LOS ANGELES _ Lady Gaga and Metallica can at least take comfort in this: It didn't happen at the Super Bowl.
Gaga, fresh off a well-received but atypically (for her) apolitical Super Bowl halftime show, had intended to team up with Metallica to showcase her hard-rock bona fides. It should have been a good fit _ she's long used heavy guitars in her bombastic pop, and she turned herself into a motorcycle for one infamous album cover.
But from the first seconds of their collaboration on "Moth Into Flame," from Metallica's throwback thrash record "Hardwired ... To Self Destruct," it was a more of a 10-car pileup.
James Hetfield's microphone gave up on him before he even got a word in, leaving the famously gravelly frontman in total awkward silence between Gaga's verses. Their backup dancers, swaying in some weird approximation of "heavy metal dancing," couldn't hold a candle to the most off-hours amateur night at Jumbo's Clown Room.
The whole set evoked a fire sale on the store floor at Guitar Center, when 15 dudes are all trying to out-finger-tap each other in a cacophonous hail. Gaga was obviously thrilled to be there, finally fronting the arena-rock band of her dreams and stage-diving backwards into the crowd. But Hetfield threw his guitar and walked offstage the second it was over.
