Metallica's Ulrich & Pearl Jam's McCready Lay Out Bonnaroo 2008 Plans

Bonnaroo is less than a month away, so we checked in with Metallica's Lars Ulrich and Pearl Jam's Mike McCready to see what's in store for their performances. Although they're working on a new record with producer Brendan O'Brien, Pearl Jam probably won't be unveiling any new tunes. "[The record] is in the infant stages," McCready said during a phone-in press conference. "It has to grow up a bit. We'll [play] some obscure B-sides. We might get into some sort of jam. That's the vibe of Bonnaroo so far." Metallica, on the other hand, are in the "nips and tucks" stages of finishing their new record, which will hit stores in September (for more on the band's LP, click here). Lars Ulrich thinks that unlike the benefit they played last night in L.A., they'll definitely unleash some new metal epics, many of which extend to seven- or eight-minutes long. "We're going to Europe next week and then we come to Bonnaroo," he said. "Hopefully there'll be some new stuff thrown in there. I'd say that's pretty likely." So what do the new songs sound like? Says Ulrich, "There's alot of hardcore, nutty, super-fast speed stuff. It's a little more like the earlier records."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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