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AUSTIN, TEX. -- "Surprise!" joked Metallica's James Hetfield onstage at the South by Southwest Music Festival Friday night. "You are surprised, right?"
Well, in a word: No. Despite being listed on the SXSW lineup as Volsung, a group from "Somewhere, Norway," the band's so-called "secret" club show in Austin was basically the worst-kept secret in rock 'n' roll.
But that certainly didn't stop it from being the hottest ticket -- or at least the most sought-after laminate -- at the annual music conference in this central Texas college burg. In town to bang the media drum for their title in the Guitar Hero video game series, the heavy metal icons -- singer-guitarist Hetfield, drummer Lars Ulrich, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo -- easily overshadowed every other act on the SXSW bill, sending media types (like yours truly) scrambling for passes and prompting fans to wait for hours in the blazing southern sun for a chance to get into their 9:30 p.m. concert.
And in the end, it was all worth all the inconvenience -- and it lived up to all the hype -- when the band performed a blazing, high-velocity show for nearly 3,000 fans jammed shoulder-to-shoulder into an outdoor amphiteatre behind a downtown barbecue restaurant.
Yep, Metallica played a rib joint. And without the ramps, pyro, video screens, satellite stages and other trappings of their usual show (though there was a giant banner promoting their Guitar Hero game). But even though the stage and the production might have been relatively small for the rock giants, the road-tightened veterans treated this as if it were the biggest stadium gig in their career.
Opening with the blistering one-two punch of Creeping Death and For Whom the Bell Tolls -- both from their 1984 sophomore album Ride the Lightning -- Metallica ripped through 13 songs in 85 minutes, pulling out all the stops for a crowd thick with dudes and bros in ballcaps and shorts. Clad in a sleeveless black T-shirt and sporting a scruffy beard that made him look like a biker Tom Waits, Hetfield briefly stuck to that Norwegian gag, claiming in a bad Scandinavian accent that they were a "young, struggling band (that) want to get signed. But he quickly got down to business and gave the fans the full nine yards, running from one microphone to another to bark his vocals, positioning himself behind drummer Ulrich to thrash away or joining Hammett for a harmonized guitar solo.
The rest of the band (also dressed in their trademark black) didn't leave him in the lurch. Ulrich bashed away hyperkinetically, often leaping up from his double-bass kit between songs to wallop a cymbal or egg on the crowd. Musclebound bassist Trujillo, the group's newest member, prowled the stage aggressively, his thundering brown notes rumbling and pulsing through the audience. And corkscrew-maned Hammett -- who played no solos on the group's troubled 2003 disc St. Anger -- clearly relished being able to cut loose and wail again on these songs.
He had plenty of opportunity. The band's set list reached all the way from their 1983 debut album Kill 'Em All (for oldsters who wanted to thrash out to Seek and Destroy and Whiplash) to last year's acclaimed return to form Death Magnetic (for newbies who wanted to hear Cyanide and Broken, Beat and Scarred), with mid-period standouts like One and Master of Puppets tossed in for good measure.
All of it was welcomed with open arms and open lungs by fans who bellowed along with every chorus at Hetfield's continued urgings.
"We don't mind if you sing loud," he said at one point, gesturing to the surrounding buildings. "We don't know what the neighbours might think, but we want to feel some love."
At the end of the show -- after presumably feeling plenty of that love -- he asked the crowd: "Have you seen some good bands here? Hope we were one of them."
They were. No surprise there.