When Metallica embarked upon their 23 month Wherever We May Roam tour in the summer of 1991, they produced a tour programme with a difference.
Alongside the traditional glossy band photos, the San Francisco band chose to mock those who’d sneered at their ascendancy by re-printing a series of caustic reviews in the programme’s pages. Pity poor Paul Maldonado Jr of the El Paso Herald Host, a journalist who reviewed one Metallica show mentioning a song the band had never played live at that point (The God That Failed) and another song that doesn’t actually exist in their catalogue (“to their knowledge [Metallica] have never written a song called Carry On”, the programme read). So pleased were they by this wheeze, that the quartet pulled the trick again later in the decade, emblazoning the cover artwork of their Whiskey In The Jar single with all the scathing reviews the cover version had garnered following it’s inclusion on the Garage Inc. album.
