5 Times Metallica Were The Best Band In The World (& 5 Times They Were The Worst)

Thrash metal band Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra... there's no way that could ever work. Right?

Wrong. In 1999, the 'Tallica boys teamed up with composer Michael Kamen (the man who helped Pink Floyd build The Wall and laid down the orchestral compositions for Nothing Else Matters) for Symphony & Metallica, a live reimagining of the band's hits with a full symphonic accompaniment.

This foot-stomping, fist-pumping piece of rock-orchestra brought fans from both ends of the musical spectrum together for two nights only at the Berkeley Community Theatre, touring through all the hard and soft moments of Metallica's discography, and resulted in several original songs (including the epic No Leaf Clover).

In fact, it worked so well that the band put together a follow-up pair of 20th anniversary concerts at the Chase Center in 2019, under the musical direction of Michael Tilson Thomas (Kamen sadly died from a heart attack in 2003, at only 55 years old).