Jason Newsted has revealed that Metallica once had darts thrown at them during an arena show in Canada in the late ’80s.
The Chophouse Band frontman traded tour stories with Blackberry Smoke‘s Charlie Starr as part of Rolling Stone’s Nashville Podcast, as the pair are currently on the road together with their respective bands in North America.
During the 30-minute conversation, he said that he witnessed a dart just miss James Hetfield’s feet during their show and had to halt the performance so the attacker could be reprimanded.
“As we played across Canada, we wouldn’t always sell those arenas out in the middle of wherever it might be, somewhere out in the woods a little bit,” said Newsted. “[It was a] 6,000 seat hockey arena, and they put the big rubber curtain up in the middle because we only sold 3,000. So, partly for sound and partly for vibe. So that pushed your stage all the way up close to the seats.
“So kids are about like this up above you,” he continued. “We’re playing a few songs, and all of a sudden, it’s a dart, right? I look over at James and then there’s another one. I go, ‘Dude’.”
“The next one on James singing, shoot, it was this far from his tennis shoe,” he added. “We always wore tennis shoes, soft tops and stuff, right? There were darts. And so he stops it. It was maybe the fourth time I remember that we ever stopped a show and it was usually for something like this. When we saw too much blood or too much of this or somebody’s arm getting pulled out or whatever, that kind of thing, we’d stop the show for a second.”
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The former bassist goes on to say that once the show was stopped, fans were quick to point out the culprit to the band and security.
“The security guys and the kids and whoever had the laser pointers at the moment, all [had them] on the kid that threw them, just like that,” he laughs. “They all jumped on him.”
Watch the whole interview below.
In May, Newsted revealed that he had been given the all-clear after undergoing treatment for throat cancer.
“They went in with lasers and took a bunch of shit out,” he said on the Let There Be Talk podcast. “So the cavern inside my head is different than it was, but we got it early. And I got my ‘free and clear’ about three weeks ago. So I beat it.”
Newsted is currently working on his memoir and already has “130 chapters.” No date for its publication has been set as yet.