Metallica ‘Hardwired’ for its New York return

Musical heavyweights Metallica have always held a special relationship with New York. While the group formed in Los Angeles and then migrated to San Francisco, the time that band members spent in the Empire State in 1983 was integral to their development. Their latest album, the well-received “Hardwired . . . to Self Destruct,” invokes the raw, stripped-down sound of those early years.

“Obviously it was a huge part of shaping who we were and who we were to become,” drummer Lars Ulrich says about New York City. “We played shows in all nooks and crannies of the greater tristate area,” including famed and now-defunct metal club L’Amour in Brooklyn. Thus the band’s May 17 show at the renovated Nassau Coliseum holds special significance.

Megaforce Records founder Jonny Z, who created the label to release the Bay Area band’s music, initially brought Metallica out from California to his New Jersey home in 1983 so they could play around the New York City area. They soon holed up in an old furniture warehouse in Jamaica and through Jonny Z forged a solid friendship with future label mates Anthrax. Metallica recorded its debut album “Kill ’Em All” that year in Rochester and later signed with Elektra Records and Q Prime Management in Manhattan.

A special Long Island moment came when Metallica, before opening for Ozzy Osbourne at the old Nassau Coliseum in 1986, visited local editor Gail Flug in her office at the CMJ New Music Report in Williston Park. They served as her “interns” for the afternoon, personally calling college radio stations nationwide to help tabulate the week’s top metal radio tracks. The event was chronicled by MTV for a news report on Metallica. The clip has been viewed on YouTube more than 600,000 times. “I think when we do a ‘Master of Puppets’ reissue, which hopefully is going to come later this year, some of that is going to be in there,” says Ulrich.

While Metallica is used to storming giant venues these days, the band occasionally scales back for certain shows. For the concert at NYCB Live’s Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, in order to deviate from its “outdoor stadium shenanigans,” as Ulrich puts it, the group is not using the five massive video screens serving as its regular backdrop. They will likely transpose the backdrop to a video floor upon which they will play in the round, as they did at a tour stop in Copenhagen in February. (There may potentially be a video ceiling as well.) “It’s not so much about gadgets and trinkets but more about the intimacy and playing in the round and getting as close to as many of the fans as possible, which we love to do when we play indoors,” Ulrich says.

Another surprise may be in store. While touring Asia recently, the group began toying with a four-man drum jam that first manifested itself during their Mexico City gigs in March within the new song “Now That We’re Dead.” During the section where Ulrich, from behind the stage, played some tribal tom grooves, the other members started banging on individual sets of toms, with Ulrich coming out to join them. They plan to integrate that concept into their current U.S. tour.

“I know it’s been on [frontman James] Hetfield’s laundry list for some time to experiment with a drum piece,” Ulrich says. “He’s always been a bit of a closet drummer, so he suggested that we all somehow stitch together a drum interlude.”

The Coliseum gig certainly means a lot to the members of Metallica, which also includes lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and bass guitarist Robert Trujillo. “We always consider playing in that area to be right at the very top of our comfort zone,” Ulrich says. “While we’re not the first act through the doors of the new Nassau Coliseum, we’re the first [hard] rock band, so we’re excited about that.”