Fronted by the singer, songwriter and guitarist James Hetfield, Metallica certainly became one of the biggest Heavy Metal bands of all time. They are one of the few bands of the genre who are still able to play in huge stadiums all around the world when they tour.
Although they were influenced mainly by bands from the 70s and 80s, Hetfield never stopped listening to new music and to support new bands. They are always watching new bands on the road and one of them James Hetfield said was one of the craziest he had ever seen.
The band James Hetfield loves and is one the craziest he’s seen
James Hetfield declared his love for many new bands during the past decades and one of them is Mars Volta, band formed in El Paso, Texas back in 2001. Back in 2017, Hetfield was interviewed by his bandmate Lars Ulrich, on the drummers show “It’s Electric” and they both talked about Mars Volta. James praised the band a lot and recalled the 2004 run on the ‘Big Day Out Festival‘ in Australia with them.
“That guy, Jon Theodore (drummer), unbelievable. Whenever I am watching him live, you were there. We saw him at a little joint somewhere in Australia. It was one of the craziest gigs I had seen. The energy those guys had and they were all wearing fancy boots too.”
“That was the combination to my mind ‘they’re going crazy and they look good too’ (laughs). They’re like all super muso kind of guys. Really, really into their instruments. As you heard, a little jazzy, this is probably one of the songs that I requested them every night and they would never play it. Because I don’t know, it was too mainstream for them, compared to some of their other wacky stuff.”
He continued:
“It’s like: ‘This is pretty heavy, it’s also wacky. It makes me feel good, this song, so play it guys’. They would say ‘No, we can’t, sorry. He doesn’t wanna play it, you know’. They’re on a different wavelength at that point. That band, what I love about them, they pushed the limits on pretty much everything.”
“Guitar playing, the vocals. I remember Cedric having pedals on the floor for his vocals. I had never seen that before and he was pushing stuff, doing weird stuff with his voice. He was really treating it as an instrument, which was very cool. The keys, the drummer, all of it. They even had a Bongo player at some point. There’s not a lot of Bongos heard on that song,” James Hetfield said.
Mars Volta once explained why they didn’t play the song Hetfield loves
As James Hetfield said in the interview with Ulrich, when they were touring together, the band didn’t took his request to play a song. The track was “Inertiatic ESP”, which was part of their debut album “De-Loused in the Comatorium” released in 2003.
The band’s vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala explained in an interview with Zane Lowe in 2022 why they decided not to play the song. “We met them in New Zealand. They came to our show and they were like, are you going to play this song? We’re like, no, we don’t play that anymore. Sorry. And he’s there. I’m like, God, we should play it for him at least.”
“We didn’t play it. We were very stubborn about where we were. It was something from the first records. We were like, we’re here now. We understand people really love that, but we’re very selfish like that. But it was cool to meet them. It was like, wow.”
According to Cedric, Metallica ended up playing the track during their pre-show rehearsal. Hetfield liked the band so much, that his son Castor, who is a musician, recalled once that his father introduced him to their music.