When you get down to it, there are two Metallicas in this world: the Metallica that laid the groundwork for Bay Area thrash alongside Exodus, Testament, Forbidden and others, and then the Metallica that, via “Enter Sandman,” ushered in metal’s degeneration from rebellious, anti-authoritarian music to a white dudebro soundtrack played by smarmy morning DJs on stations with names like “The Bone” and “The Tool.”
You know what happened next: the Napster fisaco, the Spinal Tap-in-real-life documentary Some Kind of Monster, the drum tone on St. Anger and, most recently, litigation-happy copyright lawyers.
At AT&T Park last night, we got the old Metallica.

Forget the crowd of 30,000. Forget the huge, five-panel stage set. Forget the pyrotechnics so enormous that they toasted the faces of those even in the third deck, far away from the center-field stage in a huge stadium. Metallica put on a show that felt like home, in a two-and-a-half-hour set titled “Too Heavy for Halftime” that served as a sideways middle-finger to the NFL on the eve of its biggest event.
“I know there was a petition going around,” said frontman James Hetfield, acknowledging an online effort to get Metallica booked as a Super Bowl halftime act. “But I think it works this way. We get to play a whole show, and we get to represent the Bay Area.”