By 1998 Metallica had enough clout to feed their fans shit and know most would demand a second helping. Not that they often did (at this point we were still 13 years away from the craptacular Lulu). So just two months removed from finishing their shed tour in support of Reload, the band tried a little something borrowed, something new.
To celebrate the November 24 release of Garage, Inc. (a double-disc featuring newly recorded covers tacked onto their now out-of-print The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited) the band launched a five-city small-theatre “Garage Barrage” excursion where the band played—wait for it—no originals. In fact, if you wanted to hear Metallica music that night you needed to arrive early and check out the opener, Battery, a Metallica tribute band, who played a 45-minute set of only Metallica. Ya follow?
Metallica’s set was of covers they’d be sprinkling throughout their set most of their career anyway (Queen’s “Stone Cold Crazy,” Diamond Head’s “Am I Evil?” and the show closer, Motorhead’s “Overkill”), but not in venues they’d outgrown a decade earlier.
(The full “Garage Barrage” show from November 24, 1998 at New York’s Roseland Ballroom is below):
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