Metallica fans cheer for the band in Anaheim in 2009. (Vanessa Franko)
This story originally ran on A1 of The Press-Enterprise on Saturday, April 23, 2011.
BY VANESSA FRANKO
STAFF WRITER
Nashville is the unchallenged capital of country music. Chicago can claim the blues, and Memphis has the Delta counterpart. Grunge? Seattle. Hip-Hop? New York and Los Angeles can duke it out.
If you were drawing the map of hard rock and heavy metal, you could make a case for putting the big red star right here in Inland Southern California.
After all, we’re the home of the Us Festival’s seminal heavy metal day in 1983. Ozzfest was born here in 1996. And a metal icon that hasn’t raged on an Inland stage is tough to name.
Now the area is about to make heavy metal history again as The Big 4 festival, featuring top bands Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax, makes its American debut at the Empire Polo Club in Indio today.
“I know that in the Inland Empire and obviously San Bernardino and east of there, I know Riverside and obviously Palm Springs and the desert, there’s a lot of people that are really into the heart of rock. I’ve experienced it myself over the years. I’m very psyched,” Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich said in a recent telephone interview.
Metallica, the biggest of The Big 4, has sold more than 60 million albums in the U.S., and the band’s music is heard everywhere from sporting events at stadiums to the “Guitar Hero: Metallica” video game. It was the first rock band to perform at Ontario’s Citizens Business Bank Arena when it opened in late 2008.
As a teenager and young adult in Orange County, Ulrich, now 47, would drive to San Bernardino’s Swing Auditorium to see hard rock and heavy metal shows.
The Swing’s days as a music venue ended suddenly when a plane crashed into it. Talk about heavy metal!
“I’ve made the pilgrimage out myself and saw everybody from Molly Hatchet to Judas Priest to all kinds of people out there,” Ulrich said.
The Inland region is still inspiring metal fans, the annual Mayhem Fest stopping in Devore every summer and a crop of local bands keep the fire burning..
“Metal is a huge part of the local scene,” said Greg Johnson, a music producer and a musician who lives in Murrieta.
The music helps people identify and work through aggression in a positive way, he said. The economic downturn creates a disenfranchised youth who relate to the music.
“Metallica’s been speaking to that for 30 years,” he said.
Ulrich said Southern California was an obvious place for the festival because of the bands’ ties to the region. Metallica’s roots are in Orange County and Los Angeles. Slayer started in Huntington Beach, and guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman now live in the Riverside and Hemet area, respectively. Megadeth started in Los Angeles, and frontman Dave Mustaine is a Fallbrook resident.
The four bands, which all started in the early 1980s merging the bludgeoning guitars of heavy metal and the breakneck speed of punk rock, first toured together for a string of popular concerts in Europe in summer 2010.
David Marchese, associate editor at Spin magazine, compared the lineup to having The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Who on the same bill at a festival.
“They are the four biggest thrash metal bands,” he said.
The festival is being held on the same site as the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was held last weekend and where the Stagecoach Country Music Festival with Carrie Underwood and Kenny Chesney is planned.
Goldenvoice, which is the promoter of the festivals, usually puts Coachella and Stagecoach on back-to-back weekends, but with the Easter holiday on Sunday, the company decided to separate them by a week. A casual conversation between Goldenvoice head Paul Tollett and Metallica’s management led to The Big 4 to Indio.
Unlike Coachella and Stagecoach, The Big 4 will have only one stage and be presented like a traditional concert and Tollett said it would not become an annual festival. Tollett said the event has been drawing ticket buyers heavily from Southern California, particularly those in the Inland region and the Coachella Valley, as well as Orange County.
“I’ll tell you this, that’s a show built for the 909,” Tollett said.