That One Time I Finally Saw Metallica Live
Sunday, May 11, 2025 at 03:08PM Happy Mother's Day!
Your girl finally got to see Metallica live and it was pretty epic. The set surprised me a little, but maybe it shouldn't have given the festival setup and no-repeat weekend rules.
Eric and I went to Sonic Temple Festival in Columbus, Ohio on Friday only. The fest is four days, opening Thursday and closing tonight with Metallica again. We wandered around, looked at booths, bought some Metallica merch and of course had the adult happy meals at Metallica's Blackened burger bar pop-up restaurant. They actually had a vegan option and I was shocked and stoked. Eric had real meat (of course) and he loved it. I had the real whiskey (lol) and I loved that too. Hat tip to Metallica and their San Francisco foodie roots. Also, the "prize" was a packet of Blackened branded picks. Nice.
We watched a few of the early bands including Exodus. I was on the floor for them for awhile but the sound wasn't great. Pit didn't seem to care!
Alice Cooper was freaking phenomenal as always because there's no one better. Nita Strauss was living her best life and swinging her bass around and people were eating it up. I've had "Hey Stoopid" going through my head since the set. You could tell who was seeing Alice for the first time and they were mesmerized by the guillotine bit and the snake too. I even convinced a 27-year-old stadium bartender to watch all of Alice and he agreed with me that it was awesome and worth his time. (He said he had never heard of any of the bands except Metallica).
Metallica was supposed to go on at 8:30 p.m. but that didn't happen. My theory is that their crew was working with Sonic Temple to fix the sound because it sure did seem resolved (or at least way better) for Metallica. Funny how that works, right?
As you can see from the setlist above, the opening of the show was heavy as hell. Since this was a festival formation, the stage was very stripped down, too. Lars was still dead center and there was plenty of room for him to stand at the end of every song.🙄
I will say I think Metallica started losing the crowd a little after the third track or so, but they got everyone back with "King Nothing." They just needed that big commercial song to get folks going again. After all, people had been standing or moshing for like 10+ hours at that point. Then they released an entire semi trailer full (seriously) of massive branded beach balls, and folks liked that a lot.
I was shocked we got "Orion" live. According to the Metallica song vault, the track has only been performed live like 100 times. A nice tribute to Cliff Burton for sure.
"Nothing Else Matters" and "Sad But True" were just epic, the latter being on my permanent running list for ever and ever, amen. Eric even got a "Sad But True" themed shirt.
By the time "Fuel" came around, we got lots of pyro, which is always a good thing (outdoors, that is). I also felt very lucky to get "Master of Puppets" as our closer - complete with a really long fireworks show at the end! I guess when you have all the money in the world, you can afford to set off 10 minutes worth of fireworks every night and give out heaps of custom picks and drum sticks, because zillionaires. (Also that adult vegan happy meal was $33 so someone is making a killing somewhere).
The bad part is I didn't get my beloved "One" but I'm sure the crowd tonight will and I'm guessing "Enter Sandman" will be their closer. But that's okay. I feel lucky that we got a rarer, heavier set and it wasn't just all radio singles. I mean, hearing "The Shortest Straw" live was a shocker.
I would have enjoyed "Chasing Light" as a newer track, but it is what it is. A massive catalog with lots of hits and limited time means something has to give, right? So fun, so worth the money but Christ on a bicycle, the egress to Sonic Temple this year was bad. In fact, we waited 90 minutes to get out of the parking area. The entrance was bad for lots of folks too, with Thursday traffic making the local news it was such a cluster. In fact, people were sitting up to five hours trying to park - just gridlock everywhere.
If you believe what you read on the internet (and you probably shouldn't), the festival was quite over sold, which would explain some parking issues I suppose.
Here's drone footage of the crowd during Metallica. Eric and I actually spied the drone and watched it zoom around. Cool footage.
Alice Cooper, Exodus, Metallica, Rob Zombie