Metallica's WorldWired Tour 2017 is the biggest production the band has ever brought on the road.
The tour is Metallica's first stadium tour in 20 years, and according to a new feature in Rolling Stone, the band has never put more into wowing the crowd with visuals. After all, they've already got the songs down, according to frontman James Hetfield.
"We've played some of these songs 94,000 times, so it's not like we necessarily need to practice them," he jokes of the band's pre-show warm-up room routine. "...[It's] like an athletic approach where you gotta get the blood flowing."
But that pre-show check-in and warm-up only comes after several long days of work by band and crew is completed, according to Rolling Stone:
- Each show takes three days to set up
- Metallica uses 40,000 individual speakers to deliver over 350,000 total watts of audio
- There are 83 laser fixtures on the stage that took over 640 combined hours to program
- One Metallica show could power 1,800 homes for a month
- The stage production travels on 48 trucks
- Fines for playing past curfew in some cities can run up to $25,000 per second.
It's enough to stress out a performer, and drummer Lars Ulrich admits that he sometimes gets wound up with pre-show engagements. But he says the band's group therapy (as documented in 2004 documentary Some Kind of Monster) taught him important techniques he still uses to stem the anxiety.
"I learned a lot about myself for those couple years," he says, "and I still access some of that stuff occasionally."
Photo: Getty Images