Three Shows on the Damaged Justice Tour

+ Brendan Yates + Florence Shaw on Identified

Jul 18, 2026

After releasing their fourth album …And Justice for All on September 7, 1988, Metallica played 222 shows in just over one year, between September 11, 1988 and October 9, 1989. That’s 222 shows in 393 days—a tour that was long enough to span high school and college for me, and a tour during which Metallica went from being one of the biggest underground bands in the world to one of the biggest bands in the world, with a Grammy nomination (famously losing the Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance award to Jethro Tull) and their video for “One” in heavy rotation on MTV.

My first Metallica show was the 61st show of their Damaged Justice tour on December 16, 1988. I usually felt trepidatious at punk and metal shows in Salt Lake City. I stood out in my polo shirt, and even if I traded it out for a band T-shirt, I couldn’t hide that I was one of the only non-white kids in the crowd, whether it was 100 or 10,000. So imagine the sudden burst of confidence I felt alongside the crew of 8 or so preppy-ish high school athletes who attended the Metallica show as my crew. We didn’t have a ton in common other than this band, but that was enough for that night. I’ll never forget the fear in my stomach when the lights went down in the giant Salt Palace arena and the swirling, backwards guitar intro to “Blackened”—obviously from the album, not live—began to play. The next 2 hours were my friends and I smiling, head-banging, and shouting along, “Die… Die… Die…” in the extended part of “Creeping Death” that we all wished would go on forever.

My second Metallica show was the 176th on their tour on July 23, 1989 at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum. I was spending some of the summer between high school and college at my uncle Alan’s place in New York City, and I convinced him that we needed to head out to the suburbs to get a real taste of what a Metallica crowd was like. Salt Lake City was one thing—still a sheltered, small town. Long Island was real. And the fear came back. Even though Alan was a black belt in Aikido, I felt pretty vulnerable as we walked through the thousands of parking-lot partiers who made up a scene that looked a lot like the pre-show brilliance captured in Heavy Metal Parking Lot. The show—which was pretty much the same one I’d seen in Salt Lake—still gave me the same great feeling of fear and excitement when the lights went down and the guitars began to sing. But now I was an insider. I’d seen the movie and I knew what happened, from the order of the songs to the giant replica of the album cover that eventually toppled to the floor.

My third Metallica show was the 197th on their tour on August 29, 1989 at the Seattle Arena. I’d just moved to Tacoma, WA for college, where my two dormmates were equally as obsessed with music as I was. One of them, Luke, was from Eureka, CA, and he’d seen Metallica at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, a concert that he described as pure mayhem. So when we noticed the Seattle date, we assembled a small crew of people who’d only known one another for a few days, and stuffed into someone’s car, headed 45 minutes north to Seattle. Now I really felt like I’d seen the movie, but the swirling guitar intro was no less exciting the third time, and I was a little less scared with new friends with whom I had something to bond over before our college classes even began.

A pro-shot video of that show was released a while back

It’s kind of incredible to imagine the physical and emotional journey that the band was on for those 222 shows. And it’s pretty fascinating to scroll through the never-ending itinerary HERE.