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Watch Metallica Convert the Crowd at Voodoo Music + Arts Festival

Metallica American Idiot Voodoo Festival

“We are Green Day, except a little taller,” says Metallica’s James Hetfield to the Voodoo Music + Arts Experience crowd in the official festival footage just released from the band. The metal gods were the eleventh hour replacements for their Northern Cali punk neighbors, who would’ve been headlining if not for Billie Joe Armstrong’s Las Vegas rant and subsequent rehab enrollment.

After working out the kinks in a pre-show jam, Metallica play 1988’s “Harvester of Sorrow.” The crowd seems cold, so Hetfield jokes, “Are we still here? Why? You’re hoping Green Day is going to show up, right?” Then he takes a serious tack: “So am I. He’s there getting help, alright. They’re getting it sorted out. We’re here stepping up for them. Hopefully he gets it together because the world needs them, right? I think so.”

Then the truly unexpected happens, around 14:12, and Metallica play a 30 seconds of Green Day’s “American Idiot.” As if to offset the upbeat, they follow with “Creeping Death,” 1984’s Ride the Lightning ripper, and though no circle pits break out, there is a pretty terrifying chant-along toward the end before Kirk Hammet shreds ’em all the way to the finish line.

As one YouTuber posted, “Metallica for Greenday? [sic] Good Deal if you ask me.”

Metallica @ Voodoo Music + Arts Experience set list:

Hit the Lights”
“Master of Puppets”
“Holier Than Thou”
“Harvester of Sorrow”
“Of Wolf and Man”
“Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”
“All Nightmare Long”
“Sad But True”
“Fade to Black”
“Orion”
“One”
“For Whom the Bell Tolls”
“Blackened”
“Nothing Else Matters”
“Enter Sandman”
“Creeping Death”
“Battery”
“Seek and Destroy”