What do you get when you match up the biggest Californian rock band of the 1980s with the biggest Californian rock band of the 1990s? The answer, based on this truly inspired mash-up by YouTuber The-Art-Of-Guitar, is a a stadium rock stomper which makes every other Golden State rock band of the past 30 years seem utterly inconsequential and irrelevant.
When James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich formed Metallica in Los Angeles in 1981, Van Halen served as an inspiration for what not to be, the Pasadena quartet’s sunshine-streaked, spandex-clad, all-embracing, party hard Big Rock anthems the absolute antithesis of the aggressive, NWOBHM-inspired, ‘kill all poseurs’ street metal fury Metallica pioneered. So the marriage of the two really shouldn’t work. And yet, this rules.
But don’t just take our word for it…
Famously, Van Halen and Metallica teamed up for the 1988 Monsters Of Rock stadium tour in the US, a passing-of-the-torch crusade which led Sammy Hagar to conclude that that the hungry Bay Area ’bangers would become ‘the new kings of rock.’ Clearly both bands missed a trick by not merging into one unstoppable beast there and then.
