Metallica is offering Black Tickets to see every show on their 2018-2019 tour

250 of these tickets will feature a special price of $600.

Another great piece of PR/marketing/fan-service.

I don't pay enough attention to other acts but I know many big stars are having trouble selling out venues and haven't heard them do this.

Metallica stays winning, as they say.

Makes sense

Make scratch before the devil comes to collect

Darcy is Izzy

Aye, Zombie but mixing can be fixed up with relative ease. It’s the performance that’s flawed this time. It took a perfect mix and an appreciable amount of EQ to make the show baseline palatable.

Aye, Monkey. I’m hardly an expert on the Ashba era but Bumble is quite the player. His original material leaves you wanting but his work was impeccable especially on solos. Slash doesn’t have the juice to reach that high these days. Pitman was essential to the Chinese stew in 2002. It’s so funky and cool, I can never get enough.

Any way, I’m kind of annoying myself. I clearly don’t enjoy the present band so I should just sit on my hands until an album / leak / juicy past tidbit materializes.

I remember the screechy Robin solos from 2006 too but it was just smooth as butter when they were dialed in.

But you can't cheat hundreds of hours of rehearsal to a seemingly hastily assembled reunion.

It overall has a feeling of "wait, am I playing this right". It's sloppy, tentative.

You're right Monkey, lots of wasted time and opportunities.

In my line of work there's a psychological phenomena known as perceived contrast.

The theory states that you perceive the relative contrast of an image based on the surrounding elements. To put a finer point on it, if you judge an image to be sharp or high contrast or very colorful, it's largely because of the pixels around that area biased you in your assessment. An area will be thought to be darker if it's surrounded by light pixels, and so forth.

This is my round about way of explaining Axl in 2006. The last we saw of him in 2002 he looked puffy, strange, mentally unstable, sounded questionably, and the whole thing ended with a canceled tour and with the operation in a deadly tailspin. When he resurfaced in 2006, a relative generation later, the opposite was true. He looked gruff, mean, motivated, garbed in leather and diamonds, and had his snarl back. It was on all fronts a return to form. The star had been reborn. And there were cameras there capturing it for us to see.

I remember only press shots from Rio, the fan shots from House of Blues, and the press shot from the VMAs from that long and sordid crawl through the veritable desert. In 2006, however, every day was conceivably Christmas morning. My heavens, another shot of Axl! What strange garb our dear old Robin is wearing today! Gracious me! A long-form interview with Axl! Wow. A fan recording of Hammerstein! Holy shit! A leak of Better! OH MY GOOOOOOOOODDDDDD. The proverbial floodgates were opening at long last, precious manna from the skies! Axl is risen! Axl is coming! Chinese come quickly! Hallelujah!

This also explains why 2007-2008 and onwards were so torturous. A return to secrecy, the leaks were sealed, the stream of information had dried up, and we were back to wandering in the desert.

I think this also explains the fanbases malaise during the late New GNR shows and most of the NITL Tour. Contrast. It's great for your business to deliver a consistent level of quality but anathema to rock n' roll and what makes art exciting. You need valleys to appreciate the peaks. You need marked changes to the setlist for it to be a special show. Go back to 2006 and you'll see a case study in how to do this right: different costumes, different venues, TSI material, rare AFD cuts, new solo spots, new covers, band jams, more new album material. Baz and Kid Rock guest spots. Bubbles! Izzy! It had it's flaws but it certainly wasn't encased in mothballs with a corporate sheen.

I can appreciate them cashing in while there's money on the table but it's time to bring some life to those stagnant waters.

P.S. I'm under the impression most people don't listen to the 2016-2017 soundboards very closely. The 2002/2006 bands are worlds better. The handoffs between Fortus and Slash are consistently sloppy, Slash's solos just go nowhere, Melissa's playing is flat and clunky, and Frank is Frank. I've actually probably been more surprised at Frank being respectable than others in my limited listens. "But people were stupid and you could sell them anything".