The Big 4 Announce One-Day Festival

January 25, 2011

After playing seven shows together in Europe last year, "The Big 4" of Metal - Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax - will bring their show to the U.S. for one day only on April 23. The Big 4 Festival will take place at the Empire Polo Grounds in Indio, CA, which is the same location where the annual Coachella festival is held. According to Big 4 Facebook page, the four bands will "share one stage for the one and only U.S. appearance." Tickets will be available via Ticketmaster starting Friday, January 28 at 10 a.m. PST.

A trailer for the Big 4 Festival featuring footage of the European shows can be seen below:

1 show? boo.

wonder how much tix will be fo' this shizit

That's pretty awesome. Wish they were hitting up the East Coast...Anthrax is a very underrated band!

Lame. Fuck california.

Does Mustaine come out and perform any old Metallica songs with the band? If not then it's not worth it.

From the look of the youtube clip, it looks like everyone plays "Am I Evil", so to answer your question...kind of.

$99

not bad

they should all play at the same time.

All the stupid people in the world will be there

The Big 4 Head For The Bronx

May 2, 2011



One week after "The Big 4" of Metal played their first-ever U.S. concert together in Indio, CA, they announced a show on the east coast as well. Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax will play at New York's Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, September 14, and tickets go on sale Friday, May 6 at 10 a.m. via Ticketmaster. Met Club members and Yankees season ticket holders will have their own pre-sales on May 4.

"A huge thanks to everyone who came out to the desert this past weekend," reads a message on Metallica's website that was posted on Friday, April 29. "We felt the enormous love and support, so we just had to find a way to make one more Big 4 show in the States happen. Enter New York... that's right, the Big 4 of Anthrax, Megadeth, Slayer, and 'Tallica will be in the new version of the famed Yankee Stadium on September 14, 2011! We can't wait for a night in the Bronx as our second American show and for those of you who love fun facts, this will also be the second live music event hosted at the new ballpark."

Now that four of Metal's most influential bands from the '80s have been able to set aside their differences and perform together after all these years, they all look back and say that their perceived competition with each other has subsided with age.

"It wasn't really a beef. It was competitiveness," Slayer's Tom Araya told Spin magazine at California's Big 4 show. "And then as you get older... it doesn't really change [laughs]. It's mellowed a little bit, but you still have the same attitude. You're a little older and you handle things in a more mature way. Not like back then when you were young and saying, 'I wanna kick his ass.' But deep down inside, people still have egos... I like to think that I'm not one of them."

Anthrax's Scott Ian added, "It's just too bad things couldn't have been squashed at a much earlier date. When you're younger you don't really have the tools to deal with certain things in your life."

Metallica's Lars Ulrich echoed that sentiment. "Of course there was competition, of course we were all keeping close tabs on what everybody else was doing, of course when you're 25 years old you wanna be better than the next guy," he told Spin. "But through it, no matter what the press was writing about Metallica and Megadeth, me and [Dave Mustaine] would hang out. The things we shared were greater than the things we differed on... Underneath all the posturing, there was always a genuine respect and genuine admiration. Maybe a slight jealousy in some cases, which is fine. We're not talking about Oasis fist-fights."