In a recent interview with Southeast Wreck Metal, former QUEENSRŸCHE singer Geoff Tate was asked if he remembered bottles being thrown at him and his bandmates while opening for METALLICA in Helsinki, Finland, in October 1988.
“Oh, yeah. I think I have a scar here [on my face] from that,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “[ QUEENSRŸCHE guitarist Michael Wilton] did a really interesting thing [at that show]. I applaud him for his courage, really. But it was a giant bottle of vodka that came flying up on stage, and it hit the neck of his guitar as he was playing it and it shattered all the strings. So the guitar just made this horrible sound. And so he was kind of standing there for a second, and he just grabbed another guitar and he finished the solo that he was playing. [Laughs] That was amazing. He missed like — I don’t know — five or six notes, but he got back on it and played the whole solo through. And because he did that, the audience just went, ‘YES!’ It was pretty amazing that he did that.”
“METALLICA had a huge presence in Finland at that time,” Tate added. “And, yeah, we were the opening act. So a lot of people were just waiting for us to get off the stage. But we made them listen.”
Geoff admitted that he wasn’t familiar with METALLICA’s music before QUEENSRŸCHE was chosen to open for the heavy metal legends nearly four decades ago.
“I had never heard of METALLICA until we got on that tour,” he said. “And then that’s all I heard. After that they got huge. And it was a wonderful tour to be part of. We did all of Europe with METALLICA. And then we went to America and did two tours with them. So it was a wonderful experience, really. And we got to kind of know the band, and I got to know their music intimately from being with them every day. So, it was a nice period of my life. I have good, fond memories of it all… It was a fun time to be a young man on the road, touring, playing music. There was nothing like it. It was very unique.”
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