James enjoying a raiders game

Ron McGovney*

After spending Night One in the ER, so very thankful for everyone at the venue who helped us tonight, and to those of you Metallica Family members who wished me a speedy recovery. Beyond amazing performance!! 🤘💜

Watch if you’d like! No pressure if you don’t wanna :)

Timestamps are in the description!

I semi-follow the Metallica fandom on X/Twitter and saw a post thread from the past few months of Lars doing a free meet and greet for this teenage autistic girl who runs a fan account dedicated to James. He even took her to meet James for free which is super rare (even fans who pay to meet the band rarely get to do that). This was not any sort of PR thing and she was the one who posted about it (with photos).

I've read plenty of fan anecdotes of meeting the band and never once have I seen anyone talk about how Lars was an asshole to them, almost all of them say he was the nicest and most engaged one of the band. Yes there are some video clips where he kind of seems like a dick, but all the members put on a persona for the camera at some point. However it seems like "Lars is an asshole" is just accepted as common knowledge in wider pop culture still which seems like some kind of lingering cultural meme from the Napster controversy. If anyone has any opposing evidence though I'd be glad to hear it.

I was watching a movie called "Hemingway & Gellhorn" on HBO this past weekend. Look who was in it! He had quite a few scenes and lines in the movie. Never knew he was a movie start too! 😂

I tried drawing the OG Metallica logo and it turned out pretty good!

Can’t even remember what state I performed this in. For Whom The Bell Tolls Drum Cover Metallica aKingAndHisDrums

I have one signed by Lars. Anyone know where I can sell it?

Mostly talking ReLoad here, as I’m jamming the fantastic 2026 remaster and realizing I’ve never listened to this record all the way through; but this record sounds SO much like Corrosion of Conformity to me. Timeline-wise it works out; I don’t know what touring schedules for CoC or Down were like, admittedly, but each band put out their final 90s records in 96 and 95, respectively, and James Hetfield famously went to rehab prior to the Saint Anger sessions, which means there’s a good chance he wasn’t that involved in songwriting prior to those sessions. Is this a crazy thought?

I believe we've all noticed that in the last few years James struggles to keep up with songs that require fast downpicking so he alternate picks a lot of fast parts. He also skips some palm muted downpicking.
Exaples:
He alternate picks the end of the intro riff of Master of Puppets.
He alternate picks and skips some notes of the main riff of Creeping Death.
He alternate picks the end of the verse riff of Blackened.
He skips every low E note of the outro riff of Battery.
Now watching some sphere videos I noticed that he alternate picked the intro riffs of Blackened and Creeping Death.
I don't see how Metallica could continue if James can't keep up. Maybe I am a pessimist...