Concert review: Metallica kept playing and playing, and then kept staying and staying

I looked over my right shoulder and saw a man doing what looked like a rain dance while furiously putting his full weight behind a flurry of swift punches at the air.

Across the barricades to the left, a guy in a paper Burger King crown gleefully crowd-surfed (right up until the moment security hauled him away).

Meanwhile, the burly dude standing directly in front of me would howl and flip double-birds every time someone trying to make a video of the crowd panned their cellphone in his direction; he also would periodically turn around to aggressively rub the top of my head and command me to slap him five.

Those are just three of numerous examples of the kind of frenzy into which Metallica whipped the roughly 17,000 fans who sandwiched themselves into uptown Charlotte’s Spectrum Center on Monday night for a very long, very loud, very awesome celebration of some of the band’s most seminal songs.

Though it was preceded by a seemingly endless amount of buildup (involving comedians Jim Breuer and Joe Sib, and former “Headbangers Ball” host Riki Rachtman, who now lives in Charlotte), Metallica finally strode on stage just before 9 p.m. to the strains of its familiar entrance music: Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of Gold.”

Perhaps to get some of the more-obligatory material out of the way early — this is, after all, the “WorldWired Tour,” in support of 2016’s “Hardwired... to Self-Destruct” — the foursome opened with a couple of cuts off of that album before getting to the good stuff. And that’s not to say the new album is junk. Both “Hardwired” and “Atlas, Rise!” fit nicely into the Metallica ouevre, from a sonic perspective. It’s just, well, no self-respecting fan would ever put either on their list of top-five favorites. Maybe not even their top-25.

It was actually pretty easy to tell which songs fans did come for; all you had to do was look for the entire joint to turn into a sea of people (about 90 percent of which seemed to be wearing black T-shirts) throwing horns in the air. From where I stood, those highlights comprised a veritable murderer’s row of thrash-metal classics: “Wherever I May Roam,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “Creeping Death,” “Sad but True,” “Master of Puppets,” “Enter Sandman,” and the second halves of “Fade to Black” and “One.”

The hardest of the hardcore fans even took their enthusiasm a step further upon hearing the feverish licks at the centers of “Seek & Destroy” and “Motorbreath” (both from the band’s debut album, 1983’s “Kill ’Em All”): They quickly and almost reflexively started pushing each other around in the general-admission section, creating old-school mosh pits that kept Spectrum’s security guards on their toes and led to multiple ejections.

Now, some of you are probably wondering how well the band members itself are holding up. After all, the last time frontman James Hetfield, drummer Lars Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo tried to shatter eardrums at uptown Charlotte’s big arena — almost exactly nine years ago — they were in their mid-40s, not yet too far removed from their physical prime.

Since then, they’ve all raised kids, added wrinkles and (save for Trujillo) gone gray. The current tour has been trotting the globe for two years and still has another 10 months to go; by the time it ends on Aug. 25, 2019, all but Trujillo will be closer to 60 than 50.

But for the time being, almost everything still seems to be clicking, and if they’re burned out from the long tour, they’re hiding it well.

Hammett can still keep the frenetic pace of songs like “Master of Puppets” as if the 1980s were yesterday, and he continues to do it in a fashion that looks so outwardly effortless that it’s almost eerie. Trujillo, of course, was a monster on the bass, with his big moment coming when he led the group into “Motorbreath” with a nearly spot-on cover of Cliff Burton’s legendary “Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth)” bass solo.

Ulrich remains the ham of the bunch, leaping up at the end of songs to finish them off by rolling on the cymbals while walking around his kit in a circle or running into the crowd for selfies. And though Hetfield’s vocals were lost to a mediocre mixing job on a handful of songs, they came through when it counted — particularly on more-melodic tracks like “The Unforgiven,” “Nothing Else Matters,” the front ends of “One” and “Fade to Black.”

Unlike me, the 55-year-old bandleader seemed less fascinated by those behaving outrageously and more fascinated by the range of ages within what he characterized as “the Metallica family.”

“Everyone is welcome, always and forever,” he said. “Even old people! I see some right now. ... Old on the outside, young inside.”

He also singled out a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old down in front (“I gotta tell you, when I was 12 years old, I was not in the front row of a Metallica show,” Hetfield said, as many thought to themselves, Uh, no, of course you weren’t) — although if he’d been able to see back as far as I was, he’d have noted two boys who looked perhaps 5-ish standing with their moms.

As for the staging? Though the in-the-round setup seemed utilitarian at first, over the course of the evening the dozens of large four-sided video boxes hanging above the stage proved inventively versatile, dipping and swirling through the air while displaying a variety of garish, metal-friendly images.

Columns of flames shooting up from the floor and bursts of fireworks probably could have been predicted; what probably couldn’t have been anticipated was the dance of the several dozen lighted drones during “Moth Into Flame,” perhaps the single most mesmerizing bit of concert choreography I’ve seen in quite awhile.

But as impressive as anything Monday night was the band’s stamina. In number, the setlist was not remarkably long: 18 songs. But they sprawled across 2 hours and 27 minutes, which to me was an indication that Metallica wasn’t just here for a paycheck.

This was Show #110 out of 159 on its “WorldWired Tour,” yet it felt like it easily could have been #1.

At the same time, it also felt like it could be #159. After closing with a bone-rattling rendition of 1991 smash “Enter Sandman,” all four guys hung out for a full 10 minutes after the house lights came up. Trujillo filled Solo cups with guitar picks emblazoned with the Metallica logo, “Charlotte” and the date of the concert and scattered them into the pit, while Ulrich handed out drumsticks like candy.

There was just something about the way Hetfield was waving to the crowd that — for a few moments, at least — felt like he was saying goodbye for good.

But the more he stayed out there, the more I got the sense it was because he simply wanted to hang out with that family he spoke so highly of for just a little bit longer.

He almost seemed like he was considering adding a 19th song, even though they’d already gone as late as I’ve seen an act stay on stage at the arena in recent memory. Then they finally walked off.

Then ... they came back, spilling up the stairs chasing Trujillo, who was being covered in Silly String.

“Rob’s birthday’s tomorrow,” Hetfield teased. (Trujillo is 54 as of Tuesday.)

So the band did indeed add one more song: “Happy Birthday.”

At 11:19, they finally left. But they promised to return.

“In 1986, 32 f------ years ago, Metallica rolled into Charlotte for the very first time, over at the old coliseum there,” Ulrich had said to the crowd right before the Silly String incident. “I don’t know if any of you guys were there — most of you probably weren’t born in 1986 — but we’ve been coming to Charlotte, we’ve been coming to the beautiful state of North Carolina for about 32 years, like I said.

“We’ve played the coliseum, the Blockbuster Pavilion ... a barbecue at your mom’s house a couple of years ago, and you know what? Unlike every other band these days, we’re just gettin’ f------ started. Metallica loves you, Charlotte. Metallica loves you. North Carolina. We will see you very f------ soon.”

And hey, as long as they keep cranking out performances like this, they can come back as often as they want.

This story was originally published October 23, 2018 at 1:29 PM.