Metallica will be plenty busy this weekend at Napa’s Bottle Rock Festival, but ahead of their set, the band’s Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo got in some extra time with playing with the all-star collective the Wedding Band, rocking out covers for fans at the Jam Cellars Ballroom in the Margrit Mondavi Theatre in Napa.
While you’d expect some of the metal selections such as “Ace of Spades” and “War Pigs,” the primarily metal collective showed that punk has a place in their world as well, working through The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop,” The Dead Kennedys’ “California Uber Alles” and The Clash’s “London Calling” amongst others.
Joined onstage by Death Angel’s Mark Osegueda, The Mars Volta’s Jon Theodore and Bad Wolves’ Doc Coyle, the Metallica pair showed they knew their punk licks as well.
This should come as no surprise to Metallica fans who’ve watched the guitarist and bassist at shows wowing fans with their wide ranging influences during the “noodle” portion of the show.
“For Rob and I, it’s cool, because we get to indulge our love of funk and punk,” stated Hammett to Cosmo Music in 2019.
Just this past week, Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan commented that punk was responsible not only for his band, but also for Metallica. “The punk scene back [in the ’70s] and what The [Sex] Pistols helped generate was such a truly special thing,” the bassist recalled. “There wouldn’t be a Guns N’ Roses, there wouldn’t be Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, you can just keep going on. Foo Fighters — there wouldn’t have been any of that without it.”
Watch Hammett and Trujillo indulging their punk side via fan-shot video of The Wedding Band below.
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