Since March 27, Metallica has entertained restless fans through the coronavirus pandemic with concerts from their archives every Monday. But on August 28, the band will offer a new escape: Metallica and San Francisco Symphony: S & M2.
It documents last year’s shows that the group played with the orchestra on September 6 and 8, and will arrive in 11 different configurations, including Blu-Ray, vinyl, and packages containing audio and video images of the event.
S and M2 It comes 20 years after Metallica’s first concerts with the symphony in 1999 at the Berkeley Community Theater, during which they performed 21 songs (a mix of reinvented material plus two new tracks). The shows were the brainchild of the late composer-arranger Michael Kamen, who led them; the later album YE, reached number 2 on the Billboard 200, while the song “The Call of Ktulu” won a Grammy for best instrumental rock performance.
This time, the genesis of S and M2 It arose when Metallica, raised in the Bay Area, was invited to open the Chase Center in San Francisco, the new home of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. As the group considered how to make the event special, the drummer Lars Ulrich recalls how “someone pointed out that it was the twentieth anniversary of the first round and, slowly, this idea began to take the form of two different musical entities that celebrated everything related to San Francisco.”
In 1999, the members of Metallica were 30 years old and the symphony was significantly older. An even greater disparity was their musical style: the idea of combining a thrash band with a classic ensemble was unheard of. Now, Ulrich says, “The divisions and lines in the sand between different musical genres are eroding. They are not completely gone, but it is much more communal and did not feel as uncomfortable as in ’99. You feel like not only on stage, but [in] the audience.”
At the request of the band, the musical director of the orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas, fulfilled the role of Kamen to help carry out this project (Kamen died in London in 2003). “Honoring Michael was always a guiding light in putting things together,” says longtime Metallica affiliate. Greg Fidelman, co-producer of the S and M2 album along with Ulrich and guitarist James Hetfield, and mixer of the album and the audio of the film. “We wanted to review his idea, and take it to another level.”
Fidelman explains that in order to do that, his main objective was to break the “perceived wall between the orchestra and the rock band, to make them interact as a great group of musicians”. He says the stage design was guided by this, giving Metallica “the ability to walk to and play with different sections of the orchestra,” and choosing “to have no amplifiers or speakers on stage, allowing us to sit very well to the SFS musicians. ” close to the band. “
Still, the band itself had to make adjustments, losing the wiggle room for its loose focus on the live repertoire: Ulrich says that until this couple of shows last year, the group hadn’t played the same setlist twice in any movie. related concert in about 20 years. “With the symphony, you have to know your ins and outs, rehearse starts and stops, and suddenly you can’t spread the guitar solo over four bars or make a different ending or be impulsive,” says Ulrich. “That doesn’t fly.”
During the shows, Fidelman remembers being in the recording truck, “nervously listening, hoping that nothing goes wrong.” But on day two, he stopped worrying. “I remember during the extended song after ‘The Memory Remains’, thinking to myself, ‘This is going to be great,'” he recalls, adding, “These guys aren’t afraid to challenge themselves. They have more fun when the idea of things falling apart is in the air. “
