Metallica has played plenty of massive shows throughout their career, but some were bigger than others for various reasons. Ex-bassist Jason Newsted recently sat down with comedian Bill Burr for his Monday Morning podcast, where he discussed the enormity of Metallica's performance at Day On The Green 1991 held in Oakland, CA.
Newsted pointed out that the show was legendary concert promoter Bill Graham's final show, and that Metallica was firing on all cylinders.
"The ones that have been glorified over time and sensationalized, like the big Russian show and that stuff — unforgettable, of course, [and] quite well documented. But there's other ones that are personally huge for us as a unit. Day On The Green in Oakland [on] October 12 of '91. That was Bill Graham's last proper show that he put on — period. That's a big goddamn deal to Bay Area, man. He took a chance on Metallica back in '82, '83. '84, whatever it was. And then they came back home to headline that thing.
"We'd been on the road for the Black Album a couple of months. We just started firing on all cylinders. MTV came there with 19 freakin' cameras and did their thing and recorded it nice and it sounded so killer on the TV. I remember playing a big Alembic six-string bass with a string on the top as big and as round as your fucking finger — like a telephone cable on that fucker — but tuned down for 'Sad But True', and just taking people's freakin' fillings out, man. You could see their sternums come flying up onto the stage. They were standing next to the bass bins in the front, just getting destroyed. We were hitting right then with such precision."
