Metallica XXX Blog

Robb Flynn of Machine Head updated his diary with these words on Metallica and Lars especially:

Metallica at Wembley Stadium. Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude! DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE!?!?!? Such an honor. Handpicked. Last minute. To be honest, we thought it might be a bit rough just because we were thrown on so late in the game, our fans might not know about it in time, etc. But oh my god dude. Let me preface this and start by saying that, straight up, the first 3 songs were literally the sloppiest we’d played on the entire Blackening run. Jesus?! Guitar cutting out, broken strings, tech hands me my guitar wildly out of tune, Phil’s wireless goes out… it was like, NOW?! Were gonna have all these problems NOW??!! Christ al-fuckin’-mighty! But you know what…it didn’t matter, the crowd went friggin’ APESHIT! The circle pit for Imperium (which Monte Conner says is the new Davidian) was… just… oh my fuckin’ GOD! We FINALLY pulled it together for Halo and Davidian, and from Halo on…the world just fell into place…everything got easy. Didn’t know it at the time but Hetfield watched us… from Halo on… whew! Check out that Imperium pit here.

Mastodon ruled, as always. But Metallica, man, Metallica… dude… untouchable that night. I’ve seen a couple bad shows from them recently, but man, they walked on fucking water that night. What a vibe. Setlist: Impeccable. Between-song banter: Hysterical. The crowd sing-a-long to the “la-da-da-da” part, from the lone post-Black-album song they played (Memory Remains)… it went on for 2 minutes after the song ended… goose bumps man… fucking… goose bumps. Hetfield hung in the dressing room, told us he’s rockin’ to The Blackening, “there’s some epic shit on there”… my brain pretty much imploded at that point… smoke out of the ears and everything… full-on frizzle fry.

The afterparty was drunken insanity, I gave and received no less than 17 skull bites to Brent from Mastodon, but the highlight of it all, was hanging out with Lars after the afterparty, drinking a small ocean’s worth of booze and picking his brain about every detail of the thrash era that I thought I knew about or wanted to know about. With Adam, and a small pow-wow of people, him and I held court for nearly an hour talking about everything from the years he followed Diamond Head around (he was in the rehearsal studio with them when they wrote Am I Evil), following Motorhead around, Dave Mustaine, Napster, Exodus, Baloff, Cliff, what their mindset was when writing MOP, who were their rivals at the time, the first time I saw them, what they thought of Slayer back then… dudes, I was in full-on Metallica history nerd/geek mode, and it RULED ’cause he was spilling all the dirt. We raged on over to some fancy-schmancy hotel his friends were at, where, in between skull bites, WWE wrestling sessions and all of us flashing all of our penises at cars passing by, we talked the pros and cons of cocaine, while he fawned hopelessly over our publicity girl… it was c-r-a-z-y!

What a night!!!!!!!

Stumbled back to the hotel at 6AM, was on a plane by 11AM, and 12 hours later, I was changing diapers with my 2 kids who couldn’t really give 2 shits about what I just did. I wasn’t Robb Flynn of Machine Head anymore, I was just Dada, and Dada needed to “change my poopy pants”, and “take out the garbage”, and “go to the store ’cause we’re out of formula”… and so on, and so on, and so on.

Life has a way checking you. Yesterday I was supporting Metallica, today I’m changing a record 5 (five!) poopy diapers in 1 day.