As you might have heard — and I’m not sure there’s any way you couldn’t have, literally, if you were anywhere in the vicinity of uptown — Metallica dropped by Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte on Saturday night.
And in many ways, it was a celebration of old-school heavy metal, featuring the most cherished of this particular heavy-metal band’s live-in-concert tropes.
There were columns of flames and fireworks shooting up from the in-the-round stage, and parades of skeletons and torrents of tombstones up on the cylinder-shaped screens towering above the field. Hard-charging songs with snarling lyrics about death (“Creeping Death”) and dying (“Ride the Lightning”) and killing (“Seek & Destroy”) and suicide (“Screaming Suicide”), backed by electric guitars creating sounds that sent chills up spines and drum beats that threatened to dislodge fillings in teeth.
By the second half of the show, there was even a good-old-fashioned mosh pit, which is not something I’ve seen break out at the stadium before and — even more surprisingly — was tolerated by security…