Last night (October 22nd) Metallica made their third Bridge School appearance at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California and performed acoustic versions of their hits and select covers including The Clash’s “Clampdown”, Deep Purple’s “When A Blind Man Cries” and a raucous finale of Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul” with Neil Young!

In his review of the show Steffan Chirazi, Editor of Metallica’s So What! magazine states:

Metallica perform after Roger Waters, in itself quite a thing when you consider that every single hair on the back of every single neck at Shoreline stood to attention when he played the first few bars of “Wish You Were Here”, but this is destined to be a ‘bridge’ performance of its own and one which marks Metallica as a band who speak to the younger audience but now also with the older audience as certain songs have simply become decades-long mass appeal legends of their own.

Of course, they cannot possibly go in quietly, kicking things off with a raucous version of “Whiskey In A Jar” infused with full rabble resolution, before folding into “When A Blind Man Cries” the Deep Purple deep cut they covered for the Re-Machined… Purple tribute album, however, they really start to hit stride with “Hero Of The Day” before “Bleeding Me” sees them fully settled in, relaxed and spreading their wings a whole lot wider, the desolation of the vocals taking on a new dimension in the acoustic setting. Throwing a speedy curveball is something Metallica have always enjoyed doing, and I’ll wager that no-one in the crowd saw them pulling out The Clash’s “Clampdown” and serving it up all sparky-punky-fresh, James telling the crowd afterward that as soon as he heard it, the riff would not leave his head. Everyone, to a band member, seemed to love playing the tune, and you have to wonder whether this will now become a part of the WorldWired tour.

The beauty of acoustic shows is that they offer the potential for new approaches to modern classics, and I firmly believe that tonight’s reinvention of “Enter Sandman” will do for the song what Johnny Cash did for Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”. This “…Sandman”, this sleekly lit, malevolent, low-slung lounge creature, might just have given a new twist, dimension, life and identity to one of the more classic pieces of popular American music of the last 25 or so years. It felt dark, so dark, and it felt like something David Lynch or Nick Cave or Cormac McCarthy would’ve been proud to give birth to. It was, and I mean this, sensational in the moment.

If that was a peak, then it is fair to say that the brave and noble experiment of an acoustic “Hardwired” was decidedly not. When it was rolling, it thundered along like a crazy spaghetti western mixed with some sort of mad flamenco element, but truth be told, it had a bit too much ‘self-destruct’ in the eventual delivery to work properly. My suspicion is we may not hear it in this format again for some time, although tomorrow will provide the answer to that thought. “Seek & Destroy” brought the ‘Meat-allica’ into this acoustic realm yet further, the crowd roaring and yelling when invoked and showing that Metallica had certainly managed to win over the parts of the audience that perhaps weren’t sure at the beginning.

Any lingering doubts that might’ve been loitering in row Y or in the north-east corner of the lawn, were banished once and for all when Neil Young stepped out to jam his own Buffalo Springfield-era classic “Mr. Soul”.

For photos and more of the review visit Metallica.com.

Metallica setlist:
“Whiskey In The Jar”
“When A Blind Man Cries” (Deep Purple cover)
“Hero of the Day”
“Bleeding Me”
“Clampdown” (The Clash cover)
“Enter Sandman”
“Hardwired”
“Seek & Destroy”
“Mr. Soul” (Buffalo Springfield cover with Neil Young)

Check out fan-filmed footage below: