Metallica recently played the Power Trip festival alongside Guns N' Roses, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Judas Priest, and Tool. In an interview with the band's own The Metallica Report podcast, Metallica frontman James Hetfield talked about being inspired by the other bands at Power Trip and insisting on rehearsing near the festival so he could watch all three days of it.
Hetfield also kicked off his comments by revealing that drummer Lars Ulrich really only started rehearsing with Metallica about four or five years ago… which I guess means the dude was just winging it prior?
"An interesting fact: Lars never rehearsed ever until — I don't know — I'd say maybe four or five years ago, he started really getting into rehearsing," said Hetfield. "And now he'll — I mean, he'll rehearse four days for a two-hour set, which is what he needs to do, which is awesome.
"So there was gonna be rehearsals [for Power Trip] down at HQ for a couple days beforehand. And I said, 'I'm not gonna show up guys. I would love it if we could find a rehearsal place here [closer to Power Trip], 'cause I'd love to see all these other bands.' And Robert got on board, and then we found a place over here in the polo grounds to rehearse. And I'm grateful that Lars was up for it. So they did their rehearsals down there and then we came up and we have rehearsals and get to watch these bands. It's so frickin' cool to have your own compound at a festival for all the days of the festival… We show up, go rehearse and then go out there and watch Iron Maiden. I mean, how cool is that?
"So for me, there's a lot of inspiration in every single band that's played here. Just looking up ages — I know age is bullshit. I mean, there's plenty of the guys in these bands that are [in their] early 70s, late 60s, and it's inspiring. And the fact that they're up there still kicking ass in this kind of heat was fantastic. But every single one of those bands have been a part of our childhood and our upbringing in our Metallica adventure. So it's really cool to be a part of this. And we used to hang out a bunch together in the early days, like at all the festivals we would go to and hang out.
"Yeah, we would play early on and then get to watch all the other bands after. We would hang out. It kind of felt like that again. Obviously, it was a different day, but we're all here hanging out and it's really fun. It's really fun to see. I just kind of realized that we're down in the very front looking up, Rob Halford riding out on a motorcycle and there's fans behind us, looking at us, like they're watching us enjoy that. How cool? I guess that's pretty cool. But we're fans at the end of the day. We wanted to be in the mix and see it. So it's been a fantastic weekend."
