During an appearance on a recent episode of Bill Burr‘s “Monday Morning” podcast, former METALLICA bassist Jason Newsted was asked if there was a particular concert that stood out in his mind as being particularly memorable. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “The ones that have been glorified over time and sensationalized, like the big Russian show and that stuff — unforgettable, of course, [and] quite well documented. But there’s other ones that are personally huge for us as a unit. Day On The Green in Oakland [on] October 12 of ’91. That was [legendary concert promoter] Bill Graham‘s last proper show that he put on — period. That’s a big goddamn deal to Bay Area, man. He took a chance on METALLICA back in ’82, ’83. ’84, whatever it was. And then they came back home to headline that thing. We’d been on the road for the Black Album a couple of months. We just started firing on all cylinders. MTV came there with 19 freakin’ cameras and did their thing and recorded it nice and it sounded so killer on the TV. I remember playing a big Alembic six-string bass with a string on the top as big and as round as your fucking finger — like a telephone cable on that fucker — but tuned down for ‘Sad But True’, and just taking people’s freakin’ fillings out, man. You could see their sternums come flying up onto the stage. They were standing next to the bass bins in the front, just getting destroyed. We were hitting right then with such precision.”
Jason left METALLICA back in 2001 but was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, along with guitarist/vocalist James Hetfield, drummer Lars Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett, and the man who replaced him, bassist Robert Trujillo, in 2009.
Newsted‘s exit from METALLICA was documented in the band’s 2004 documentary, “Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster”, which followed the members of the group through the three most turbulent years of their long career, during which they battled through addiction, lineup changes, fan backlash, personal turmoil and the near-disintegration of the group while making their “St. Anger” album.
Newsted was METALLICA‘s third bassist, following Ron McGovney and the late Cliff Burton. Trujillo took over in 2003 after Newsted‘s exit.
Jason spoke in detail about the reason he left METALLICA in a 2013 interview with Scuzz TV. Newsted said that his eventual split with the group was over the way his then-side band, ECHOBRAIN, was handled.
Newsted told The Pulse Of Radio a while back that he never saw how ECHOBRAIN could have interfered with METALLICA. “I never felt that it was going to affect METALLICA in any way,” he said. “There was no way that it could. The monster and the integrity and the legend that METALLICA‘s built, it would take a lot more than that to ever affect it.”
