During the 59th Annual Grammy Awards, a technical glitch caused issues with METALLICA‘s James Hetfield‘s microphone while performing with Lady Gaga. The eagerly anticipated duet was marred by this malfunction, a situation that caused significant embarrassment for Hetfield, who was forced to share a microphone with Lady Gaga. Despite the initial frustration, Hetfield later reflected on the incident positively, stating that it made the performance feel more like a genuine collaboration.
During a recent interview with RJM, METALLICA tech Chad Zaemisch looked back on the incident, saying: “We had to use some other personnel for the award show for particular reasons. And the audio guys ran the mic cable kind of from backstage out and around and then plugged into their mics. And we did a run-through earlier, everything was fine.”
An additional complication was the overcrowded stage, which might have felt somewhat odd. It could be perceived as the Recording Academy’s interpretation of metal shows – teeming with people leaping around the stage, turning the performance into a chaotic experience for the band members and their team.
“But we went out to do the show, they had taken a bunch of… I guess they were actors or something, to stand behind the band on either side, to jump around and be all excited,” Zaemisch continued. “This was the big song with Lady Gaga. She’s got a wireless mic, that’s cool.”
As if managing a highly sensitive and chaotic stage setup with numerous performers wasn’t challenging enough, the crew had to contend with the problematic task of patching two cables. The connector, unfortunately, was situated right in the heart of the chaos.
“They didn’t have a long enough cable, so they put two mic cables together. So somebody was jumping up and down and jumped on the connector and that’s what unplugged it.”
He added: “But you couldn’t really see that because people were kind of going nuts over there screaming and rocking out doing the whole thing. And I finally was looking at the cable and figured out what had gone wrong, and ran over there and plugged it back in.”
However, James had already tipped over the microphone stand. At this point, the situation began to spiral into further complexity.
“And by this time, James had knocked it over,” Chad said. “So I ran out. He didn’t see me set it back up. And then I think audio guy turned it off or something.” And he went to go speak into it again, and it still wasn’t working. Or it wasn’t working in his ears, but it was working out through the broadcast truck or something. It was a mess. And I can’t remember if he knocked it over again or whatever. But yeah, at the end of that, that was pretty miserable.”
“At the end of that, if you look at the video, you can see James kind of coming off stage and just threw his guitar to me, and I was still kind of ducked down behind some equipment trying to watch this mic cable and just somehow caught it, reached my arms up and caught the thing.”
