Metallica All Time Best Songs

[Violet Mcdow]

IfMetallica fans don't like the song selection on the group's upcoming European tour, they have only themselves to blame. That's because the band is letting ticket holders in every city vote on the set list. Every single song in their vast catalog is fair game and the results are public on the band's website. "To be totally honest with you, sometimes I wish they would vote on some of the really obscure songs," says Lars Ulrich. "We love playing crazy stuff. . .We want to mix it up as much as possible." We decided to do our own poll and have our readers vote for their favorite Metallica songs. Click through to see the results.

Experienced Metallica fans know exactly what the opening notes of "Seek and Destroy" mean at a concert: time to get your coat on and think about an exit strategy because the show is about to wrap up. The group is famous for shifting up their set list from night to night, but it's tradition to wrap up with "Seek and Destroy," one of their oldest songs that dates all the way back to Dave Mustaine's tenure in the group. No two versions of the song are the same, and a rendition on Live Shit: Binge and Purge is over 18 minutes long. They've played this one more than 1,300 times and it's impossible to imagine a show without it. It would be like the Ramones skipping "Blitzkrieg Bop" or AC/DC leaving without "Highway to Hell."

A very large segment of Metallica's fans feel the group peaked with their 1986 album Master of Puppets, which kicks off with this insanely fast thrash classic. The lyrics seem to refer to the battery of an incredibly violent confrontation, but Metallica cut their teeth at a San Francisco club called the Old Waldorf, located at 444 Battery Street, leading many to think the song is also about the battery of heavy metal music. Whatever the truth, "Battery" remains one of the great head banging songs of the 1980s. For a gentler take on it, check out the version on S&M that the group recorded with the San Francisco Symphony.

Many people probably assume that the guys in Metallica don't sit around reading Ernest Hemingway books in their spare time, but someone in the group obviously picked up his 1940 classic For Whom the Bell Tolls before writing this song with the same title. The lyrics are directly inspired by a section of the book where soliders in the Spanish American War are gunned down on a hill. It's one of the standout tracks on Metallica's 1984 disc Ride the Lightning.

In the early 1980s, Metallica were watching the scene in the Charlton Heston movie The Ten Commandments when the Angel of Death kills the first-born son of all the Egyptians. "Whoa," bassist Cliff Burton said. "It's like creeping death." The group liked the phrase and quickly wrote this thrash masterpiece for their second album, Ride the Lightning. The song is told from the point of view of the Angel of Death and is full of references to the Book of Exodus.

The closest that Metallica ever got to prog rock was their 1986 instrumental from Master of Puppets. The song is more than eight minutes long and was named after the constellation Orion because it has a spacey bridge. Cliff Burton played a huge role in the writing of this song, and his bass solo is arguably his greatest moment in the band's history. The song is still in the group's live rotation, but it hasn't quite sounded right since Cliff passed away.

Metallica fans have been accusing the group of selling out all the way back to the release of this 1984 song, which was the group's first ballad. It's a dark track about depression and suicide, and in a bizarre twist of fate James Hetfield nearly died while performing it in 1992 on a co-headlining tour with Guns N' Roses. A giant ball of flames shot up during the end of the song, and Hetfield got confused and stood right above it. He suffered horrible third-degree burns and couldn't play guitar for weeks, but the tour carried on.

Many of the songs on Master of Puppets are about the loss of control in some form or another. The epic title track addresses addiction. "It deals pretty much with drugs," James Hetfield says. "How things get switched around, instead of you controlling what you're taking and doing, it's drugs controlling you." The song has been played live at nearly every Metallica concert since 1986, racking up over 1,400 plays. Just a few weeks ago, they opened a show with it for the very first time. They also recently broke it out on The Howard Stern Show and The Colbert Report.

This past Friday night, I went to see the heavy metal bands Metallica, Pantera, and Mammoth WVH at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, which holds over 80,000 people (the stadium, not the state of New Jersey, which holds more, many of them for life). Metallica, which was the main heavy metal band, was playing two nights at the stadium, the first night with Pantera and Mammoth WVH, which is awesome, and then a second night with Five Finger Death Punch and Ice Nine Kills opening so total wusses could come to one of the shows too.

A few minutes later, fucking Pantera came on stage. It should be noted that singer Philip Anselmo was wearing shorts, which is fine because my whole shorts thing is on a leg-by-leg basis anyway and I happen to know for a fact that Philip has a genetic condition that causes his body to reject fabric below the knee so I had zero problem with it. What I said about Wolfgang still stands! Also, you are probably wondering at this point whether or not I saw Pantera a couple nights earlier in Camden, New Jersey along with Lamb of God and Child Bite and whether or not I totally hung out with the band and everything, and the answer is yeah, duh. I do shit like this all the time too.

I went to the concert with my super hot girlfriend, so if you went to the concert that night too and saw a woman, odds are pretty good it was her. There were a lot of other people on the train from fucking Penn Station going to the show, but everyone could totally tell I was the most metal, as evidenced by the fact that when we got to fucking Secaucus and had to switch trains, I bought a big beer at the convenience store there and drank it right in front of the cops while staring at them all like \u201CWhat?\u201D I do shit like this all the time.

We got to the MetLife Stadium aka the Meadowlands a short while later. I hate when big corporations put their name on a stadium. I know MetLife probably thinks it\u2019ll make everyone buy their dumb insurance, but guess what MetLife- I already have insurance through Aetna and I got full dental coverage and everything so when I go to the dentist, I just walk out of there without paying the bill and they can\u2019t say shit about it. How\u2019s your dumb stadium now?

Once we got inside, I got another cold one (beer) and my girlfriend and I headed to our seats, which were in section 116, row 13, which is awesome cuz of Danzig. Almost as soon as we sat down (for like a second- I just had to tie my shoe), Mammoth WVH, which is the band of Wolfgang Van Halen, son of Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli, who is also super hot and was on One Day at a Time, came on. Mammoth WVH were seriously excellent at music. My only real complaint is that, as best I could tell, Wolfgang Van Halen didn\u2019t do any Eddie Van Halen-style right hand tapping, even though I was hoping it would happen the whole time whether he wanted it to or not, almost like it was some sort of genetic condition he had zero control over, kind of like how I get sunburnt really easily and also have a huge dong. Also, Wolfgang Van Halen wore cut-off jean shorts on stage like he was helping a friend move a couch or something instead of opening up for fucking Metallica in a stadium not even that far from my house. Get your shit together and put some damn pants on, Wolfgang. Your dad wrote \u201CEruption\u201D! Fuck.

After Mammoth WVH finished, I headed upstairs to get like five or six more beers and also a chicken sandwich with fries. My girlfriend wanted a bottled water so I got that shit too cuz you\u2019re with me you get treated like fucking gold. I also took a wizz so massive I was worried the governor might have to issue a flood warning for the entire state of New Jersey. Also, on the way back to our seats, I could tell pretty much everyone wanted to high-five me because of how metal I am but I couldn\u2019t because of the sandwich. Sorry, dudes.

When my super hot girlfriend took a bite of the chicken sandwich, which we were originally just gonna split, she decided it was too spicy for her so I just ate the whole thing cuz fuck it and it was honestly kind of mild for me cuz I\u2019m basically a fucking Viking. Also, I forgot to mention the fries were garlic parmesan, the most metal of all fries- yes, including Cajun fries, which are bullshit. But they were cold so I ended up just whipping them at some guy in an Avenged Sevenfold T-shirt\u2019s head.

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