Rants // The Tale of the Time Metallica Sued Me

Misc Music Discussions without categories

Maker of power pop. Maniac Cop 2 enthusiast. I play the guitar/bass and sing. They/Them

Gather around youngsters and listen close and I’ll tell you the tale of the time Metallica sued me. We begin in the year 2000: I had just turned 16 and set out on my then lifelong ambition to work at a record store. The cool store in town wanted 18 and older so my only option was the Circuit City.

While Circuit City technically hired me to work the music department, they 100% didn’t give a shit. There were two departments: commissioned sales and the rest of us. So I basically did general retail work and occasionally got to talk about records which was the entire reason I got the job.

But because of this I got to meet everyone at the store and get pretty close with them so when Napster first popped up the car stereo guys were *on* it. I was an extremely early user. Asked for a CD burner for my birthday. I had it fuckin made at Y2K.

I also loved Queen but mostly Brian May’s guitar work. That’s my little secret about the band, everyone loves Freddie Mercury and of course they’re right to do so but have you heard that goddamn riff from “Tie Your Mother Down”?

All my favorite queen songs are Brian May forward. Except for “‘39” but that’s because I was also a theater kid in high school but it isn’t relevant to the story at hand. Where was I? Oh yes, “Hammer To Fall”, “I Want It All” things of that nature. Good tunes.

So this brings us to “Stone Cold Crazy” an absolute ripper on SHEER HEART ATTACK (the band at their most glam, it’s a dope record) that Metallica covered on GARAGE, INC.

WHICH WAS THE ONLY FUCKING METALLICA SONG I HAD LARS

One day I log onto Napster and I swear to god I remember the splash screen as reading “You’ve Been Sued By Metallica”. Basically in the year 2000, Lars Ulrich had famously printed out 350,000 Napster accounts and brought them to a judge who said (reasonably) that you can’t sue a bunch of Hotmails…

… so Lars went to Napster and said basically “give us your accounts”. Napster’s response was basically that they didn’t want to get involved so they locked all the accounts and told us to reinstate them we had to provide our contact information so that we could be properly served.

Which I obviously wasn’t going to do. I have no idea how many people willingly sent them contact info but I would be willing to bet most of them did what I did: set up a new Hotmail. I’m 16 years old in 2000? Who’s going to email me?

So that’s the story of the time I changed my email address to avoid legal culpability. And I still don’t think it’s right to sue people for a song you covered.

So there’s an embarrassing coda to this story of me being a smooth operator at 16, a cyberhacker surfin’ the net with impunity and making copies of Dreamcast games. It did legitimately freak me out to be sued be the band Metallica.

When I set up my new Napster account I used a pseudonym just to be safe and put the agent’s contact info from that part in the musical RENT where she sings it leaving a voicemail. THE THEATER KID PART WAS RELEVANT AFTER ALL!!