You gotta give it to Metallica: they’ve really found a way to make quarantine work for them and their fans. For the past few weeks, the band has been releasing high-quality video of epic performances throughout their long, storied career. Today, they’re giving viewers and especially cool treat: footage of their full performance from the 2011 Big Four show at Yankee Stadium in New York City.
For those of you who don’t know or remember, the Big Four shows were a series of massive concerts in which the Big Four of thrash — Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax — officially shared the stage together for the first time in metal history. The events ended with massive onstage jams in which members of the four bands joined forced to cover a song or two — in this case, a ripping rendition of Motörhead’s “Overkill” featuring Kerry King, Dave Lombardo, and Gary Holt of Slayer; David Ellefson, Chris Broderick, and Shawn Drover of Megadeth; and Scott Ian, Rob Caggiano, Frank Bello, Charlie Benante, and Joey Belladonna of Anthrax.
Check out the footage below:
Here’s the full setlist featured in the video:
Full set:
“Creeping Death”
“For Whom the Bell Tolls”
“Fuel”
“Ride the Lightning”
“Fade to Black”
“Cyanide”
“All Nightmare Long”
“Sad But True”
“Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”
“Orion”
“One”
“Master Of Puppets”
“Blackened”
“Nothing Else Matters”
“Enter Sandman”
Encore:
“Overkill” (featuring Kerry King, Dave Lombardo, Gary Holt, David Ellefson, Chris Broderick, Shawn Drover, Scott Ian, Rob Caggiano, Frank Bello, Charlie Benante, and Joey Belladonna)
“Battery”
“Seek And Destroy”
Before Slayer ended their touring career, there was a lot of talk about a Big Four tour. According to Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine, the tour would be a way to introduce fans around the world to the heart of thrash metal.
“It’s not about just doing concerts for the sake of concerts — it was about the movement, it was about what we did together as a group,” Dave said in a 2018 interview with Eddie Trunk on SiriusXM. “And excluding Anthrax, we were all like neighbors almost, ’cause we all lived so close; it was just a half hour to an hour at the most between each other’s houses on the freeway. So I think it would be great to do more Big Four stuff. [We could] do one in Japan, do one in South America — we never did one in South America, we haven’t done one in Asia. Give the people an opportunity to see it before it goes away forever.”
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Words by Chris Krovatin
