That Metallica didn’t take the 25th anniversary staging of the Woodstock festival entirely seriously was evident even before the San Franciscan quartet followed Nine Inch Nails onto the site’s North Stage on the evening of August 13, 1994. Had they perused the festival’s official merchandise stalls, the 350,000 music fans who streamed on to Winston Farm in Saugerties, New York, that weekend would have spotted a bespoke ‘Metallistock’ t-shirt featuring the band’s ‘Scary Man’ mascot with dollar bill symbols in his eyes, flowers in his hands and a ‘peace sign’ pendant around his neck, under which was scrawled the words ‘Hippie Shit’.
Billed as ‘2 More Days of Peace and Music’, the event’s faux nostalgia might have captured the imagination of America’s ‘baby boomer’ demographic, but for Metallica it primarily represented a tidy paycheck and an opportunity to piss about in front of a live TV audience. And so, following James Hetfield’s cheery “Fuck you!” greeting, heavy metal’s biggest band chose to reintroduce themselves to the American public by opening their sub-headline slot with Breadfan, an obscure B-side track written by cult Welsh prog-rock trio Budgie.
