Metallica
Metallica is the most successful heavy metal band of the past quarter century. Metallica's line-up has primarily consisted of drummer Lars Ulrich, rhythm guitarist, vocalist James Hetfield, and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, as well as current bass player Robert Trujillo. Metallica's early releases included fast tempos, instrumentals, and aggressive musicianship that placed them as one of the "big four" of the thrash metal subgenre alongside Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax.
The band earned a growing fanbase in the underground music community and critical acclaim with the 1986 release Master of Puppets, described as one of the most influential and "heavy" thrash metal albums. The band achieved substantial commercial success with its self-titled 1991 album, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. With this release the band expanded its musical direction, resulting in an album that appealed to a more mainstream audience.
Lou Reed
As the lead singer and songwriter of The Velvet Underground in the late 1960s, Lou Reed created a body of work that has extraordinary influence to this day. Although their sales figures were not substantial, the Velvets are considered one of the most important rock and roll bands of all time, laying the groundwork in the Sixties for many tangents rock music would take in ensuing decades.
Reed left the band in 1970 and embarked on a prolific solo career. His 1972 album Transformer yielded the iconic hit "Walk on the Wild Side," but within a few years, Reed had moved on to explorations of the avant-garde with a double set of amplifier feedback entitled Metal Machine Music. Reed's uncompromising dedication to his art has garnered legions of influential fans, among them U2, R.E.M., and Sonic Youth.
Ozzy Osbourne
As one of the founding members of Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne helped create the heavy metal genre. The success of their first two albums - Black Sabbath and Paranoid - marked a paradigm shift in the world of rock. Not until Sabbath upended the music scene did the term "heavy metal" enter the popular vocabulary to describe the denser, more thunderous offshoot of rock over which they presided.
With their riff-based songs, extreme volume, dark subject matter and Ozzy’s banshee wail, Black Sabbath embodied key aspects of the heavy-metal world. In 1980, Ozzy went onto to a successful solo career. Songs like "Crazy Train" and "Suicide Solution" were marked by the raw, vulnerability of Ozzy’s voice. Later, of course, he also became a reality television star in MTV's popular series The Osbournes.
Metallica will be performing material from their vast catalog of music and will be inviting these and other special guests onstage for never-before-seen collaborations. Check back soon to see who else they'll be performing with.
