When I Fell Off the Band Wagon

With the release of Metallica's 9th studio album Death Magnetic I started reminiscing about when, why and how I started listening to Metallica. This is what I came up with.

The first LP that I ever bought was Ride The Lightning. I rode my bike to Target, bought the album, rode home and promptly put the cassette in my sock drawer so that my parents wouldn't find it. From then on I was hooked, I listened to that album over and over again and of course found ways to get money to purchase the other albums, keep in mind I was probably 12, not much gainful employment at that age. That would have been around '91 or '92 so I didn't start listening until after Black had been released and for all I knew they weren't going to release anything else since there was a 5 year hiatus between Black and Load. Once it was announced that they had a forth coming album I was stoked, I was sure to be home every night for the local radio station's "Mandatory Metallica" segment where they would play a number of old songs and a few of the new tracks.

I must say that I was shocked when I started seeing pictures of them turn up in magazines, before the release of Load, all clean cut. To me these guys were the face of heavy metal as I knew it and now they looked like any other guy you might see walking down the street.

I was never very thrilled with Load, it didn't possess the hard riffs that I loved or looked forward to. The lyrics seemed forced and not with the same thoughtfulness from the previous albums.

In the end, the final straw for me was when Jason Newsted was replaced with Robert Trujillo due to Newsted wanting to work with his side project which Metallica thought would take away from the band. It was that and getting over 300,000 users banned from Napster when I realized that they no longer were in it for the enjoyment of making music, it was now all about the money.