B.J. LISKO 7 months ago

Metallica Tech Reveals What Went Wrong When Band Played With Lady Gaga

Original Photo Credit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ_gBY-6UuE

In 2017, Metallica performed with Lady Gaga at the Grammy Awards. Unfortunately for Metallica and specifically frontman James Hetfield, the singer’s mic cut off during the performance, and he ended up sharing another with the pop star.

It was an awkward moment, and a visibly angry Hetfield knocked over a mic stand and threw his guitar as he walked off stage. One of the band’s techs, Chad Zaemisch recently gave an interview to RJM where he recalled the incident and shed light on exactly what happened.

“We had to use some other personnel for the award show for particular reasons,” he said. “And the audio guys ran the mic cable kind of from backstage out and around and then plugged into their mics. And we did a run-through earlier, everything was fine.”

Numerous extras were on stage for the performance and one of them inadvertently unconnected Hetfield’s mics, but techs couldn’t pinpoint the problem right away.

“They had taken a bunch of… I guess they were actors or something, to stand behind the band on either side, to jump around and be all excited,” Zaemisch explained. “This was the big song with Lady Gaga. She’s got a wireless mic, that’s cool.”

“They didn’t have a long enough cable, so they put two mic cables together. So somebody was jumping up and down and jumped on the connector and that’s what unplugged it.”

Zaemisch re-connected the cable, but Hetfield had already knocked over the mic stand.

“And by this time, James had knocked it over,” Zaemisch said, “So I ran out. He didn’t see me set it back up. And then I think audio guy turned it off or something. And he went to go speak into it again, and it still wasn’t working. Or it wasn’t working in his ears, but it was working out through the broadcast truck or something. It was a mess. And I can’t remember if he knocked it over again or whatever. But yeah, at the end of that, that was pretty miserable.”

“At the end of that, if you look at the video, you can see James kind of coming off stage and just threw his guitar to me, and I was still kind of ducked down behind some equipment trying to watch this mic cable and just somehow caught it, reached my arms up and caught the thing.”

“And it was like, ‘Oh, boy, man, this is like, the exact moment you don’t want something to go wrong.’ And it did. So it was just one of those things where we weren’t using all of our stuff. It wasn’t like our tour. Some things were out of our control, some dumb stuff happened, and, you know, that’s what the result was. Wasn’t fun.”