’ delight. The band sounded excellent, too, performing each song with precision since they had to match the sound up to the visuals. Those computer generated scenes, in a weird way, became the true star of the event.

For once, fans in the nosebleeds were better positioned than those on the floor. On Saturday, one fan told me he had completely missed the expansive imagery of Metallica-branded flags that covered the screens all the way up to the top. During every song, you have to decide whether to watch the screen or squint down to see where Lars Ulrich’s drums are or if James Hetfield is kneeling. The band still put on a stadium-worthy performance, and sometimes the Sphere showed them on the screen, but largely, they provided a great soundtrack for sometimes astonishing visuals. “For modern technology and old guys playing loud music, this is pretty fucking awesome,” Hetfield commented on Thursday.

The imagery worked best when it played off the song. For the Ride the Lightning instrumental, “The Call of Ktulu,” they showed H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu monster climbing out of an ocean eventually transplanting him to the Vegas strip to wreak havoc. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” took Ernest Hemingway’s narrative about Spanish Civil War soldiers looking to the sky just before they die and literally showed a bombed-out church and the view from a fighter plane’s cockpit. The similarly war-themed “One” depicted soldiers marching until an explosion turned them into walking skeletons. And the ways they brought their album art to life (showing a prison riot around Lady Justice for … And Justice for All, placing fans in the electric chair for Ride the Lightning, and burying them under charred debris for 72 Seasons) felt immersive. (Fortuitously, they didn’t animate Load.)

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Not all of the visuals were so stunning, though. “Sad but True,” one of the band’s heaviest songs, merely got disembodied hands wielding hammers and men walking to accompany it. And “Orion,” an instrumental ostensibly about a badass mythic Greek giant, got a replica of regular concert truss lighting and screens showing the band members. Also, it felt strange to hear Hetfield sing, “Gimme fuel, gimme fire” with no real pyro.

The 17,000-or-so concertgoers didn’t mind, though, since it was hard not to feel overwhelmed by the display. The band’s fans live, breathe, and, for those who participated in the blood drive, literally bleed Metallica. So experiencing a one-of-a-kind event like this, and being part of a community like Metallica’s, was genuinely moving for some. The man next to me on Saturday air-drummed the entire show, and a couple behind me kept commenting about how happy Hetfield looked on the big screen during every song. And of course there was the one fan who made it clear Christmas had come early for him by wearing a full Santa Claus suit both nights and waving regally like St. Nick at the band members from the “Snake Pit” in front of the stage.

But the specialness of the event wasn’t confined only to the Sphere, as fans visited Metallica’s many experiences. The pop-up shop offered more than band T-shirts and posters; it featured photo ops placing fans in the artwork (like sitting in the Ride the Lightning electric chair) and a replica of the infamous Metallica Mansion “garage” where the band wrote Master of Puppets, well peppered with empty beer cans. Fans who spent a little extra money on VIP experiences could visit the Black Box, a specialty bar that also included a replica “tuning room” where they could play Hetfield’s, Hammett’s, and Trujillo’s real guitars and pose with Ulrich’s drums (signs posted said they wouldn’t give fans drumsticks, since that would be chaotic), tour a Metallica museum (which featured the late bassist Cliff Burton’s instrument behind glass and handwritten lyrics), and listen to rare demos and songs at a music “bar” (notably the contentious “leaked Napster version” of “I Disappear”). These extra things to do made Vegas a destination for Metallica fans.

Robert Slayback, a fan from New York, allowed his son, Jake, to miss a few days of ninth grade to make the trip to Vegas for Metallica. “That’s a good reason to miss class, right?” Robert said as he and his son stood in line to get into the Black Box, where a Sirius XM broadcast was scheduled to take place. “We listen to [Metallica’s Sirius station] all the time in the car. He said, ‘[Metallica archivist] Spider-Dan’s gonna be there.’ I said, ‘He’s not in the band,’ but he’s pumped.'”

I also spoke with fans from all over the country who made the concert a destination event. A group of friends outside of the pop-up shop told me that they variously flew in from Chicago, Philadelphia, Indiana, and Minneapolis to hang out at Life Burns Faster. “It’s hard for us at this age, in our 40s, with kids to be able to get out and do something like this,” one of the fans, Dave Leopold, told me. “So we had high expectations. Everything we heard about the Sphere made it sound like it was going to be incredible, and [the show] exceeded everything. This was 100 percent worth it.”  

The band made it clear on Saturday that it is well aware of the impact they have on people’s lives. “We are super grateful that all of you have taken the time, the effort, and the cash to show up here live to celebrate this very moment with us,” Hetfield told the crowd after playing the deep cut “Leper Messiah” on Saturday. “We don’t take it for granted.”

But perhaps more meaningful is what he said at the start of Saturday’s show right after they opened with the fan favorite, “Blackened”: “Are you with us? We are Metallica, and so are you.”

Nowhere was that fact clearer than after each concert in the casino where rivers of black Metallica T-shirts flooded the pit. Much like how photos and video can’t properly capture what it’s like to see Metallica at the Sphere, it’s impossible to replicate the sense of camaraderie among the fans. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, as the saying goes, and Metallica and their fans will be staying here off and on at least for a few more months. Viva Planet Metallica.

Metallica “Life Burns Faster,” Night One set list:

“Battery” “Creeping Death” “Now That We’re Dead” “Sad but True” “The Shortest Straw” “Wherever I May Roam” “The Day That Never Comes” “… And Justice for All” Kirk Hammett and Rob Trujillo “Doodle” “Nothing Else Matters” “The Call of Ktulu” “Lux Æterna” “Ride the Lightning” “The Memory Remains” “Seek & Destroy” “Master of Puppets”

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