Metallica Covers Bob Seger’s ‘Turn the Page’

Metallica performed a truly badass live cover of the classic Bob Seger song “Turn the Page” while appearing on The Howard Stern Show. Drummer Lars Ulrich explained that he heard the song and thought of frontman James Hetfield.

I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge up in San Francisco and I heard the live version of Turn the Page and I could just hear James singing that. The first thing that popped out was just James would fucking nail this vocally and just the lyric element, I think it felt like it would speak on his behalf and to the situation that we were in…and there was just something about the vocals.

Guitarist Kirk Hammet said he was excited to do the Bob Seger song because he wanted to translate the saxophone lines onto slide guitar in the way Duane Allman would.

When I was listening to the song and I heard the saxophone part, I thought that would be a great guitar line and I thought it would be even cooler if I played it on slide because I’m a big Allman Brothers fan. …Duane Allman in particular.

Stern was particularly impressed with their performance.

Beautiful boys. Oh, God isn’t that good?

And Hetfield expressed how he felt.

I love that song.

Here’s a live version of the Metallica cover from 2015.

Here’s Seger performing the song in 1980.