MACHINE HEAD Frontman Talks About Playing With METALLICA, Hanging Out With LARS ULRICH

October 23, 2007

MACHINE HEAD frontman Robb Flynn has posted a lengthy new "diary entry" on the band's official web site. An excerpt from his posting follows:

"[Supporting] METALLICA at Wembley Stadium [in London in early July]. Duuuuuude!? DUUUUDE!?!?!? Such an honor. Handpicked. Last minute [as the replacement for BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE, who had to cancel].

"To be honest, we thought it might be a bit rough just because we were thrown on so late in the game, our fans might not know about it in time, etc. But oh my god, dude.

"Let me preface this and start by saying that, straight up, the first three songs were literally the sloppiest we'd played on the entire 'Blackening' run. Jesus?! Guitar cutting out, broken strings, tech hands me my guitar wildly out of tune, Phil's [Demmel] wireless goes out... it was like, NOW?! Were gonna have all these problems NOW??!! Christ al-fuckin'-mighty! But you know what...it didn't matter, the crowd went friggin' APESHIT! The circle pit for 'Imperium' (which Monte Conner says is the new 'Davidian') was... just... oh my fuckin' GOD! We FINALLY pulled it together for 'Halo' and 'Davidian', and from 'Halo' on...the world just fell into place...everything got easy. Didn't know it at the time but [James] Hetfield watched us... from 'Halo' on... whew!

"MASTODON ruled, as always. But METALLICA, man, METALLICA... dude... untouchable that night. I've seen a couple bad shows from them recently, but man, they walked on fucking water that night. What a vibe. Setlist: impeccable. Between-song banter: hysterical. The crowd sing-a-long to the 'la-da-da-da' part, from the lone post-'Black'-album song they played ('Memory Remains')... it went on for two minutes after the song ended... goose-bumps man... fucking... goose-bumps.

"Hetfield hung in the dressing room, told us he's rockin' to 'The Blackening'. 'There's some epic shit on there.'... My brain pretty much imploded at that point... smoke out of the ears and everything... full-on frizzle fry.

"The afterparty was drunken insanity. I gave and received no less than 17 skull bites to Brent from MASTODON. But the highlight of it all was hanging out with Lars [Ulrich] after the afterparty, drinking a small ocean's worth of booze and picking his brain about every detail of the thrash era that I thought I knew about or wanted to know about. With Adam [Duce], and a small pow-wow of people, him and I held court for nearly an hour talking about everything from the years he followed DIAMOND HEAD around (he was in the rehearsal studio with them when they wrote 'Am I Evil?'),following MOTÖRHEAD around, Dave Mustaine, Napster, EXODUS, Baloff, Cliff, what their mindset was when writing 'Master of Puppets', who were their rivals at the time, the first time I saw them, what they thought of SLAYER back then... Dudes, I was in full-on METALLICA history nerd/geek mode, and it RULED 'cause he was spilling all the dirt.

"We raged on over to some fancy-schmancy hotel his friends were at, where, in between skull bites, WWE wrestling sessions and all of us flashing all of our penises at cars passing by, we talked the pros and cons of cocaine, while he fawned hopelessly over our publicity girl... it was c-r-a-z-y!"

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